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MANAGUA, LELEMUKU.COM - Nicaragua's government said Monday it will implement a program to guarantee the safe return of exiles, a proposal the opposition dismissed as "absurd."

Anyone who fled in the past year and does not have an open court case or formal accusation against them will be eligible to return, the foreign affairs ministry said in a statement. It said the International Organization for Migration will provide technical support.

The government made the proposal to the opposition Civic Alliance on April 10, but said it didn't reach a consensus.

Alliance director Azahalea Solis said the group rejected the proposal as "absurd."

"It's ridiculous to act like the exiles would believe the same government that threatened them, persecuted them, killed their relatives and occupied their houses is now going to safeguard their lives and safety," Solis said. She said the proposal did not include any real mechanism for protecting those who return.

According to the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, at least 325 people have been killed during the past year of unrest. The commission estimates there are more than 52,000 people who have fled the country, mostly to Costa Rica.

The Civic Alliance believes there are at least 160 people who fled the country while facing an arrest order.

Solis said the alliance had countered the government's idea with a plan for returns to be supervised by the Inter-American Commission for Human Rights, but said the government rejected that idea. The government has opposed the commission as a guarantor of the negotiations.

She also criticized the government for not completing the release of political prisoners that authorities had promised.

'Tremendous joke'

Jairo Bonilla, a student protest leader who went to Costa Rica last year, said he still receives daily threats from government supporters.

"For us as exiles there is no guarantee that we could return and nothing would happen to us," said Bonilla, who maintained that he is accused falsely of violent acts during the protests.

Bonilla also said President Daniel Ortega is trying to relieve international pressure on his government.

"He wants to make it seem like everything is normal in Nicaragua, that Nicaragua is negotiating, when every day they are killing more people, they are arresting more people without the world realizing it," Bonilla said.

Human rights activist Sara Henriquez, exiled in Italy, called the proposal a "tremendous joke."

"We don't have any assurance that they aren't going to kill us," she said. "All of us who left for exile, it was because we were threatened with death or we have cases with the police." (VOA)

MANAGUA, LELEMUKU.COM - Nicaragua's oldest and most-widely read newspaper published its Friday edition with a blank front page in protest against what it says is the government's withholding of ink, paper and other materials needed for its printing press since September.

In a Friday editorial, the La Prensa newspaper asked: "Have you imagined living without information?," and complained that the government of leftist President Daniel Ortega had impounded its supply of printing materials for 20 weeks.

"We don't know how much longer we can keep printing the newspaper. Maybe two more months, maybe until tomorrow," Jaime Chamorro, director of La Prensa, told Reuters by phone.

Human rights organizations and independent media say the Ortega government is attacking freedom of expression.

Arrests of reporters ordered by judge

The government recently shut down a broadcaster and held two reporters on terrorism and hate-incitement charges, while a judge ordered the arrest of three more.

The newspaper said customs agents at the behest of the government have been withholding imports of paper and ink in retaliation for critical coverage of simmering political tensions in the Central American country.

Since April 2018, Nicaragua has been experiencing one of its worst crises since a civil war in the 1980s.

Protests raged for months before a government clampdown reined them in, but more than 300 people were killed during that time and over 500 incarcerated, according to the Nicaraguan Center for Human Rights, one of the groups the government has blacklisted.

News outlets closed

Rights groups say four radio stations and one TV station have closed, while dozens of journalists have been beaten and threatened.

Nicaragua's customs authority was not available for comment on the accusations made by La Prensa. The government did not respond to a request for comment.

The Ortega administration maintains there is freedom of expression in the country and has accused the opposition of seeking to mount a coup to oust him. (VOA)

MANAGUA, LELEMUKU.COM - In barely a week’s time, Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega has cemented the authoritarian reputation of his government by shuttering the offices some of the few remaining resonant voices of dissent and expelling the international monitors documenting his government’s alleged crimes.

The heavy-handed raids on the country’s most prominent nongovernmental organizations and the seizure of the offices of the independent news outlets Confidencial and 100% Noticias left a clear message that no one, especially former Sandinista comrades, was safe from a crackdown on dissent following a wave of protests that increasingly aimed at pushing the 73-year-old president from power.

At least 325 people have been killed since protests erupted in mid-April and were violently suppressed. Some 565 people have been jailed, according to the Nicaraguan Human Rights Center, which itself was raided. Many of those held face terrorism charges that carry decades-long sentences. Thousands have fled the country in self-imposed exile.

“All Nicaraguans are vulnerable to the possibility that they fabricate charges from the laws they (the government) invented,” the founder of Confidencial, Carlos Fernando Chamorro, said in front of Managua’s courthouse. “No one is safe here. The law protects no one because in Nicaragua there is not rule of law.”

