The former dissident Sandinista guerrilla Hugo Torres, arrested in June 2021 in Nicaragua and accused of alleged “treason against the country”died this Saturday due to a “disease”, reported the Public Ministry without specifying which one.
“The Public Ministry of Nicaragua informs the Nicaraguan population the death of Jorge Hugo Torres Jiménez, due to illness”indicated the state entity in a statement, hours after the news had been spread by their relatives.
The ex-guerrilla “He presented deterioration in his state of health, he was transferred to a hospital in the capital to be treated properly, where he was always accompanied by his sons Hugo Marcel and María Alejandra, as well as by his son-in-law Alejandro Ernesto Martínez, however, He passed away due to the ailments he had.”said the judicial body.
The Public Ministry had accused Torres, arrested on June 13, 2021, for crimes considered “treason against the fatherland”. He did not detail the suffering of the man who risked his life to get President Daniel Ortega out of prison in 1974, nor how long he was in the hospital.
The state entity indicated that “upon learning of the seriousness of the disease, for humanitarian reasons, it asked the judicial authority the definitive suspension of the beginning of the oral and public trialwhich was authorized by the court.
Torres, considered a “political prisoner” of the Ortega Government, was known in Nicaragua for participating in an operation in 1974 that took the current Nicaraguan president out of prison, when the country was ruled by the Somoza family dictatorship. In the mid 1990s he became a dissident.
The former Sandinista guerrilla had been captured on June 13, in a wave of arrests against opponents that landed some 40 dissident leaders in prison and critics of Ortega, including 7 candidates for the Presidency from the opposition.
This situation occurred in the context of last November’s elections, in which Ortega was re-elected amid internal criticism and criticism from the international communitywhich did not recognize the legitimacy of the process.
Torres died eight months after his arrest without having been tried.. At that time, the Nicaraguan authorities did not report the legal or health situation of the former guerrilla.
The opposition Democratic Renovating Union (Unamos), the former Sandinista Renovating Movement (MRS), of which Torres was vice president, had reported that They had not known of his whereabouts for several weeks.
Dozens of people who are also considered “political prisoners” in Nicaragua have been in prison for between three and eight months without facing trial, but his legal situation has so far not been clarified by the Nicaraguan authoritiesand his health status is unknown.
Opposition organizations such as Unamos or the Blue and White National Unity, as well as the Nicaraguan Human Rights Collective Never Again, blamed Ortega for the death of Torres and reiterated the denunciations of alleged torture and ill-treatment against Torres in prison.
Torres is the second “political prisoner” to die in Nicaragua in government custody, according to the information known so far, after the death of the convict of dual Nicaraguan and American citizenship Eddy Montes Praslin, who was shot by a custodian’s gun in May 2019.