She Was Released from Jail but Banished from Nicaragua
“I’m fine. Sad, angry, emotional, but okay,” she told me, at the same time that her voice broke into intense crying. “They still have other women locked up.”
By Maria Castañeda (Confidencial)
HAVANA TIMES – I don’t remember if it was a year ago – maybe a little less, or a little more. The last messages we exchanged had to do with a birthday – hers or mine, I don’t remember that either. We ended with that phrase so often employed: “Hope to see you soon.” Missing was an “I love you;” or a “Be careful.”
“Be careful?” Did you wonder: “Of what?”
How can this story be told simply? They were on her heels. They were following her and watching her. They’d been after her for a while, because of her activities and her activism. She didn’t do anything, but that did it all. In a country where it’s a crime to defend freedom, to exist and resist, she met all the requirements for what happened later.
It was in the wee hours, or in the morning. They took her away without saying why. The Police detained her and took her to the women’s prison La Esperanza [“hope”], a name that reflects anything but the experiences of those inside. It took us several days to learn of her whereabouts and her emotional condition.
What is she accused of? Why did they detain her? No one knew. “We already told her not to go around doing those things, or one day they’d take her away,” said some of her relatives and acquaintances, in order to play down the fact that there wasn’t even a stated accusation against her, or an alleged crime, due process, or incriminating evidence that would clarify the reasons for her imprisonment.
In Nicaragua for some time now, there’s no logic to explain the government’s actions or the arbitrary way the authorities behave.
Weeks later, they told us that the reason she’d been detained is that someone leaked one of her videos to the Police, in which she was seen ripping an FSLN flag. As if at some moment our freedom of expression had been limited by not being able to openly profess opposition to a dictatorial regime and its symbols.
On September 5, they freed her. Or, better said, they took her out of the country because an agreement for banishment was negotiated with the United States. They haven’t returned the liberty they snatched from her when they put her behind bars. They may call it freedom, but it isn’t.
Banishment has profound emotional and psychological implications and – why not say so as well – economic ones. This isn’t an elegant act, with the intention of sending her to a better place to enjoy the freedom she was deprived of for living in a country that’s been abducted, or the freedom they snatched from her for opposing the repression.
Instead, it’s a multi-pronged sentence of ostracism, loss of identity and uprooting. In this case – up until now at least – there’s been no official communication that she’s been declared stateless. Banishment in itself, however, entails keeping her from living in her country and in freedom, in addition to a hugely uncertain situation, not knowing if she will be able to return or ever again embrace her loved ones. The turmoil this implies is merely the floral arrangements of this terrible outcome.
Let’s not forget that banishment was already a punishment for political enemies in Rome or ancient Greece, and for heretics in the Middle Ages. The anachronism in which the Ortega-Murillo dictatorship has positioned itself gives a good notion of their idea of power, their responsibility for the violation of basic human rights, and their immensely scarce willingness to find a real and lasting solution to this democratic crisis.
She already knew all that. I know because she told me so when I spoke with her after a year of not hearing from her. Her voice was shaky, and she opted not to hide her tears of pain, rage, impotence. Nor did she shrink from making some joke.
“I knew they were going to come look for me. They wanted to do it in the middle of the ruckus on the street so no one would protest. I forced them to come find me in my house,” she said, followed by a prolonged silence.
“After imprisoning me, they robbed me,” she concluded. What more could they steal after taking her most valued belonging – her freedom?
She told me of the horror of her prison. She insisted she hadn’t been tortured, saying they hadn’t lain a finger on her. They made her feel that the degrading treatment of depriving her of daylight and fresh air for an entire month was something normal. These are humiliations that the UN Convention against Torture categorizes as one more violation of her rights.
“I’ve spent an entire year without being able to write. At least they gave me an Old Testament to read. Without those windows, I would have gone crazy.”
She’s always been a radiant, happy loving, and warm woman, who loved provoking debate. She always questioned “the establishment” and power, from the standpoint of citizen participation. She – a force of nature with a contagious and explosive smile – accepted as valid punishment being deprived of sunlight, air and human contact.
Although she was always a tireless fighter who wouldn’t accept “no” for an answer, this time she accepted the imposed jail conditions. In this way, the regime is succeeding in suffocating all the fire and sprit that awoke in her in 2018. To kill all conscience and quench all criticism or demand for justice, liberty or democracy. She, herself, told me: “There’s no more opposition; people are no longer in the streets; they’re not protesting anymore.”
“I’m fine. Sad, angry, emotional, but okay,” she told me, at the same time that her voice broke into intense crying. “They still have more women locked up – that’s so unjust, I can’t bear it. One of them is going to turn 70 – an older woman being punished under accusations of being a terrorist.”
“I don’t know what I’m going to do. They let me out, and they didn’t even let me put on clean clothes.” I listened to her story on the other end of the telephone line with the same fury that she was feeling, and with her same powerlessness. What else can I do except listen, tell the story?
They had told her they were sending her out [of the country], but they didn’t tell her family. Another form of punishment and uncertainty. When they announced in the early morning of September 5th that 135 prisoners would be leaving the country, we were thrust into a sea of doubt, not knowing who these people would be, and in what conditions they’d reach the destination that someone had negotiated in their name.
She’s strong. I know her well, and I know she’ll come out ahead. We, her network of friends and those who love her, are also here to assure this. They’ve already done her all the harm they could. They continue torturing the rest of the hundreds of thousands of people still in the country, and, from a distance, the other hundreds of thousands of us who are outside. But we’re not going to stop in our resolve that Nicaragua will be free once more.
First published in Spanish by Confidencial and translated and posted in English by Havana Times.