Lesther Alemán arrives at Miami Airport in a family photo on February 11.
Student leader Lesther Aleman singles out the “16th May 2018”, the date his life changed. That day, he confronted the world as a witness for Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega and his wife, Rosario Murillo, to demand that they stop “the repression” of the protests in April this year. “We cannot have a dialogue with a murderer because what has been committed in this country is genocide,” he said.
It automatically became a symbol of the youth struggle for democracy in Nicaragua and an important playing piece for the regime. He went into exile in Florida, returned to Managua with his mother, Lesbia Alfaro, and was eventually arrested on July 5, 2021. He spent 584 days in El Chipote, one of Latin America’s most feared prisons, and was exiled with him along with 221 other political prisoners to the United States on February 9th. When they flew to Washington, Ortega revoked their citizenship.
Almost five years after the day the boy drew his courage and political commitment from an unknown source, he now lives in Miami, at a sister’s house. 15 days have passed since his release and he is finally ready to speak, so on Saturday he held a video conference with EL PAÍS. It was almost a monologue, long and detailed. Dressed in the national baseball jersey and with that timbre of an old tenor so unusual for the big boy who raised his voice to Ortega and who, after all he’s been through, feels more comfortable, spoke of his arrest and imprisonment, about the debts with his family and the future that awaits him and the Nicaraguan opposition after many of their most outstanding icons like himself have been sentenced to exile.
The hardships at El Chipote. “In the first seven or eight months since my kidnapping, because that was a kidnapping, I lost so much weight that it hurt to fall asleep, banging one knee with the other. At first I even counted 10 grains of beans in a tablespoon of Gallopinto. We ate with our hands. The plates were red and black [colores sandinistas] so that no one is wrong. Some time later, the strategy suddenly changed: just before the summons to the Court of Appeal, they started serving me twice. I got the urge to eat. And this is how I am now, fat. i was weak But my thought was: I have to get out of here alive, I’ve already starved to death.
I haven’t had toothpaste or a brush for more than three weeks. Also no prescription drug which I took and asked for so much. “We can’t give it to you,” they told me, “because your mother didn’t come to bring it, because your family left you. Nobody came to ask about you. That’s why you have slippers [sandalias] from number eight, your number is 11′. He didn’t have a towel either. Two weeks later they gave me a piece of cloth two quarters long and one quarter wide. I spent 87 days in a punishment cell, then they transferred me to the one with bars. There were two bunk beds, two slabs of concrete, one on top and one on the bottom. The bathroom was a dump where we had to relieve ourselves. The same hole we used to clean ourselves with a half-cut water bottle. The light bulb was on 24 hours a day. The heat was unbearable. I arrived in the month of July. The zinc on the roof cried between 11:00 and 2:00 p.m.
The first night behind bars. “Inside was a completely decrepit, disoriented person and the thinnest person I had ever met. was [el periodista deportivo] Michael Mendoza. I was in boxer shorts. It was the only thing in that cell, a pair of boxer shorts, and he wore them. He says to me: ‘What’s up, little one?’ “Don Miguel?” I asked; in the dim light he wasn’t sure if it was him. “You are an angel to me,” I added. To which he replied: “That’s because my name is Miguel Ángel.” It was the first laugh in the middle of hell. I told him that his daughter Alejandra, then seven years old, had recorded a video asking about him, his papote as he called it. And that his wife was still strong. I thought I would cheer him up. But it was the opposite: I filled him with fear because I knew his daughter was pending. He said to me, ‘Don’t worry, they won’t hit you here. They won’t hit you here.”
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The detention. “I didn’t fight back when they came to me. I myself opened the gate of my house because they were destroying it. I told them: ‘Calm down, I’m not going to escape’. I had never been to prison, so I had no idea what to expect. I prepared my hands like this [hace un gesto de ofrecerlas juntas a la altura del regazo]. They immediately folded them back to me and gave me a wink [agarraron] my hair and they started hitting me. It was disproportionate. I was a 23-year-old man with no criminal record who lived with his mother. They arrested neither a drug dealer nor a fugitive from justice.
As we drove down the avenue in the van, whoever seemed to be running the operation said, ‘Let’s make the road long for this son of a bitch.’ They put me between two agents. One hit me on the back of the head and neck with a clenched fist. The other hit my chest. “Well, yes,” said the first, grabbing my forelock [tupé]“Repeat what you said to the commander, the chief. Do you have the balls to tell me’. “There’s no point in repeating it,” I replied, “because I don’t see that Mr. Ortega is here to repeat it.” He hit me on the chest so hard that I got a bruise from it. Later, whoever was running the device pulled out his cell phone and shone at me. “You’re going to tell me what you told the commander, son of a bitch, because we’ll never forgive you for insulting Nicaragua.” I repeated that there is no point in repeating it. He hit me. That was the last. From then on, they never hit me again.”
