Eight public hospital doctors in Nicaragua on Friday said that they have been fired after violating alleged orders not to treat wounded protesters opposing Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega’s government.
Reporters saw several of the dismissal letters signed by the director of the Oscar Danilo Rosales Arguello hospital in Leon, and they did not specify a cause.
“Our crime is having tended to the wounded from the protests or having supported the marches in some way, asking for justice, freedom and a real democracy,” said Javier Pastora Membreno, who was head of surgery and endoscopy for the hospital before he was among those let go.
Photo: AFP
“We are doctors, not terrorists,” he added.
There have been complaints for weeks that anti-government protesters were being turned away from public medical facilities, but Ortega and his government say no such order ever existed.
“It is totally false that anyone has been denied attention in the hospitals,” the president said in an interview with Fox News broadcast this week.
Nicaraguan Minister of Health Sonia Castro also said previously that the nation’s health system “has never, at any time, been closed to any treatment.”
The hospital director declined to be interviewed.
Pastora, who had worked for the Nicaraguan Ministry of Health for 33 years, on Friday spoke at a demonstration outside the hospital to protest the firings. The other fired doctors were there along with a hundred or more demonstrators.
Those sacked worked in diverse fields, such as pediatrics, spinal medicine, gastroenterology, oncological surgery and pediatrics, and included the only doctor in the municipality specializing in infectious diseases.
“I do not know if the ministry authorities are clear on what this decision means for the quality of attention to the people and for the training of doctors,” Pastora said.
Aaron Delgado said he was performing surgery on a breast cancer patient when he was interrupted and told to report to human resources, where he received his dismissal notice.
“They did not even let me finish the operation,” Delgado said. “All this because a month ago outside the hospital we treated the wounded from a massacre perpetrated by the government’s paramilitaries against citizens who were at barricades in the neighborhoods of Leon.”
Also on Friday, police reported the arrest of a 42-year-old man in the killing of Rayneia Lima, a young Brazilian medical student who was shot dead while riding in a vehicle in Managua on Monday night.
A police statement identified the suspect as a security guard and said they seized from him an M4 rifle, which is not commonly used by private security firms.
The rector of the American University of Managua, where Lima was a student, earlier this week said that she had been attacked by pro-government forces.
CONFRONTATION: The water cannon attack was the second this month on the Philippine supply boat ‘Unaizah May 4,’ after an incident on March 5 The China Coast Guard yesterday morning blocked a Philippine supply vessel and damaged it with water cannons near a reef off the Southeast Asian country, the Philippines said. The Philippine military released video of what it said was a nearly hour-long attack off the Second Thomas Shoal (Renai Shoal, 仁愛暗沙) in the contested South China Sea, where Chinese ships have unleashed water cannons and collided with Philippine vessels in similar standoffs in the past few months. The China Coast Guard and other vessels “once again harassed, blocked, deployed water cannons, and executed dangerous maneuvers” against a routine rotation and resupply mission to
GLOBAL COMBAT AIR PROGRAM: The potential purchasers would be limited to the 15 nations with which Tokyo has signed defense partnership and equipment transfer deals Japan’s Cabinet yesterday approved a plan to sell future next-generation fighter jets that it is developing with the UK and Italy to other nations, in the latest move away from the country’s post-World War II pacifist principles. The contentious decision to allow international arms sales is expected to help secure Japan’s role in the joint fighter jet project, and is part of a move to build up the Japanese arms industry and bolster its role in global security. The Cabinet also endorsed a revision to Japan’s arms equipment and technology transfer guidelines to allow coproduced lethal weapons to be sold to nations
Thousands of devotees, some in a state of trance, gathered at a Buddhist temple on the outskirts of Bangkok renowned for sacred tattoos known as Sak Yant, paying their respects to a revered monk who mastered the practice and seeking purification. The gathering at Wat Bang Phra Buddhist temple is part of a Thai Wai Khru ritual in which devotees pay homage to Luang Phor Pern, the temple’s formal abbot, who died in 2002. He had a reputation for refining and popularizing the temple’s Sak Yant tattoo style. The idea that tattoos confer magical powers has existed in many parts of Asia
ON ALERT: A Russian cruise missile crossed into Polish airspace for about 40 seconds, the Polish military said, adding that it is constantly monitoring the war to protect its airspace Ukraine’s capital, Kyiv, and the western region of Lviv early yesterday came under a “massive” Russian air attack, officials said, while a Russian cruise missile breached Polish airspace, the Polish military said. Russia and Ukraine have been engaged in a series of deadly aerial attacks, with yesterday’s strikes coming a day after the Russian military said it had seized the Ukrainian village of Ivanivske, west of Bakhmut. A militant attack on a Moscow concert hall on Friday that killed at least 133 people also became a new flash point between the two archrivals. “Explosions in the capital. Air defense is working. Do not