Almost two years after the start of the protest demanding the departure of President Daniel Ortega, repression continues in Nicaragua. "People forget what is going on there, but crimes against humanity continue to happen there," denounced Bianca Jagger, member of Amnesty International’s United States’s advisory board in early February, founder and president of a human rights foundation and a goodwill ambassador for the Council of Europe.
The British activist of Nicaraguan origin was in Paris for the presentation of the documentary Nicaragua, a homeland free to live in, the insurrection of the grandchildren of the Sandinista Revolution, from Daniel Rodriguez Moya of Spain.
"This documentary (who has not yet found a distributor) is important because we need to know what's going on. The European Union must apply sanctions not only against the government, but against people, insists Bianca Jagger, 74 years old. I appeal to President Emmanuel Macron to push for these sanctions within the EU. "
On December 19, 2019, the European Parliament approved a resolution on "the situation of human rights and democracy in Nicaragua" inviting member states to "Agree without delay on the specific list of persons and entities to be sanctioned, including the president and the vice-president" and wife of Mr. Ortega, Rosario Murillo.
Clandestine documentary
In December 2018, the United States Congress approved the Magnitsky Nica Act imposing financial sanctions on relatives of Mr. Ortega, including Rosario Murillo, and Laureano Ortega Murillo, one of the couple's sons. In December 2019, Washington also imposed sanctions against their eldest son, Rafael.
Daniel Rodriguez Moya, journalist and university professor specializing in the Sandinista Revolution, decided to go to Nicaragua after seeing the images of the first demonstration of April 18, 2018, which turned into a national insurrectional movement against Mr. Ortega, in power since 2007 (after a first period between 1979 and 1990).
"When I saw the streets full of young people, students – when we always said that young people were lazy, bent over their smartphones and not interested in anything -, peasants, pensioners, clergymen, I had the intuition that it was not a protest like the others, says the director. I then remembered a phrase from Fernando Cardenal, a Jesuit priest who said in 2008: "Young people will go back to the streets to make history in Nicaragua". It was a kind of prophecy that was coming true. I said to myself: I have to go see it with my own eyes. "
