The kidnapping of Miss Nicaragua: a new hostage of the dictatorship

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The delirious accusations that the Police of the Ortega and Murillo regime have launched against the director of the Miss Nicaragua organization, Karen Celebertti, banished last week, and against her husband, Martín Argüello Leiva, and her son Bernardo Argüello Celebertti, kidnapped and disappeared, have caused astonishment and resounding condemnation among Nicaraguans and international public opinion.

These three citizens, who are part of the organization that promoted the coronation of Sheyniss Palacios, Miss Nicaragua, in the Miss Universe pageant, and who are therefore co-participants in that great national triumph, are accused of the crimes without any evidence of “conspiracy, treason, terrorism, incitement to hatred, organized crime, and money laundering,” among other fabrications invented in the El Carmen bunker.

In reality, the only thing they are guilty of is having worked with impartiality and professionalism to organize the Miss Nicaragua contest, and having supported Sheyniss Palacios in its preparation, who, with her excess of beauty, talent, and charisma, became She became Miss Universe two weeks ago in San Salvador.

A beauty queen who is also threatened by this rosary of insane accusations, whose only crime has been to restore joy and hope to the people, and to have been crowned Miss Universe through her own efforts, and not “thanks to Commander Daniel and companion Rosario,” as the official propaganda orders.

The police statement written in her own handwriting by the regime’s spokesperson is an act that dishonors the National Police itself and that, without being a criminal accusation, advances a guilty sentence by describing the accused as “stateless”. But, deep down, it reveals the paranoia, fear, and desperation of a family dictatorship that tries to control everything, but cannot silence the explosion of joy that Miss Universe has caused, in the streets and on the networks, nor has it could crush the freedom of conscience of Monsignor Rolando Álvarez, the bishop of Matagalpa who for 10 months has been locked up in a maximum security cell in the model prison.

Integrity, decency, solidarity and the capacity for indignation, the same values ​​that the great jurist who was Dr. Roberto Argüello Hurtado, former president of the Supreme Court of Justice, father, grandfather, and father-in-law of the three victims, practiced and preached. , are your only shield in a country without laws in the face of an infamous accusation.

We Nicaraguans have never lost the capacity for amazement to condemn the dictatorship’s crimes against humanity, even though they are increasingly irrational. First, they massacred the people en masse in 2018. They imprisoned thousands of people and sent hundreds of thousands of families into exile. They stripped us of the right to elect and be elected in 2021. Then they eliminated all civic spaces and civil society organizations. They confiscated universities and independent media. They unleashed fierce persecution against the Catholic Church and religious freedom. And now they are trying to politicize a beauty pageant to criminalize it by presenting it as an alleged coup d’état.

The crazy assault against Miss Nicaragua and Miss Universe is part of the legacy of chaos and disaster that Daniel Ortega intends to inherit to Nicaraguan society: a family dynasty with a more totalitarian dictatorship, although without legitimacy or popular support. And all of his accomplices know this perfectly well: the generals of the Army and the Police, the new economic ministers, the political operators of the regime, and its figureheads and paramilitaries. They know that the dynasty is destined to fail, because, furthermore, they will never be able to confiscate the joy and hope of the people, and the freedom of conscience.

After having lived for five years under a de facto police state that has violated all freedoms, Nicaraguans continue to silently condemn injustice. Civic resistance, in prison and in exile, is a democratic conquest more powerful than the guns and slander of the dictatorship in its current state of total moral degradation.

It is possible that in the mafia mentality of the dictators, Martín and Bernardo Arguello are seen as mere bargaining chips, as hostages to try to silence Miss Universe Sheyniss Palacios. But, that is a useless bet, because Sheyniss has never been nor intends to be a political actor. Instead, the explosion of joy that his victory is unleashing is already part of a new wave of change that, sooner rather than later, will end up burying a decrepit dictatorship.