Teenager Banished from Nicaragua over a Facebook post
The 17-year-old was released to his mother, who lives in Costa Rica, on the condition that he “doesn’t come back” to Nicaragua.
HAVANA TIMES – A Facebook post recalling the victims killed during the 2018 April Rebellion led the Ortega regime police to send a 17-year-old to jail for a few hours, then banish him from the country. The occurrence took place on April 19, in the municipality of Morrito in Nicaragua’s Rio San Juan department, that borders Costa Rica. When his mother, who resides in Costa Rica, came to get information on his detention, the authorities offered to free him on condition that he “not return to Nicaragua.”
The banished adolescent is the nephew of former political prisoner Armando Robles, who has also been banished. Information about what happened was provided by sources close to the family.
“They held him at the San Carlos Police Station for a few hours, until his mother crossed the border to ask for his release. They turned him over to her, but on condition that she take him with her [back across the border],” the source recounted.
The teen left the country through the San Pancho border post. According to the source, he was already living in Costa Rica with his mother, due to the political persecution against his family, and “was only on vacation.”
“It’s an outrage! They can’t decide why a Nicaraguan should leave the country. Nicaragua isn’t theirs,” stated the source.
At least 39 Nicaraguans, most of them members of either the opposition or the Catholic Church, as well as a journalist, have been detained by the National Police in Nicaragua thus far this month, according to a preliminary report released in mid-April by the Blue and White Monitoring organization.
“In total, we’ve documented 39 arbitrary detentions with possible political motivations thus far in April,” the report says. The list includes the detention of a journalist who covered an Easter Week Church procession, the monitoring group indicated. Their reports have been endorsed by the Inter-American Commission for Human Rights.
Expelled architect: “I fear for my family’s safety”
One of those detained in this latest wave of repression was the Mexican-Nicaraguan architect Arnoldo Horacio Guillen Monterrubio, 61. Guillen was detained on April 18 in Corinto, Chinandega, and eventually expelled from the country by the regime, supposedly for passing out blue-and-white stickers.
“Nicaragua is a jail, without freedom of expression. In Mexico, I’m free, but I fear for the safety of my family in Nicaragua. I fear for my wife and my daughter, who are Nicaraguan, and for my siblings and my Mexican and Nicaraguan relatives who reside in Nicaragua. I escaped going to jail for 14 years, but my family is still in Nicaragua,” Guillen told the Mexican newspaper El Universal.
According to the paper, the arrest of this individual, who’s a dual citizen of Mexico and Nicaragua, will be denounced before the Mexican government’s National Human Rights Commission.
According to an article published in the online Nicaraguan newspaper La Prensa, the architect was detained on Tuesday morning, April 18th. On the afternoon of that same day, police agents invaded the hostel where Guillen was staying in Corinto and demanded that the locale’s owner “turn off the cameras,” because they were going to search the room where the Mexican-Nicaraguan had been staying,
Witnesses told the Nicaraguan newspaper that at the moment of the search, Arnoldo Guillen was already handcuffed and in police custody. The architect has been an opponent of the regime since 2018 but maintained a low profile to avoid reprisals. He had never before been subjected to either siege or persecution by the dictatorship of Daniel Ortega and Rosario Murillo.
Arnoldo Guillen’s Nicaraguan father, Darwin Guillen Duarte, died in 2019. His mother, Esperanza Monterrubio Rivera, 85, is originally from the Mexican state of Hidalgo, but is now a Nicaraguan resident. Arnoldo was born in Monterrey, Nuevo Leon, Mexico, but his family emigrated to Nicaragua in 1968. He’s married to a Nicaraguan woman, and they have a four-year-old daughter.