A dozen Nicaraguans exiled in Costa Rica protested Tuesday in front of the offices of the Central American Bank for Economic Integration, in San Jose, for granting credits to Daniel Ortega’s government.
One of the demonstrators chained himself to the access door of the CABEI headquarters while clamoring for credits to the Managua government.
Nicaraguan opposition member Héctor Mairena, exiled in Costa Rica, explained to AFP that they consider CABEI president, Dante Mossi, an “accomplice of the Ortega dictatorship and (his wife and Nicaraguan vice-president, Rosario) Murillo”.
Nicaragua, according to CABEI data, is the country that receives the most resources from the institution. They put money “under the Ortega-Murillo dictatorship, without any justification for that,” said Mossi, 63, a journalist and lawyer.
CABEI maintains 33 investment projects in Nicaragua for an amount of 1,586 million dollars, according to the bank, among them the study of the financing of a deep water port in the Caribbean Sea coast.
In addition to Central America, the institution finances projects in a dozen countries in the rest of the Americas, as well as in Spain, Taiwan and South Korea.
Mairena is one of 94 Nicaraguans whose nationality was revoked by the Nicaraguan judiciary on February 15. Among them, writers Sergio Ramírez and Gioconda Belli.
At the beginning of February, Ortega released 222 imprisoned opponents, deported them to the United States and also stripped them of their Nicaraguan nationality.
Nicaragua tightened its laws to punish opponents in the context of the repression that followed a political and social crisis with street protests that erupted in 2018 against Ortega, in power since 2007 and successively reelected in contested elections.
