Forced by the courts to interrupt her campaign during the last presidential election, the main Nicaraguan opponent, Cristiana Chamorro, was sentenced on Monday March 21 to eight years in prison.

Given favorite by the polls for the November 2021 ballot, she thought she would defeat Daniel Ortega.

But she was arrested six months before and placed in house arrest by order of the Nicaraguan courts.

Convicted of money laundering and embezzlement, Cristiana Chamorro, 68, will remain under house arrest, according to the Nicaraguan Center for Human Rights (Cenidh).

The charges brought by the government of President Daniel Ortega had prevented her from participating in the presidential election in November.

According to the court, which tried her behind closed doors for seven days in the sinister El Chipote prison, the alleged acts were committed through the Violeta Barrios de Chamorro Foundation (FVBCH), a press freedom training and defense center that Cristiana Chamorro directed for twenty years.

The foundation was used to receive money from abroad intended to destabilize the government of Daniel Ortega and his vice-president and wife Rosario Murillo, according to the prosecution.

Cristiana Chamorro's brother, Pedro Joaquin Chamorro, also convicted, was sentenced to nine years in prison, which he will have to serve in El Chipote prison where he has been detained since his arrest.

Sentences of up to thirteen years in prison were imposed on two former employees of the FVBCH, as well as Cristiana Chamorro's driver.

"Fines [amounting to] millions" were imposed on the opponent and its three former employees.

They are "impossible to pay" and if these "are commuted to prison terms, this would be equivalent to life imprisonment", notes the Cenidh.

Serial trial

Arrested on June 2, 2021, Cristiana Chamorro dismissed the charges, assuring that the case had been brought against her for having tried to "serve Nicaraguans" by running for president.

"When you take a position that endangers the power of the dictatorship, you expect everything, even the worst," Cristiana Chamorro told AFP at the end of May.

"The people put me at the top of the voting intentions. That's why the dictator ordered them to accuse me, it's revenge against the people," she said.

A total of seven opposition candidates, along with 39 other opponents, were arrested in the months leading up to the poll, allowing President Daniel Ortega, a 76-year-old former guerrilla, to be elected to a fourth term. without a strong opponent in front of him.

Some thirty opponents have already been declared guilty, of whom now more than twenty have been sentenced to terms ranging from eight to thirteen years in prison.

One of them, Hugo Torres, a Sandinista guerrilla hero who turned to opposition to Daniel Ortega, died in hospital custody in February.

The election of Daniel Ortega is not recognized by most of the international community, notably by the Organization of American States (OAS), the United States and the European Union, on the grounds that the Nicaraguan elections do not were not democratic.

Cristiana Chamorro is the daughter of former President Violeta Barrios de Chamorro (1990-1997), who defeated Daniel Ortega at the polls in 1990.

His father, journalist Pedro Joaquín Chamorro, was shot dead in Managua in January 1978 for opposing the Somoza dictatorship, which ruled Nicaragua for nearly half a century until the victory of the Sandinista Front in National Liberation (FSLN) in 1979.

With AFP

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