Spain will offer nationality to 135 Nicaraguan opponents expelled from their country. This proposal aims “to the 135 political prisoners who were expelled from their homes and stripped of their nationality on September 5” for the justice of the regime of President Daniel Ortega, declared, on Friday, October 5, the Spanish Minister of Foreign Affairs, José Manuel Albares, before a parliamentary commission.
These detainees were released after an agreement with the United States, and were initially received in Guatemala. Among them are faithful Catholics and thirteen members of a Texas Christian missionary organization, Mountain Gateway.
The Spanish offer “It is an offer of fraternity and a sign that everything that happened in Nicaragua is a total injustice”Evangelical pastor Walner Blandón, one of the former detainees, from the Guatemalan capital, reacted to Agence France-Presse.
Elections not recognized by international organizations and several countries
Madrid has already offered Spanish nationality to more than 300 opponents stripped of their Nicaraguan nationality in 2023, among them the writers Gioconda Belli and Sergio Ramírez.
Daniel Ortega, 78, is a former guerrilla leader who governed Nicaragua in the 1980s after the triumph of the Sandinista revolution. He returned to power in 2007 and was re-elected in elections not recognized by international organizations, the United States or the European Union, which accuse him of multiple despotic excesses.
Daniel Ortega is accused of having established an authoritarian regime in Nicaragua, a country of 7 million inhabitants. In 2018, three months of protests against his regime were harshly repressed, leaving more than 300 dead, hundreds detained and thousands more forced into exile, according to the UN.
