There are days that don’t repeat themselves twice. In my life, this Thursday, February 9th, was one of those days. Just after two in the afternoon in Madrid, while I was writing pages of my new novel, I received two messages, the first: Tiffany Roberts, a journalist from the Univisión, announced in a tweet that a plane carrying 222 political prisoners from the Ortega Dictatorship and Murillo flew from Nicaragua to Washington. Nominally exiled, these people were released from prison to freedom. At the same time, the second came: My son Camilo, whose wife was expecting their first baby, announced to me on WhatsApp: Julián will be born today.
222 people who were imprisoned, imprisoned and subjected to cruel and degrading prison conditions for almost two years simply for demonstrating resistance to the dictatorship of Daniel Ortega and Rosario Murillo went towards a different life. A baby lovingly held in the womb for nine months made its way into a vast and strange world. Freedom and joy came twice for me.
Ever since the dictatorial regime that rules Nicaragua opened its repressive claws at the gates of the general election in 2021 to eliminate electoral competition and declare a merciless war on those who dared oppose it, Nicaraguans have had the upper hand experienced repression. Already in 2018, more than 300 people lost their lives in protests against this new incarnation of the old and bloody Latin American dictatorships, but the blow of 2021 was unexpected. For consecutive days, election candidates, political leaders, opinion leaders, experts, defenders of political prisoners, media directors and businessmen were arrested without reason. A term that has replaced habeas corpus in my country for 90 days. nothing was known about her other than rumours. Families, children, wives hung around the jails asking for information that no one gave them.
After much questioning and wandering, they were able to locate their relatives. They were of all ages. Some were over 70 years old. Under the laws of the country, they were valetudinarios, exempt from prison because of their age, but that didn’t count for the Ortega-Murillo regime. The “persons of interest” or high-profile prisoners were held in a recently built short-stay prison, El Chipote prison — paradoxically, as the Sandino camp was called.
There, isolated, in two-by-two prisons, some with constant lights, others in darkness, without blankets, sleeping on cement slabs, on starvation diets, with no predictable visits to their families and banned from reading or writing, people with no guilt other than the legal one Those who resisted the regime were cruelly imprisoned for more than 600 days. Pro-dictatorship judges have been sentenced to prison terms in flawed trials that left defendants without defense counsel or time to find out what they were accused of. They were sentenced to between 8 and 13 years in prison for “undermining national integrity”.
For those of us who knew her and knew of her innocence, her situation, her suffering, the stories of her loved ones took us back to the days of the Somoza dictatorship in Nicaragua. Had so many died for another dictatorship born within the same Sandinismo to repeat history? Ortega and Murillo’s unprecedented and unpunished act has been condemned by the international community. Hundreds of people in solidarity around the world have mobilized to denounce this violation of human rights of Nicaraguans.
We do not know exactly what caused the release of the prisoners on February 9th. The United States claims it was a unilateral action by the regime; I think international pressure worked. It is a factor of hope to know that the community of nations can act together to imprison those who seek to foist their injustices on them.
Today I imagine my friends Cristiana Chamorro, Violeta Granera, Dora María Téllez, Ana Margarita Vijil without bars to confine them. I imagine parents embracing their daughters and sons, Vicky Cárdenas and Berta Valle, tireless fighters for their husbands, meeting them. It excites me and I can’t help but feel relieved.
Ortega will say that the country has rid itself of traitors. He will say that for this reason they were stripped of their citizenship and ordered to be sentenced to civil death.
But just as my grandson Julián was born on the same day and knew the light, these people will come out of the darkness to rediscover their interrupted lives. In 1975 I was sentenced in absentia to several years in prison by the dictatorship of Anastasio Somoza. With the fall of the dictatorship, my unjust punishment is over. Our beloved prisoners will also see the end of their exile and regain their rights. Whatever Ortega and Murillo order, they are and will always be Nicaraguans.
Gioconda Belli He is a writer and poet.
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