Tortilla con Sal, August 8th 2018
On May 19th this year opposition activists ambushed buses carrying Sandinista supporters returning to Tipitapa after a peace march supporting the government in Managua. On the highway adjacent to the National Agrarian University, opposition activists had placed makeshift barricade across the road. When teh Sandinista supporters tried to remove the obstacles so as to continue their journey home, opposition activists inside the UNA campus attacked them from both sides of the highway.
one of the wounded Sandinista supporters from the UNA ambush
However the Interamerican Commission for Human Rights abandoned any attempt to impartillay investigate the incident. IACHR Director Paulo Abrao publicly sided with the opposition activists. In this audio recording he emphatically states his support for their completely false version of the incident, namely that they were the victims of an attack by the Nicaraguan police.
This Facebook post quotes Paulo Abrao claiming to have verified that the police attacked the opposition activists who ambushed the Sandinista supporters at the UNA. In fact, he did no such thing. What he did was take at face value the false accusations of the opposition activists without making the least effort to check them against other possible versions. He had no basis whatsoever, apart from his own flagrant bias, on which to contradict the police assertion that they had no presence at the UNA. Abrao offers zero evidence to the contrary except the false testimony of the opposition activists whose version is flatly contradicted by the injuries suffered by the Sandinista supporters ambushed by Abrao's proteges
In this video, CIDH and the opposition aligned CPDH human rights organization take testimony from the opposition activists who ambushed the Sandinistas returning to Tipitapa
The "peaceful" activists are carrying their artesanal mortars as they give their version of events. Firstly, the wounds are very clearly minor, the kind of minor injuries to be expected from a clash between not very well armed rival protestors, certainly not the kind of injuries to be expected from a police attack. Secondly, Abrao's retort to Police Commisioner Diaz (who had stated in an earlier message that the police had no presence at the UNA) that he Abrao was in some sense able to verify the "attack" is completely false when in fact he was no more than a witness to the aftermath of the attack and presents zero evidence of any police presence. Instead of simply taking the opposition activists' word for it that they were attacked by the police, when the actual injuries suggest otherwise, a professional conscientious investigator would have checked out the claims of the Sandinista victims who also presented similar injuries to the kind sustained by the opposition activist, if anything somewhat more severe. Paulo Abrao failed to do so in yet one more example of his abysmal failure to fulfil the obligations of the Inter American Commission for Human Rights under the mandate for its mission to Nicaragua, namely to investigate impartially the events provoked by the country's crisis. To the contrary, under Abrao's direction the IACHR has openly sided with the right wing political forces seeking to overthrow Nicaragua's legitimate government,