Chamorro ran the Sandinistas’ newspaper La Barricada for years and his mother, Violeta Barrios de Chamorro, was initially part of the Sandinista ruling junta when it gained power. But she later split and eventually ran for president, defeating Ortega in 1990.

Vice President Rosario Murillo, who is Ortega’s wife and who also controls the government’s communications, did not grant a request for an interview with herself or Ortega. But at an event with police last week, she made a thinly veiled reference to Chamorro and other “traitors.”

A week of cracking down

The new wave of crackdowns began a little over a week ago when Ortega loyalists in congress stripped nine organizations of their legal status, alleging they supported what the government has called a coup attempt, a reference to the protests.

Police raided the groups’ offices the night of Dec. 13, hauling off computers and reams of documents. They returned the following night to occupy their buildings.

Police toting rifles could be seen watching television inside the offices of Confidencial while its staff kept its website updated from hotel rooms, their homes and eventually a secret location where they re-established their newsroom.

“The issue is that the institutions that he’s going after are symbolic of the strength of civil society,” said Manuel Orozco, a senior associate at The Inter-American Dialogue in Washington. Ortega thought he could maintain control through the political parties, but this opposition movement has come from civil society.

When Chamorro went to police headquarters Dec. 15 to ask to see what order had allowed the seizure of his offices, he and his staff were pushed away by riot police who punched and kicked at least one of his reporters.

Riot police were present again two days later when Chamorro and his wife walked hand-in-hand to the gates of the courthouse to seek judicial relief.

“As human beings, obviously we’re afraid of being smashed by the regime, which up to now has prevailed through force and terror,” Chamorro said. Invoking his father, a journalist and national hero killed in 1978 by the Somoza dictatorship that was later overthrown by the Sandinistas, Chamorro said that each person is the master of his own fear.

“All citizens have to learn to manage fear and overcome it and show that you can’t kill ideas and ideas can’t be killed by killing journalists,” he said.

Former Sandinistas

Chamorro isn’t alone as a former Sandinista now squarely in Ortega’s sights. Many of the intellectuals and key figures who participated in early Sandinista governments have split away over the years, accusing Ortega of taking a more authoritarian path.

Vilma Nunez, the president of the Nicaraguan Human Rights Center, was a supreme court vice president under Ortega’s first Sandinista government in 1979 and dedicated much of her early career to defending Sandinistas persecuted by the Somoza regime.

Last week police forced their way into her offices and now the center, known by its Spanish initials of Cenidh, is reorganizing at a clandestine location. Cenidh has been documenting abuses by police and paramilitaries since violence began in April.

“They believe that by finishing off belligerent organizations that won’t be silent about human rights they are going to silence the voices of protest that persist,” Nunez said.

Appearance of normality

In the streets of Managua, outward appearances suggest some degree of normality. Christmas decorations are spread about the city, more restaurants and bars are staying open after dark and the city’s Eastern Market has been humming with shoppers.

But vendors say business has been running 25 to 30 percent below what it was last year, even in the run-up to Christmas.

Nicaragua’s private business umbrella organization COSEP issued a report this month saying that instead of the forecast 5 percentage-point growth in Nicaragua’s economy this year, it will finish with a 4-point contraction.

Not so visible are people living in fear.

A woman who for months has been helping to hide dozens of university students who had occupied campuses in anti-government protests continues to ferry donated food and clothing to them. But she said there’s never enough food, and some subsist on rice and ketchup.

But their emotional health is the greater concern, she said: These were students on career tracks who suddenly found themselves unable to return to the university or even walk down the street. After police and paramilitaries retook the university campuses last summer, hundreds of students have either fled the country or remain in hiding.

“They have imprisoned their future,” said the woman, who requested anonymity to protect the students in her care.

Tight security

To get to the Managua home of Carlos Tunnermann, a former university rector, the Sandinistas’ first education minister and later Ortega’s ambassador to the United States, you have to get through two police checkpoints.

Tunnermann, a member of the Civic Alliance formed to negotiate with the government last spring, lives near Ortega’s home and falls within his expanded security perimeter. The first checkpoint is easy enough, the second, however, is more challenging. After a half hour of questions, the gate finally swung aside.

Tunnermann said that the recent aggression toward the NGOs and Chamorro’s media outfit could have been a reply to the U.S. government’s economic sanctions last month against Murillo and Nestor Moncada, Ortega’s national security adviser.

Tunnermann said Ortega seemed to not grasp yet that each time he ratchets up the crackdown, the international community will increase the pressure on him.

In Tunnermann’s mind, dialogue and eventually a concession by Ortega to move up presidential elections scheduled for 2021 were the country’s best chance for peace.

But there was a major obstacle, he said: Ortega and Murillo “have invented a reality that is not the true reality. It’s a reality that is only in their minds. (VOA)