Nicaragua has released more than 200 political prisoners and sent them to the United States

More than 200 opponents imprisoned in Nicaragua were released Thursday by Daniel Ortega’s regime and sent to the United States. “Approximately 222 political prisoners have come to the city of Washington, they have been released,” the former Nicaraguan ambassador to the OAS Artur McFields announced in a video on social networks, dismissed from the regional body after defining his country as a “dictatorship”.

A diplomatic source in Managua confirmed the release of the prisoners, which was later ratified by the Nicaraguan justice system.

In an initial reaction, the United States stressed that it had “facilitated the transportation” of the 222 imprisoned opponents and ensured that Ortega “decided to release them unilaterally”.

This is a “positive and welcome” decision, added a State Department spokesman, who assures that the freed people “leave the country voluntarily” and will be able to reside in the United States for two years.

The spokesman recalled that Washington he had been asking “for some time the release of imprisoned people in Nicaragua for the exercise of their fundamental freedoms, as a first step towards the restoration of democracy and the improvement of the climate of human rights” in the Central American nation.

For his part, McFields did not specify how many or who will continue to be detained in Nicaragua. According to data from the Nicaraguan opposition, until this week the number of “political prisoners” amounted to 245 people.

Javier Álvarez, a Nicaraguan exiled in Costa Rica, told AFP news agency that among those released were his wife and daughter, also of French nationality.

Similarly, Berta Valle, wife of prisoner Félix Maradiaga, said the US State Department had confirmed the release of more than 200 political prisoners, who were transferred to Managua International Airport to board a plane bound for Washington.

The Nicaraguan writer Sergio Ramírez, Ortega’s vice president in his first term (1985-1990), and currently in exile in Spain, expressed his satisfaction with the release of the prisoners.

“Today is a great day for Nicaragua’s freedom struggle as so many wrongfully convicted or prosecuted prisoners are released from prisons, prisons they were never meant to be in. They are going into exile, but they are going to freedom.” Ramírez tweeted.

At the beginning of 2021, Ortega has stepped up the persecution of his political opponents to clear the ground for the November presidential election of that year. Police arrested seven possible presidential hopefuls, and Ortega won a fourth consecutive term in an election that the United States and other countries called a “farce.”

Nicaraguan judges sentenced to prison terms several opposition leaders, including former senior officials in the ruling Sandinista movement and former presidential hopefuls, were charged with “conspiracy to attack national integrity”.