The government of Daniel Ortega and his wife “is perhaps the bloodiest dictatorship that has ever existed on the continent,” said Dario Richarte. The crimes they are accused of include “assassination, serious deprivation of liberty, forced disappearance of persons, torture, deportation or forced transfer of population and persecution of a group or community”.
A “criminal plan of repression”
The complaint was filed in August 2022 by a group of professors from the University of Buenos Aires led by Dario Richarte.
An arrest warrant was also issued against “each of those responsible for the state structure, police, military and paramilitary, for crimes against humanity,” he added. The complaint refers to a “criminal plan of repression” and is based on testimonies from victims who have remained anonymous.
The legal action “was expanded as the dictatorship committed new human rights violations,” the lawyer said.
“No one is safe” from the “repressive model” put in place in Nicaragua by the government of President Ortega, which threatens human rights in an “unprecedented” way, the NGO Amnesty warned in mid-December international.
Accused of having established an autocracy with his wife
Daniel Ortega, a 79-year-old former guerrilla who led Nicaragua in the 1980s after the triumph of the Sandinista revolution, returned to power in 2007. He reformed the Constitution a dozen times, including allowing him an indefinite number of mandates.
He is accused by the United States, the European Union and Latin American countries of having established an autocracy with his wife, who will become “co-president” thanks to a constitutional reform adopted in November by parliament, controlled by the ruling party, the Sandinista National Liberation Front (FSLN, left). The reform must be validated during a next parliamentary session in January. It provides for a “presidency of the Republic (…) composed of a co-president and a co-president”, who will be designated during elections organized “every six years”, and no longer every five years.
The two leaders will coordinate “the legislative, judicial, electoral bodies” or those managing regions and municipalities, while the current constitution considered them independent.
Daniel Ortega and Rosario Murillo radicalized their positions and strengthened their control over Nicaraguan society after the anti-government protests of 2018, the repression of which left 320 dead according to the UN. Between February 2023 and September 2024, the Ortega government stripped of their Nicaraguan nationality more than 400 politicians, businessmen, journalists, intellectuals, human rights defenders and members of the clergy who were driven into exile or expelled from the country.
