Former Nicaraguan presidential candidate Juan Sebastián Chamorro was one of the 222 opponents that Daniel Ortega’s government deported in February 2023 for considering them “traitors to the country.”
Since 2021, after announcing his candidacy for the presidency, Chamorro had been in prison.
He says he was arbitrarily detained and suffered inhuman treatmentthreats and constant interrogations.
Now, from exile and stripped of his nationality, he dedicates himself to denouncing the “atrocities” of the Ortega government and to seek the support of the international community.
In an interview with BBC Mundo, Chamorro spoke about the situation of political prisoners, the figure of Ortega, president from 1985 to 1990 and uninterruptedly since 2007, and his call to expand the sanctions against the government.
Furthermore, it refers to the limitations of leading a leadership in exile and recognizes the rulings that the opposition has had in the search for change in Nicaragua.
Chamorro is an economist, and belongs to a family from which have emerged five presidents from Nicaragua, including his aunt Violeta Barrios de Chamorro.
In exile he is a researcher at the Kellogg Institute of International Studies at the University of Notre Dame, in the USA.
BBC Mundo interviewed Chamorro in London, where he met with a group of British parliamentarians interested in having evidence about the allegations of human rights violations in Nicaragua.
On February 29, the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights published a report in which it maintains that the “government of Nicaragua continues to perpetrate serious systematic violations of human rightsequivalent to crimes against humanity… directed at civilians, including children and students, for political purposes.”
What is the current panorama in Nicaragua?
It is a situation in which Ortega has been able to inflict as much fear and terror on the population as possible.
There are recent surveys that say that the vast majority of Nicaraguans do not want to talk about politics for fear of reprisals.
Citizen participation has been reduced, nearly 3,500 NGOs have been cancelled, there are no independent media, there is no rule of law, and for the minimum level of public expression you can end up in prison.
The Language Academy closed. He canceled even the Boys Scouts.
Everything that means an intellectual, political, cultural, economic space, anything that gets in the way of his plan of political domination, he destroys it.
Within that scenario, what is the issue that worries you the most?
I would say political prisoners, because it is an issue of imminent risk.
In recent years, political prisoners have died in the custody of the dictatorship.
Recently, Michael Healy, a colleague who traveled with us on the flight in which 222 political prisoners left Nicaragua, died.
He was confiscated, banished, suffered a lot in prison, died of a heart attack. Obviously those are sequels.
There are more than 121 political prisoners at this time.
They are in very harsh conditions.
And family members do not feel able to report it, for fear of reprisals.
There is also the issue of how to confront this dictatorship, which has great allies.
And this is where Venezuela, Cuba, Putin, Iran… This entire ecosystem of dictators who share technologies plays an important role.
If you look at the supposedly anti-foreign financing laws that have devastated NGOs, Putin implemented them and Ortega copied them.
We are seeing that [Nicolás] Ripe [en Venezuela] He is doing things that Ortega already did, and this is proof that all these guys are sharing the cards to do their evil in each of their countries.
It’s almost like a carbon copy of the way Maduro is mocking the international community. He is disqualifying candidates, like Ortega did with me.
It is surprising the level of parallelism that one finds in each of these countries.
Death, murder I would say, of [el líder opositor Alexei] Navalny [en Rusia] The issue of political prisoners also makes me respond to you.
And in a broader context, there is the issue of continuing to hold Ortega and his family responsible for the crime against humanity of eliminating our citizenship.
He has left very clear evidence in the commission of that crime. I think Ortega was wrong and has left us a case that we can take up and return to him in the form of an accusation before the International Court of Justice, for example.
There are other crimes that are more heinous, such as murder, and Ortega has murdered more than 350 Nicaraguans*.
[[*It refers to the fact that at least 355 people died during the repression of protests in Nicaragua from April 2018 to July 2019, according to the IACHR].
And actually that should be the main cause that should be promoted, but obviously collecting evidence is more difficult.
In the case of the elimination of nationalities, and this is where he makes the mistake, he leaves a trace of evidence easily recognizable and admitted by himself.
How strong do you see Ortega’s figure at this moment?
Ortega is basing his power on the weapons, army, police or paramilitary bodies* that are at his disposal, and that indicates a certain weakness.
[*Amnistía Internacional denuncia que durante las protestas de 2018 operaron grupos paramilitares para reprimir a los manifestantes, algo que el ejército de Nicaragua niega].
It has strength in the sense of having the strength of weapons, but also weakness, because the moment you have to resort to them is when you are really running out of options.
And his approval levels are always falling. People there are very clear that we are under a dictatorship.
I’m talking about surveys* of Nicaraguans, it is a total repudiation of the dictatorship.
[*AGalluppollfromJuly2023showeda[*UnaencuestadeGallupdejuliode2023mostróun 34% opinion favorable to Ortega. At the same time, a survey by the Public Opinion Monitoring System, disseminated by media related to the government, showed 78.9% approval for the president].
