Nicaraguan Police Deploy 1,000 Troops to Guard Ortega during his Daughter’s Wedding

For at least twelve hours, during the afternoon of Saturday, December 21st until dawn of Sunday 22^nd, hundreds of traffic police, officials from the National Police and agents from the Police’s Special Operations Department (DOEP), were deployed in the streets going from the El Carmen neighborhood, where Daniel Ortega has his residence and dispatch, to Pueblo Viejo, in the Sierras of Managua, where Camila Ortega Murillo, Daniel Ortega’s oldest daughter with his wife and Vice-President, Rosario Murillo, celebrated her wedding.

The police deployment included police patrols, K-9 units, traffic restrictions and detours, along with the reinforcement of permanent vigilance posts installed at roundabouts and intersections as part of the police state the dictatorship imposed at the end of September, 2018 to prevent citizens’ protests, after the massacre of the April Rebellion.

All along the 16 kilometers that separate the Ortega-Murillo bunker from the place for the ceremony, there was at least one officer every 50 meters.  At some points there were groups of four to eight police on both sides of the road.  The deployment did not go unnoticed in an area where there are exclusive residential areas, shopping malls and corporate offices.

Social networks were full of memes, pictures and comments, questioning the squandering of funds and exaggerated security mechanism deployed to protect the guests invited to Camila Ortega and Noé Salas Cisneros’ wedding.

A 79-second video shared on Facebook, showed a caravan of 12 police pick-ups packed with agents, in addition to four Mercedes Benz—all identical to the armored ones that transports Ortega—and another half a dozen unmarked vehicles, transporting some of the guests…or more body guards.

An ambulance and five police motorcycles completed the entourage.

“How humiliating for the people to have to see such outrageousness and waste of money! How’s his conscience doing, if according to him he uses no escort because ‘Christ is his armor’?”, questioned the Facebook user who shared the video.

“No wonder the dictators came out with a huge police deployment with officers from the DOEP [Police Special Operations Department] and traffic police every 50 meters and radiopatrols, an ambulance and a caravan of civilian vehicles as escorts. An obvious show that the tyrants live terrorized. They know the people hate them”, added another.

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The newlyweds Camila Ortega con Noé Salas Cisneros

“Were you invited to Camila’s wedding?”

Most of the comments (setting aside offenses), aimed to make the base who still support Ortega and family see that their role is reduced to being a puppet, no matter whether it is limited to shouting slogans in physical and virtual plazas, or even those who lend themselves as armed shock forces.

“How many paramilitaries and ‘sapos’ did Camila invite to her wedding? Yes. Not a one”, questioned the “Lo viral en Nicaragua” (“what’s viral in Nicaragua”) page.  Along the same line, another user known as María Fernanda rebuked: “If the rumors are true about Camila getting married today, I want to see how many flat-broke people were invited to the wedding”.  “Realize how sad your life is: you are only invited to the roundabouts and to march under the hot sun like camels”, she added.

“My barrio’s CPC (the most local party organizations) still has not received the invitation to Camila Ortega’s wedding.  Nor have any of my Sandinista neighbors who live in houses made of sheets of plastic.  Have your neighbors received their invitations? Or can only high class people go to that wedding?”, criticized another user known as Dr. Paracetamol.

Reporter Luis Galeano from the Café con Voz program, exiled in the United States, also commented: “They say the tyrant’s daughter got married… I thought since they were so popular, there would be a party in one of the plazas or the ‘Hugo Chavez’ roundabout for a “shower from the people’, however, it was in ‘Pueblo Viejo” … The 200 cordoba citizens won’t get to see it, not even in video”.

“Camila married Noel Salas, a Cargill executive.  The wedding was in my old Santo Domingo, at a luxurious place which Daniel Ortega bought, as the oligarch that he is.  I don’t know how the ‘sapos’ don’t realize that everything they’ve hated all their lives, is what Ortega is today”, claimed “lunaminuscula’ in a tweet.

The Pueblo Viejo hotel and convention center, located on a 75-acre organic coffee plantation in the Sierras of Managua, was acquired during mid 2014 by a buyer with close ties to the presidential family, for an amount calculated by the real estate industry to be between 10 to 15 million dollars, according to a note published in Confidencial.

In an interview with La Prensa, published on November 30, former President Enrique Bolaños confirmed Ortega bought the hotel from his nephew, Alejandro Bolaños Davis. “Ortega spends the cooperation money from Venezuela however he wants,” explained Bolaños. “He bought a hotel!”