Two organizations denounce the seizure of their headquarters in Nicaragua

Two organizations that were outlawed by the Daniel Ortega regime denounced this Wednesday the illegal confiscation of their facilities by the Police.

“Grupo Venancia denounces that today, February 8, starting at 9:30 a.m., police officers, riot police, PGR (Attorney General’s Office) personnel, and civilians took over the facilities where we have worked for 31 years,” said this group of women through a statement.

“The seizure of our property is one more arbitrary step, after the illegal cancellation of our legal status. We already knew that the laws are meaningless in this country.” They described the action as “another show of state violence against our rights.”

According to Grupo Venancia, the occupation of its facilities in the city of Matagalpa “is a robbery, not even a confiscation, because they are not complying with the legal procedures for it.”

“They deprive us of our premises, but can’t take away our commitment to the defense of human rights in all its extension, nor of the ideal of a Nicaragua with justice, freedom and democracy, where working for the common good and defending rights is not a crime,” they noted.

The stolen headquarters is also known as the Guanuca Cultural Center, the leading local for decades of varied cultural activities in Matagalpa.

Also the CPDH

Meanwhile, the Permanent Commission on Human Rights (CPDH) denounced from Miami, where its activists have gone into exile, that the “bloody dictatorship of the Sandinista Front, headed by Daniel Ortega and Rosario Murillo in Nicaragua, in addition to consummating the theft of our offices in Managua, intends to erase all traces of the work we do in defense of the Nicaraguan people”.

“Our emblems and colors were erased from our building, but they will not be able to erase the crimes and tortures committed due to their excessive ambitions for power and their totalitarian megalomania,” said that organization in a statement.

The now confiscated headquarters of the CPDH in Managua. Photo: Jorge Torres / EFE

The CPDH maintained that it never saw political colors in its work receiving and monitoring complaints, “on the contrary, we have always kept in mind our commitment to the Nicaraguan people, and we continue to defend them at any cost.”

“The defense of human rights is much more than a building. Long live Nicaragua,” they added.

This article was originally published in Spanish in Confidencial and translated by Havana Time