Saint Joseph/The Immigration and Customs Enforcement Service (ICE) detained this Monday in Florida the denationalized Nicaraguan journalist Luis Galeano, director of the opinion and debate program Café con Voz, critical of the Government of Nicaragua co-chaired by husband and wife Daniel Ortega and Rosario Murillo.
“Our director Luis Galeano has been detained by ICE,” published the Café con Voz platform, which the communicator runs with his wife, Deykell Santamaría, from exile in Miami.
Galeano, 48, is a Nicaraguan journalist who was declared a “traitor to the country”, deprived of his nationality and property by the Nicaraguan authorities on February 15, 2023 along with the writers Sergio Ramírez and Gioconda Belli; the auxiliary bishop of Managua Silvio Báez; veteran human rights defender Vilma Núñez, journalist Carlos Fernando Chamorro and former commander Luis Carrión, among a list of 94 people.
“Our director Luis Galeano has been detained by ICE”
His wife confirmed to reporters that Galeano was working as a driver for the Uber platform when he was detained and that he later called her from a police station in Orlando, Florida.
Galeano left Nicaragua in December 2018, as reported at the time, after the arrest warrant issued by a judge in Managua, in the midst of the social, political and human rights crisis that the country has been experiencing since April of that year.
The communicator, who worked in the defunct newspaper El Nuevo Diario and who was editor of the Nicaraguan delegation of the EFE Agency (2004-2006), broadcast his program on the 100% Noticias channel, which was raided by the National Police, while the state-run Nicaraguan Institute of Telecommunications and Post Office (Telcor), the sector’s regulatory body, ordered subscription television operators to remove it from their menu, and their offices were subsequently seized.
Political organizations, journalists and opponents in exile have expressed solidarity with Galeano or advocated for his release.
“We ask the United States Immigration and Customs Enforcement Service to assess the situation in which opposition journalist Luis Galeano finds himself. He is politically persecuted by the Sandinista dictatorship of Murillo-Ortega in Nicaragua. Our solidarity with Luis!”, the Great Nicaraguan Opposition Confederation published on its social networks.
“He is politically persecuted by the Sandinista dictatorship of Murillo-Ortega in Nicaragua. Our solidarity with Luis!”
Nicaraguan opposition leader Juan Sebastián Chamorro said in an audio sent to the media that Galeano “is a distinguished Nicaraguan journalist who has fought for freedom of expression, for truth, for justice in Nicaragua,” and warned that “his life would be at extreme risk of being deported to Nicaragua.”
“Luis is a politically persecuted person and deserves to be treated in the United States as a political asylum seeker. We call on the authorities to take into consideration the fight for the freedom of expression of Luis Galeano, his program, for the good of Nicaragua and also his family,” Chamorro advocated.
Nicaragua has been going through a political and social crisis since April 2018, which was accentuated after the controversial general elections of November 2021, in which Ortega was re-elected for a fifth term, his fourth consecutive.
These elections took place with its main contenders in prison, whom it later expelled from the country and deprived of their nationality and political rights, after accusing them of “coup plotters” and “betrayal of the country.”
