Panama’s former president moves into Nicaraguan embassy to avoid jail and plan his election campaign
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Panama’s former president has taken shelter in the Nicaraguan embassy with his dog and a barbecue set where he plans to ride out a corruption investigation and regain power.
Ricardo Martinelli is hanging on to his creature comforts as he evades a prison sentence by setting up home in the diplomatic residence in Panama City.
In recent days staff have been spotted moving the 71-year-old’s personal belongings into the run down house with items including air-conditioning units, two flat screen TVs, a gas-powered family barbecue and his dog Bruno.
Martinelli, who led Panama from 2009 to 2014, has been claiming that he is the target of “political persecution” and that the country is a “civil dictatorship” since the Supreme Court confirmed his 10-year sentence for money laundering on Feb 2.
Nicaragua’s president Daniel Ortega and and his wife, vice-president Rosario Murillo, regarded as running the Western Hemisphere’s most oppressive dictatorship, granted Martinelli asylum on Feb 7.
Martinelli, a Left-wing billionaire businessman, was originally sentenced in July last year over his purchase of the Editora Panama América media group. He was also fined £15 million and barred from public office, ruling him out of May’s presidential elections.
Polls show he has the support of about 40 per cent of the electorate, making him the clear frontrunner in a crowded field.
He faces a second trial later this year for allegedly taking bribes from Odebrecht, a Brazilian construction company.
Martinelli’s two sons were deported by the United States last year after serving 36-month sentences in the Odebrecht case.
It is not the first time that the Ortega-Murillo regime has provided a bolthole for Latin American leaders facing legal problems, even giving them Nicaraguan nationality.
Two former presidents of El Salvador, Maurico Funes and Salvador Sánchez Cerren, wanted in their homeland for stealing from public coffers, have successfully sought refuge in Nicaragua. So too have two associates of the former Honduran president Juan Orlando Hernández, now facing a drug-running trial in the US.
In the 1980s, Mr Ortega once gave refuge to Pablo Escobar just as the Colombian was starting his rise to become the world’s most feared druglord.
“No one believes Martinell’s absurd rhetoric. He is trying to save his own skin and justify the unjustifiable,” said Francisco Aguirre, a former Nicaraguan foreign minister, who was stripped of his citizenship last year and deported to the US after 18 months in jail for “undermining national sovereignty”.
“The dictatorship giving him asylum does not surprise me. Birds of a feather flock together, and they have done this before with other corrupt and authoritarian leaders,” he added.
