Ortega’s Police Abduct Family Members of Exiled Activist

Police working under the regime of Daniel Ortega attempted to arrest Javier Alberto Alvarez Zamora on the night of September 13. Alvarez, however, had already decided to leave Nicaragua and seek international protection. Upon discovering that he wasn’t home, the officials then arbitrarily detained his wife, Jeannine Horvilleur Cuadra, 63, and their daughter Ana Carolina Alvarez Horvilleur, 43. Both have dual French and Nicaraguan citizenship.

The women remain detained at the infamous El Chipote jail where many political prisoners are held and suffer different types of torture. There has been no word from the authorities regarding the reasons for their arrest. The denunciation of these events came from Javier Alvarez, now in San Jose, Costa Rica, who filed his complaint with the Nicaragua Nunca + [“Never Again Nicaragua”] Human Rights Collective, with offices located in that city.

“Today, September 15^, 2022, the Nicaragua Nunca Mas Human Rights Collective received the declaration of Javier Alberto Alvarez Zamora, 68, denouncing the systematic harassment of himself and his family perpetrated by the regime of Daniel Ortega. The persecution forced him to leave the country to request international protection,” states the document published by the human rights advocates.

Alvarez also noted his extreme concern “for the dangers faced by his wife and his daughter, abducted by the regime’s police.” The Police had burst into his home the night of September 13, with no legal warrant, and taken them to jail.

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Arbitrary detentions an ongoing pattern

Attorney Gonzalo Carrion, from the Nicaragua Nunca+ Collective noted that there’s “a pattern of arbitrary and unconstitutional actions [on the part of the Police], consisting in capturing close relatives and loved ones of people they’re persecuting”. According to Carrion, the objective is to force these people to give them information that could lead to the capture of the person they’re seeking.

This pattern “reaffirms the intensified practices of terrorism in the last months, directed against different social sectors of the country. The Nicaragua Nunca Mas Human Rights Collective denounces the recent wave of arbitrary detentions (..). Once again, we condemn these, and demand an immediate end to the repression,” states the public declaration from the human rights advocates.

“In the case of the Alvarez Horvilleur family, the officials’ objective was to arrest Javier Alvarez, not his family members,” Carrion underscored.

This article was originally published in Spanish in Confidencial and translated by Havana Times