2 more Nicaragua opposition figures convicted in trials

Nicaraguan judges have convicted a former high-level Sandinista official and a student leader accused of conspiring to de-stabilize the government of President Daniel Ortega as a series of perfunctory trials keep the president’s opponents behind bars

MEXICO CITY -- Nicaraguan judges on Friday convicted a former high-level Sandinista official and a student leader accused of conspiring to de-stabilize the government of President Daniel Ortega, as a series of perfunctory trials keep the president's opponents behind bars.

The nongovernmental Nicaraguan Center for Human Rights said Victor Hugo Tinoco, who was deputy foreign affairs minister during the first Sandinista government in 1979 but later split with Ortega, was convicted of “conspiracy to undermine national integrity.”

In a separate trial, student leader Max Jerez was convicted of the same charge. A day earlier, student leader Lesther Aleman was sentenced to 13 years in prison on the same charge.

Tinoco was arrested last year along with five other leaders of the Sandinista Renovation Movement, which split from Ortega in 1994 and is now known as the Democratic Renovation Union. Another of the party’s leaders, Dora María Téllez, a former Sandinista commander who led an assault on the National Palace in 1978, was sentenced to 13 years in prison Thursday.