Eduardo González
This past Tuesday, the Council of Ministers granted Spanish nationality by letter of nature to a new group of thirteen Nicaraguan opponents, including the writer Gioconda Belli, which brings to 110 the number of beneficiaries of this measure after having been expelled and dispossessed. of their citizenship by the regime of Daniel Ortega.
“The Council of Ministers has granted Spanish nationality to thirteen other Nicaraguans stripped of theirs, including Gioconda Belli, with whom I spoke by telephone,” announced the Minister of Foreign Affairs, José Manuel Albares, through his official account on the social network X. “The defenders of democracy and freedom have the support of Spain,” he added.
“I would have wanted to become a giant to embrace all of Spain,” Gioconda Belli herself wrote on the social network X. “The call from Minister Albares to tell me that I had been granted Spanish nationality was something that I will always remember,” she continued. “Exile is rarely accompanied by such special gestures. Thank you,” she concluded.
In accordance with the Royal Decrees signed by the Minister of the Presidency, Justice and Relations with the Cortes, Félix Bolaños, and published yesterday by the Official State Gazette (BOE), the beneficiaries of this measure are Gioconda María Belli Pereira, Juan Sebastián Chamorro García, Lenyn Ernesto Rojas Campos, Moisés Alfredo Leiva Chavarría, Nilson José Membreño, Raúl Antonio Vega González, Edgar Francisco Parrales Castillo, Ana Otilia Quirós Víquez, Berta Adelma Valle Otero, Carlos José Salinas Maldonado, Cinthia Samantha Padilla Jirón, Denis Javier Palacios Hernández and Freddy Alberto Navas López. All of them have received nationality by letter of nature, an exceptional procedure that is much faster than the usual channels and that avoids the prolongation of the stateless situation.
Gioconda Belli (Managua, Nicaragua, 1948), awarded the Reina Sofía Prize for Ibero-American Poetry on November 29, is one of the most recognized Central American writers. She published her first poems in 1970, in the cultural weekly La Prensa. Her work includes a dozen books of poems, two anthologies, eight novels and two books of essays. Her first collection of poems, Sobre la grama (1972), earned her the Mariano Fiallos Gil Poetry Prize from the Autonomous University of Nicaragua, one of the most prestigious in the country. Additionally, in 2020 she received the Jaime Gil de Biedma Poetry Prize for her work El pez rojo que nada en el pecho.
Belli, who defines herself as a “poet, novelist, feminist and humanist,” was part of the Sandinista National Liberation Front from a very young age and held various positions in the Government and the Sandinista Party, from which she distanced herself in 1993. In She currently lives in exile in Spain and is among the more than 300 people who were stripped of their nationality almost a year ago by Daniel Ortega’s regime for “treason to the country.”
Since May 2023 and until this last batch in January 2024, the Spanish Government has granted nationality to 110 “stateless” Nicaraguans, after offering it, in the first instance, to the 222 political prisoners deported in February 2023 by the Nicaraguan authorities. and, that same month, another 94 Nicaraguans already exiled and also stripped of their citizenship by Ortega.
Among the 110 nationalized are diplomats, former state officials, human rights defenders, Sandinista dissidents, opponents, journalists, academics, students, businessmen and merchants, and such important figures as Cristiana Chamorro, presidential candidate in the 2021 elections; journalist Carlos Fernando Chamorro Barrios, founder of the local newspaper Confidencial and son of former president Violeta Chamorro; or the sociologist Gertrudis Guerrero, wife of the exiled Nicaraguan writer Sergio Ramírez.
