The Nicaraguan writer Gioconda Belli on February 9th in Madrid (Spain). Juan Carlos HIdalgo (EFE)
This Monday, the regime of Daniel Ortega and Rosario Murillo completed the confiscation of the house of the writer Gioconda Belli in Managua. Police officers and the Attorney General’s Office (PGR) occupied the building seven months after the poet was stripped of her Nicaraguan citizenship along with more than 300 political prisoners, opponents, activists and journalists.
Belli and the other opponents, including the writer Sergio Ramírez, were declared traitors and the confiscation of their nationality was accompanied by the confiscation of all their assets. Although the regime had already begun identifying the property of some of those denationalized, it carried out the confiscations gradually.
“I have lost many things, but they will not make me lose my dignity. However, I blame and condemn them for, guided by their ambition and vengeful blindness, they have committed so many evils against the country that I predict the terrible but well-deserved end that the tyrants will suffer,” Belli told EL PAÍS. “My house will be full of ghosts and there will be no living being living there who can be happy in it,” he added.
In addition to Belli’s property on Carretera Sur, on a hill overlooking Lake Xolotlán, Camilo Castro Belli’s house was also confiscated. He is a journalist, documentary filmmaker and son of the writer. He currently lives in exile in Costa Rica with his wife, the documentary filmmaker Leonor Zuñiga.
Like his mother, de Castro Belli was also stripped of his citizenship. Belli’s latest film is called Patrol and denounces the plundering of the Indio-Maíz reservation and the extractive livestock farming on indigenous lands, whose main outlet is the United States.
Last July, the regime confiscated a house belonging to Sergio Ramírez in the municipality of Masatepe, where the Luisa Mercado Foundation, which administered the Cervantes Prize, operated.
Confiscations are one of the Ortega-Murillos’ latest repressive methods to silence critical voices. The confiscation of the house of Gonzalo Carrión, a human rights lawyer living in exile in Costa Rica, also became known.
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