An international press watchdog is calling on Nicaraguan officials to investigate Tuesday’s attack on reporters covering the funeral of poet and priest Ernesto Cardenal.
According to the New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists, several reporters were chased, shoved, beaten and robbed during Cardenal’s funeral at the Metropolitan Cathedral in Managua, Nicaragua’s capital.
Local news outlets say the unidentified attackers, clad in red-and-black bandanas — the colors of President Daniel Ortega’s ruling Sandinista party — shouted slogans praising the hard-line ruler.
Serious injuries
Jennifer Ortiz, director of digital outlet Nicaragua Investiga, said police officers outside the cathedral stood down as the violence unfolded.
Police did not respond to requests for comment.
“We are a small independent media, and they leave us totally defenseless,” Ortiz told CPJ. “We are outraged by how journalism has been attacked, and we are worried about what might happen in an electoral context.”
The assailants punched and kicked Ortiz’s staff reporter, Hans Lawrence, before stealing his phone, tripod and microphones.
Lawrence, who is epileptic, was vomiting blood after the attack and remains under medical evaluation.
Ortega supporters also beat and robbed Leonor Álvarez of national daily newspaper La Prensa, and David Quintana of Boletin Ecológico, who was also hospitalized briefly.
Ongoing violence
The attack came just days after the Violeta Barrios de Chamorro Foundation, a Managua-based press advocacy group, said it had recorded at least 2,051 violations of press freedom since April 2018. That tally includes a Feb. 25 incident in which at least a dozen reporters were attacked by police while covering public demonstrations.
Attacks on journalist have become so that common in Nicaragua that the group has launched a data-visualization registry to track reports of violence against journalists nationwide.
In a recent interview with Managua-based Onda Local radio, Nicaraguan journalism professor Juan Ramon Huerta called the current state of censorship worse than that experienced during the Somoza dictatorship, which Ortega’s Sandinista movement helped to overthrow in the late 1970s.
“Somoza did things that were outrageous in terms of censorship; they destroyed and burned La Prensa, they closed radio stations, but today the attacks are more brutal,” he said.
In the 2007 inaugural speech that marked Ortega’s return to power, Huerta said, the former guerrilla commander warned journalists that they risked becoming enemies of the state.
“[Ortega said we] had to do a different kind of journalism, and behind that came censorship,” Huerta said.
International condemnation
Ortega has overseen deadly police crackdowns on wave after wave of anti-government protests, which were triggered by cuts to social security and other austerity measures in April 2018.
The clampdown has drawn international condemnation from the United Nations Human Rights Council and the Organization of American States, which, like demonstrators calling for Ortega’s resignation, compare the president to the dictator he helped to overthrow.
Ortega’s government calls the uprising, which has claimed 320 lives, part of a U.S.-financed coup attempt.
Cardenal, who died of heart and kidney failure in Managua on Sunday at the age of 95, once supported the Sandinista revolution before distancing himself from Ortega, becoming one of the president’s most trenchant critics.
In 1983, he was one of three Nicaraguan priests suspended from the priesthood over his support for the Sandinistas. Pope Francis lifted Cardenal’s suspension in February 2019.
Paris-based Reporters Without Borders ranks Nicaragua 114th out of 180 countries in its 2019 World Press Freedom Index, a 24-point drop from its 2018 ranking.
