Top Nicaraguan presidential candidate Cristiana Chamorro convicted in crackdown on opposition

Cristiana Chamorro, 68, had served as editor of the country’s largest newspaper, the family-run La Prensa, and as director of a press-freedom foundation named after her mother.

She, her brother Pedro Joaquin Chamorro, and three other people who were involved with the foundation were found guilty on Friday, at the end of a week-long trial, according to relatives. Prosecutors had maintained the organization received money from overseas to destabilize the government, a charge the defendants denied. Cristiana Chamorro faces up to 13 years in jail, while her brother, a former lawmaker, could get up to seven years.

“As my siblings said in court, this trial has the goal of staining the legacy of our parents — an objective that will not be achieved,” said Carlos Fernando Chamorro, a journalist, in a telephone interview from exile in Costa Rica. The Chamorros’ father, also named Pedro Joaquin Chamorro, was the best-known opposition figure confronting the right-wing Somoza dictatorship when he was shot dead in 1978.

Some analysts had expected Ortega to ease his crackdown on the opposition after his November reelection. Instead, the judicial system has convicted more than 30 opposition activists, many charged with treason.

They are among a wide array of critics targeted since Ortega’s government crushed a student-led national rebellion in 2018. Civil-society organizations, academics, the Roman Catholic Church and independent media have faced raids, threats and legal restrictions. The Biden administration and the European Union have imposed sanctions on Nicaraguan leaders for what they call election fraud and the muzzling of the opposition.

On Saturday, the Vatican announced that the Nicaraguan government had expelled the papal nuncio, Msgr. Waldemar Stanislaw Sommertag, who had mediated in talks between the government and opposition after the 2018 demonstrations. The Vatican said in a statement that the action was “grave and unjustified.”

The Nicaraguan government did not respond to a request for comment. Earlier in the week, it defended itself against criticism by the United Nations, which accused the government of human-rights abuses. Such accusations “are intended to continue disqualifying and denigrating our national authorities and institutions, as well as the legal system that supports the Nicaraguan state, based on false and totally biased information,” the Nicaraguan statement said.

Ortega became president after helping to lead the Sandinista revolution that toppled dictator Anastasio Somoza in 1979. The former Marxist guerrilla was defeated by Violeta Chamorro in elections in 1990 and voted back into office in 2006.

Sheridan reported from Mexico City.