The broadside against Ortega. “Do I regret saying what I said? I won’t deny that I’ve thought about it a lot. To date, the video, and look how many years it’s been, I’ve only seen it three times. At some point I felt guilty for what had happened to my father [se llama Lesther Alemán, como él]. They have done a lot of damage economically. Also for the suffering of my mother. But in a macro analysis I can guarantee that I don’t regret it, I don’t regret it. I’ve always known that I don’t just want to highlight this milestone in Nicaragua’s history. No, I think that was a circumstance. The story got me there, I accepted the commitment that the story has pursued with the mistakes I made, good or bad. I improvised the speech. If I had prepared it, I don’t think I would have gotten out of my chair. In my opinion, there was no disrespect whatsoever, neither towards the State of Nicaragua nor towards the Nicaraguans. It was pure sickness to see that things haven’t changed.
the interrogations. “You went out [de la celda] to an interview they preferred to call an interrogation and the first thing was: ‘Your mother doesn’t love you, she finds you guilty for what you did because you ruined her life. Nicaragua blames you because the deaths were yours for attacking the state of Nicaragua.’ Those were the interrogations. One day one of the 28 interrogators I had told me, “I want you to tell us the truth: we have found a second-degree blood relationship [el presidente de El Salvador Nayib] Bukele. We want to know how much money the government of El Salvador gave you and how much education you received. I lowered the mask, hands restrained. “Don’t you think, officer, that we look alike with our beards?” I asked him. These interrogations took place three times a day. They also came at night. They would bang on the can and yell, “Lesther, get ready.” The interrogators, about 25% of whom were women, always tried to convince me that what I had experienced was a lie. That they used me, that I was a useful fool, a worker of the church, especially the bishops. A puppet of imperialism, of course the United States. I had been chosen and indoctrinated to [el fallido acto del] The National Dialogue will question Ortega. In these interrogations, they tried to convince me of the official version that there was an attempted coup in 2018 and that they had to respond to the erosion of sovereignty.”
motherly love. “When my mom first came to me, she got my worst version. It was early September [de 2021], they wanted to offer him something like proof of life. I was dying to hear from her, concerned that the uncertainty of not hearing from me had compromised her health. The first thing she said to me when she saw me was, ‘Pick up your shirt and show me your nails.’ I replied, ‘Calm down mom, I’m complete.’ In fact, he had already started limping and he was having problems with his lower back. I like being clean and I feel good about it, but my mustache had grown so much that I was eating it and my fingernails were overgrown. There I found out that they had brought me flip flops, they had brought me towels and deodorant and that my mother had been in jail since day zero trying to see me and fill up drinks and my personal hygiene items. She believed that all of this reached me as it reached others. They told me that my mother didn’t care about me and that no lawyer was interested in my case. I found out later that my attorney filed a detention review request before 48 hours had passed.
The agents will bring Lesther Alemán before the judge in August 2022. Cesar Perez (AFP)
What I missed most there was singing and dancing to her, as I always did when she arrived at the university. I didn’t know how strong she was. He reported to the prison at 10:30 am every day. So for 20 months. When they broke down the door of my house on the day of the arrest, he ran into his room and took 250 cordobas with him. “Here, just in case,” he said to me. She is calmer now because she released me even though she was very upset and scared on the day of the release. If my mother’s pillow could talk, it would tell me how much suffering it is hiding from me, how many things it is hiding.
resistance in prison. “In the first few months, in the first year, it was a conscious strategy to break us mentally. Silence was mandatory in El Chipote. If they heard me pray, they would shut me up. The same when he sang: forbidden. Neither does whistling. We couldn’t tell the time. They would not let me have the Bible or any other book. And it was doubly forbidden to interact with the other cell. The officer who was around, who greeted you, who was friendly, who might give you the time if you asked him the time, you wouldn’t see that officer again because the cameras were recording him.
El Chipote seemed set to give us mental problems. My way of holding on was to keep my head focused and try to remember details to keep from losing my mind. I remembered the first picture I had when I was four years old. It was my way of traveling through memories. Faith also helped me and introduced me to writing my thesis, choosing the topic. When they put me in a cell alone, I even found an imaginary friend. I called him Napoleon because there was a concrete structure on the bunk that looked like a tin soldier. And I said to him: ‘Listen, Napoleon, I have to tell you something…’.
