This is an interview of a former employee of the Ortega communications apparatus, who joined the unarmed uprising after he realized the regime was killing civilians. It provides an inside view of the process when people get picked up by the paramilitaries, how they are treated, the torture they undergo, and how the “judicial process” works in tandem with the illegal abduction and torture apparatus. All told by someone with some familiarity with these forces.
By José Luis Rocha[1], published in El Gato Negro
So I kept looking in her eyes and said, “I am dreaming, right?” She started to cry, “yes my boy, you are dreaming. “Am I still in jail?” I asked. “Yes, you are still in jail, love,” she said and gave me a big hug with her eyes full of tears.”
The young man who is presented her as Cap was one of the thousands who rose up during the rebellion of April 2018, the hundreds kidnapped by the paramilitaries, those sentenced by a judicial branch rotten to its core, and those confined in a penitentiary system that has as one of its primary purposes vengeance and the extortion of its national and foreign adversaries. Maybe Cap would have preferred to not have experienced what he relates here, but he tells it for the healing of those who suffered it and to keep awareness alive. He shares one year of his life: from his capture to his release from jail. He adds it as his contribution to history.
CAPTURE IN NINDIRÍ
“I arrived at home, where there was a big poster with my photo stuck on the wall. `Come in´, my Mom said to me. I entered and gave her a hug. And I saw the poster with my image. `And that?´, I asked. `That is what we carried in the marches,´ she responded.` Oh, ´I said to her, `but now I am here.´ ` Yes, my love, come in and sit down, take these clothes and change, do you want to eat something?´ But I remember that I went in, looked to the back of the yard, and did not see the dog, I did not see my Mom´s parrot, I saw white, all white. And later my Mom come up to me with a plate of food and I said to her, “I do not know why I was there for so long, it seems like this is a dream.´ There was silence. So I kept staring in her eyes and said to her, `I am dreaming, right?´ She started to cry. `Yes, my boy, you are dreaming.´ `Am I still in jail?´, I asked. `Yes, you are still in jail, love,´ she said, and she hugged me hard with her eyes full of tears.”
The sound of the chains sliding through the large door woke him. It was 4am, time for the first of three daily headcounts. It was July 27, his birthday. He continued in jail, and he would be there for a much longer time. He had just passed the first 16 days of an imprisonment that would last eleven months. In La Modelo, the heart and nerve of the penitentiary system of Nicaragua. The place had had many famous guests of Sandinism. Tomás Borge, who years after his confinement, on occupying the post of the Ministry of the Interior, had under his charge the entire prison system and did nothing to improve it, bequeathing it to our times just as we know it today. For seven years Daniel Ortega was there, because of whose mandate they imprisoned Cap and another 920 people, mostly youth.
That early morning of July 27th Cap came up to his mother fleetingly in circumstances very similar to those of Ivan Grigórievich, the protagonist of the novel “Everything Flows” by Vasili Grossman. Iván saw his mother in a dream while he was in a Stalin Gulag camp. “she did not see her son. He would shout to her, `Mom, mom, mom…´but the loud roar of the tractors drowned out his voice. He did not doubt that in the midst of the noise of the road she would recognize in the white-haired convict her son: with just hearing him, with just seeing him an instant, but she did not hear him, she did not see him. Desperate, he opened his eyes.” Cap also opened his.
I little later he heard the bitter sound of the bolts, moving pots and the shouts of the other prisoners. On that warehouse of mites that they called a mattress, as thin as a tortilla and as blue as detergent, he rolled over and began to put together scraps of his life to recover himself: he was Cap, former journalist, former evangelical, former producer, former editor, former photographer, former collaborator of the FSLN and former worker in the TV channels of the Ortega-Murillo clan. He has a present full of pasts. Now he was just a political prisoner in the penitentiary system, dreaming about his return home. He was one of among the more than 700 who were captured after the rebellion of April 2018. He had a name, but above all he had a number. Both were interchangeable in the headcounts: if the guards shouted his number, he had to respond with his name, and vice versa.
FROM DREAM TO REALITY
“After that dream I went from a state of negation to a state of absolute acceptance. I was an inmate, entirely in jail. I was captured, tortured and subjected to a judicial process full of false testimonies and accusations. My life had nothing to do with that world of violence. Never in my life had I been in fights. I tried to grow up with my Mom, my family, as a functional member of society. I became a journalist. All my brothers are professionals. I was not a criminal. I had a publicity agency: I produced audiovisuals, took photos of models. That was my life. I did not go to fight clubs. I did not even watch boxing. I had no idea what that was about. I had never felt the punches like those they gave me. It has been the most horrible thing of my life. I felt kidnapped by a group of killers, a group of bad people who I do not know what had happened to them to torture me in that way.”