According to you, Ortega also sees the Church as a threat to his power…
Ortega’s movement defines itself as “Christian, supportive and socialist.”
So there is a contradiction that is explained because Ortega, being a voracious political animal, tries to extinguish everything that for him, in his twisted mind, could mean power, which is why he attacks the Church.
He sees the church as an opponent in his political ambitions.
He sees this immense power that the Church has to convene, to group Nicaraguans into a set of ideas, and he cannot stand these things.
And I am not only referring to grouping the Christian community, but physically grouping and that is why it acts by prohibiting processions: it does not want there to be Nicaraguans in the streets, it is afraid or it does not tolerate Nicaraguans demonstrating for whatever reason.
For example, an NGO that works with stray dogs closed. Why does he do that? This already reaches levels of paranoia that some people associate with the terminal phases of the dictatorship.
Students were protagonists in the 2018 protests, what has happened to that movement?
The student leadership after having been imprisoned, like Max Jerez or Lester Alemán and others, is in exile.
The student movement was harshly repressed and what there is now is a police state in public universities.
You cannot have congregations of three or four people in a public space, because if there is something there the university staff will come to disperse it. There is strict surveillance.
They attacked that type of control with more force and what they could not control because they were private universities, they confiscated them and stole them, as happened with the UCA.
The UCA thing was a settling of accounts, because the UCA opened the gates of the university during the massacre on Mother’s Day.
If they had not opened the doors, many more than the 19* people who were murdered that day would have died.
[*El gobierno reconoció al menos 15 muertos en el marco de las protestas].
The student movement, I believe, has matured, but it happens to us like everyone else: it is very difficult to have leadership while in exile.
And this is part of Ortega’s deliberate policy, which is very Cuban, by the way, of forcing these leaders to leave the country.
But in the end a very important mark has been left, it was demonstrated that those who spoke of a supposed apathy of youth on political issues are completely wrong.
Six years later there is a group of students and young people who were maybe 12, 13 years old when this exploded, and the big question is: how are they thinking about it?
It will be difficult in the long term for the dictatorship to control the student movement, because the student movement has always been rebellious and rebellious in all our countries, as it should be.
You say that Ortega is using migration to the United States as a political weapon. What are you talking about?
Ortega is allowing thousands of people of all nationalities to freely enter Nicaragua and continue their journey to the United States.
And he is doing it with an economic objective: he is charging these people and he is promoting it.
The Managua airport was full of charter flights until a few weeks ago, when the United States began to sanction these charter companies.
The numbers have gone down, but the information we have is that more than 26 flights could be arriving daily.
Now there are just two or three and they are registering them as tourists, but there is a discrepancy between the people who enter and the people who leave, and this discrepancy is quite large.
I mean that these people arrive by plane and go to Honduras.
In a context where migration is the most important issue, I would put it among the most important on the North American agenda, because there is a crisis on the southern border of the United States, and Ortega is adding gasoline to that fire.
It is a deliberate political attack on the United States.
How helpful has the international community’s support for the opposition been?
There is a huge surprise in seeing the atrocities that are committed, especially when one tells it from a personal point of view.
Saying that human rights are being violated in Nicaragua is not the same as listing the violations that a person like me or other opposition leaders have experienced. We have basically been stripped of everything except our lives and our hope.
They are surprised that things like this are happening in the 21st century in Latin America.
All these atrocities and this Ortega mentality surpass anything that can be done in the international community.
But that doesn’t mean one should give up saying them. It’s quite the opposite. If you don’t make these complaints, it could even sound complacent.
The British Parliament has just shown us that there is interest in carrying out an investigation about what is happening in Nicaragua and these spaces must be taken advantage of.
I am going to continue denouncing until there is democracy in Nicaragua.
You call for international sanctions against the Ortega government to be expanded. Aren’t you worried that these sanctions will affect ordinary citizens?
As long as these sanctions are not applied to the ordinary citizen.
I am not particularly a believer that general sanctions will necessarily have a positive effect.
I am not a big friend of trade embargoes, but there is a family of sanctions that go beyond the individual sanction of human rights violators, which must be done anyway, because they are people who have committed crimes.
My position is that free trade agreements must be used. But there must also be basic behavior for these countries and sharing beliefs such as respect for human rights, freedoms, etc.
And if you are not aware of that, there have to be sanctions, not necessarily removing you from the treaty, but invoking articles of the treaty to put pressure on compliance.
In addition, there are a series of sanctions that are neither individual nor directed at the population.
For example, why will blocking a company that provides repressive equipment to the police in Nicaragua affect the general population? That will rather help the population not to be repressed.
Or block financial funds that the dictatorship is using from the international community to do more of the same, or family businesses that the dictatorship has through international contracts.
The problem with sanctions is that, even if they are individual, these dictators always use them to say “this problem is happening because of the embargo, because of the sanction.”
