Nicaragua jails army doctor who criticized police crackdown on canal protestors.
| Autor | Witte-Lebhar, Benjamin |
A recent military court ruling in Nicaragua has added new fuel to the fire for opponents of the Central American country's larger-than-life canal project, which officially broke ground in December but continues to spark protests at home and draw mostly unfavorable press coverage abroad.
The ruling, handed down in mid-March, involved an Army doctor arrested two months earlier for allegedly making disparaging remarks regarding a police crackdown on anti-canal protestors. "We're having a Red Christmas just like in the 1980s," the physician, Lt. Yader Montiel Meza, was reported to have said after police broke up a Dec. 24 protest that coincided with the canal project's official launch (NotiCen, Feb. 5, 2015). Military prosecutors accused Montiel Meza of conduct unbecoming an officer. And on March 10, military court judge Efrain Garcia sentenced the lieutenant to three months in prison.
An Army spokesperson defended the decision and insisted that Montiel Meza, 42, received due process. But rights groups and government critics slammed the ruling, calling it unfair and politically motivated and accusing the military of kowtowing to the partisan whims of President Daniel Ortega. "[Montiel Meza] is now a prisoner of conscience," attorney Wendy Flores of the Centro Nicaraguense de Derechos Humanos (CENIDH), a leading Nicaraguan human rights organization, told reporters.
Flores and others say the Army doctor is being punished not for anything he did or said against the military but because his statement was seen as an insult to Ortega and his once-revolutionary Frente Sandinista de Liberacion Nacional (FSLN), which has a two-thirds "supermajority" in the legislature, controls nearly all of the country's municipal governments, and exerts influence in both the Corte Suprema de Justicia (CSJ) and Consejo Supremo Electoral (CSE), Nicaragua's top electoral authority (NotiCen, Nov. 15, 2012).
Critics complain that Ortega and the FSLN have also gained increasing control of the national police force and the 12,000-soldier-strong Army. The latter is headed by Gen. Julio Cesar Aviles Castillo, a loyalist who was able to retain his post beyond the normal five-year term limit thanks to a military reform the FSLN-dominated Asamblea Legislativa (AL) pushed through in early 2014. The reform allows the Army's chief of staff to stay on indefinitely.
The vote took place one day after the unicameral legislature approved a tailor-made constitutional makeover that, among...
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