Once again after a large prisoner release/banishment, ten political prisoners from before the 2018 protests and others remain in jail.
HAVANA TIMES – Jaime Navarrete Blandon, who has remained detained despite completing his sentence on January 23, 2023, is one of the political prisoners of the Daniel Ortega and Rosario Murillo dictatorship who stayed behind after the exile of 135 political prisoners from Nicaragua to Guatemala. He had already remained behind before when the first group of prisoners of conscience was exiled in February 2023.
Navarrete, 40, is the only political prisoner who has served his sentence of three years and six months for the alleged crime of drug possession. However, he is not free because the Ortega-aligned judicial system “revived” his 22-year prison sentence that had been pardoned under the Amnesty Law approved in 2019.
He was recaptured on July 24, 2019, and has remained in prison ever since. His defense lawyer, Yonarqui Martinez, points out that the man has been subjected to torture.
Ten other political prisoners remain incarcerated and were not released once again. Among them are the ten prisoners of conscience from before the April 2018 Rebellion: Ortega’s longest-serving political prisoner, Marvin Vargas, imprisoned since 2012, and nine others convicted in the case known as the “July 19 Massacre.”
A day after the September 5th exile of the 135 political prisoners, the official list with the names of those released is still unknown. The regime remains silent and conceals the official list that should be made public by its operators.
According to the Nicaraguan Group of Reflection of Former Political Prisoners (GREX), these remaining political prisoners were shaved, photographed, taken out into the sun, and given clean clothes on Sunday, September 1st. A police officer told them they “would be taken out and moved to another place,” so both they and their families were hopeful of their release. But it did not happen.
GREX also confirms that Jose Manuel Urbina Lara, a well-known lawyer and opponent of the Ortega regime, remains in prison. He was sentenced to four years for involuntary manslaughter after being involved in a traffic accident in March 2021 in which a person he gave a ride to died.
His family reported that he was in a “deplorable” condition in September 2022, having lost at least 45 pounds and was ill. Then, a supposed lawyer appeared to deny these claims. Daniel Ortega claimed that Lara was one of the political prisoners the United States refused to accept on February 9, 2023. He is one of the political prisoners over 60 years old.
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