AMNESTY ACCUSES ORTEGA GOVERNMENT OF TORTURING PROTESTERS.

MANAGUA • Jaime Navarrete took to the streets outside his home in Managua, Nicaragua, to protest against Daniel Ortega, the country’s increasingly autocratic socialist president, in May this year.

One month later he paid for his activism as masked thugs crashed through his front door at 5 a.m., beat him to the floor and looted his home before handing him to police to be tortured.

“When I saw him, his neck and back were covered in burns, and his body bruised by beatings,” Navarrete’s mother, Margine Blandon, said on meeting her son after he was finally released. A report launched Thursday by Amnesty International shows that Navarrete’s experience is far from isolated.

“Torture is being used not solely as an instrument of punishment, but as a means of dissuading others from protesting,” said Carolina Jimenez, Americas deputy director for research at the human rights charity. “It is one element in a strategy of lethal repression intended to terrorize the population.”

The report also covers the criminalization of protesters, more than 400 of whom are in prison. Many are being tried under anti-terror laws passed in July by the National Assembly.

“Not only did President Ortega deploy police to arbitrarily arrest and torture demonstrators, he also used heavily armed pro-government groups to kill, wound and intimidate all those brave enough to stand up to his repressive strategy,” said Erika Guevara-rosas, Americas director at Amnesty International, in the report.

The report says that among the extrajudicial “executions” were 16-year-old Leyting Chavarría, who was shot in the chest when police and pro-government armed groups attacked barricades in the city of Jinotega and Faber Lopez, a police officer.

“Although the government blamed ‘terrorist’ gunmen for (Lopez’s) death, his family said his body did not bear any gunshot wounds but did show signs of torture. On the eve of his death, Lopez had called his family to say he was resigning and that if he didn’t contact them the next day it would be because his colleagues had killed him.”

The largely peaceful protests in April were sparked by fiscal reforms cutting pensions and disability payments, as well as a decade of growing authoritarianism under Ortega.

On Tuesday, a group of three student leaders were sentenced to 17 years in prison each on new terrorism charges, introduced in the midst of protests.

“It is absurd that Nicaragua has gone from being the safest country in Central America to having more than 300 terrorists in jail,” said Julio Montenegro, their lawyer.

Azahalea Solis, a member of the opposition Blue and White Alliance, said: “The struggle will continue. We’re far beyond the point of no return.”