Nicaragua buries victims of latest violence
MANAGUA: Mourning families held funerals across Nicaragua on Friday for 16 people killed in one of the bloodiest days of protest in the country, where weeks of antigovernment demonstrations have left more than 100 dead.
Anguished relatives sobbed over the caskets of their loved ones at a series of funerals in the capital Managua, shocked over the brutal repression of what was a peaceful Mother’s Day march on Wednesday.
Hundreds of people packed into a church in Managua for the funeral of 14-year-old high school student Orlando Cordoba.
He was hit by a bullet while marching in a protest against President Daniel Ortega’s government at the Central American University.
The teenager’s body was draped with a blue-and-white scarf bearing the legend “Free Nicaragua.”
“Lord give me peace in my heart ... I never expected this,” said his weeping mother, Yadira Cordoba, as she clung to his coffin while it was being closed.
Policeman Armando Reyes asked fellow police to leave the funeral of his son Francisco Reyes, 34, who was shot in the head during Wednesday’s march.
“It wasn’t a dog that died,” he said.
“I am very hurt. I never imagined they would take my son’s life. They murdered him without a problem, they are murderers,” the dead man’s mother, Guillermina Zapata, told AFP.
Similar emotional scenes were repeated at other funerals as victims were laid to rest after what protest umbrella group Civic Alliance described as the “worst massacre” since protests started on April 18.
Ortega, 72, has dominated Nicaraguan politics since leading the Sandinista revolution that ousted dictator Anastasio Somoza in 1979.
He took over the country as head of a ruling junta and then president until 1990, then returned to power in 2007 — and looks determined to stay there, despite the protests and the devastating loss of his once-solid support from the business elite.
The seven-week-old protests began over a much-hated pension reform and ballooned into a mass threat to Ortega’s rule.
The embattled president denies repressing them, and called Wednesday’s unrest a “conspiracy” by the opposition aimed at “terrorising” the people.
He has rejected calls to step down and the Catholic Church, which has tried to mediate the conflict, has refused to resume the talks as long as government “repression” continues.
Casting further shadows over the talks, the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights warned that Silvio Jose Baez, the auxiliary bishop of Managua who had been mediating them, had received “death threats” and that his life was in danger, in a statement released in Washington. — AFP