The former Sandinista historical guerrilla Hugo Torres, 73, died in detention this Saturday for reasons not yet specified, eight months after being arrested by the government of President Daniel Ortega, whom he rescued from prison in 1974 during the fight against the dictatorship of Anastasio Somoza.
“We Hugo Marcel, María Alejandra and Lucía Aracelly communicate with deep pain the death of our beloved father, Jorge (Hugo) Torres Jiménez”, the family confirmed in a brief note of mourning, in which they indicated that “later” they will announce more information.
A member of the Democratic Renovating Union (Unamos) movement, to which Torres belonged, and who requested anonymity, informed Efe of the death of the former guerrilla, specifying that the causes were unknown and whether it occurred in the El Chipote cell, where he is officially secluded.
According to Unamos, Torres had been taken from his cell in December and taken to an emergency hospital, after which nothing more was known about his whereabouts.
“By the express will of our father, no funeral services or public ceremonies will be held (…) in these difficult times, the family requests respect for privacy and the mourning we are going through,” the family said in the mourning note.
Also known as “Comandante Uno,” Torres participated in an attack against Somoza to free Ortega and other Sandinista guerrillas in 1974.
In 1995 he separated from the Sandinista National Liberation Front (FSLN), the party in power, to found the Sandinista Renovation Movement (MRS), currently Unamos, and in June 2021 he was captured in the midst of a wave of arrests against opponents.
As of Saturday afternoon, the Nicaraguan authorities had neither confirmed nor denied the death of Torres, whom the Ortega government accused of “treason against the country.”
In June 2021, minutes before being arrested, Torres, Vice President of Unamos, released a video on social networks in which he referred to the paradox of having risked his life to free the President of the Government who arrested him.
“46 years ago I risked my life to get Daniel Ortega out of jail (…) and in 1978 I risked it again (…). This is how life turns, those who once embraced principles in favor of justice, in favor of freedom, today have betrayed them, today they are the main enemies of those principles”, he said then.
In the same video, Torres, who in 1978 led the assault on the National Palace of Nicaragua together with “Comandante Cero” Edén Pastora (1936-2020) and “Comandante Dos”, Dora María Téllez, also convicted, pointed out to Ortega that he was desperate.
“These are desperate blows by a regime that feels moribund, that has no legal basis, that has no justification from an institutional and legal point of view, to remain in power beyond November of this year, in which Free and supervised elections should be held,” he said.
Last November, Nicaragua held general elections in which Ortega was re-elected with seven candidates for the Presidency from the opposition in jail and another two in exile, after having canceled the legal status of three opposition parties and imprisoned more than 40 leaders. dissidents, including Torres.
Dozens of countries have questioned the legitimacy of the elections, considering that they were not held in adequate conditions to guarantee democracy.
Torres is the second person considered a “political prisoner” to die in detention, after the death of the dual Nicaraguan and American citizen Eddy Montes Praslin, who died in prison after being shot by a guard’s gun in May 2019.
After Torres’s death, at least 176 “political prisoners” remain in Nicaraguan jails, according to data endorsed by the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR). (I)
Source: Eluniverso
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