Violeta Chamorro, Nicaragua's Former President, Dies at 95
Violeta Barrios de Chamorro, the Nicaraguan leader whose rule in the 1990s marked the end of the country's civil war and who served as Latin America's first elected female president, died on Saturday at 95.
Chamorro took power in 1990 after beating revolutionary leader Daniel Ortega in a surprise election in which she united opposition forces against his Sandinista party. Ortega, who had led the overthrow of the dictatorship of Anastasio Somoza after four decades of his family's iron-fisted rule, was expected to win the vote.
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9 hours ago
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Critic of Nicaragua's Ortega shot dead in exile in Costa Rica
A retired Nicaraguan army officer in exile who fiercely criticized authoritarian President Daniel Ortega was shot dead Thursday in neighboring Costa Rica, his family and officials said. Major Roberto Samcam, 66, was gunned down at his apartment building in San Jose, reportedly by men pretending to deliver a package. "It was something we did not expect, we could not have imagined it," Samantha Jiron, Samcam's adoptive daughter, told AFP from her home in Madrid. Nicaraguan rights groups and exiled dissidents immediately blamed the government of Ortega and his co-president wife Rosario Murillo. "Roberto was a powerful voice" who "directly denounced the dictatorship" of Ortega, Samcam's wife Claudia Vargas told reporters in San Jose as she fought back tears. His job, she said, was to "expose human rights violations" in his homeland. The head of Costa Rica's judicial police, Randall Zuniga, said that the attackers took advantage of the fact that Samcam's apartment building was unguarded in the mornings. The gunman "called out to... Roberto," who "approached without knowing" the danger, Zuniga said. "When he was within striking range, the individual began shooting at him and hit him at least eight times," he told reporters. The Nicaraguan news site Confidencial reported that the killers fled the scene by motorbike. The US State Department's Bureau of Western Hemisphere Affairs said on X that it was "shocked" by Samcam's murder and offered Costa Rica help in "holding the assassins and those behind them accountable." Nicaragua's former ambassador to the Organization of American States, Arturo McFields, who lives in exile in the United States, called the killing "an act of cowardice and criminal political revenge by the dictatorship of Nicaragua." "The manner of the crime indicates political motives. This is very serious," Nicaraguan writer Gioconda Belli, exiled in Spain, stated on X. Neither Ortega nor his government commented on the case. Samcam, who was a political analyst, had spoken out frequently against the government in Managua, which he fled in 2018 to live with his wife in Costa Rica. That year, protests against Ortega's government were violently repressed, resulting in more than 300 deaths, according to the UN. In January last year, another Nicaraguan opposition activist living in Costa Rica, Joao Maldonado, was shot while driving with his girlfriend in San Jose. Both were seriously wounded. While the motive of that attack was the object of much speculation, Samcam's killing fueled suspicion among Nicaraguans that it may also have been linked to his political activities. - 'Night of long knives' - Former Costa Rican president Luis Guillermo Solis called Samcam's murder "for his frontal opposition to the Ortega and Murillo dictatorship" an "outrageous and extremely serious act." "I feel that Daniel Ortega and Rosario Murillo are initiating a 'Night of the Long Knives'... due to the regime's weakening," Dora Maria Tellez, a former associate of Ortega turned critic, said from Spain, where she too is in exile. The "Night of the Long Knives" was a bloody purge of rivals ordered by Nazi leader Adolf Hitler in 1934. "They resort to the execution of a retired ex-military officer, whom they believe has a voice that resonates within the ranks of the army," Tellez told the Nicaraguan news outlet 100% Noticias. Ortega, now 79, first served as president from 1985 to 1990 as a former guerrilla hero who had helped oust a brutal US-backed regime. Returning to power in 2007, he became ever more authoritarian, according to observers, jailing hundreds of opponents, real and perceived, in recent years. Ortega's government has shut down more than 5,000 non-governmental organizations since the 2018 mass protests that he considered a US-backed coup attempt. Thousands of Nicaraguans have fled into exile, and the regime is under US and EU sanctions. Most independent and opposition media operate from abroad. Pro-government media in Nicaragua did not report on Samcam's killing. bur-fj/cb/sst
Yahoo
9 hours ago
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Prominent Nicaraguan dissident shot dead in exile in Costa Rica
