The vast majority of the political prisoners who were serving in the prisons of the dictatorship were crimes they never committed, invented in repressive laws enacted expresslyhave been released, put on a charter plane, and sent into exile at dawn, in the same arbitrary way in which they were captured and subjected to processes that never had any legal value, and kept in iniquitous conditions in isolation cells, a few of them confined to their homes.
I have just seen the official video in which a robed magistrate, president of the Court of Appeals of Managua, reads with a cavernous voice, in a deserted public room in the Judicial Complex, the sentence in which the prison sentence is changed to the penalty of exile, and they are stripped, in addition, in perpetuity, of all their political and civic rights for treason, another arbitrariness without any basis.
Shortly after, the National Assembly, in an emergency meeting, obediently unanimously approved a decree to remove Nicaraguan nationality from traitors to the homeland, that is, those exiled in flight, contrary to the Constitution. Even more arbitrariness. And they forget that the laws are not retroactive by universal principle, even if it were a constitutional law, but in Nicaragua the universal principles have ceased to be valid.
Banished, stateless, but free. God writes the lines of freedom crookedly, but with a straight letter. And this is just the first page. The best pages are yet to come.
They take away their nationality to find a way to satisfy the ears of the rabid fanatics, blindly militants, paramilitaries committed with blood in the repression, who must be confused, accustomed as they are to the furious discourse, hammered every day, that these traitors to the homeland , terrorists responsible for a frustrated coup in 2018, would never see the light of the sun. That has been the official discourse. Traitors, terrorists, trash, country sellers. And they saw her. They saw freedom. As the whole country will see it one day.
All the political prisoners under the dictatorship, those who boarded the plane that took them into exile and those who stayed, we still do not know why, are exemplary Nicaraguans who resisted isolation in punishment cells for long months with dignity, and made the jail their fighting trench, the jail where they should never have been. Brave men and women, political, union and peasant leaders, champions of human rights, business executives, journalists, student leaders, jurists, academics, Catholic priests, and even a bishop, head of the dioceses of Matagalpa and Estelí, Monsignor Rolando Álvarez , a voice of prophetic truth.
All of them, accused of a crime taken from the legal sleeve, “undermining national sovereignty”; the sovereignty appropriated by a couple, a family in power, an old revolutionary party turned into an imitation of a dream that failed so long ago.
They were never broken. They never lowered their heads in front of the puny judges at Orwellian hearings. They wore prisoner uniforms without detriment to their dignity, and set an example of decorum to a country silenced by force, which in the meantime sees thousands leaving through blind spots across its borders, fleeing from repression, from silence, from fear. A country that has not yet awakened from its long nightmare, after a dictatorship, another, even more ferocious, but that, when the plane taking off the exiled prisoners takes off, celebrates it intimately, like a small joy, even knowing that it is far away of the ultimate goal of freedom and democracy.
It was always clear that these political prisoners were hostages. The dictatorship, faced with its growing international isolation, wanted to keep this negotiating card, the only possible one, the prisoners in exchange for something: the economic sanctions imposed by the United States, the European Union, Canada, Switzerland, England, both on entities of Government as public companies and private companies related to the regime, as well as police officers, officials and members of the dictatorial family. Have you got any of that? It is not yet known what they got in return. The special flight on which the hostages traveled had its destination at Dulles Airport in Washington, but the State Department has been quick to clarify, in a communication addressed to congressmen, that it was a unilateral decision by Ortega, “his own decision”, and urge him to take other steps for the restoration of democracy and freedom in Nicaragua without acknowledging any compromise.
Either way, the dictatorship has been left empty-handed. His best strategy would have been to deal the hostages in batches, and not release them all at once, to keep cards in hand. Bad sign, as far as they’re concerned. And releasing them is not a test of strength, but of weakness. It demonstrates it by declaring them stateless, a final revenge, already far from the reach of their clutches, as if their decrees, and the sentences and laws of their comparsas, judges and deputies, had value in perpetuity, and Nicaragua was going to continue under their rule for always.
Those exiles are more Nicaraguan than ever.
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