Nicaragua: Surviving the Beatings in Ortega’s Prisons

Tony told me I would be getting a visit. He shouted it at me in his melodious, friendly voice that wakes me in the early hours of the morning when he and four other cops drag me out to interrogate and beat me.

-Get up, you son of a bitch, someone’s coming to see you soon!

The last time I was granted a visit, I learned from my cousin that my mother had died three months ago.

My family asked the police and the judges to allow me to go to the hospital to say goodbye to her and also begged them for me to go to the funeral or even to the burial, but they refused.

After the fifteen-minute visit, I was returned to my cell. In the hallway I started to cry. It was the first time I shed tears without being beaten.

“What’s wrong with you now, faggot?” asked Barbapapa, who was an expert in kicking prisoners in the balls if we talked back.

“My old lady died and you didn’t tell me,” I answered bitterly.

“You think this is a hotel, you piece of shit?” he said, pushing me.

When I regained my balance, I elbowed him in the gut. He threw me to the ground and kicked me you know where. Other jailers approached and also beat me until I lost consciousness.

I woke up in the punishment cell with a busted my lower lip and the taste of blood in my mouth. The space was two by two meters, with no sunlight or toilet, only a stinking hole from where fat cockroaches came out and slowly wandered along the walls. The bed was a cement slab with no pillows or sheets. During the day I was suffocating from the heat. At night I was very cold.

That morning, like all the previous ones since I was kidnapped, I was taken out for interrogation under a blinding white light. Again they asked me the same stupid questions. They didn’t even have the brains to come up with new nonsense.

“Tell us who paid you to kill the honorable president…”

I stared at them. I didn’t know whether to laugh or to pity them. I thought how I wished I’d ever been close enough to that bastard to shoot him and put an end to his rotten dictatorship.

-Tell us who ordered you to destabilize the country.

I thought of the word: “destabilize”. These morons didn’t even know what it meant. Honestly, my jailers must’ve earned merit recognition for their master’s degrees in bullshit.

When I didn’t answer them, they punched me in the stomach and ribs. When I didn’t have visitors, they only hit me in the face, so this abuse confirmed that someone would come to see me. So I was happy and took the beatings in the hope that soon I would speak to a family member.

Before all this, I was a first year Architecture student at the National Engineering University. When the protests began, I witnessed how the police shot at the protesters. Like many on social media, I saw the video of the death of the child Alvarito Conrado, who was shot in the neck by a sniper.

I participated in marches, built barricades, shouted slogans demanding justice and posted photos and comments on social media daily. One night when I was sleeping after having participated in a vigil in the neighborhood church, ten officers in three patrol cars came to my apartment, destroyed doors and windows and kidnapped me.

On the way, the beating began and continued until they put me in jail. There we were hundreds of detainees, mostly young people who participated in the marches. After a few months I was brought before an elegant hitman who called himself a judge, who, without prior investigation, without giving me the right to a lawyer and without trial, in ten minutes sentenced me to two hundred years in prison just for participating in marches and commenting on my social networks, as if I were some famous influencer like Cristiano Ronaldo, Elon Musk or Shakira, when I barely had fifty followers.

I went a year without hearing from my family. When I was able to see my mom, she said she was fine, although she’d gained weight.

“Are you taking the medicine again?” I asked.

“No,” she replied, but I knew he was lying.

She told me that I, on the other hand, looked like skin and bones. And it was true. I had lost fifty pounds. The jailers only gave us one plate of food a day. If we complained, they gave us food every two days. If we kept “bitching” as they said, they would beat us and reduce the rations. The food was just rice and beans. Many times the beans included bugs and pebbles. I had to chew carefully, I nearly broke my teeth twice. Once when I was punished for protesting the mistreatment, I received so little food that I counted only ten beans on my plate. Another time they laced my food with something, and I had diarrhea for fifteen days.

Several times, they took me, handcuffed, to a room, sat me down, tied my ankles to the chair and before leaving, they turned the air conditioning on full blast. I would spend hours freezing to death. When they came back hours later, I had wet myself from the cold. They would tease me and pour water on me. Then they would throw me back into my cell.

“I am proud of you,” were the words my mother said to me the last time I saw her alive.

Four months later my cousin came to see me. My brothers had fled the country because the police were also looking for them.

“What about my mother?” I asked.

“She hasn’t been feeling well,” she explained, avoiding details.

I was afraid the cancer had come back. She was sick for several years. In the hospital she received chemotherapy and medicines. The doctors said the cancer had gone into remission, but now I was afraid she was sick again.

After I heard about her death, I stopped eating. When they questioned me, I didn’t even look at them. I didn’t even feel the blows anymore.

Three days after the last interrogation and beating, they took me out of the cell. They let me take a bath, gave me a clean uniform and took me to a room where there was a table and two chairs. My hands and feet were handcuffed. They set down a glass of water. I already knew the guards had spit in it.

Then a woman came in. She was dressed very formal and her perfume reminded me of being free. I felt ashamed, because I smelled of stagnant sweat, rotting water, mold and decay.

She explained that she was a psychologist and that she was there to talk to me about how I felt. She had a notebook in which she began to write.

“If you are thirsty, you can drink the water,” I said, smiling.

She eyed the glass with suspicion. She wasn’t stupid, the psychologist.

“How old are you?” she asked, looking at my handcuffs.

“I am twenty years old”

“When did you begin to feel you were losing your appetite?”

“After I heard about my mother’s death.”

“Do you feel sad?”

“No, I am very angry because I have been illegally imprisoned for months, I was sentenced without trial, I had no right to a defense, I am a victim of torture and they did not allow me to say goodbye to my mother,” I summarized, lowering my voice.

She got nervous, jotted down a few things and then, as if she’d figured out my life story in two minutes, she assured:

“What you have is grief.”

I stared at her and raised my eyebrows.

“It’s mourning the loss of your mother,” she specified without seeming to have heard the rest of what I said.

“Here’s what I recommend: you should release your anger, distract yourself and think nice thoughts.”

“Think nice thoughts,” I repeated to myself. Now that was good advice. The best advice I’d ever been given in this fucking dungeon.

“If you are religious, you should read the Bible.”

“They won’t let me read anything, not even the Bible,” I answered.

She continued to give me advice.

“You should also take walks.”

“They won’t let me out of my cell. I haven’t seen the sunlight for more than a year,” I explained.

The woman didn’t seem to pay attention to what I was saying.

“You should also regain weight by eating healthy three times a day.”

“They only feed us rice and beans twice a day,” I revealed.

“Try to sleep at least eight hours a day.”

“I can’t because in the early mornings they take me out to interrogate me and beat me,” I revealed.

“Finally, remember to take deep breaths and, you know, think nice thoughts,” she concluded, closing the notebook and stood up.

A guard came in, took her notes and showed her out. Then he took me to my cell.

In the early morning I was taken out again for interrogation.

When they started hitting me, I took a deep breath and as the psychologist suggested, I concentrated on thinking nice thoughts.

*The book En abril yo seguía viva y otras historias verdaderas, by Arquímedes González, offers 21 stories about abuses and repression in Nicaragua, to honor the memory of the victims and make visible the pain of thousands of Nicaraguans. With permission of the author, Niú Magazine publishes the presentation of the book and a selection of three stories.