The agency says that the country has been transformed into a “police state”, where the government “has installed a regime of terror.”
The elections on November 7 in Nicaragua seek to perpetuate President Daniel Ortega in power, said the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR) on Thursday, in a report that indicates “structural impunity” and “crimes against humanity” in the country. Central American.
The elections take place in a “climate of repression and closure of democratic spaces in the country. This seeks to perpetuate power indefinitely and maintain privileges and immunities, in a context of repression, corruption, electoral fraud and structural impunity, ”said the IACHR, an organ of the OAS.
“The above conditions make a full and free electoral process unfeasible,” he warned.
The report, entitled “Nicaragua: Concentration of Power and Weakening of the Rule of Law,” especially notes that “none” of the measures to promote free elections proposed by the OAS General Assembly have been implemented.
At its last meeting, in October 2020, the highest body of the Organization of American States (OAS) urged Nicaragua to promote an electoral reform to guarantee the transparency of the elections, but the Ortega government rejected the resolution.
“Regime of terror”
The IACHR report highlights that this year, “in an unusual way,” more than 30 people were “arbitrarily” detained, including seven presidential candidates, who remain deprived of liberty.
It also denounces the cancellation of the legal status of three political parties, the “continuous harassment” of civil and human rights organizations, and the harassment and repression against all opponents.
Nicaragua has been transformed into a “police state”, where the Ortega government, in power since 2007, “has installed a regime of terror”, with suspension of fundamental rights and an “intense and systematic” attack on public liberties “Through state and parastatal security institutions,” said the IACHR.
The report also underlines that, in responding to the massive anti-tuberculosis protests that broke out in 2018, the Ortega government “carried out conduct that according to international law should be considered crimes against humanity.”
The repression of the demonstrations left at least 328 dead, 1,614 detained, of which 136 are still in prison, and more than 103,000 exiles, according to the IACHR.
“Absolute rejection”
The IACHR said that Nicaragua expressed its “absolute non-acceptance and rejection” of the report, a copy of which was sent to it before its publication.
“It is nothing but an insulting, offensive and absurd compilation of false, distorted and manipulated facts that do not reflect the reality of our country and whose sole purpose is to defame the State,” said the Ortega government in its response to the IACHR.
He added that he considered it “a frank obedience and replica of the damaging and interfering designs of the North American Empire, in its attempt to injure our sovereignty and self-determination, in the face of its next electoral process.”
The report traces the origins of Nicaragua’s institutional deterioration to the so-called “Alemán-Ortega” pact of 1999, sealed between then-president Arnoldo Alemán (1997-2002) and Ortega, who had already been president between 1985 and 1990 after the Sandinista revolution in 1979 that defeated the dictatorship of Atanasio Somoza.
According to the IACHR, this agreement established a bipartisan system that led to the concentration of power in the Executive, a process that intensified in 2007, when Ortega assumed his second term, and was consolidated after the crisis that began in April 2018. (I)
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