ACI Prensa Staff, Sep 7, 2023 / 09:30 am
Speaking from exile in Atlanta, peasant leader Medardo Mairena Sequeira shared his testimony telling how the Daniel Ortega dictatorship in Nicaragua tortured him and imprisoned him for refusing to falsely accuse the country’s bishops.
Speaking with EWTN News after leading a peaceful protest outside the Nicaraguan consulate in Los Angeles on Aug. 27, the leader of the Nicaraguan “campesino” (“peasant”) movement charged that Ortega “has become entrenched in power and anyone who makes waves, who make noise, that he feels can be his competition, can immediately be abducted, tortured, and, in the worst case, murdered.”
Mairena, who lived in rural Nueva Guinea, where his land was expropriated along with that of thousands of other people, recounted that he was imprisoned and tortured in 2018.
“I’m not surprised by what [Ortega] is doing with the Church. At that time they hounded me, wanting to negotiate a dirty deal, offering me my release in exchange for making false accusations against the bishops’ conference, as if they [the bishops] were the organizers of an alleged coup, something that never happened,” the activist related.