Where Is Missing Nicaraguan Ret. Col. Victor Boitano?
and what is he accused of?
Eugenia Valle fled into exile with her family, in order to denounce the disappearance of her husband, Victor Boitano. “We haven’t seen him for six months,” she affirms.
HAVANA TIMES – Six months after retired Colonel Victor Boitano was detained by a group of armed men in civilian clothes, his wife Eugenia Valle states that officials of the Ortega regime are still concealing her husband’s whereabouts. Valle has denounced from exile the forced disappearance of her husband.
Boitano was abducted on April 23, 2024, at his home in Managua after being beaten by a group of police in civilian clothing who arrived at about 9 pm to arrest him, “without a warrant”.
“When he [Boitano] opened the door, a bunch of plainclothes policemen threw themselves on him and flung him to the floor. He was yelling, so I went out with my daughter and the woman who works in our house to see,” Valle recounted. She spoke during an interview with the online television news program Esta Noche.
Eugenia Valle and her family haven’t seen the retired colonel since that night. They looked for him in the Directorate of Judicial Assistance, better known as the El Chipote jail; they inquired at the prison known as El Modelo, more formally the Jorge Navarro National Penitentiary; and they even went to the “Faustino Ruiz” Police Headquarters in Managua’s El Sol plaza, to request an audience with Nicaraguan Head of Police Francisco Diaz.
In the latter office “they declined to take my letter or to give me an appointment with Francisco Diaz. In El Chipote, “I looked for him for the first three months, but they kept telling me that he wasn’t there, that I should look for him somewhere else.” And in La Modelo, “they made me wait for two or three hours while they went through the motions like they were consulting, but later only told me that he wasn’t there,” Valle explained.
Given the uncertainty over the whereabouts of her husband, and fearful of being detained herself, Eugenia Valle left the country with her family at the beginning of October, so she could denounce the disappearance of the retired colonel to the outside world.
“I demand that the government give us an answer; that they tell us where he is, show their face, and state why they detained him and what he’s accused of,” Valle demanded.
Released political prisoners report seeing him in La Modelo
Valle explained that they’ve received no official notification on the location of her husband, nor have the authorities recognized his arrest. However, several of the political prisoners who were released and banished to Guatemala on September 5th reported having seen Victor Boitano in the La Modelo prison.
“We’ve obtained information that he’s there in the El Modelo jail, in a wing that they call El Infernillo [“Little Hellhole”]. They tell us that there’s been no trial but that in the interrogations they allude to the four books he wrote, with anti-government opinions, and a supposed case where he wanted to kidnap a daughter of the Comandante [Daniel Ortega],” Colonel Boitano’s wife commented.
In 2011, when Boitano was running for deputy with the Alianza Liberal Nicaragua Party, he was detained after Enrique Quiñonez, the presidential candidate from his same party, stated in a press conference that the retired colonel had suggested to him that they kidnap one of Daniel Ortega’s daughters.
“All of that was supposedly resolved a long time ago,” Eugenia Valle noted. “At that time, they held him in the old El Chipote jail for around two and a half months (…) Later they proposed that he read a statement accusing the United States government of interventionism, and in exchange they’d let him go free with no stains on his personal record,” she added.
After that episode, Boitano retired from the Nicaraguan political arena. In 2018, he went to live in Italy, and acquired Italian nationality. He returned to Nicaragua in September 2023 for his daughter’s graduation.
Boitano’s chronic ailments put him at great risk
His family is especially concerned because Victor Boitano, 63, suffers from a number of chronic illnesses. “He has diabetes, high blood pressure, circulation problems, and suffers from delusions of persecution, a mental condition that was diagnosed even before he left the Army,” Valle disclosed.
“I’m really worried, because if he’s now spent over 180 days without his medications, he must be in crisis. That’s an illness that people don’t understand – they think he’s being rude or even violent. But it’s that. I’m afraid they could beat him, or with the great heat in Nicaragua, he could be facing a crisis with his blood pressure,” noted Boitano’s wife.