The Spanish government will offer Spanish nationality to the 222 political prisoners released by Nicaragua, expelled to the United States and who will be stripped of their nationality, announced the Minister of Foreign Affairs, José Manuel Albares, in an interview broadcast this Friday.
“The Government offers Spanish nationality to these 222 released prisoners, before the news that the process has begun to declare them stateless”, Albares told Spanish media outlet Servimedia, information confirmed by the ministry to AFP.
Albares specified that they will come into contact with the opponents, and that the process It could be fast, by way of the naturalization letter.
The 222 opponents were released on Thursday in Nicaragua by the government of Daniel Ortega and deported to the United States, the president himself announced.
A bishop refused to be deported and went back to jail.
Among the released opponents were former presidential candidate Cristiana Chamorro and her brother and former minister Pedro Joaquín Chamorro, as well as other politicians who wanted to challenge Ortega in the latest elections. Both are sons of former president Violeta Barrios de Chamorro (1990-1997).
The Nicaraguan judge who certified the expulsion reported that all were deprived of their political rights in perpetuity, and the government will withdraw their Nicaraguan nationality.
In this sense, the Parliament made up of supporters of Ortega approved on Thursday a law according to which "traitors to the homeland lose the quality of Nicaraguan national." The rule requires a second legislative approval in the second half of this year, which is taken for granted.
Hundreds of opponents were detained in Nicaragua in the context of the repression that followed the protests that broke out in 2018 against Ortega, in power since 2007 and successively reelected in disputed elections.
An illustrious Nicaraguan, the writer Sergio Ramírez, and other Latin American opponents, such as the Cuban Yunior García, or the Venezuelan Leopoldo López, have recently settled in Spain.
