The police of the regime of Daniel Ortega and Rosario Murillo broke down this Friday the doors of the manor house of the writer Sergio Ramírez in Masatepe, a city located on the Meseta de los Pueblos in Nicaragua. The Luisa Mercado Foundation, a cultural and educational institution founded in 2007 in memory of the mother of the Cervantes Prize, worked in the house. The police occupation materialized the de facto confiscation of the property in the midst of the persecution that the presidential couple maintains against critical voices.
Less than 24 hours after the police occupation, the award-winning writer reacted in a statement: “This act of aggression against culture puts an end to a cultural enterprise that left a deep mark of which we are proud, because we were able to to create readers in Masatepe and its surroundings, to train musicians, to help educate youth and children, and to bring culture to a place where we belong, and where our lives belong.”
The Luisa Mercado Foundation provided free cultural services to the city of Masatepe and other surrounding towns. Ramírez pointed out that one of the manor houses was acquired for this purpose and also invested in its remodeling so that it could accommodate a library of 6,000 volumes, open to students and the general public. It also had halls for cultural events and exhibitions of plastic arts and photographs; a children’s corner; music school, Lisandro Ramírez Velásquez in homage to Ramírez’s paternal grandfather, who was a composer and conductor. The organization also held cycles of talks, publications and literary workshops, given on some occasions by the writer before he went into exile in Spain.
Ramírez has settled in Spain due to the political persecution against him. In April 2022, the legal status of the Luisa Mercado Foundation was canceled by the Parliament controlled by Ortega and Murillo, in the midst of the massive closure of more than 3,000 NGOs in Nicaragua. The cultural institution stopped working since then and the manor house remained closed, until this Friday when it was violated by the officers.
Until this Friday, the regime had only confiscated the Amazonia Condominium (where the journalist Sofía Montenegro, also denationalized, had an apartment) and the properties of businessman Piero Coen Ubilla.
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Ramírez, who was Vice President of Nicaragua, has not stopped denouncing the regime at the international level. The day that the legal status of the Luisa Mercado Foundation was closed, the writer said that “suppressing these organizations and confiscating their assets means nothing more than the pretense of silencing civil society and ending all expressions of freedom and democracy that this type of of organizations has carried forward”.
Most of the beheaded NGOs do not pursue any political purpose, but carried out humanitarian assistance work or work with a cultural focus, as is the case of the Luisa Mercado Foundation. “These are the crimes for which the Foundation is punished, as are the other organizations whose rights have been violated today for similar reasons,” added the Nicaraguan writer who was quoted by the Nicaraguan authorities during the repressive escalation of 2021. Nicaraguan Prosecutor’s Office in the framework of the case of alleged money laundering against the Violeta Barrios de Chamorro Foundation (FVBCh).
“Writing is worth paying any price for”
Ramírez assured this Thursday, a day before the confiscation, that “writing is a trade for which it is worth paying any price”: “Even if they take away the country in which you were born.” In February, the writer was stripped of his nationality along with 93 other opponents, journalists, human rights defenders, feminists and political leaders.
Ramírez and the Nicaraguan writer Gioconda Belli, exiled in Spain, participated in the closing ceremony of the first Conference on Hispanic Literature, organized by the International University of La Rioja (UNIR) in the Spanish city of Logroño, where they were honored. “In any case, literature will always be returning you, in an incessant way, to that indelible country,” added Ramírez, accused of “treason”, declared a fugitive from justice and all his assets confiscated.
Both writers were awarded the Pedro Henríquez Ureña International Prize, from the Ministry of Culture of the Dominican Republic, for their career and literary excellence. The writer referred to the diffuse limits between history and fiction: “When living the facts of independence, abnormality will be added to the exaggeration, which will not stop marking history from now on” and, therefore, “the way of telling it and taking advantage of it from literature”.
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