Edgard Parrales, former ambassador to the OAS and critic of Daniel Ortega, is arrested in Nicaragua

The former Nicaraguan ambassador to the Organization of American States (OAS) Edgard Parrales, a critic of President Daniel Ortega, was arrested this Monday in Managua, reported the non-governmental Articulation of Social Movements.

The arrest took place hours after it analyzed Nicaragua’s withdrawal from the body on a local television channel, the non-governmental body said. Parrales increases to 41 the number of opponents imprisoned since May in Nicaragua.

Parrales, 79, who represented Nicaragua before the OAS between 1982 and 1986, in Ortega’s first term as president, was captured in front of his house and put in a car with colors similar to those of the National Police, heading unknown, according to the information.

Until the afternoon of this Monday, the police authorities have neither confirmed nor denied the complaint.

However, the former diplomat’s wife, Carmen Córdova confirmed that her husband was detained when he was leaving his home in Managua.

When it came out, “he shouted: they are taking me against my will!”, The woman revealed to the independent digital magazine Confidencial.

For her part, the president of the independent Nicaraguan Center for Human Rights (CNDH), Vilma Núñez told the press that Parrales was captured by “two people in civilian clothes who took him away in a car.”

“We demand that Parrales be returned to his home safe and sound,” the writer Gioconda Belli demanded on Twitter.

Parrales’ arrest was also denounced on social media by the opposition Nicaraguan University Alliance, the Articulation of Social Movements network and the Civic Alliance of Nicaragua.

Before being captured, the former priest and jurist, analyzed Nicaragua’s departure from the OAS on Channel 10 television, where he affirmed that the Ortega government had to comply with the commitments acquired with the organization for two years before retiring. EFE.

Nicaragua announced its withdrawal from the body last Friday, after the 51st General Assembly of the OAS warned that the recent elections, which extended Ortega’s mandate by five years, “were not free, fair or transparent and do not have democratic legitimacy.”

With the capture of the ex-diplomat, the number of professionals, critics, or political opponents of the Nicaraguan president adds up to 42, who have been captured since last May, including seven who aspired to run for the Presidency during the elections on the 7th.

Parrales is the only one still alive of the four priests that Pope John Paul II suspended “a divinis” in 1984, along with the Trappist poet Ernesto Cardenal, the educator Fernando Cardenal, and the former Sandinista diplomat Miguel D’Escoto, to join to the theory of liberation, a suspension that was lifted in 2014.

In recent years, he dedicated himself to providing analysis to the media about the crisis that the country has been experiencing since the 2018 protests against the government, whose repression left 355 dead and more than 103,000 exiles, according to the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR ), refers AFP.

According to the Mechanism for the Recognition of Political Prisoners, whose data is supported by the IACHR, at least 159 Nicaraguans remain behind bars as “political prisoners” in the Central American country.

More than 100,000 Nicaraguans have fled their country in the last three years, as a result of the socio-political crisis in Nicaragua, according to the Nicaraguan Center for Human Rights (Cenidh), an amount that has doubled in 2021, according to the organization of Nicaraguan Exiles in the World (NEEM). (I)