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French university student Gabriel Lepinay had only a few hours left in Managua before boarding his flight back to Quebec, Canada, where he studies Political Science at Universite Laval. After spending three weeks vacationing in Costa Rica, the 19-year-old decided to spend his final five days in Nicaragua. However, on the afternoon of July 2, 2026, what was supposed to be a peaceful walk to the shores of Lake Xolotlan turned into a nightmare of nonstop police interrogations and his expulsion from Nicaragua.
As he walked toward Managua’s waterfront, he found it unusual to see so many red-and-black FSLN flags and dozens of police officers stationed on every street corners. Surprised by the heavy security presence, Gabriel took out his cell phone, recorded a video just a few seconds long, and posted it to his Instagram account. The response from the regime’s repressive forces was immediate.
A police officer noticed the recording, snatched his phone, and forced him against a wall at gunpoint. After calling for backup, an officer dressed in civilian clothes, a common practice among the regime’s intelligence agencies, demanded the password to the device.
“He spent quite a while going through my phone until he found my Instagram story, and then they took me handcuffed to a detention center,” the student told CONFIDENCIAL.
Eleven Hours of Interrogation
Gabriel Lépinay remained in custody from the night of July 2, 2026, until two o’clock the following afternoon. During that time, he was subjected to exhausting interrogations conducted by “many different people.”
“Even when I was sleeping, they would wake me up and immediately start asking me questions again,” he recalled. The agents even relied on technology to conduct the interrogation, using ChatGPT’s voice feature to translate their questions.
Gabriel said the authorities “never” explained why he was being detained, but he inferred the reason from the questions they repeatedly asked him. They questioned him about possible ties to the United States, whether he worked for the press, whether he belonged to a political organization, and what his opinions were of Daniel Ortega. They even asked about his political affiliation in France.
“They asked me hundreds of questions. The process dragged on for a very long time, and some of the questions were repeated mechanically—as many as fifteen times. They accused me of lying,” said the young man, who had to repeatedly insist that he was not part of the opposition.
The 19-year-old said that during the questioning, the police “were extremely persistent and threatening.” “It was exhausting having to keep repeating that I had nothing against Ortega,” he said.
Denied a Lawyer and Contact with the Embassy
As is customary in cases of arbitrary detention in Nicaragua, the regime violated every guarantee under international law. Although Gabriel Lepinay repeatedly requested legal counsel and asked to contact the French Embassy in Managua, the police gave him a blunt reply: “There’s no lawyer here, no embassy. That’s just how things are here.”
After enduring the ordeal of interrogations in what he described as a “very cold” room, the young man was taken in handcuffs to the Costa Rican border and expelled from the country. His suitcase was returned to him missing many of his belongings, his Canadian visas had been crumpled, and officials took dozens of photographs of him in a process that lasted several hours, causing him to miss his flight back to Canada.
Gabriel admits he knew very little about Nicaragua’s political situation and was unaware of the extent of the country’s police state until he arrived there. “I searched for information on Google and realized it was a dictatorship, although I didn’t know much about it before. I had never heard of tourists being detained like this,” the French student lamented.
