As part of the celebration of the 49th anniversary of the takeover of the house of Chema Castillo and 44th anniversary of the founding anniversary of the Ministry of the Interior, dictator Daniel Ortega, accompanied by the high command of the Police and the Army, announced that the National Assembly will hold a special session on Thursday, December 28, to approve with an emergency nature – a bill that will change the name of the current Ministry of the Interior to the Ministry of the Interior, as it was called during the first Sandinista regime of the eighties.
According to Ortega, the aim of the change is to return to the roots of Sandinismo and to free the police from the subjugation imposed on him by the Ministry of the Interior. Ortega said that during the first regime of the Sandinistas (1979-1990) they had two solid forces, the Army and the Ministry of the Interior, with which he said they managed to defeat the armed counterrevolution, but after the electoral defeat of 1990, the new government of Violeta Barrios de Chamorro changed the name to the institution to the Ministry of the Interior.
The step we are taking today, of returning to life to the Ministry of the Interior is a step that gives us enormous strength and we count again on the two great instruments with which we defeat the counterrevolution, the Army and the Ministry of the Interior,” Ortega said.
What was the Home Office doing?
In the 1980s, the Ministry of the Interior was led by Tomás Borge, one of the founders of the current ruling Sandinista National Liberation Front (FSLN) party, who is accused of having imposed a system of espionage and persecution against those who were considered “enemies of the revolution,” including members of the Catholic Church. He is also credited with ordering the murder of 37 political prisoners and for unleashing a manhunt against the Miskitus indigenous people of the Nicaraguan Caribbean, which was always denied by himself.
What the new Home Office Act will say
The Act initiative establishing the functions and structure of the Ministry of the Interior revives the repressive role of this institution in the past.
The new Law will establish that the Ministry of the Interior is the body of the State responsible for implementing, maintaining and implementing the necessary measures to ensure citizen, State security and domestic order in the national territory.
Its area of competence will be Nicaraguans and citizens of other nationalities, contributing to the Sovereign Security and the Internal Order of the country, through the Directorates-General established in the law.
The Ortega Police will be a member of the Higher Directorate of the Ministry of the Interior, through the representation of the Director General, the first commissioner Francisco Díaz.
The Ortega dictatorship has been making changes in the role of the Ministry of the Interior since last year. In August 2022, the National Assembly, under the control of the dictatorship, changed the Law on the Regulation and Control of Non-profit Organizations, to give absolute control to the Ministry of the Interior over non-governmental organizations (NGOs), which has been key to canceling more quickly hundreds of agencies held by opponents, with the aim of reducing the critical spaces to its regime.
Ortega says the governorship subjected the police
Dictator Daniel Ortega also said in his speech on Wednesday that the Liberal governments used the Ministry of the Interior to weaken the police and the army, trying to justify the change of name and functions that is now being done with that institution.
Does the right government arrive to find out how to destroy us, to destroy us they had to look for us to wear out, how to weaken ourselves in the Army and the Police, that is, in the Army and the Ministry of the Interior. The Ministry of the Interior with many directions to attend to, but with combative cohesion, they wanted to turn it into a bureaucratic instrument and the first thing they did was to change the name of the Ministry of the Interior and they gave it, what name they put on it, they put it on, they put it, Ortega said.
And he added that in front of that Ministry of the Interior they immediately laid out enemies of the people, enemies of the revolution to seek to decompose the Ministry of the Interior, to seek how to undermine the Ministry of the Interior, even to seek to undermine the police, yes from the ministries they had, because they had the Ministry they called the Interior that submitted to the police.
At the anniversary event of the Ministry of the Interior, Ortega imposed promotion and validation of police degrees on the Officials of the Directorates-General of the Ministry of the Interior, including the Deputy Minister of the Interior, Luis Cañas, who was now appointed Commissioner General.
This article has been translated from the original which first appeared in La Prensani