He was the best man and close adviser at Daniel Ortega’s wedding, broke politically and now suffers a ruthless revenge.

Revenge is a dish served cold. He knows it Daniel OrtegaHaving waited five years without any major reaction to the defection of his former right-hand man in legal affairs and political negotiations, the magistrate RAFAEL SOLIS CERDATo confiscate assets he owns in Nicaragua, including those of close relatives.

From the end of January 2024 to the present, the Nicaraguan regime has seized at least six properties belonging to Solís or his relatives. On February 27, a Nicaraguan police patrol went to the home of Solis’ mother, Rafaela Cerda, 93, who was forced to leave the property “with only the clothes she was wearing.”

The wave of seizures against Solis and his relatives comes nearly a year after the Ortega regime announced it.A traitor to the country” and order that all his wealth pass to the State of Nicaragua.

Solis was the magistrate Supreme Court of Justice of Nicaragua For 19 years and at the same time he served as a political representative of the ruling party, Sandinista Frontin the judicial system and personal contact with Daniel Ortega and his wife, Rosario Murillo.

He resigned on January 8, 2019 through a public letter in which he said, “state of terror” Repression against the civil protests that erupted in 2018 to leave power by Daniel Ortega.

With massive marches in the streets, and more than a hundred barricades paralyzing the country, at its weakest moment, Ortega called for the first dialogue with the opposition in May 2018, which helped him buy time and mobilize an armed paramilitary force. Backed by the military and the police, who violently thwarted street protests.

According to the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR), there were 355 killings related to the suppression of protests in 2018, and other organizations estimate that more than a thousand people were arrested, and nearly one hundred thousand people fled the country. Protect their lives, lives or liberties.

“They have sown fear in our country and have no respectable right with the inevitable consequences of establishing and consolidating at least one dictatorship with the characteristics of an absolute monarchy,” Solís expressed in his resignation letter.

“If so many people had not been killed, I would have been with you and I would have continued in court and in the front,” he added in the letter that was released while the former magistrate was already in exile in Costa Rica, where he still lives.

Rafael Solís Cerda, 70 years old, was The first ambassador sent to the United States by the Sandinista guerrillas When he took power in Nicaragua in July 1979. Solis arrived still in military uniform and hurriedly bought a set of civilian clothes to appear before then-US President Jimmy Carter.

Solis comes from a wealthy and religious family. He studied at the Colegio Centroamericana and the Universidad Centroamericana (UCA), both run by the Society of Jesus. He became involved in the fight against the Anastasio Somoza regime in the 1970s, first through the Christian student movement and then in the Sandinista guerrillas.

After the revolutionary victory, he spent a year as ambassador to the United States, and then joined the Sandinista Popular Army (EPS), which appointed him as its representative in the newly formed Council of State, a kind of revolutionary parliament.

After the electoral defeat of the Sandinista Front in 1990, Solís disappeared from politics and tried to become a fishing businessman on the country’s Atlantic coast, but he surprisingly reappeared in 1996 as a substitute deputy candidate of the then Sandinista Renewal Movement (MRS). , a dissident faction of the Sandinista Front, which protested the way Daniel Ortega led the party in opposition.

However, Solis’ allies assure that he never distanced himself from Daniel Ortega. “The proof is that Ortega appointed him as a judge of the Supreme Court of Justice in 1999, when Ortega and Arnoldo Alleman shared the powers of Nicaragua,” explained a source who requested anonymity.

“I have come to defend the interests of the Sandinista Front,” Rafael Solís said publicly when assuming his chair as a magistrate, a controversial phrase for a judge who persecuted him during his tenure.

“I remember Payo (Rafael Solis) was in exile in Costa Rica. And I remember it on the interior front in Managua. He was a devoted and brave fellow, but he always had that trait—a trait that put him where he was of course—to be obedient, to do what he was told, no matter what his own decision. If this could be a necessity in a military situation, that quality should at this time disqualify him as a candidate for the Supreme Court, let alone as a member of it,” the Nicaraguan author wrote. Gioconda BelliIn an article published in 2007.

In September 2006, when Daniel Ortega was required to appear married by the Catholic Church in view of that year’s elections, in which he was running for a fifth term as the Sandinista Front’s presidential candidate, Solis appeared. the witness A questionable ceremony that would have taken place in 1978, when Ortega and Rosario Murillo, according to their version, would have been married in Costa Rica under the services of a guerrilla priest.

Daniel Ortega had only lost three consecutive elections and the warnings of Cardinal Miguel Obando, the powerful archbishop of Managua, would have been decisive in his defeat. A day earlier, Obando asked voters to judge the quality of the candidates by whether or not they were married according to the rites of the Catholic Church.

Although Rosario Murillo had admitted years earlier that he had never married Daniel Ortega, after Obando’s warning, versions of a guerilla marriage began to circulate, of which only Rafael Solis remained as a living witness. Ortega and Murillo “renewed” their wedding vows before the Archbishop of Managua himself and with Solís as best man.

That year, Daniel Ortega won the November 2006 election that would bring him to power, a position he holds to this day 17 years later.

Rafael Solis participated in all of Sandinismo’s strong plays, always behind Daniel Ortega. He was one of the editors of the Current Political Constitution, in 1987; He assisted Ortega in the rape and sexual abuse allegations he committed Zoilamerica Narvaez, in 1998; He was one of the negotiators of the agreement with the liberal Arnoldo Aleman; And, in October 2009, he was the main architect of a Supreme Court ruling that allowed Ortega to be re-elected despite an existing constitutional ban.

“I don’t think it will lead the nation to this. I never imagined it,” Solis lamented in an interview with the American newspaper The New York Times two days after resigning.

Nicaragua’s National Assembly (Parliament) did not process Solís’ resignation, but eight months later, in October 2019, it “removed” him from office in a summary vote that accused the former magistrate of “the scoundrel“,”a traitorThe “and” partRebellion“

On January 29, Daniel Ortega’s regime confiscated the Casablanca Hotel, a 15-room luxury building located in the coastal area of ​​San Juan del Sur, owned by Rafaela Cerda, the mother of a former magistrate.

Police also seized the homes of Rafael Solis’ sister and niece, Ana Isabel Solis and Aldo Rapaccioli Solis, respectively. A shopping center called Plaza Isabela in Managua, whose property is registered in the name of Ana Isabel Solís, was also confiscated.

The last act of revenge took place on February 27 when four patrols showed up at Rafaela Cerda’s house, located in the exclusive neighborhood of Villa Fontana in Managua, and demanded that the non-elderly woman vacate the property because it belonged to her. of the state of Nicaragua, according to local media.

Infobay He tried to speak to Rafael Solis about the issue, but the former magistrate claimed he could not comment at this time.