Nicaragua frees 135 political prisoners after secret U.S. negotiations

President Daniel Ortega and his wife, Vice President Rosario Murillo, have accused Catholic clergy of supporting anti-government protests that swept the country in 2018. The government led a brutal crackdown on the demonstrators and has closed down more than 5,000 civic organizations, many of them religious. In recent months, it has intensified its repression of evangelical Christian groups.

Among those freed Thursday are 13 members of the Texas-based Mountain Gateway missionary organization, as well as Catholic laypeople and students, the White House said in a statement.

“It’s a real, tangible example of what democracies can do, working together,” John Kirby, a spokesman for the White House National Security Council, told reporters in a phone briefing Thursday.

Asked about the involvement in the prisoner release by Vice President Kamala Harris, who has led a Biden administration effort to deter migration by improving conditions in Central America, Kirby said it “all that stemmed right from the work that the vice president did on root causes.” He declined to give details on Harris’s role and described the effort as an administration-wide initiative. Harris is the Democratic nominee for president.

Thursday’s operation marked the second time the Biden administration won the release of a large group of Nicaraguan political prisoners and flew them out of the country. Last year, the Nicaraguan government freed 222 inmates, including top opposition politicians and business leaders. They were taken to Washington.

Guatemalan President Bernardo Arévalo said in a tweet that his country “firmly rejects the threat of a return to the authoritarian era. Today we reaffirm this commitment and return the international solidarity that we have received so often, by taking in 135 Nicaraguan brothers and freed political prisoners.”