As part of the “inhuman” plan of psychological torture that Daniel Ortega’s regime subjected to old comrade Dora María Téllez, a legendary guerrilla fighter and Sandinista commander number two, was the ban on knowing the time. So she invented a system: She put her head very close to one of the walls of her cell, number 1 of the male isolation gallery, where she spent a year and eight months in El Chipote prison in Managua, one of the most notorious correctional facilities in Latin America. and looked up. So I tried to decipher the mysteries of the dim natural light that filtered through the only 6 x 4 meter booth that never left it. “Now it must be 11,” they said, “it’s about lunchtime.”
That was the only way to order her endless days until another prisoner arrived, Álex Hernández (500 days in the hell of El Chipote), “a genius of time precision”, she says, who from her cell number four “the sun falls on a little piece of corridor.” “I whispered to him: ‘Alex, what time is it? 10:15, he replied, “Téllez recalled in an interview with EL PAÍS this Friday. “One day one of the guards confessed to me, the it was forbidden to wear a watch so as not to give us hints: ‘I don’t know how he does it: it’s 10:15!’
Téllez wants to be precise with his 605 days in Hell, so he takes the journalist’s notebook and pen and draws a map of the place where he spent his horrific imprisonment. “The cell was eight feet high, which was punctuated by a concrete terrace,” she explains, sitting in the lobby of the hotel housing the U.S. State Department this Thursday in an emergency with the elegant posture that only offers resistance 222 political prisoners released by the regimes of Daniel Ortega and Rosario Murillo to be deported to Washington on a chartered plane. A few hours later, as they flew through the skies toward freedom, came the latest reprisal: the National Assembly amended the constitution to strip them of Nicaraguan citizenship.
In the group of exiles there are journalists, politicians, businessmen, students and farmers, but the strongest symbol is certainly Téllez. “The afternoons in El Chipote were the worst. They were very long,” the ex-guerrilla continues. At least in the morning they went to sports: three hours a day: “strengthening the quadriceps, basic karate routines …”. Every day he walked eight kilometers in circles. It became such an obsession that he eventually injured his foot.
After all, it was the only possible distraction. A historian by profession, “reader out of necessities of life”, she was forbidden to read and write. Nor could he have any books, papers, or pencils. “We slept naked on a smooth mat on the cold floor. They didn’t give us towels, we dried off by putting our clothes on them. They were constant psychological torture. I was never physically tortured, the prison staff’s treatment was kind and efficient; it is the inhumane treatment of the Ortega-Murillo regime. I did the math, he only spoke for one minute out of the 1,440 minutes a day, if you add up all the short conversations with the guards. I ended up losing my voice, so I devoted myself to soft singing to counteract this loss. The visiting regime is “another form of torture”. “Initially, I spent three months not seeing anyone. Then two months, one month, 40 days; It was very irregular.”
Of course, all of these prison measures are prohibited by international human rights conventions. “Although the scariest thing,” Téllez admits, “was the isolation. The women who were in El Chipote were all isolated. Anna Daisy [Vijil]Tamara [Dávila]suyen [Barahona] and I’ve always been in that regime. The men were never kept like this for more than two months.” Why the difference? When asked, Téllez makes the silent gesture of firing a gun. “Special darling,” he jokes. “This is the deep hatred for the women of the Ortega-Murillo family.”
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The discipline she acquired during her years as a guerrilla, which brought her world fame when Gabriel García Márquez immortalized her in his 1978 chronicle Assault on the Palace, about resistance to the Somoza dictatorship, helped her face imprisonment. It also helped him there to think about “everyday resistance”. “I knew I had to persevere, it was my way of beating Ortega every day. Every day I didn’t get mentally hurt, every day I didn’t defecate in the cell. That he didn’t hang me. Whenever I had interviews and interrogations, I told the officers clearly and bluntly. This is meant to kill us mentally and emotionally. And what do you want? he told them. They are looking for me to hang me with the poles”.
Téllez lists below the list of health effects solitary confinement can have. It’s a list based on his experiences: “Anxiety disorders, pervasive sleep disorders (although I love falling asleep), bowel movement disorders, eating disorders, skin conditions, migraines, pigmentation disorders, tooth loss, vision loss, balance problems. Now I have to be careful, if I step to the side I could land on the ground.”
One of the worst moments of imprisonment occurred the night his former comrade-in-arms, Commander One, retired General Hugo Torres, relapsed in his cell. “I hear the noise and lean out of the bars; I see that there is a movement of officers. I see someone running and then the officer came back. They open the cell and a rather portly young officer comes out with Hugo. It is clear to me that it was not a faint, the left arm was lifeless…” says Téllez. Torres was returned to his cell, but failing to receive timely medical attention at El Chipote, he relapsed again. He was taken to a hospital where he later died. That was a heavy blow for Téllez.
When she was told Wednesday to remove her blue prison uniform, she initially thought she might be being interviewed. Then the hours passed. “They got us out at 1:30 a.m., then I already ruled out the rest of the reasons: they threw us out of the country. I didn’t know if it was going to Mexico, Colombia or the United States.”
In Washington, he was able to meet his partner, who also served her sentence. “The day of the arrest I laughed when I saw her come in. They came with the AKs [por los fusiles de asalto AK-47], bulletproof vests, break down doors. There we waited for her. An agent pushed me, but they didn’t use force.”
Now he says he plans to continue the fight this side of the world. “Ortega thought he was going to break us, but there wasn’t a single prisoner who begged for forgiveness. We all fight back. It’s time to reorganize and keep fighting,” he says.
Though for the moment he’s content to “regain the dawn”. She began at dawn that Friday by marveling from her room at the hotel in exile as the sun rose over the Virginia horizon and the sky “turned orange.”
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