2023-09-04 23:22:02
MEXICO CITY (AP) — More than 700 professors, writers and researchers from academic centers in Latin America, the United States, Canada, Europe and Africa on Monday condemned the closure and confiscation of the Jesuit Central American University of Nicaragua (UCA) by the government of Daniel Ortega last month.
In a public letter released to the press, its 728 signatories “vigorously rejected the campaign of harassment and criminalization” that culminated “with the closure and confiscation” of the UCA, ordered on August 16 by the Sandinista government, which made it a a state university after accusing it of being “a center of terrorism”.
The academics highlighted that the UCA, the first private university founded in Central America (in 1960), “trained thousands of professionals in different disciplines and specialties”, in addition to “maintaining a sustained projection and social commitment” and promoting important scientific investigation”.
The signatories, including the American writer Margareth Randall, the professor and theologian Paul DeHart, the Brazilian professor Clifford Andrew Welch and the former Nicaraguan rector Ernesto Medina, expressed their support for the university authorities, the Society of Jesus and its teachers and students. They called on the academic institutions of the region and the world “to express their active solidarity” with the UCA.
Since December 2021, at least 26 universities have been closed and their assets were seized by order of the Ortega government with a similar procedure. Seven of them foreigners.
They indicated that since 2018, when a student rebellion broke out in Nicaragua, the UCA “has suffered systematic smear campaigns,” as well as “attacks on its physical facilities” and the exile of its rector and vice-chancellor, the Jesuits José Idiáquez and Jorge Huete, in addition to constant budget reductions, they indicated.
Ortega described the social revolt as a “failed coup” and accused the Catholic Church of promoting it, along with the political opposition and the United States government. This gave rise to growing tensions and the imprisonment of Bishop Rolando Álvarez, arrested and sentenced to 26 years and four months in prison last February.
The closure of the UCA is an “arbitrary measure” and a “clear manifestation of contempt for freedoms, quality education, critical thinking and values” that that university promoted, said the letter, signed by academics and intellectuals “committed with the right to education and academic freedom”.
Consulted by AP, the British writer and translator Helen Dixon, another of the signatories of the letter, said that the disappearance of the UCA caused astonishment in the European academic world, which “cannot believe that a government can take over the facilities of a university”.
Dixon, a professor at the Institute of Development Studies at the University of Sussex, added that Ortega seeks to “suppress any form of critical thinking” by controlling education. “It is outrageous, a tremendously profound violation of the intellectual life and memory of a country,” said the writer, who taught at the UCA in Managua during the 1980s.
He opined that “the Nicaraguan regime is an increasingly evident dictatorship,” and asked “the governments of the world to suspend their commercial relations and apply strong sanctions” against the Ortega administration.
Nicaragua has been experiencing a serious crisis since the outbreak of the 2018 protests, where repression by police and paramilitaries caused at least 355 deaths, more than 2,000 injuries and some 10,000 exiles in the months following the revolt, according to human rights organizations.
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