Nicaraguan opponent Félix Maradiaga said on Thursday that during a fight with the police, which prevented him from leaving a house, his finger was broken and two others were dislocated.
Maradiaga, the main opposition political unit of the Blue and White National Unity (UNAB), wanted to travel to Bilwi, the capital of the northern Caribbean region, with a humanitarian transport to deliver to those affected by Hurricanes Iota and Eta, which hit the country on Monday. last.
A video released by UNAB showed the moment when the police blocked Maradiaga on the outskirts of a capital house she lives in temporarily, because, as she said months ago, she had to leave her own house for “security reasons.
Agents, wearing shields against the riot, surrounded the politician and pushed him until he had to return home. “Come in, come in, come in,” police ordered when his opponent tried unsuccessfully to bypass the security cordon and approach a group of journalists waiting outside.
“I tried to leave the house where I spend the night and they did not allow me. They prevent us from exercising our constitutional right to mobilize in our own country, “Maradiaga told The Associated Press.
He said a private doctor came to his house to treat him and found that “one of his right fingers is fractured and the other two are dislocated,” but police “do not allow me to go to a clinic for an x-ray.” .
“They didn’t let me leave for days, I’m in a situation of kidnapping,” he insisted.
Maradiaga recalled that other opposition leaders had suffered similar sieges in recent days by police and paramilitary elements linked to the government.
However, he stressed, the situation “is even more extreme in the most remote rural areas of the country, where opponents suffer persecution and extrajudicial crimes from the dictatorship of Daniel Ortega.”
Another UNAB executive, Roger Reyes, who was traveling with Maradiaga to Bilwi, was detained by police at Sandino Airport when he was about to board a local flight, according to Reyes himself with another video that published it on social networks.
Last Tuesday, journalist Carlos Fernando Chamorro was expelled by police officers while holding a press conference outside his Confidencial and Esta Semana media offices, which were closed by the government two years ago in the context of social protests. . from 2018.