Nicaragua: ex-guerrilla and student leader, guilty of conspiring against President

RIO DE JANEIRO, BRAZIL – Former dissident Sandinista guerrilla fighter Dora María Téllez, and student leader, Lesther Alemán, were found guilty on Thursday of conspiring to undermine national integrity, according to the Legal Defense Unit (UDJ) and the organizations to which they belong.

Téllez, a historic Sandinista fighter and former comrade of Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega, was found guilty of the crime of conspiracy by the fourth criminal district trial judge of Managua, Ángel Jancarlos Fernández González, said the UDJ in a message.

The Prosecutor’s Office requested 15 years in prison and disqualification from holding public office for Téllez, who presided over the former Sandinista Renovation Movement (MRS), a split of the ruling Sandinista National Liberation Front (FSLN), now called the Nicaraguan Democratic Union (Unamos).

The 66-year-old former guerrilla, who has been in prison since June 13, 1978, participated on August 22, 1978, in the Sandinista commando that stormed the National Palace and took hostage the legislators of the then-president and dictator Anastasio Somoza Debayle, who was overthrown on June 19, 1979.

She was Minister of Health during the first Sandinista government (1979-1990). She distanced herself from the FSLN in 1995 when a group of dissidents, among them writer and former Vice President Sergio Ramírez Mercado, currently in exile and retired from politics, founded the MRS.

THE STUDENT WHO INCRIPPED ORTEGA

Meanwhile, student leader Alemán, who rebuked Ortega during the beginning of a failed national dialogue almost four years ago, was also found guilty of conspiracy against national integrity, according to the Nicaraguan University Alliance (AUN), to which he belongs.

“Today, Lesther Alemán, leader and founder of Alianza Universitaria Nicaragüense, was found guilty by the Ortega and Murillo dictatorship,” said that movement. “His crime: telling the dictator (Ortega) head-on and firmly that May 16, 2018,” that “in one month you have disrupted the country, it cost Somoza many years!” and urged him to surrender, the AUN recalled.

The student leader, 24 years old and sentenced by Judge Nadia Camila Tardencilla Rodríguez, jumped into the public limelight for confronting President Ortega in a live television broadcast, to whom he asked for his surrender in the framework of anti-government demonstrations that the Government forcibly neutralized.

THE TRIAL AGAIN AGAINST FIVE OPPONENTS

The trial against Téllez and Alemán took place behind closed doors in El Chipote, a prison located in the Judicial Assistance Directorate of the National Police, which has been denounced by the Nicaraguan Center for Human Rights (Cenidh) as an alleged “torture center” of the Nicaraguan Police. With them, there are now five Nicaraguan opponents who have been convicted of conspiracy to commit undermining national integrity.

The first three were activists Yader Parajón and Yaser Mahumar Vado and opposition leader Ana Margarita Vigil, who have pending sentencing. According to the Public Prosecutor’s Office, which had announced that the trials would be oral and public, the opponents are being tried for having violated the Political Constitution, the Law for the Defense of the Rights of the People to Independence, Sovereignty and Self-Determination for Peace, the Law of Sovereign Security and the Nicaraguan Penal Code.

Among the accused are the seven opposition leaders who announced their intentions to aspire to the Presidency in the elections, in which Ortega was re-elected for his fifth five-year term, fourth consecutive, and second together with his wife, Rosario Murillo, as Vice President.

With information from EFE

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