Seven million people kidnapped by a criminal couple

By: Carlos Alberto Montaner - 01/01/2023

This will be the last article of this year 2022. But the topic will be very important in 2023. It has to do with several million people. With almost seven million human beings kidnapped by a criminal couple. I am talking about Nicaragua and the presidential couple formed by Daniel Ortega and his VP and wife, Rosario Murillo.

I usually read the objective prose of Carlos Fernando Chamorro. From him I learned that among the 235 absolutely innocent political prisoners there are 4 who bear that magical last name: his siblings Cristiana and Pedro Joaquín, and his cousins Sebastián and Juan Lorenzo Holman Chamorro.

His ancestor, Fruto Chamorro, was one of the first presidents of the Nicaraguan nation in the 19th century, although he was born in Guatemala to Nicaraguan parents. (At that time, the unity of the entire isthmus was sought).

Why are those 235 people imprisoned? Because any one of them can defeat Ortega in a free election. And more so in the case of a Chamorro, who is a guarantee of honesty in administrative matters and democracy in the transmission of authority.

Daniel Ortega already went through that. Doña Violeta Barrios, widow of Chamorro, was president of Nicaragua between 1990 and 1997. (She was helped to rule the country by Antonio Lacayo, Cristiana’s husband, who tragically died prematurely.) She beat Daniel Ortega by 54% of the votes against 40% for the Sandinista Front. The rest, up to 100%, were divided into an alphabet soup. Today Doña Violeta is bedridden, a victim of Alzheimer’s.

Hence the adjective “magical” that I use. Pedro Joaquín Chamorro Cardenal, former editor of La Prensa, and a fierce opponent of the Somoza family, died shortly before Tachito fled the country defeated by the guerrillas in the summer of 1979. Otherwise, he would have been the boss, the president, or the head of the opposition.

Let’s see some facts to judge current Sandinismo. Nicaragua has a population of six million seven hundred thousand people, of which 400,000 have fled the country and have taken refuge in Costa Rica, while twice as many have done so in the United States, for a total of more than one million people (2020 US Census).

Today, many of them have the Costa Rican or American citizenship. They started leaving their country in the 1980s, when it made some sense to be a communist. Today, only North Korea and Cuba are communists, and we can see how they are doing. The USSR no longer exists, and China and Vietnam are not communists anymore. The three nations are dictatorships, but they are far from being subject to the Marxist catechism. They are rather fascist-like monstrosities with a devotion to the State and the ruling leader.

Thousands of Nicaraguans have requested political asylum in the US, just in the last two years, when Daniel Ortega and Rosario Murillo became butchers ordering the militias to kill 355 people, almost all of them young students, although the government “only” admits 200. The advantage (which is a disadvantage for Ortega and Murillo) in these times is that governments cannot hide a massacre of that size.

How many weeks will pass before some responsible officers demand that the strange couple that rules in Managua face their destiny? There, an “obligation to obey orders” does not exist. And it does not exist, because there is no war, and the military went to cause casualties among an unarmed population. The only way for these officers to avoid guilt is to invoke the precedent of Ceaucescu and his wife Elena. No one went to jail in Romania for holding a trial and shooting the perpetrators of so many outrages and crimes.

Many governments would be willing to give asylum to the 235 people mentioned by Carlos Fernando Chamorro. Nothing would be more in tune with the times. Freedom for Nicaraguan political prisoners! [©FIRMAS PRESS]

*@CarlosAMontaner. CAM’s latest book is Sin ir más lejos (Memories). Published by Debate, a label of Penguin-Random House, the book is available through Amazon Books.

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