The delusional accusations that the Ortega and Murillo regime police have launched against the director of the Miss Nicaraguan organization, Karen Celebertti, banished last week, and against her husband, Martín Argaello Leiva, and her son Bernardo Argaello Celebertti, kidnapped and disappeared, have provoked astonishment and a resounding condemnation among Nicaraguans and in international public opinion.
To these three citizens, who are part of the organization that promoted the coronation of Sheyniss Palacios, mis Nicaragua, in the Miss Universe contest, and who are therefore partners of this great national triumph, are charged without any evidence of the crimes of conspiracy, treason to the homeland, terrorism, incitement to hatred, organized crime, and money laundering – among other manufactured manufactures in the bunker of El Carmen.
In fact, all they are guilty of is having worked impartially and professionally to organize the Miss Nicaragua contest, and to have supported in its preparation Sheyniss Palacios, who, with his waste of beauty, talent, and charisma, became Missing Universe two weeks ago in San Salvador.
A queen of beauty who is also threatened by this rosary of insane accusations, whose only crime has been to restore joy and hope to the people, and to have crowned my Universe for their own effort, and not thank Commander Daniel and comrade Rosario, as ordered by official propaganda.
The police statement drawn up in his fist and letter by the spokeswoman of the regime is an act that dishonors the same National Police and that, without being a criminal charge, advances a guilty verdict by calling the defendants “sad.” But, deep down, it reveals the paranoia, fear, and despair of a family dictatorship that pretends to control everything, but it cannot silence the explosion of joy caused by my Universe, in the streets and in the networks, nor has it been able to crush the freedom of conscience of Monsignor Rolando Álvarez, the bishop of Matagalpa who for 10 months has been locked in a maximum security cell in the model prison.
The integrity, decency, solidarity and capacity for indignation, the same values that the great jurist who was Dr. Roberto Argaello Hurtado, former president of the Supreme Court of Justice, father, grandfather, and father-in-law of the three victims, was his only armor in a country without laws before an infamous accusation.
Nicaraguans have never lost the capacity to be astonished to condemn the crimes against humanity of the dictatorship, even if they are increasingly irrational. First they mass slaughtered the town in 2018. Thousands of people were imprisoned and sent to exile hundreds of thousands of families. They stripped us of the right to choose and be elected in 2021. They then eliminated all civic spaces and civil society organizations. They confiscated independent universities and media. They unleashed a fierce persecution of the Catholic Church and religious freedom. And now they’re trying to politicize a beauty contest to criminalize it by presenting it as an alleged coup d’état.
The nonsense assault on Miss Nicaragua and Miss Universe is part of the legacy of the chaos and disaster that Daniel Ortega intends to inherit from Nicaraguan society: a family dynasty with a more totalitarian dictatorship, although without legitimacy, or popular support. And all his accomplices know perfectly well: the generals of the Army and the Police, the brand new economic ministers, the regime’s political operators, and their testaferros and paramilitaries. They know that the dynasty is destined for failure, because, moreover, they will never be able to confiscate the joy and hope of the people, and freedom of conscience.
Having lived for five years under a de facto police state that has violated all freedoms, Nicaraguans continue to condemn, in silence, injustice. Civic resistance, in prison and in exile, is a more powerful democratic conquest than the rifles and slander of the dictatorship in its current state of total moral degradation.
It is possible that in the mafia mentality of dictators, Martin and Bernardo Arguello they will be seen as mere changes, as hostages to try to silence Miss Universe Sheyniss Palacios. But that’s a pointless gamble, because Sheyniss has never been or pretends to be a political actor. On the other hand, the explosion of joy that is unleashing its triumph is already part of a new wave of change that, sooner rather than later, will end up burying a decrepit dictatorship.
This article has been translated from the original which first appeared on El Pais