Daniel Ortega continues with his plan to turn Nicaragua into a kind of North Korea of the Americas, with the dictator Kim Jong-un as the main reference. The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) announced yesterday that he will leave the Central American country after the revolutionary order. Since the harassment and demolition of organizations and universities began in 2018, more than 3,500 have now ended up expelled from the country or closed.
“At the request of the Nicaraguan authorities, the ICRC has closed its offices in Managua, thus ending its humanitarian mission,” the entity said from Mexico City. Ortega expelled the ICRC delegate in his country a year and a half ago.
“They no longer want to have anyone inside doing even the slightest pressure for human rights. I am very afraid that the radicalization model they are following has many similarities with the closure of the North Koreans. They are totalitarian systems that try to control even aspects of people’s daily lives,” sociologist Elvira Cuadra, director of the Center for Transdisciplinary Studies of Central America, confirmed to EL MUNDO.
The ICRC reached an agreement with the Sandinista government to visit prisoners in prisons, overcrowded with political prisoners since the popular rebellion against the government broke out in April 2018. Despite the mass banishments, almost a hundred inmates remain today in the dungeons of the revolution.
Among the ICRC’s tasks was also support for the local Red Cross, but nothing remains of it standing today. The revolutionary Parliament dissolved the Red Cross in May, confiscated its property and replaced it with a government agency, the White Cross of Nicaragua. Their crime: violating their neutrality in anti-government demonstrations.
Isolation and radicalization, in addition to continuous human rights violations, define the drift that the Ortega dictatorship has imposed on its society to screw itself into power. International journalists are no longer welcome in the Central American country, but even tourists are restricted from taking images of the country.
A North Korea that goes even beyond social control: Ortega launched the opening of an embassy in the Asian country months ago, while confirming that his ally will establish the fifth embassy in the Americas in Managua, after Venezuela, Cuba, Brazil and Mexico. Ortega’s choice to head the embassy in Pyongyang is Modesto Munguía, an unknown Sandinista activist.
“Daniel Ortega is establishing a kind of tropicalized North Korea,” lamented Félix Maradiaga, one of the former Democratic candidates imprisoned and later exiled to the United States.
Ortega has more reasons to feel close to Kim Jong-un. Both the Sandinista leader and his wife, co-president Rosario Murillo, have opted to impose a kind of hereditary dynasty to maintain power in the future. The Ortega Murillo clan manages television, radio, public budgets and government agencies. The chosen one is Laureano Ortega Murillo, a tenor in his free time, who heads the transcendental relations with Russia and China.