“Now I have permanent damage to my shoulder, ribs and shoulder blade. The torture left me not just physical scars, but psychiatric ones. It has been complicated. At times I have episodes of violence, scenes of a 10,000 devil temper that I had never had in my life. And so I get to thinking about how I was before and I see what I am now, and I think what the fuck did they do to me, how I was transformed. And I think that I am not this. In this year scenes of my life occurred that I am not able to get over. There are parts that my mind has blocked. I know they are there somewhere because there are gaps in time in the chronology that I myself have been writing. There are moments in which I do not know exactly what happened and other moments in which I was like unconscious. I do not know whether I was unconscious really or whether my mind blocked that memory.”
By a paradoxical effect, the dream led him to reality and planted him in front of it in a definitive way. It took him to a painful and intermittent reality. To the reality of the fissures in his ribs and shoulder blade and his sense of being at the mercy of an enraged pack who had brutally tortured him. From his forgetfulness pregnant with memories, it hurt him to dig into that past, but now he remembers it for History.
July 11, 2018: captured by paramilitaries in Nindirí
“When they grabbed us we were going to Masaya. We took a route where there had never been paramilitaries: the old road from Nindirí. Three of us were traveling in a vehicle owned by the driver. I heard a burst of gunfire. I was not the burst of an AK-47, and I think that this is very important. The police and paramilitaries use AKs, but in this case the weapons were M-16s, gringo weapons which in this country only have two providers: a private vendor and drug-traffickers. Not even the army uses M-16s. I heard the first burst of fire; with that loud sound, very unique to the M-16. Shot until the magazine was used up. One of us said, “Son of a bitch!” and I turned around to look behind, where the Hilux was following while shooting. I do not know how not even one shot hit its mark. They passed us and cut across our path almost causing a crash. The driver had no other option, he braked. So they made some preventive shots and aimed at us. They said, “If you move, you die.”
They were all dressed in black and were hooded, some wearing camouflage. They were not using yet the uniform that later they would use to distinguish them and not shoot themselves up or the police, as happened on more than one occasion. The clash in La Trinidad was one of the most notorious, but not the only one. It is known that they received a tip and also that they had been tracking them with the tenacity of bloodhounds.
“The head of the road blocks of Masaya had told on us, who was threatened and bought by the police and the paramilitaries. It was a mixture of both. They offered him a good post as head of the paramilitaries and they told him that that organization was going to last a long time and that it was not going to end after the cleanup operation. He was a former “cachorro[2]”. He had done his military service in the 1980s. He had taken their side and we, without knowing it, told him that we were taking medicines and other resources. The medical posts were pretty undersupplied, because there were a lot of wounded. We made the trip and the paramilitaries grabbed us.”
Their success they owed to a combination of the tip and luck, which that day loaded the dice in their favor. The Argentinian writer Ricardo Piglia states that “luck, paradoxically, is always on the side of the established order and is (along with snitching and torture) the principal means that searches have to close the loop and trap those who try to make themselves invisible in the jungle of the city.”
“The leader was some 50 years old and a huge belly. He could be recognized by his belly, because it had a very unique shape. He was a cop. Over time I realized that he was the head of the paramilitaries in that zone and the one who did the investigations was the chief of intelligence of the police of Masaya. They sent him to lead a group of paramilitaries. One of his men put the cannon of his rifle on my head and told me, “do not raise your hands, keep them on your legs. He opened the door, threw me out and knocked me down.”
They were inert, the three lying on the pavement, possibly still wet from the heavy rains of that season. They thought they were going to die. The young man who drove prayed out loud what he thought would be his last prayers. The paramilitaries issued an expeditious extrajudicial sentence: if you are not taking anything compromising, we are going to let you go; if you have something bad, we are going to kill you. With subjects situated beyond good and bad, operating in that schizophrenic space of complete illegality and absolute state support, it was not possible to discern what they considered “bad.”
“We had hidden everything under the plastic that appeared to be the bottom of the trunk. As if we were trafficking in drugs, that is how we had to carry the medicine. It was sad, but it was a reality. They opened the trunk and did not find anything. But later they knocked on it and heard that it was not empty. So, they broke it open and out came liquid alcohol. They found the medicine. I only remember that one guy said, “Fucking barricaders”. The worst started then. They started beating us with the butts of their rifles on our back and heads: bam, bam, bam. “Uhuh, fucking barricader, where were you taking this?”, they shouted at us. “We are doctors”, responded one of us. “Doctors of what? Of barricades?”, he shouted. They continued beating us and took away our phones. On going through the phones they said, “Oh yes, these are the sons of bitches from the UPOLI.”
