A decision to put 222 Nicaraguan dissidents on a plane to Washington came suddenly, and officials in the US and Nicaragua said the move took them by surprise.
The plane was barely off the ground on Thursday when word began to spread of the surprise release of opposition figures, journalists, activists and priests who were considered to be political prisoners.
The majority had been sentenced in the past two years to lengthy prison terms. The mass release came together in a couple of days and the prisoners had no idea what was happening until their buses arrived at Managua’s international airport.
Photo: AP
The prisoners created political and public problems for Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega, and releasing them relieved pressure on his regime, analysists said.
“The political pressure of the prisoners, the political prisoners, became important to the Ortega regime, even for the people, the Sandinista people who were tired of abuses,” opposition leader Juan Sebastian Chamorro, who was one of those released, told a news conference on Friday.
“I think [Ortega] wanted to basically send the opposition outside of the country into exile,” he said.
Ortega had said they are terrorists funded by foreign governments and worked to destabilize his government after huge street protests occurred in April 2018.
The timeline was “very short,” a US Department of State official said on condition of anonymity, suggesting the transfer was put together in as little as two days.
“Once we were aware of this, we were able to spring into action and ensure the safe transportation of these individuals,” the person said.
Nicaragua drafted a list of 228 prisoners it wanted off its hands. The US struck four of them off the list, and then two more refused to get on the plane on Thursday, officials from both countries said.
Jared Genser, a human rights lawyer who handled the cases of opposition leaders Chamorro and Felix Maradiaga, said on Friday that “dictators never release political prisoners because they want to, they release them when they have to, when releasing them is the least worst choice.”
It could have been that the constant attention to the prisoners’ plight from human rights organizations, the UN and foreign governments made them more of a liability than simply expelling them from Nicaragua, Genser said.
One of the two prisoners who decided to stay in Nicaragua was Catholic Bishop Rolando Alvarez, a decision that resulted in a Nicaraguan court on Friday sentencing him to jail for 26 years.
The written decision declared Alvarez to be “a traitor to the fatherland” and said he would not step out of jail until 2049.
The court also stripped the bishop of his Nicaraguan citizenship and fined him US$1,600.
Alvarez, who is Nicaraguan-born but educated in Spain and the Vatican, declined to board the chartered plane carrying exiled prisoners to the US.
Ortega called Alverez’s decision “absurd” and said he would return to jail for “terrorism.”
Alvarez had been an outspoken critic of what he called restrictions on religious freedom under the Ortega government.
Additional reporting by AFP
Swedish campaigner Greta Thunberg was deported from Israel yesterday, the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs said, the day after the Israeli navy prevented her and a group of fellow pro-Palestinian activists from sailing to Gaza. Thunberg, 22, was put on a flight to France, the ministry said, adding that she would travel on to Sweden from there. Three other people who had been aboard the charity vessel also agreed to immediate repatriation. Eight other crew members are contesting their deportation order, Israeli rights group Adalah, which advised them, said in a statement. They are being held at a detention center ahead of a
A Chinese scientist was arrested while arriving in the US at Detroit airport, the second case in days involving the alleged smuggling of biological material, authorities said on Monday. The scientist is accused of shipping biological material months ago to staff at a laboratory at the University of Michigan. The FBI, in a court filing, described it as material related to certain worms and requires a government permit. “The guidelines for importing biological materials into the US for research purposes are stringent, but clear, and actions like this undermine the legitimate work of other visiting scholars,” said John Nowak, who leads field
NUCLEAR WARNING: Elites are carelessly fomenting fear and tensions between nuclear powers, perhaps because they have access to shelters, Tulsi Gabbard said After a trip to Hiroshima, US Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard on Tuesday warned that “warmongers” were pushing the world to the brink of nuclear war. Gabbard did not specify her concerns. Gabbard posted on social media a video of grisly footage from the world’s first nuclear attack and of her staring reflectively at the Hiroshima Peace Memorial. On Aug. 6, 1945, the US obliterated Hiroshima, killing 140,000 people in the explosion and by the end of the year from the uranium bomb’s effects. Three days later, a US plane dropped a plutonium bomb on Nagasaki, leaving abut 74,000 people dead by the
Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi is to visit Canada next week, his first since relations plummeted after the assassination of a Canadian Sikh separatist in Vancouver, triggering diplomatic expulsions and hitting trade. Analysts hope it is a step toward repairing ties that soured in 2023, after then-Canadian prime minister Justin Trudeau pointed the finger at New Delhi’s involvement in murdering Hardeep Singh Nijjar, claims India furiously denied. An invitation extended by new Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney to Modi to attend the G7 leaders summit in Canada offers a chance to “reset” relations, former Indian diplomat Harsh Vardhan Shringla said. “This is a
RSS