Nicaragua: Surviving the Beatings in Ortega’s Prisons
Stories from “In April I Was Still Alive”: Interrogations in the prisons of Daniel Ortega and Rosario Murillo’s dictatorship
By Arquimedes Gonzalez (Confidencial)
HAVANA TIMES – Tony told me I would be getting a visit. He shouted it at me with his melodious and friendly voice, the same one that wakes me in the early morning hours when he and four other cops drag me out to interrogate and beat me.
“Get up, you son of a bitch, someone’s coming to see you soon!”
The last time I was granted a visit, I found out from my cousin that my mother had died three months earlier.
My family had begged the police and the judges to let me go to the hospital to say goodbye, and they also pleaded for me to attend the funeral—or at least the burial—but they refused.
After the fifteen-minute visit, they returned me to my cell. I started crying in the hallway. It was the first time I shed tears without being beaten.
“What’s wrong now, you little faggot?” asked Barbapapa, an expert in kicking prisoners in the balls if we talked back.
“My old lady died and you didn’t tell me,” I replied bitterly.
“You think this is a hotel, you piece of shit?” he said, pushing me.
When I regained my balance, I elbowed him in the gut. He threw me to the floor and kicked me—you know where. Other guards came and joined in the beating until I lost consciousness.
I woke up in solitary confinement with a busted lower lip and the taste of blood in my mouth. The place was two by two meters, with no sunlight or toilet—just a stinking hole from which fat cockroaches crawled out and slowly across the walls. The bed was a cement slab with no pillow or sheet. During the day, the heat was suffocating. At night, it was freezing cold.
That dawn, like all the ones before it since I’d been kidnapped, they dragged me out for another interrogation under a blinding white light. They asked me the same stupid questions again. They couldn’t even come up with new nonsense.
“Tell us who paid you to kill the honorable president…”
I just looked at them. I didn’t know whether to laugh or pity them. I thought how I wished I’d ever been close enough to that bastard to shoot him and put an end to his rotten dictatorship.
“Tell us who ordered you to destabilize the country.”
I thought about that word: “destabilize.” These morons didn’t even know what it meant. Honestly, my jailers must’ve earned merit awards for their master’s degrees in stupidity.
Since I didn’t answer, they punched me in the stomach and ribs. When I didn’t have a visit scheduled, they only hit me in the face, so this kind of abuse confirmed someone was coming to see me. That made me happy, and I endured the beating with the hope of talking to a family member soon.
Before it all began
Before all this, I was a first-year architecture student at the National Engineering University. When the protests started, I saw the police shooting at demonstrators. Like many on social media, I saw the video of little Alvarito Conrado being killed by a sniper with a shot to the neck.
I took part in marches, built barricades, chanted for justice, and posted daily photos and comments online. One night, after a vigil at the neighborhood church, ten officers in three patrol cars stormed my apartment, smashed doors and windows, and kidnapped me.
They started beating me in the car and didn’t stop until they threw me into prison. There were hundreds of us detained, mostly young people who had joined the marches. Months later, I was brought before an elegant hitman who called himself a judge. With no investigation, no lawyer, and no trial, he sentenced me to two hundred years in prison in ten minutes—for marching and posting online, as if I were some influencer like Cristiano Ronaldo, Elon Musk, or Shakira, when I barely had fifty followers.
I spent a year with no news from my family. When I finally saw my mom, she said she was fine, though she’d gained weight.
“Are you taking your meds again?” I asked.
“No,” she replied—but I knew she was lying.
She said I looked like skin and bones. And it was true. I had lost fifty pounds. The guards gave us only one plate of food a day. If we complained, it became once every two days. If we kept “bitching,” as they said, they beat us and cut rations. The food was just rice and beans—often with bugs and pebbles. I had to chew carefully; I nearly broke my teeth twice. Once, after being punished for protesting the abuse, I counted only ten beans on my plate. Another time, they laced the food with something, and I had diarrhea for fifteen days.
Several times, they took me, handcuffed, to a room, tied my ankles to the chair legs, and turned the air conditioning to max before leaving. Hours later, I’d wet myself from the cold. They laughed, poured water on me, and threw me back in the cell.
“I’m proud of you,” were my mother’s last words to me.
Four months later, my cousin came to visit. My brothers had fled the country—the police were after them too.
“And my mom?” I asked.
“She’s not feeling well,” she said, avoiding details.
I feared the cancer had come back. She’d been ill for years. The hospital had given her chemo and meds. The doctors said the cancer was gone, but now I was afraid it had returned.
After I learned about her death, I stopped eating. During interrogations, I wouldn’t even look at them. I couldn’t feel the blows anymore.
Three days after the last beating, they took me out of the cell. I was allowed to shower, got a clean uniform, and was taken to a room with a table and two chairs. My hands and feet were cuffed. They set down a glass of water. I already knew the guards had spit in it.
Then a woman came in. She was dressed formally, and her perfume reminded me of freedom. I felt ashamed—I smelled like stale sweat, rotten water, mold, and decay.
She said she was a psychologist and came to talk about how I felt. She had a notebook and started writing.
“If you’re thirsty, you can drink the water,” I said with a smile.
She eyed the glass suspiciously. She wasn’t stupid.
“How old are you?” she asked, looking at my cuffs.
“I’m twenty.”
“When did you lose your appetite?”
“After I found out my mom died.”
“Do you feel sad?”
“No, I’m angry because I’ve been imprisoned illegally for months, sentenced without trial, denied a lawyer, tortured, and not allowed to say goodbye to my mom,” I said, lowering my voice.
She got nervous, scribbled some notes, and then, as if she’d figured out my life in two minutes, declared:
“What you have is grief.”
I raised my eyebrows.
“It’s grief over your mother’s death,” she clarified, ignoring everything else I’d said.
“Here’s what I recommend: release your anger, distract yourself, and think beautiful thoughts.”
“Think beautiful thoughts,” I repeated to myself. That was actually good advice—the best advice I’d been given in this fucking dungeon.
“If you’re religious, you should read the Bible.”
“They don’t let me read anything. Not even the Bible,” I replied.
She kept offering suggestions.
“You should take walks.”
“They don’t let me leave my cell. I haven’t seen sunlight in over a year,” I said.
She didn’t seem to be listening.
“You should regain weight by eating healthy meals three times a day.”
“They only give us rice and beans twice a day,” I told her.
“Try to sleep at least eight hours a night.”
“I can’t. They wake me in the early mornings for interrogations and beatings,” I revealed.
“Lastly, remember to take deep breaths and, you know, think beautiful thoughts,” she concluded, closing her notebook and standing up.
A guard came in, took her notes, and showed her out. Then he led me back to my cell.
At dawn, they pulled me out again for interrogation.
When they started beating me, I took a deep breath and, just as the psychologist suggested, I focused on thinking beautiful thoughts.
——-
First published in Spanish by Confidencial and translated and posted in English by Havana Times.
Note: The book En abril yo seguía viva y otras historias verdaderas ,(In April I Was Still Alive and Other True Stories) by Arquímedes Gonzalez presents 21 stories of abuse and repression in Nicaragua, to honor the victims’ memory and shed light on the suffering of thousands of Nicaraguans.