“They were happy because they were going to torture us”
Without wasting another second, they tied us with rope and threw us into the truck bed. The captors must have been a bit dumbfounded because the one who asked for the passwords for the phones had them repeat the same response three times. “It doesn´t have one”, interspersing rifle butt blows to the neck before asking the same question again that had already been truthfully answered. They were so programmed to get passwords by force or to the fact that there always had to be passwords. The information in the three cell phones, full of groups with names of “April 19” and similar names, entertained them for a time in the fact that they savored in advance the applause of their superiors. Maybe they imagined then a relaxing torture session or the rest of the day free to spend -.equipped with a vehicle, weapons, fuel and impunity –on raids in residential areas that were so frequent in those days.
Euphoric and drunk with triumph, they renewed the beatings and added shots in the air and on the ground, which they later directed to a small multitude, a small group that peeked out to find out what was going on and whose potential intervention they wanted to cut off from the start. Along the way they asked the boss what they were going to do with the barricaders. We are going to kill them, but first we are going to take them to Coyotepe, was his response. The Coyotepe hill, located around Masaya, the same one that for decades had been the Meca of the Boy Scouts, the scene for their rites of passage, was used in those days as a clandestine jail and torture center. On receiving the news, the five paramilitaries and their macho Alfa howled with great fanfare.
“They were happy because they were going to torture us. Literally happy. I suppose that in a situation of madness, like what they are living, it was very joyful to torture us and do to us what they wanted even to the point of killing us. They got sad when, because of a last-minute change, they ordered them to take us to the station. On arriving there we saw a huge double line of police and paramilitaries. It was a tunnel of people. `Go on, little guy´, they told me, `you are going to pass through there.´ They made us move forward shoving us, while blows fell on us with everything: motorcycle helmets, kicks, billyclubs…whatever they wanted. The only thing that one can do in that moment, being handcuffed, it to walk as low as possible to avoid some blows. All of them were hooded, police and paramilitaries. Afterwards they made us kneel down against a wall. `Go on then, get in line.´ I kept staring at one of them and he said to me, `Don´t look at me,´ and he bashed my head against the wall, and it left me dazed. Then I felt the first blow on my shoulder blade. A very hard blow, done with brass knuckles. They did the same to my two friends. They repeated the blows two times more and then another one smashed our heads against the wall. Others were more creative and hit our eardrums. With the dizziness they held us by our hair so we wouldn´t fall. Some 16 police passed by. It felt like an eternity, even though it only took like ten minutes.”
Then they put the handcuffed on with our hands behind their backs, and they pulled them to make them as tight as possible, cutting off circulation and producing an indescribable pain. Starting at that moment they separated them to undermine their morale and make each one believe that the other two had broken down and provided incriminating information. They led him down a corridor, close to a chamber that maybe they used as a storeroom, with three paramilitaries. The policeman that was there said, “I am going to leave because I do not want to see this.” He knew that they were going to beat them with skilled fists. And sinister ones. It was a detective who later took the statements of the three young men and who, with the passage of time, was a witness in their trial, where he stated that he personally had apprehended them and that he had seized weapons from them. He did not want to see in order to better lie.
“…in a type of state of unconsciousness”
“From that time on I did not know what had happened with the others. The other two were taken to separate rooms. They beat me and insulted me, `Damn barricader, criminal, son of a bitch, you are not going to leave here alive.´ One said to me, `We have your ID here, we are going to kill your Mom, I already know where you live.´ And it was a lie, because I did not have my ID on me. I have the problem of being a big mouth and I said to him, `My Mom does not live in the address that is on my ID, and you do not have my ID because it was not in my billfold.´ Then they hit me harder. `You are bold,´ he said to me. I was in a type of state of unconsciousness. I only felt the shoving from the blows, I did not feel the blows as such. They did not pain me. I felt that something was pushing my body, but the blows were not hurting me. Afterwards they did, but not at that moment.”
Pedro Joaquín Chamorro refers to the fact that, on the way to the torture chamber “all of the normal world that one just left disappears. It becomes small, almost unreal, because the man focuses on himself…”And then in a full torture session I perceived his voice as “the echo of someone that got farther and farther away from my own person.”
