Nicaraguan court exonerates Ernesto Cardenal

Managua, Feb 8 (EFE).- The slander conviction of the Rev. Ernesto Cardenal, an acclaimed poet and leading opponent of the Nicaraguan government, was overturned Monday by an appeals court.

Besides lifting the freeze imposed on the priest's bank accounts to ensure he would pay the judgment, the court ordered that the ruling be published in the press in the interest of clearing the name of the octogenarian former culture minister, Judge Rafael Avellan told reporters.

Avellan said he and his colleagues overturned the conviction because trial Judge David Rojas should have thrown out the case in accord with a recent revision of the penal code that requires slander charges to be filed within 30 days of the offending speech.

The original accusation against Cardenal dates from 2003.

Rojas convicted the poet in 2008 and ordered him to pay a fine of 20,000 cordobas ($1,025) for allegedly slandering German businessman Inmanuel Zerger five years earlier in the course of a land dispute.

Cardenal refused to pay, calling his conviction "unjust and illegal."

He has contended all along that the revival of the slander charge - which had been thrown out in 2005 - was in reprisal for his outspoken criticism of President Daniel Ortega.

An ally of the Marxist-oriented Sandinista movement that ousted U.S.-backed dictator Anastasio Somoza in 1979, the priest accepted the post of culture minister in the post-revolutionary government headed by Ortega.

Like many others, however, Cardenal eventually quit the Sandinista party in response to Ortega's growing authoritarianism.

"After many years of waiting for justice to be done, and despite the earlier arbitrary guilty verdicts, the appeals court has now recognized the truth and has done justice," Cardenal said Monday in a written statement read on Managua's Channel 12 television.

The poet added that he was hopeful the courts would soon act to undo a November 2009 ruling awarding the Hotel Mancarron to Immanuel Zerger.

Cardenal maintains the property belongs to the Association for the Development of Solentiname, a group he founded to aid residents of the town where he once served as parish priest.

Ernesto Cardenal, recipient of the 2009 Neruda Prize for poetry, is a two-time nominee for the Nobel Prize for Literature.