Government of Nicaragua says that Hugo Torres died from an illness

The former dissident Sandinista guerrilla Hugo Torres, arrested in June 2021 in Nicaragua and accused of alleged “treason against the homeland”, died this Saturday due to a “disease”, reported the Public Ministry without specifying which one.

“The Public Ministry of Nicaragua informs the Nicaraguan population of the death of Jorge Hugo Torres Jiménez, due to illness,” the state entity said in a statement, hours after the news had been spread by his relatives.

The former guerrilla “presented a deterioration in his state of health, he was transferred to a hospital in the capital to be treated properly, where he was always accompanied by his children Hugo Marcel and María Alejandra, as well as by his son-in-law Alejandro Ernesto Martínez, however , died due to the ailments he had, ”said the judicial body.

The Public Ministry had accused Torres, arrested on June 13, 2021, of crimes considered “treason against the country.” He did not detail the suffering of the man who risked his life to get President Daniel Ortega out of prison in 1974, nor how long he was in the hospital.

The state entity indicated that “upon learning of the seriousness of the disease, for humanitarian reasons, it asked the judicial authority to definitively suspend the beginning of the oral and public trial, which was authorized by the court.”

Torres, considered a “political prisoner” of the Ortega government, was known in Nicaragua for participating in an operation in 1974 that took the current Nicaraguan president out of prison, when the country was ruled by the Somoza family dictatorship. In the mid-1990s he became a dissident.

The former Sandinista guerrilla had been captured last June 13, in a wave of arrests against opponents that led to prison some 40 dissident leaders and critics of Ortega, including 7 candidates for the Presidency by the opposition.

This situation occurred in the context of the elections last November, in which Ortega was re-elected amid internal criticism and criticism from the international community, which did not recognize the legitimacy of the process.

Torres died eight months after his arrest without having been tried. At that time, the Nicaraguan authorities did not report the legal or health situation of the former guerrilla.

The opposition Democratic Renovating Union (Unamos), the former Sandinista Renovating Movement (MRS), of which Torres was vice president, had reported that they had not known his whereabouts for several weeks.

Dozens of people who are also considered “political prisoners” in Nicaragua have been in prison for between three and eight months without facing trial, but their legal situation has not been clarified by the Nicaraguan authorities until now, and their health status is unknown.

Opposition organizations such as Unamos or the Blue and White National Unity, as well as the Nicaraguan Never Again Human Rights Collective, blamed Ortega for Torres’s death and reiterated the complaints of alleged torture and ill-treatment against Torres in prison.

Torres is the second “political prisoner” to die in Nicaragua in government custody, according to the information known so far, after the death of the convict of dual Nicaraguan and US citizenship Eddy Montes Praslin, who was shot by a custodian’s gun in May 2019. (I)