Who is Arturo McFields, the ambassador who was close to Daniel Ortega and surprised to denounce the dictatorship live to the OAS

The character of the moment is Arturo McFields Yescas, who this Wednesday denounced the dictatorship of Daniel Ortega in a live session of the Organization of States Americanos (OAS), of which he was until that time the ambassador representative of Nicaragua.

“I am taking the floor today on behalf of more than 177 political prisoners and more than 350 people who have lost their lives in my country since 2018,” McFields Yescas said, leaving everyone connected to the session speechless and turning their statements into an expansion bomb that circulated as a last minute in the headlines of communication from all over the continent. “Denouncing my country's dictatorship is not easy, but keeping silent and defending the indefensible is impossible. I have to talk, even if I'm afraid,” he added.

Arturo McFields Yescas was appointed ambassador of Nicaragua to the OAS Permanent Council on October 27, replacing Luis Alvarado, according to presidential agreement 183-2021 published in Official Gazette 189. On November 5, during the ceremony for the presentation of credentials before the Secretary General of the OAS, Luis Almagro, McFields said he was very honored to represent “the Homeland of Sandino, Benjamin Zeledón and our Universal Poet Rubén Darío,” said the official newspaper 19 Digital at the time.

A journalist by profession, graduated from the Central American University of Managua (UCA), McFields joined Nicaraguan diplomatic service in 2011, when he was appointed as a press attaché at the Nicaraguan embassy in the United States. He was then appointed as minister councillor to the OAS and finally as permanent representative with the rank of ambassador.

As a journalist, he worked in Nicaragua on a Christian radio station, then in the newspaper La Prensa and Canal 12 television. For this channel, he made a famous report showing the house of Daniel Ortega and Rosario Murillo on Christmas 2005, on the eve of the election campaign that would take them to the presidency. This is the only time that people outside the family or political circle of Daniel Ortega have known the house of the couple who set up a dictatorship in Nicaragua.

“I admire Buddhism very much as it preaches detachment, detachment, not attaching to anything, because one is not eternal, one is movement, life is that, life is movement and one must flow with that movement and one must be detached and know that one day you are here and another day you are there (dead), but the only thing that counts is that you spirit prevail,” Murillo explained to the then-young and skinny journalist of coastal origin.

The deference to Arturo McFields, which he has not had with any other journalist, possibly stems from the strong friendship Rosario Murillo had with the poet David McFields, father of Nicaragua's later ambassador to the OAS.

David McFields was a Sandinista diplomat during the revolution and belonged to the bohemian group of artists and poets who, at the end of the 80s, arrived at the home of the Ortega Murillo in a kind of nightclub that Rosario Murillo installed in his home, which he named “Purple Tortuga” in honor of a famous nightclub in old Managua.

During the report by journalist McFields, Murillo showed his particular religious thought, such as that of an image of Sandino with candles and salt at his feet. “Salt attracts negative things, because salt is the sea, it is infinity is immensity, so this helps you attract negative energies and that there is no negativity in the environment, that there is harmony,” he said at the time.

Daniel Ortega, for his part, showed how he ate lamb with his hand, sitting on the ground in a tent in the desert, with the murdered Libyan colonel Muammar el Gaddafi.

Shortly after its denunciation against the dictatorship on Wednesday, the Nicaraguan regime's foreign office issued a statement ignoring McFields as Nicaragua's ambassador to the OAS. “The Government of Reconciliation and National Unity, through the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, complies with informing our people and those concerned, that Mr. Arturo McFields does not represent us, so no statement by him is valid. Our representative to the OAS is Ambassador Francisco Campbell Hooker, duly accredited,” reads the statement.

Likewise, supporters of the regime reacted upset on social media to McFields' statements, declaring him a “traitor”, “vendepatria” and “counterrevolutionary.”

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