An Argentine court issued an international arrest warrant for Nicaraguan president Daniel Ortega on Monday. Judge Ariel Lijo’s ruling aims to extradite the Sandinista leader over alleged human rights violations, which include persecution on religious grounds and of indigenous communities and journalists’ arrests.

The warrant also calls for Rosario Murillo — Nicaragua’s vice-president and Ortega’s wife — and 16 others to be questioned in Argentina.

The case was opened last August after a complaint was filed by lawyers Diego Pirota and Darío Richarte, and points to “serious” human rights violations “in which high authorities of the Republic of Nicaragua have participated.” In his ruling, Lijo stated the existence of a “strategic plan of repression deployed in Nicaragua that involved all levels of the political and judicial power of the state.” He added that the government enforced a “systematic and widespread plan of violent repression against the civilian population” whose purpose was “to dissuade social demonstrations and the persecution of dissident political sectors.”

Lijo, who is one of President Javier Milei’s candidates for the Supreme Court, went on to describe a plan that has carried out “arbitrary imprisonments, assassinations, torture, forced disappearance of persons, forced displacement of populations, deportations, media censorship, deprivation of medical care, termination of professional licenses, persecution for political and religious reasons, cancellations of legal status and deprivations of nationality.”

According to the judge, the plan was first deployed between April and June 2018 with the repression of social protests in the country. Lijo also warned that the Nicaraguan authorities did not answer his court’s requests for international cooperation.

This is not the first time Ortega’s government has been accused of human rights violations. In March, a United Nations-appointed team concluded that the Nicaraguan authorities committed crimes against humanity. That report called for Ortega and Murillo to be “held accountable by the international community.”

Ortega was one of the leaders of the Sandinista Revolution that ousted General Anastasio Somoza’s dictatorship in 1979 and later fought the US-backed Contras from 1981 to 1990. The revolution was known for its agrarian reform and nationwide alphabetization campaign, which reduced the country’s illiteracy rate from 50% to 13% in a matter of months. Ortega was elected president in 1984 with 67% of the vote and then lost his reelection bid in 1990.

The Nicaraguan strongman was elected president again in 2007, and has remained in office since then. Currently in his fifth term, Ortega’s government has become increasingly autocratic over the years, alienating many of his former revolutionary allies. In 2009 and 2016, Nicaragua’s Supreme Court issued constitutional changes that enabled Ortega to run for a second and third consecutive term. The government also deported hundreds of political prisoners and declared 94 citizens — many of them former Ortega comrades in the Sandinista revolution — as “traitors to the homeland,” stripping them of their nationalities and confiscating their assets.