In a cruel turn to Sandinista history, Daniel Ortega ordered the closure of Nicaragua's last human rights NGO

On the same day that the Standing Commission on Human Rights (PCHR) was 45 years old, Daniel Ortega's regime legally eliminated it. It is a cruel turn of history, because this organization was born on April 20, 1977 defending, among others, Sandinista commanders who at that time were fighting to overthrow dictator Anastasio Somoza.

José Esteban González, the late founder of the CPDH, reported in an interview with the newspaper La Prensa that one of the first cases the organization took on was the defense of Sandinista commander Tomás Borge, one of the main leaders of the Sandinista Front, who was imprisoned in the prisons of the Somoza regime. “What we asked was that they should be given a public trial, fair and with the right to defend themselves, not to be tortured,” González explained.

On Wednesday, the National Assembly, controlled by the Ortega regime, canceled the legal status of 25 non-governmental organizations, including the CPDH, the last remaining legally established human rights organization in Nicaragua.

Marcos Carmona, executive director of the PCHR, said at a press conference that the organization will continue to work for human rights, perhaps under another name, “because legal personality is not required to defend human rights.”

“The allegations they are making is that we have not complied with the delivery of the financial reports. We have made it clear on many occasions that we were present before the Ministry of the Interior presenting these audited financial reports and there was never the will to receive these reports,” Carmona said.

“With this, what we clearly see is that there is no will on the part of the Government that there are human rights organizations that are documenting the abuses being committed in our country,” he added.

The “legal death” of the PCHR occurs in a context of repression against human rights defenders. Gonzalo Carrión is one of them. Until 2019, Carrión was the legal director of the Nicaraguan Center for Human Rights (CENIDH) and for almost 30 years he had been defending the rights of those who participated in social protests in Nicaragua.

On December 30, 2018, Carrión illegally crossed Nicaragua's southern border to reach Costa Rica and avoid being captured or killed, in a wave of persecution unleashed by the Ortega regime against human rights defenders. The Directorate of Judicial Assistance of the Police told him to participate in the fire of a house in the Carlos Marx neighborhood, in Managua, where six people, including two children, were killed by charring.

“I was endorsed by the involvement of a crime against humanity committed by the police forces and paramilitaries,” he says from his exile.

On Saturday, June 16, 2018, six members of the Pavón Muñoz family were burned to death when hooded and accompanied by police officers, according to testimonies of surviving relatives, they set fire to the house in the Carlos Marx neighborhood where a mattress factory was also operating. Gonzalo Carrión was one of the first to arrive at the scene of the tragedy and his presence was used by the regime to hold him responsible for the brutal crime. “I didn't have many options. It was prison, exile or the cemetery,” he adds.

Carrión recalls that the process of dismantling human rights organizations began from the very moment Daniel Ortega returned to power, in January 2007. “They have been closing spaces from the beginning, but in the last four years they have pursued a scorched earth policy against human rights defenders,” he says.

Dozens of human rights defenders sought refuge in exile, others were arrested and many remained working in Nicaragua under threats and siege, in clandestine conditions, explains Carrión.

Since the 2018 protests, an offensive began to legally eliminate human rights organizations. It began on December 12, 2018 when the Nicaraguan Center for Human Rights (CENIDH) was closed and confiscated, and ended this Wednesday, April 20, with the last remaining legal organization, the Permanent Commission on Human Rights.

The CPDH official, María Oviedo, was arrested in July last year and remains in conditions of torture and isolation in the prison known as El Chipote, where most of the regime's political prisoners have been detained since May 2021.

Pablo Cuevas, another CPDH official, abruptly left Nicaragua with his entire family on March 8 because he said he felt that his life was in danger. “We went underground. I don't have any money, but I do have many friends and they helped me. There are people who put themselves at risk for me, because if they had caught me they would surely be at risk”, explained Pablo Cuevas during the program 100% Entrevistas.

“I knew there was an order to arrest or kill me,” says Cuevas, who this month crossed the Rio Bravo, on the border with Mexico, to reach the United States where he is seeking political asylum.

“The human rights situation in Nicaragua is in the worst scenario imaginable,” says Gonzalo Carrión, who along with other colleagues founded a new human rights defenders organization in Costa Rica that works for Nicaragua from exile called “Never Again”.

Carrión, who has been defending human rights for 30 years, recalls that since 1990, when Daniel Ortega lost power until 2006 when he regained it, the governments of that time “also violated human rights”, but he notes that when the Sandinistas demanded rights organizations from the opposition, often violently human beings protected them and “these neoliberal governments” allowed them to reach the galleries of the prison known as El Chipote to verify the status of the detainees, something unthinkable in the Ortega regime.

The irony, adds Carrión, is that those who today persecute human rights organizations used to seek them for help. “They called us to intercede for them when they were in prison or under pressure. At that time we were described as leftists for helping them and now they tell us that we are agents of the empire for helping those they persecute.”

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