Over 200 detained members of Nicaragua's opposition were freed Thursday and expelled to the United States, in a surprise move by the Central American country's increasingly authoritarian president, Daniel Ortega.
After weeks of quiet talks with Washington, Nicaragua allowed the 222 detainees -- which include former challengers to Ortega -- to board a chartered flight to Washington.
US officials said they would allow the former prisoners, who were taken to hotels, to stay for at least two years and provide medical and legal support.
"I would like to thank God and everyone who made possible this miracle -- the miracle of freedom," Juan Sebastian Chamorro, who was arrested before he could challenge Ortega in 2021 elections, said at Dulles International Airport near the US capital.
"We are here in the land of freedom and we are very grateful," he said.
Chamorro, whose aunt defeated Ortega in the 1990 presidential election, said that the group had no warning until they were given clothes and taken to another cell before being put on buses.
"It's been 20 months behind bars in a maximum-security prison, totally incommunicado," he said. "But here we are with our heads high."
Nicaragua's legislature moved quickly Thursday to strip the expelled dissidents of their citizenship as well as their political rights.
Felix Maradiaga, another opposition figure arrested before he could stand against Ortega, said he was asked to sign a one-line note that he was leaving the country voluntarily and that he was not told he would lose citizenship.
"We had absolutely no information on what would happen," he said. "I will be Nicaraguan until the day I die."
Ariana Gutierrez Pinto, waiting at Dulles airport for her mother Evelyn Pinto, a human rights activist who had been detained since November 2021, said she felt "hopeful."
"To me their release is just because they will no longer live in misery, but it is also unjust because they are being expelled from their country," she said.
- 'Constructive step' -
The United States welcomed their release but said it was made unilaterally without any promises in return for Ortega, who is under a slew of US sanctions.
State Department spokesman Ned Price said that everyone in the group consented to travel to the United States, with two people choosing to stay in Nicaragua.
"This was not part of a broader deal with the government of Nicaragua," Price told reporters.
"We would like to have a better relationship with Nicaragua. That ultimately is up to the government of Nicaragua," he said.
Blinken said the group included one US citizen, who was not identified.
Javier Alvarez, a Nicaraguan living in exile in Costa Rica, said that his wife and daughter, who also have French nationality, were among those liberated.
- Growing clampdown -
Hundreds of people were sent to prison in Nicaragua in the wake of anti-government protests in 2018 that were met with a brutal crackdown resulting in 355 deaths and more than 100,000 people fleeing into exile.
A firebrand Marxist in his youth, Ortega was a guerrilla in the Sandinista movement who initially took power in 1979 after toppling the Washington-backed Somoza family dictatorship.
The United States supported armed resistance to Ortega and the Sandinista rulers, in one of the most controversial interventions in the last decade of the Cold War.
Defeated in 1990, Ortega returned to power in 2007, and has since engaged in increasingly authoritarian practices, quashing presidential term limits and seizing control of all branches of the state.
The United States has imposed a series of sanctions on human rights grounds on Ortega as well as Vice President Rosario Murillo, who is his wife.
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© Agence France-Presse
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