Nicaraguan Student Leader Amaya Coppens Beaten for Reporting Abuse of other Prisoners
The political prisoner had denounced the cruel treatment of detainees from Masaya. A guard beat her up and her medication was restricted.
By Ivette Munguia (Confidencial)
HAVANA TIMES – The parents of political prisoner Amaya Coppens reported that their daughter was beaten and her hair pulled by a Police officer in the facilities of the infamous El Chipote interrogation jail.
The beating occurred after a family visit in which Coppens told her parents the way in which the Police beat Norlan Jose Cardenas, who belonged to the alleged criminal gang “Chabelo,” which many people of Masaya assure were just anti-government protestors.
Tamara Zamora, mother of Coppens, learned of the beating of her daughter because after the visit she waited outside the jail for the mothers of the other political prisoners and “the group (of relatives) who entered after us were the ones that gave us the information. One of the girls, who was in a cell where they wait, saw that the officer had Amaya by the neck, they also grabbed her hair and dragged her.”
The officer who attacked Coppens responds to the name of Geovania and uses the badge number 25207. “She is a very evil woman,” said Zamora while complaining that her daughter has not been given the medicines she needsk for high-blood pressure.
“Amaya is chronically ill with high-blood pressure. She was not feeling well when I saw her and we were demanded that they give her the medication”, explained the mother of the student political prisoner, whom the Ortega regime has incarcerated for the second time.
Father outraged by cruel treatment
Federico Coppens, father of the political prisoner, stated just minutes before the beating, that he felt “very outraged” about the poor prison conditions and cruel treatment suffered by his daughter. She is confined in a cell facing a punishment cell “where a boy from Masaya named Cardenas and his dad, who is also a prisoner, have both been treated in a really horrifying way.”
Coppens denounced that Cardenas and his father remain “handcuffed 24 hours a day, they are dragged on the ground, beaten, kicked, and really receive a degrading treatment.
Amaya Coppens was arrested on November 14, along with 12 other people, while carrying water and humanitarian aid to a group of mothers of political prisoners on hunger strike at the San Miguel Arcangel Church, in the city of Masaya. She is currently facing a judicial process for the fabricated charge of “illegal arms trafficking” and her trial has been scheduled for January 30th.
Previously Coppens was imprisoned accused of terrorism, the crime that the regime’s police/prosecution/judges attributed to the hundreds of blue and white protestors. She was released last June after nine months in jail, under the amnesty law.