Chile offers nationality to Nicaraguan expatriates

The government of Chili offered Chilean nationality to the more than 300 Nicaraguans stripped of their nationality by the government of Daniel Ortegareported the Foreign Ministry in a statement on Tuesday.

Chile will have “the necessary legal means” to offer the more than three hundred Nicaraguan people qualified as political opponents, “due international protection that allows them to reside in the country and obtain Chilean nationality”following the rules of the country.

The South American country thus proposes an alternative “for those who have been unjustly expatriated from Nicaragua” and decide to accept it voluntarily.

The communiqué points out that the history of Chile has shown that “The defense of democracy and human rights and international solidarity between peoples transcends political situations.”

The Nicaraguan government declared on Wednesday “traitors to the country” to 94 opponents and critics, among them, the writers Sergio Ramírez and Gioconda Belli, as well as journalists and human rights defenders, who were stripped of their nationality and ordered to confiscate their real estate.

The event occurred just days after the release and exile of 222 imprisoned opponents, who were sent to the United States in a plane provided by the government of Joe Biden.

Boric’s was the first Latin American leftist government and one of the few to condemn the actions of Ortega, whom I do not hesitate to describe as a dictator.

“A fraternal hug to Gioconda, Sergio, Sofía, Carlos and all those whom Ortega has tried to strip them of their Nicaraguan nationality”the president tweeted on Saturday in reference to the writers Gioconda Belli and Sergio Ramírez, the feminist activist Sofia Montenegro and the journalist Carlos Fernando Chamorro Barrios.

“The dictator does not know that the homeland is carried in his heart and in his actions, and is not deprived by decree. They are not alone!”, Boric continued.

Days before, Chilean Foreign Minister Antonia Urrejola had described the Ortega regime as a “totalitarian dictatorship” that persecutes any kind of dissent.

Among the 94 identified, who were also declared fugitives from justice, there are also the lawyer Vilma Núñez, president of the Nicaraguan Center for Human Rights (Cenidh), the former guerrilla Mónica Baltodano and her family, and the former Sandinista commander Luis Carrión.

Also, the Catholic bishop Silvio Báez and the priest Edwin Román, both exiled in Miami, the peasant leader Francisca Ramírez, the dissident former ambassador to the OAS, Arturo McFields, the former foreign minister Norman Caldera and the former vice president of the Supreme Court of Justice Rafael Solís, who left Nicaragua after the social protests of 2018.

Source: AP