Walter Gómez

Walter Gómez Silva: Convicted for his technical work with the independent media

In his youth, Walter Gómez had already lived through the horrors of war. He was recruited for the compulsory military service of the first Sandinista government in the 1980s. In 1986 he returned and decided to study economics while in his spare time he played basketball, a sport he loved.

He graduated as an economist from the Carlos Fonseca Amador University Campus (Unan-Rucfa), got married and had two children: a boy and a girl. He was assuming different professional responsibilities. At the beginning, he had to travel from Managua to Tipitapa to work and years later, at 55 years old, he worked as the financial administrator of the Violeta Barrios de Chamorro Foundation.

Those who worked with him knew that he was a trustworthy person and was described as being very helpful, someone who did not get desperate or angry about anything.

At the end of May 2021, Walter was arrested. It was the 28th and it began to circulate through social networks that in the middle of an investigation that the regime’s Prosecutor’s Office carried out against the organization where Gómez worked, he was arrested in the night hours. The police knocked on a window of his house in Colonia El Periodista and forced the family to open the door. They entered, took him away and did not care that his underage son witnessed the arrest with horror.

That was the last time he was seen in freedom. Since then he has lost more than 50 pounds of weight due to the poor food conditions in which he finds himself and the torture under which he has been forced to live for a whole year.

On November 4, 2021, the Inter-American Court of Human Rights granted provisional measures in his favor, requiring the State to proceed with his immediate release.

However, Ortega Judge Luden Quiróz decided to follow the regime’s guidelines and sentenced him in March of this year to 13 years in prison and a fine of one million six hundred thousand dollars for the false crimes of misappropriation and improper retention, money laundering, abusive management and ideological falsehood that he did not commit.

Freedom for Walter Gómez! 

We demand to the Ortega-Murillo regime: Free Nicas Now!