A retired Nicaraguan military officer who later became a critic of President Daniel Ortega has been killed in a shooting at his condominium in Costa Rica, where he lives in exile. The death of Roberto Samcam, 67, on Thursday has heightened concern about the safety of Nicaraguan dissidents, even when they live abroad. Police in Costa Rica have confirmed that a suspect entered Samcam's condominium building in the capital of San Jose at approximately 7:30am local time (13:30 GMT) and shot the retired major at least eight times. Costa Rica's Judicial Investigation Organisation identified the murder weapon as a 9mm pistol. Samcam's wife, Claudia Vargas, told the Reuters news agency that the suspect pretended to be a delivery driver to gain access to her husband. The suspect allegedly fired on Samcam and then left without saying a word, escaping on a motorcycle. He remains at large. Samcam went into exile after participating in the 2018 protests, which began as demonstrations against social security reforms and escalated into one of the largest antigovernment movements in Nicaragua's history. Thousands of people flooded Nicaragua's streets. Some even called for President Ortega's resignation. But while Ortega did ultimately cancel the social security reforms, he also answered the protests with a police crackdown, and the clashes killed an estimated 355 people, according to the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR). More than 2,000 people were injured, and another 2,000 held in what the IACHR described as 'arbitrary detention'. In the months and years after the protests, Ortega has continued to seek punishment for the protesters and institutions involved in the demonstrations, which he likened to a 'coup'. Samcam was among the critics denouncing Ortega's use of military weapons and paramilitary forces to tamp down on the protests. Ortega has denied using either for repression. In a 2019 interview with the publication Confidencial, for instance, he compared Ortega to Anastasio Somoza Debayle, the last member of what is commonly known as the Somoza family dictatorship, which ruled Nicaragua for nearly 43 years. And in 2022, Samcam published a book that roughly called Ortega: El Calvario de Nicaragua, which roughly translates to: Ortega: Nicaragua's torment. Ortega has long been accused of human rights abuses and authoritarian tendencies. In 2023, for instance, he stripped hundreds of dissidents of their citizenship, leaving them effectively stateless, and seized their property. He has also pushed for constitutional reforms to increase his power and that of his wife, former Vice President Rosario Murillo. She now leads with Ortega as his co-president. The changes also increase Ortega's term in office and grant him the power to coordinate all 'legislative, judicial, electoral, control and supervisory bodies' — putting virtually all government agencies under his authority. From abroad, Samcam was helping to lead an effort to document some of Ortega's alleged abuses. In 2020, he became the chain-of-command expert for the Court of Conscience, a group created by the Arias Foundation for Peace and Human Progress, a nonprofit founded by a Nobel Prize-winning Costa Rican president, Oscar Arias. As part of the group, Samcam solicited testimony of torture and abuses committed under Ortega, with the aim of building a legal case against the Nicaraguan president and his officials. 'We are documenting each case so that it can move on to a trial, possibly before the Inter-American Court of Human Rights,' Samcam said at the time. Samcam is not the only Nicaraguan dissident to face an apparent assassination attempt while in exile. Joao Maldonado, a student leader in the 2018 protests, has survived two such attempts while living in the Costa Rican capital. The most recent one, in January 2024, left him and his partner seriously injured. Maldonado has blame Nicaragua's Sandinista National Liberation Front — which Ortega leads — for the attack.
Yahoo
12 hours ago
- Yahoo
Trump criticizes ‘non-working holidays' on Juneteenth
President Donald Trump took to social media Thursday on Juneteenth, a federal holiday, to criticize the number of 'non-working holidays' in the United States. 'Too many non-working holidays in America. It is costing our Country $BILLIONS OF DOLLARS to keep all of these businesses closed. The workers don't want it either! Soon we'll end up having a holiday for every once working day of the year. It must change if we are going to, MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!' Trump wrote in a post on his Truth Social platform. Juneteenth is the oldest regular US celebration of the end of slavery. It commemorates June 19, 1865 – the day that Union Army Maj. Gen. Gordon Granger rode into Galveston, Texas, and told a group of slaves that the Civil War had ended and they were free - more than two years after President Abraham Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation. During Thursday's White House press briefing, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt told reporters Trump was unlikely to mark the federal holiday. 'I'm not tracking his signature on a proclamation today,' Leavitt said. 'I know this is a federal holiday — I want to thank all of you for showing up to work. We are certainly here, we're working 24/7 right now.' Trump has previously tried to take credit for making Juneteenth 'very famous,' saying during his first term in 2020 that, 'nobody had ever heard of it.' His comments came while the nation was reeling from ongoing civil unrest after George Floyd's death at the hands of Minneapolis police officers. Trump had previously pledged to make Juneteenth a federal holiday during his 2020 presidential campaign. Juneteenth didn't become an official holiday until 2021, under President Joe Biden's administration. Since his reelection, Trump has made the elimination of DEI programs a centerpiece of his administration, cracking down on diversity efforts in the federal government with a series of executive orders. CNN's Donald Judd contributed to this report.
