The Nicaraguan press is facing a “bloody dictatorship” in the country that has criminalized, exiled, exiled, confiscated and stripped of citizenship dozens of journalists, says Nicaragua Investiga website director Jennifer Ortiz.

In an interview with EFE on the occasion of Journalist’s Day in Nicaragua, Ortiz (1986), one of 22 Nicaraguan communicators who criticized the government of Daniel Ortega, recently declared “traitors to the motherland” and deprived of citizenship, says that on this day “there is something to celebrate, because that we survived a lot.”

“We are facing one of the bloodiest dictatorships in Latin America that has made us suffer threats, stigmatization, criminalization, expulsion, denationalization, confiscation,” says the communicator, who also runs Voces en Libertad, an organization that supports the media and Nicaraguan authorities. journalists.

“It was very hard, and despite this, we continue to fight,” Ortiz argues, pointing out that “it was independent journalism, together with human rights organizations, that documented the most serious human rights violations and crimes committed by the government.” as of April 2018″ when anti-government demonstrations broke out.

For Ortiz, who lives in Costa Rica, the “scale of the regime’s attack on the independent press” stems from what he believes Ortega “deems us dangerous to his permanence in power”, which he returned to in 2007 after coordinating the junta . in government from 1979 to 1985 and first presided over Nicaragua from 1985 to 1990.

“As long as journalism continues to harass the authorities, continues to monitor the authorities, continues to expose the corruption of the authorities, we can say that we have succeeded,” says the director of Nicaragua Investiga, an alternative media that was born in the context of the socio-political crisis in which the Central American country lives.