Chile offers citizenship to Nicaraguan expats

SANTIAGO (AP) — The Chilean government has offered Chilean nationality to more than 300 Nicaraguans stripped of their nationality by the government of Daniel Ortega, the Foreign Ministry said in a statement Tuesday.

Chile will provide “the necessary legal means” to offer the more than three hundred Nicaraguans qualified as political opponents, “international protection that allows them to reside in the country and obtain Chilean nationality”, in accordance with the country’s regulations .

The South American country thus offers an alternative “for those who have been unjustly expatriated from Nicaragua” and decides to accept it voluntarily.

The statement stresses that the history of Chile has shown that “the defense of democracy and human rights and international solidarity between peoples transcend political situations”.

The Nicaraguan government on Wednesday declared 94 opponents and critics “traitors to the fatherland”, including writers Sergio Ramírez and Gioconda Belli, as well as journalists and human rights defenders, who withdrew their nationality and ordered the confiscation of their their belongings.

The event came just days after the release and exile of 222 imprisoned opponents, who were flown to the United States on a plane provided by the Joe Biden government.

Boric was the first left-wing government in Latin America and one of the few to condemn the actions of Ortega, whom I have no hesitation in calling a dictator.

“A brotherly hug to Gioconda, Sergio, Sofía, Carlos and all those to whom Ortega tried to strip them of their Nicaraguan nationality,” the president tweeted on Saturday, referring to writers Gioconda Belli and Sergio Ramírez, to the feminist activist Sofia Montenegro and journalist Carlos Fernando Chamorro Barrios.

“The dictator does not know that the fatherland is carried in his heart and in his actions, and is not deprived of it by decree. You are not alone ! Boric continued.

Days earlier, Chilean Foreign Minister Antonia Urrejola had described Ortega’s regime as a “totalitarian dictatorship” that persecutes all kinds of dissent.

Among the 94 identified, who have also been declared fugitives by the courts, are also the lawyer Vilma Núñez, president of the Nicaraguan Center for Human Rights (Cenidh), the former guerrilla Mónica Baltodano and her family, and the former Sandinista commander Luis Carrión.

Also, the Catholic bishop Silvio Báez and the priest Edwin Román, both exiled in Miami, the peasant leader Francisca Ramírez, the former dissident ambassador to the OAS, Arturo McFields, the former Minister of Foreign Affairs Norman Caldera and the Former Vice President of the Supreme Court Justice Rafael Solís, who left Nicaragua after the 2018 social protests.