– Spain offers nationality to 135 Nicaraguan opponents
The Spanish government will offer nationality to the 135 Nicaraguan opponents stripped of their citizenship at the beginning of September and expelled from Nicaragua.
Published today at 06:11
Spanish Foreign Minister José Manuel Albares, in Paris on August 30, 2024.
AFP
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Spain will offer nationality to the 135 Nicaraguan opponents stripped of their citizenship in September and expelled from their country, Spanish Foreign Minister José Manuel Albares announced on Friday.
This offer is aimed at “the 135 political prisoners who were chased from their homes and stripped of their nationality on September 5” by the justice system of President Daniel Ortega, José Manuel Albares declared before a parliamentary commission.
These 135 detainees were released following an agreement with the United States, and initially received in Guatemala. Among them are faithful Catholics and 13 members of a Texas Christian missionary organization, Mountain Gateway.
The Spanish offer “is an offer of fraternity and a sign that everything that happened in Nicaragua is a total injustice,” evangelical pastor Walner Blandon, one of the ex-detainees, reacted to AFP from the Guatemalan capital.
Not a first
Madrid has already offered Spanish nationality to more than 300 opponents stripped of their Nicaraguan nationality in 2023, including writers Gioconda Belli and Sergio Ramirez.
Daniel Ortega, 78, is a former guerrilla leader who governed Nicaragua in the 1980s after the triumph of the Sandinista revolution. He returned to power in 2007 and was re-elected in elections not recognized by international organizations, the United States or the European Union, which accuse him of multiple despotic excesses.
Daniel Ortega is accused of having established an authoritarian regime in Nicaragua, a country of seven million inhabitants. In 2018, three months of protests against his regime were harshly repressed, leaving more than 300 dead, hundreds detained, and forcing thousands more into exile, according to the UN.
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