They use it as a flag and although it has no effect on the general population, they make you believe that it is so.
It has also been said that sanctions are not effective in removing a dictator, but sanctions are not made for that: they are made to exert political pressure, which has to be complemented with other actions and make life more difficult for dictators.
What has the opposition failed in its search for change in Nicaragua?
Politics is quite competitive.
Unfortunately, not only in Nicaragua and Latin America, but in general, politicians play a zero-sum game, in which they win based on what they can take from another.
Unfortunately, sometimes we politicians are like that, we think that to gain more space among the opposition we can be detrimental to another fellow opposition member. That is a very harmful way of thinking.
A lot of political maturity is required for the ideological differences between opponents to be used as wealth.
It is good that we recognize these differences so that people say “these guys are facing a greater evil and their differences are going to have to be resolved with votes.”
So I think we have lacked that strategic vision.
We have been very open in our discussions. I think there are some things that are better to work on with a higher level of intelligence, not to expose so many things.
When suddenly the dictatorship sees some difference between us, it highlights it and says: “Look, they are killing each other.”
You are part of a group of leaders who assumed the responsibility of achieving change in Nicaragua. What do you say to those people who may feel frustrated when they see that change is not coming?
That it is not our fault, that we may have made mistakes, as is normal in politics, but Ortega is not in power because of us, because we are ineffective or because we are not united.
Ortega is not leaving because he is on a pile of corpses, he has killed people and he will continue killing if necessary. And he does not leave any type of democratic opening.
So, I would tell people that we have to think about a fight that is going to take as long as it has to take, but that we all have to be in this fight, which is long.
The person responsible is Ortega and our responsibility is to show ourselves to the Nicaraguan people and to the international community as a new generation of politicians who, seeing this atrocity, want to ensure that it does not happen again.
Your family has been very influential in Nicaraguan politics. Do you have any responsibility for the situation the country is in?
Yes, of course, in the same context that corresponds to all Nicaraguan families. This is a tragedy that has happened to us as a country.
Ortega is guilty, but he is also the product of a political culture of “I’m going to take you away and put myself in.”
We are all responsible for a political culture of the chief, the strong man, the tyrant, the messiah who is going to solve all my problems without doing anything. That is a well-worn cultural problem.
Fortunately, with a few exceptions, the vast majority of the politicians in my family have been Democrats. We have believed in tolerance, that no one can be above the law.
Obviously when you are involved in the political system you have responsibilities, but it will be up to history to evaluate it in a more balanced way.
The figure of Doña Violeta [Chamorro, presidenta de 1990 a 1997]for example, generates a lot of debate, a lot of passion, but I think the charges are being resolved in favor of the fact that he left a very positive legacy.
You recognize the limitations of being an opponent in exile. What leadership remains in Nicaragua?
Although leadership in exile plays a role, I believe changes must come from within.
In Nicaragua there are six million people, they are people who are inside a large prison.
There is a lot of leadership there, perhaps not as visible as those of us who are exiled, but they are people who do not lose their political vocation even if they have the police station in front of them.
There are many people that we cannot mention for safety reasons, but there is an enormous amount of activism that is there waiting for an opportunity.
Even people who don’t necessarily have a political streak are very upset with all of this.
When a few months ago Sheynnis Palacios won Miss Universe, people exploded in popular celebration and that bothered the dictatorship.
That tells you that people are ready.
People came out en masse and the dictatorship could not do anything, because there were pockets of celebration throughout Nicaragua.
They were overwhelmed and he gave them a wake-up call.
But, at the same time, every day we have to work on hope, because every day someone wakes up wanting to hang up their gloves.
Indifference, apathy, abandonment of principles are enemies of social causes.
The official, the angry Sandinista, the businessman who is still there, everyone can contribute with a grain of sand.
On the other hand, there are cracks among Ortega’s people, there is discontent within his security forces, I saw it when I was imprisoned. These cracks must be framed until they break.
Is removing Ortega by force an option that you are considering?
That is a scenario contemplated, but not necessarily desired. It is not something we seriously contemplate from a practical point of view.
If you are going to opt for a forced exit, you have to be prepared to face that very scenario if you come to power. That leads one to a complicated dilemma.
Plus, these guys have a monopoly on force. They are implementing force, they are implementing violence, we are talking about murders, disappearances, kidnapping, exile.
So, trying to force things of that nature, violent exits, coups d’état, palace assaults, that leads to the enormous risk of being crushed.
There are many people who say that this is the only thing left, but we say that it is not the only thing.
It is true that the peaceful civic solution has not given the result we wanted, but it is also true that this type of strategy is more successful, but it takes more time.
Good fights take time, energy, determination and enthusiasm. That can’t be lost.
With this I am not saying that the solution is to go to a demonstration with a flag again or do risky things, but to maintain the fighting spirit.
After Ortega, the second enemy is apathy, abandonment, the feeling of defeat.
This is going to change.
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