Ortega taking advantage of dialogue to hike repression: Nicaragua activists

Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega has taken advantage of failed attempts to mediate a deadly political crisis to increase levels of repression in the country, activists charged Wednesday.

With the death toll from the past two months of violence now at 186, Nicaraguan activists said the government appeared to have ramped up the violence, even when it was participating in church-mediated talks aimed at halting the unrest.

“The president has taken advantage of this national dialogue to increase levels of repression and increase levels of violence,” said Denis De Jesus Darce, a project director with the Permanent Commission of Human Rights of Nicaragua (CPDH).

Speaking to journalists through a translator on the sidelines of a session of the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva, he pointed to a dramatic increase in deaths since the talks began, as well as a shift towards the use of “military weapons”.

In the beginning, he said, the crackdown affected only the protesters themselves, but increasingly, police and paramilitary groups have been targeting members of the community who have provided medical and humanitarian assistance to the demonstrators.

Nicaragua’s descent into chaos was triggered on April 18 when relatively small protests against now-scrapped social security reforms were met with a government crackdown.

Those demonstrations mushroomed into a popular uprising, with anti-government protesters facing off against police and paramilitaries supporting Ortega, whom critics accuse of acting like a dictator.

The latest attempt at church-mediated talks fell apart on Monday, when clergy accused the government of failing to make good on a promise just three days earlier to invite international organisations to come to Nicaragua to help probe the violence.

– ‘Barbaric acts’ –

“The massacre is continuing… The population is being assassinated,” CPDH president Marcos Carmona told journalists, also speaking through a translator.

He described how many killed and injured protesters had been shot in the back, and said his organisation had “video footage of national police shooting people.”

And “the barbaric acts do not end there,” he said, saying the CPDH had also been documenting how the authorities are using “small airplanes that circle the protests, and release large quantities of Cypermenthrin”, an insecticide.

“It is toxic, and impacts people’s vision and health,” he said.

Carmona said CPDH was preparing to soon hand over the evidence it had been gathering to the UN and other international organisations.

Darce said the Nicaraguan people were counting on the international community to step up and help bring an end to the violence.

“The people of Nicaragua want peace, and we are asking for the international community to put pressure on the government,” he said.

He said he hoped the UN Human Rights Council would “speak out clearly and directly” against Ortega, and that it “won’t wait for there to be 500 deaths, but condemns the acts of violence now.”