2023-09-29 09:41:48
President Daniel Ortega (left) and his wife and Vice President Rosario Murillo (right) greet their supporters upon arrival at an event to commemorate the 44th anniversary of the Nicaraguan Revolution in Managua, on July 19, 2023.
Photo: AFP – JAIRO CAJINA
Workers in bright orange construction vests showed up at a house in Nicaragua’s capital, Managua, with tools to pick the lock and remove cabinets.
Days before, employees from the attorney general’s office went to another house in Managua and said it was now state property. The men who arrived in police trucks at a third house on the wooded outskirts of town came with sledgehammers.
Camilo de Castro, a filmmaker whose work is critical of the government, said police officers who arrived at his door were ready to break it down.
De Castro and the other two owners, Gonzalo Carrión and Haydee Castillo, are all human rights activists who are among the more than 300 Nicaraguans declared traitors this year by the Sandinista government, with no rights to citizenship or property.
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In recent days, the government has begun to make it official in stark fashion, deploying and confiscating property of its opponents, including the homes of two former foreign ministers.
The campaign is reminiscent of the leftist party’s first era in power, in the 1980s, when Sandinistas expropriated homes, triggering years-long legal disputes. The country’s current leader, Daniel Ortega, led the Sandinista Revolution that brought them to power and lives in a house he confiscated decades ago.
Ortega was defeated at the polls in 1990, but after some changes to the Constitution that made his victory possible, Ortega claimed the presidency in 2007. He spent the next decade undermining the country’s democracy through his interference in the National Assembly, elections and the Supreme Court.
Tens of thousands of people they rose up against Ortega and his wife, the country’s vice president, Rosario Murillo, in 2018, accusing them of becoming exactly what they once fought against: leaders of a dictatorial family dynasty. Government opposition put hundreds of people in prison, and at least 300 died after being shot while they protested.
Earlier this year, 222 political prisoners were released and exiled.
The move to begin taking control of the properties in recent days follows the confiscation of a major Jesuit university and the arrest of several priests. On Monday, the Sandinistas took control of a private business school founded by Harvard University nearly 60 years ago. The government campaign is showing that, even five years after a failed uprising, dissent has serious consequences.
“It was not enough for him to arrest me and send me into exile in addition to stigmatizing me as a terrorist and as a seller of his country,” said Castillo, who now lives in Baton Rouge, Louisiana.
Murillo, who acts as a government spokesman, did not respond to a request for comment. She and the president have said they consider opposition activists terrorists for trying to overthrow the government by blocking roads, paralyzing commerce and occasionally resorting to violence. Many of them, like De Castro, have been accused of terrorism.
The international community has widely criticized the Ortega government, and the United Nations They have compared him to the Naziswho committed crimes against humanity.
Ortega helped lead an insurgency that in 1979 overthrew the corrupt dictatorship of Anastasio Somoza Debayle. A civil war followed, during which the new Sandinista government confiscated the Somoza family’s numerous ill-gotten loot. Initially, the confiscation was intended to return to the Nicaraguan people what had been stolen from them, through the redistribution of land through agrarian reform.
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But the Sandinistas also seized the homes of people who fled, accusing them of being allies of the Somoza regime or declaring the property abandoned.
When they were expelled from power in 1990, after losing the elections, the Sandinistas took advantage of the transition period to obtain legal documentation for the properties they had distributed among their allies, a distribution known as the “piñata.”
Although the government once rationalized property transfers, claiming that up to 200,000 poor people received property titles, critics claimed that the top brass took over some 6,000 homes, including some of the country’s best real estate holdings, such as large estates. and beach houses.
Ortega himself still lives in a complex six bedrooms in Managua, which occupies an entire block, which he took from a former adversary who decades later became his vice president.
Moisés Hassan, a former member of the Sandinista junta that governed at the time, said that everything Somoza owned had previously been stolen, so it was perfect that it was “returned to Nicaragua.” Those houses, Hassan explained, were going to be used as asylums or orphanages, but then those “drones took advantage and started robbing houses,” accusing the people of being Somocistas.
During his tenure, Sandinista officials who lived in palatial accommodations maintained the fiction, according to Hassan, that the houses were property of the state and had simply been “assigned” to them.
Hassan, one of the first Sandinistas to break with the party, fled the country for Costa Rica two years ago and is one of the political opponents who were stripped of their Nicaraguan citizenship. Recently, government officials confiscated the seven-bedroom house he bought in Managua in 1980, which had recently been valued at $280,000.
Hassan, 81, said that house was the only material thing he owned, apart from his pension, which was also taken from him.
Carrión, the human rights activist, fled to Costa Rica five years ago, when the government dissolved the human rights organization he led. He spent at least $70,000 on his house in downtown Managua and had finished paying for it.
Carrión said they were convicted without trial and took the house, even though the law says they can only do that if a property is used in the commission of a crime.
A passerby took photos showing a piece of his kitchen lying in a pile of rubble in front of the house.
Carrión, 62, who also lost his pension, trusts that the Ortega-Murillo government will end up collapsing and the houses will be recovered.
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Experts say it will be a long road before the properties are returned to their owners. It took decades for the people who lost their homes in the 1980s, many of whom were or became U.S. citizens, to be compensated, and that was only after the Sandinistas were no longer in office.
It took pressure from Washington and threats to withhold American aid to make a dent in the thousands of claims, said Peter Sengelmann, 87, who lost his home in 1979, presumably because his two brothers were associated with the Somoza government. and later headed the Committee to Recover Confiscated American Properties in Nicaragua.
“The Sandinista government paid me about a third of what I was worth, and I accepted it, because I thought it was better than nothing,” said Sengelmann, who now lives in Miami. “It took about 15 years.” He was paid $85,000.
Jason Poblete, an American attorney who specializes in international property claims, especially from Cuba, said that about a year and a half ago he started receiving calls from property owners in Nicaragua. He was told they were being harassed with fake unpaid property tax bills, another tactic the government uses to give seizures “a veneer of legality,” he said.
The issue is likely to become a sticking point for a long time, as it is in Cuba, where almost 6000 citizens and American companies lost homes, farms, factories, sugar mills and other property totaling $1.9 billion when the Castros took power in 1959. Hundreds of thousands of Cubans also lost property, Poblete said, without compensation.
“The Cubans learned to do this and they taught the Nicaraguans,” Poblete said. “It is a more sophisticated form of political intimidation.”
De Castro, who in the past worked briefly as a reporter’s assistant for the New York Times, said no lawyer from Nicaragua would take his cases. He added that several activists who were stripped not only of their property, but also of their citizenship, plan to file a case with the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, arguing that the measures violate international law. Among the plaintiffs is his mother, the writer Gioconda Belliwhose house was also taken.
As long as the regime is in power, De Castro said, they will not be able to return and take back their homes. And he doesn’t think the government is going to stop there.
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