Nicaragua July 30, 2019
Nicaraguan human rights director accused by staff of massive theft of US
taxpayer money, death toll inflation
ANPDHs board members are accusing their director of stealing huge sums from
US soft power organizations and inflating death tolls during last years
coup attempt in Nicaragua. The OAS, which relied heavily on ANPDHs flawed
data, has kept silent so far.
By Nan McCurdy
A year after a US-backed coup attempt rocked Nicaragua, a major scandal is
unfolding over the alleged theft of half a million dollars in US taxpayer
money by an organization at the center of the destabilization effort.
Three board members of the Nicaraguan Association for Human Rights (ANPDH)
have denounced their former director, Álvaro Leiva, accusing him of stealing
almost half a million dollars in funding provided by the US governments
National Endowment for Democracy and other US soft power outfits.
The board members have also accused Leiva of altering the number of deaths
and injuries in the ANPDH reports in order to ask for more resources from
North American donors, which totally invalidates the credibility of those
reports, according to Nicaraguan journalist Adolfo Pastran.
During the regime change attempt, which lasted from April 18 through July of
last year, ANPDH claimed there were more than 400 dead, inflating the death
toll by at least 150 and falsely blaming the government for each death.
ANDPH also exaggerated the numbers of detained, wounded and disappeared of
which there was only one: Bismarck Martinez, a Sandinista member who was
kidnapped on June 29, 2018 and found murdered in May of this year. Videos of
the horrendous torture of Martinez were found on the cell phones of his
torturers following their arrest.
As The Grayzone reported, the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights
(IACHR) of the Organization of American States (OAS) relied heavily on the
flawed data of ANDPH in its own lopsided report on the 2018 crisis in
Nicaragua.
The ANDPH was founded in Miami in 1986 under President Ronald Reagan to
clean up the dirty war his CIA was waging against Nicaragua. Awarded an
initial 3 million dollars from Congress in 1987, the group was charged with
improving the human rights image of the US-backed Contras while zeroing in
on alleged abuses by the Sandinista front. The ANPDH has received US funding
ever since with a strong upswing in 2018, when the operation to topple
President Daniel Ortega kicked into gear.
This July 23, ANPDHs board of directors placed a complaint against Leiva
for stealing nearly a half million US dollars, falsifying signatures and
altering financial reports.
Gustavo Bermúdez, a member of ANDPHs board, said that among the $443,876
received by Leiva was $45,000 in 2017 and $60,000 in April 2018 from the US
governments National Endowment for Democracy. He reaped an additional
$28,876 in 2017 from the US governments National Democratic Institute and
$310,000 from the Open Society Foundations of anti-communist billionaire
George Soros between 2017 and 2019.
A graphic displayed during Bermudezs press conference showing US funding
for ANPDH allegedly stolen by Leiva
Bermúdez is a journalist and widely recognized opponent of Ortega and the
Sandinista front, making his accusations more difficult to dismiss.
Leiva, for his part, says he is the victim of a conspiracy overseen by the
dictatorship of Ortega that aims to punish him for his human rights work.
He has attacked his former colleague, Bermúdez, as part of a fifth column
of sophisticated people who dress in sheeps clothes and are wolves in
practice.
In an interview with Adolfo Pastran, the President of the criminal branch of
the Supreme Court, Francisco Rosales, said that Leivas alleged actions
violate the criminal code, the Constitution and the law against terrorism
and money laundering and are crimes prosecutable ex officio. What has been
said is very serious, they themselves have discredited those reports and
confirms that they put live people on their lists of dead, Rosales stated.
Pastran said that Leiva could be accused of laundering money through two
bank accounts in two Nicaraguan banks: Given the seriousness of the
complaints against Leiva, none of the national newspapers, radio and TV
stations that lauded the ANPDH reports on numbers of dead and shared them
internationally, have said or printed a word.
The Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR) of the Organization
of American States (OAS) has not commented despite the fact that their
reports were fed with information, now proven fraudulent, from the ANPDH, as
well as the reports of Americas Watch, Amnesty International and the United
Nations High Commission for Human Rights, which would indicate that all
those reports are flawed. Even some Catholic bishops who gave statements
using ANPDH data are profoundly silent, Pastran noted.
Leiva left Nicaragua in 2018 along with treasurers José Luis Rodríguez
Reyes and Zaira Gabriela Hernández Espinoza with whom he formed a new
non-governmental organization (NGO) in Costa Rica and with whom he intends
to continue raising resources, Bermúdez concluded.