The process. “I never knew I would go to court [en febrero de 2022] because they have never notified me, nor have they notified me. When I came into the living room, the surprise was that my mother was there. But that wasn’t a process. The verdict was announced. And like circus performances, it turned out very neat. People who never interviewed me testified, and there were errors in the hours they gave of the capture. Two computers were confiscated: I kept one, my first computer, as a souvenir. The other, the last one, was damaged and had kept photos, nothing more. They also took my first iPhone, a 4-S that I can’t forget. Another reminder. They presented a notebook titled “Dreams”. Also interviews in international media.
And then they presented the video [en el que increpa a Ortega]. “Preserve, accept and process the audiovisual material as evidence of the crime of violating national security,” said the judge, who was like a member of the Sandinista youth, a mob. The best part was when they presented a picture of me aged 10 just outside of [el parque de atracciones de] Disney [en Orlando, Florida]. The prosecutor said there was evidence that the CIA started my training. The Judge: “Let it be made clear that this was a consummate plan before the defendant was arrested.” And then came the most embarrassing moment of my life. Hearing a word I didn’t want to hear: guilty [lo condenaron a 13 años]. It didn’t take him two minutes to think about it. When I heard the blow, all I thought about was showing myself strong in front of my mother, almost like a martyr, that I would suffer but not her. So my mother turns to me and makes this gesture [el gesto de sacudirse algo del pecho, como quitándole importancia]. Like he’s saying, ‘That won’t dent me’”.
Loss of citizenship. “I found out they took it from us at the hotel [de Herndon, Virginia, cerca del aeropuerto de Dulles, en el que el Departamento de Estado alojó a los 222 desterrados durante los primeros días]. Someone came up to us and said, ‘Ortega just spoke and said we’re not Nicaraguans anymore.’ It is very difficult for someone to take what lives in you and what you are. And even less a decree as absurd as that of Ortega. I am Nicaraguan because I carry it in my soul, I have it in my heart and in my blood. I am Nicaraguan and I will remain so, whether it hurts anyone, whether it bothers them or not. Regardless of the documents. He took my birth certificate, my passport, even my vaccination cards. Deleted the academic record. Papers. Ortega would have to destroy me to stop being Nicaraguan. He didn’t even make it in prison, so he won’t make it by decree”.
The future of the opposition “More than 340 families are still on trial in Nicaragua. April is not dead, he is not gone, he is not forgotten, he is still alive. Stopping the leaders who simply called for an orderly, civic way out of the crisis was a deliberate strategy that I call a “mistake.” Ortega has incurred the political cost of staying in power. He beheaded the opposition, but he forgot something. This isn’t about a person. April is not subject to any organization. You know it better than I do: in the universities, in the state institutions, in the police themselves, in the repressive apparatus, in the neighborhoods, in the communities… there is resistance everywhere. The fact that we were in prison didn’t stop the world. It’s not 70, it’s not 222, Nicaragua has chosen to change; he’s had enough It is undeniable that there are currently fears of the radicalization of the Ortega regime. But the opposition has learned something: we need to organize ourselves better after the mistakes we made in 2020 and 2021. The differences got to us before we even took the time to get to know each other. Am I staying in politics? I do not know. All I know is the need for Nicaragua to democratize and become free. And if I can help, I’ll be there. My country deserves a future, but it’s not clear if it will have it when my generation, the best minds, leave the country.”
The Persecution of the Nicaraguan Church. “History will be able to answer us. The Church Persecutor never stopped. I admire the sacrifice of Monsignor Rolando Álvarez [condenado a 26 años de cárcel tras negarse a abordar el avión del destierro]. He accepted martyrdom in life by being imprisoned. The church in my country has a greater capacity for assembly than any political party, including the Sandinista Front. Because since 2018, the church has been the comfort of Nicaraguan families. Ortega is not clumsy, but the cost he pays is too high when he turns against the church. I tell him: ‘Be careful, Ortega, because you are fighting God.’ The Church sees the coffin of her persecutors passing and is still ready to celebrate the Mass of her present body.”
‘New life’. “After arriving in the United States, I took the time to talk to my family, to be honest. In a way, I wanted to apologize to them, to apologize for the collateral damage of my political involvement. You didn’t see it coming. In politics, I can identify as an apparition. You will find no history in me [de compromiso] back 2018. My family was swept up in the aftermath. These weeks were for healing.
Next thing is to locate me. I’m still parachuting, falling through the sky, I can already see the houses, but I don’t know where I’ll fall. For me it is only clear that I will study, that I will delve into communication, maybe political communication. It’s a situation of uncertainty. The humanitarian parole that we have been granted is not a haven, not a political asylum. I have family in the United States and yet I find it very difficult. I suffer doubly for those who don’t have it because it’s even harder. This is one of the commitments I have made: to work, within the few opportunities I have, to connect those who came in the midst of this exile. Incidentally, these days I have enjoyed contemplating the firmament and the moon again. I’ve spent almost 20 months not being able to and I love looking at the moon.
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