The authorities of the National Technological Institute (Inatec) of Nicaragua inaugurated on Friday, May 24, a hotel-school on a property that the regime of Daniel Ortega and Rosario Murillo illegally confiscated last February: the vacation complex of the family of the former president of Nicaragua , Violeta Barrios de Chamorro, who is in poor health given his advanced age in Costa Ricaand where his banished children provide him with specialized care.
The official propaganda promoted with great fanfare the inauguration of the property consisting of four apartments and a service house called Farallones de Sotavento, a property valued at 2.2 million dollars, according to a bank appraisal held by EL PAÍS. Sotavento is located on a hill in the bay of San Juan del Sur, one of the main tourist destinations in Nicaragua.
The land where the property stands was acquired by Dr. Pedro Joaquín Chamorro Cardenal, Martyr of Public Liberties and National Hero,at the end of the sixties, before he was assassinated by the Somoza dictatorship. Later, the former president built a summer house on the land for her family, made up of her four children: Pedro Joaquín, Claudia, Cristiana and Carlos Fernando Chamorro Barrios.
During the nineties, after “Doña Violeta” – as she is popularly known in Nicaragua – defeated Ortega at the polls, Sotavento was used as the president’s rest house, “without using protocols or State resources,” says a source linked to the Chamorro Barrios family.
Property Registry does not allow settlement
Until 2006, that is, for more than 20 years, the property was a family meeting place. In the same year of 2006, former president Chamorro Barrios decided to create a five-part company, in which she, like her children, have a 20% shareholding.
The old vacation home was demolished and four apartments were built, plus the service house that is now confiscated. The Farallones de Sotavento company was legally constituted and registered in the Rivas department, in the south of Nicaragua, in 2006, according to the charter held by EL PAÍS.
Almost a decade later, in 2017, Pedro Joaquín and Carlos Fernando Chamorro Barrios decided to sell their apartments to two people who are not accused by the regime of “treason to the country” like them. To materialize these sales, former president Chamorro Barrios decides that all the shares will pass into the name of her four children. That is, they completely inherit the matriarch’s shareholding. The family makes a new deed of purchase and sale to record this transfer of shares, and then, the transaction between sellers and buyers.
However, the new deed and transfers could not be registered on the dates of the sale because the Property Registry did not allow it, despite several attempts by the new owners. “As the State did not allow the settlement, what was registered in Rivas is always the original deed, in which Doña Violeta and her children continue to appear as owners. So today the regime also confiscated the former president who brought peace to Nicaragua,” says the source.
Except for Claudia, the three Chamorro Barrios brothers (all journalists) were stripped of their nationality by the Ortega-Murillo regime. The political condemnation included the confiscation of his assets and freezing of bank accounts. Cristiana – who was the presidential candidate with the most popular support according to polls – and Pedro Joaquín Chamorro were political prisoners, while Carlos Fernando fled into exile for the second time in 2021 to avoid prison.
More than 250 million dollars in confiscations
The confiscation of assets is one of the repressive policies that the Ortega-Murillo regime has used the most against its critics. No one who opposes or criticizes the ruling party has been left unscathed: they have confiscated properties of opponents in their capacity as citizens, large businessmen, private sector unions, small and medium-sized businesses; non-governmental organizations, media, universities, the Catholic Church and even diplomatic headquarters.
Although the Ortega-Murillos were already carrying out de facto confiscations after 2018, it was in February 2023 when the Sandinista Parliament approved a reform to article 20 of the Magna Carta, which established that every Nicaraguan declared as a “traitor to the country” will be “He will strip his nationality” and his “assets will pass into the name of the State.” To date, 317 citizens have been denationalized and victims of confiscations, but the regime has gradually consummated the illegal seizure of property. They have started with the highest value properties and those located in areas of high capital gains.
According to an investigation by the Pro Transparency and Anticorruption Observatory (OPTA), of the organization Let’s Democracy, to date the ruling party has confiscated 135 properties with a value that amounts to 250 million dollars. However, this estimate “is the tip of the iceberg of the new Ortega-Murillo piñata,” the organization emphasizes.
“Eagerness to persecute the Chamorro family”
The regime named the hotel-school on the confiscated property “Cacique Nicarao.” “This new school, dedicated to the training of professionals in the tourism and hotel sector, will serve more than 600 protagonists in two physical facilities, fully equipped with all the tools for the development of a wide training offer,” Inatec published on its networks. social. They supposedly invested ten million córdobas (about $270,000) in “rehabilitating” them.
“To confiscate said property and convert it into an Inatec school, the Government had to review the registry in Rivas and find out its owners, and Doña Violeta is still one of them… What can be interpreted is that Ortega and Murillo have not only a desire to persecute the Chamorro Barrios family, but in this way they wanted to commit an act of political revenge for Doña Violeta’s victory over Daniel Ortega in free elections in 1990,” insists the source linked to the confiscated family.
The Chamorro Barrios family is considered one of the most politically influential in Nicaragua, especially for its commitment to public freedoms since his father began as director of the newspaper La Prensa.
In San Juan del Sur itself, the regime confiscated property belonging to Rafaela Cerda, mother of former Sandinista magistrate Rafael Solís Cerda, who is in exile in Costa Rica. Dr. Solís publicly rejected the confiscation. In an interview with the newspaper La Prensa He said that now the Ortega-Murillos “want to appear to inaugurate a hotel and a hotel school as if they were works carried out by them with great fanfare, when in reality what they did was half paint and remodel them. Even so, they were confiscated.”
Through the Attorney General’s Office (PGR), the regime tried to justify the massive confiscations in Nicaragua, alleging that they have “recovered for the people” hundreds of properties “related to drug trafficking and money laundering” that “have been improperly used” by individuals.
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