The price to be paid to defend the Human Rights It can be very high. TO Edipcia Dubón He was expelled from his country, Nicaraguaand a brutal process that the dictator Daniel Ortega He has extended massively to frighten anyone who dares denounce the abuses of the Sandinista regime.
Exiled since 2018, now he has joined the Catalan Program for Protection for Human Rights Defenders, an initiative of the Generalitat de Catalunya whose mission is to support international humanitarian activism. Dubón attends the newspaper.
Nicaragua has lived an authoritarian drift under the yoke of Daniel Ortega and Rosario Murillo. How has you affected you?
In Nicaragua there is a dictatorship, a massive persecution of anyone who thinks differently and does not have discrimination either by sex or by religion, or by age. That has implied that more than 10% of the Nicaraguan population has had to leave the country trying to protect their lives. More than 200,000 Nicaraguans have arrived at Costa Rica seeking refuge. What happened to us? They took us a country. Since 2018 I don’t return home. I was denationalized in 2023, sentenced as “Traitor to the Homeland” with another 452 people. They applied what is called civil death.
How does that repression process work?
They strip your nationality, cancel your birth records as if you had never born in Nicaragua, expropriate your assets and cancel all your civil, political, economic, cultural and environmental rights. They also invalidate your academic titles and block your bank accounts. You have nothing to show what they have done to you. It is a violence that extends to families.
The denationalization was a completely canceled practice, the last case that was known was that of Orlando Letelier in Chile in 1970 (under the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet). Nicaragua’s is the only case of mass denationalization of people in Latin America.
Is the denationalization primed with the weakest groups?
The denationalization affects different groups. Between 30-40% of cases are against people between 60 and 90 years old, some with severe chronic or neurological diseases, who have stolen their pensions and will not have the opportunity to have jobs and recover what they have taken away. Another group is that of women, who can be greater, be of productive age or be girls.
In the case of minors, the effects are of another type. If your father and mother do not exist in the records because they have been denationalized, who appears in your birth certificate? Who signs your output permit from the country? There are cases of minors who have to leave the country, but without a passport or any type of document they remain as stateless in a limbo. According to the UN records records, there are 49 minors in that situation.
Did the regime carry you because you were part of the political opposition?
Repression hits not only those who have had a political exercise. They have denationalized bishops, journalists, businessmen, peasants, university professors. In this country you have no right to think differently, to express your difference. The Ortega regime uses us as a way to warn the rest of the population. Submission is through police violence and social control.
Spain gave him nationality.
I appreciate it deeply because that is what allows us to mobilize. If I did not have a Spanish passport I could not travel because I am a fugitive from justice. And without Spanish nationality? It would be as an apátrida. It has incalculable value, but it is not enough because there are legitimate rights that have been stolen. We need justice.
How can the regime weaken from exile and stripped of rights?
We believe that the route is civic and peaceful and that is why we believe in the international mechanisms of justice and human rights. The establishment of a group of United Nations experts who is documenting all violations, demonstrating that in the country crimes against humanity have been committed, to enable justice in the International Court of Justice and in the International Criminal Court. But it is not enough. We need the action of the Democratic states that assume the responsibility of opening the judicial causes in those instances. So far there is not a single government that has signed up to accompany us.
What other methods apply against dissent?
Repression has gone through different stages. Today there are 70 prey people, who know. His relatives are afraid to give more information about it because they are subject to torture, to vexars of all kinds. They have been transcending methods such as police patrols that arrive at your home, take everything off and expel you to the border. In addition, the regime has dismantled all the country’s civic space. More than 4,000 organizations have been closed and their managers have been persecuted through judicial causes and the freezing of their accounts. Nicaragua has become a farm where the master and Lord is Don Daniel Ortega and Mrs. Rosario Murillo and where all the people living in that territory are subject to their will.
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