“At that moment a paramilitary opened the door of an adjoining room and I was able to see one of my friends in there. They had tied a rope around each ankle and a guy on top of him, on his back, applying pressure down to keep his knees straight, and another two guys pulling on the rope, and another one beating him, shredding his feet and damaging his joints. They were saying to him, `OK, talk you son of a bitch, where were you going? Where were the weapons hidden in the car?´ And they beat him hard. I heard him crying and saying to them, `We do not have arms, there were no weapons.´ They did not find weapons. We only had medicines and that is not a crime, unless they had been from MINSA (Ministry of Health). If they had been from MINSA, that would be another matter. But they were paramilitaries who had carried out an abduction. It was not even an arrest. They were armed third parties, parastate forces. They thought that because he was the driver he knew better where we were going. `Leave the boy alone´, I told them, `he doesn´t know anything, he was driving because I paid him to drive.´ It was a lie, but I wanted them to stop beating him. So I began to say to them, `Call your boss, the boy had nothing to do with this, I paid him to transport these things, he does not know even where he was going, I was telling him and that is why I was in the front seat, if you want to know something, ask me.´
The great mystery for the investigators – which reappeared as an obsession present about the funds in all the interrogations – was where the US$200 came from that they found. The money was aid to buy antibiotics to deal with a ferocious infection from a AK-47 wound for an injured person would was convalescing hidden in a farm. For the purpose of extracting this information, they forced Cap to be present in the torture session of his friend. They knew each other since they were 16. They studied together in the university and later together opened a publicity and audiovisual agency. They joined the struggle together. And together they fell into the hands of the paramilitaries. They loved one another as brothers. Cap broke down crying and begged. `Shut up,´ they ordered him, `later will be your turn, for now, just watch.´
Tortured by the head of the paramilitaries
“With that the head of the paramilitaries arrived, the old fat guy. Well, not fat, but with a big gut. He is different. His arms are strong, like those of a person who at some moment of his life had physical training, but now had a giant gut. He arrived and said to the paramilitaries, `Look what I found on the phone of this son of a bitch.´ They had gotten into my social networks and the page of the taking of the UPOLI that we administered. He showed videos on the phone where we came out calling on the people to put up barricades, demonstrate and close down the highways with blockades for 24 hours so that the murderous and genocidal government of Daniel Ortega might understand that the people are not on his side. This is what we were saying in a press release from the UPOLI. The boss said to me, `you call the commandante a murderer, dictator, genocide, mercenary; you have balls, right?´
“But I was not paying attention to him. I was only looking at the room where my friend was. He ordered the door closed. And there I was, on my knees, with six damned guys looking at the video where I was offending their semi-god. So, I thought, they are going to dismember me alive. He ordered that they stand me up. They stood me up grabbing me by the handcuffs. That hurts like you have no idea. He ordered that they take off my shirt. But I have handcuffs on. Because I am a big mouth, I say to him, `You are stupid, how are you going to take off my shirt with the handcuffs on? That is impossible, idiot.´ And they hit me in the back of the neck with the butt of the M-16. That blow sat me down. Only I felt that I fell. `Leave the shirt on him,´ said the boss, `just lower his pants.´` OK´, I said, `I know what they are going to do to me, and if youare going to do that, better shoot me, because I am going to put up resistance and I am going to break something of more than one of you, I am going to bite, I am going to tear you apart.´ `What do you think we are going to do to you?´, he said to me, `why are you afraid, if you are ballsy, you are a little man? Were you not being macho calling the commandante a murderer?´ `I am telling you,´ I repeated, `if you are going to do that, better kill me, shoot me here, now quickly.´ `I am going to take you to Coyotepe,´ he said to me, `and there I am going to do whatever I want, but not right now.´”
“So they pulled my pants down, but they left me in my boxer shorts. The boss came up to me, he grabbed me by the testicles, and twisted, yanked down and then yanked to one side. That pain I did feel. My body did not override it, as it did with the previous blows. He knew where to place the blow. He had training. He did not hit you just to hit you. He knew how to torture. He knew how to demoralize you and reduce you: through the blows that he delivered, through fear and the terror that he inflicted through the times of torture and the time prior to each blow. That is why he had me there with my pants down so that I would think that they were going to rape me. Everything that he did destroyed me, discarded me. He makes you feel that you do not know what is going to happen and the uncertainty is what is the worst. Being there the only thing that you want is to die quickly, and that is what I wanted. I did not want them to take me to Coyotepe to do with me what they wanted. I wanted them to kill me now, quickly. I couldn´t give a shit about the rest.”
“The guy said to me, `Right now you are going to show me that you have balls,´ looking again at the video. `Are you watching it?´ Another hooded person held the phone with the video where we were going out callingon people to rise up. And he said to me, `Are you watching it?. Where are the balls? Are you really ballsy?´ And he yanked my testicles down. They kicked me and said, putting the video on, `Listen to yourself, ballsy, where are the balls?´ They kicked me until I fell. They continued kicking me with their boots. One preferred to crush my testicles. They also kicked me in the abdomen. And they continued kicking me in the testicles. I did not cry out. I did not have the strength to shout. I only cried. Because of the blows to the testicles, I peed myself and defecated. I realized that when I got to El Chipote. I thought that they were going to rape me. But what they wanted was to punish me. Torture me for the pure enjoyment of doing it, without any greater purpose.”
In the novel Margarita está linda la mar [Margarita how beautiful the sea], the balls of Rigoberto López occupy a site of honor next to the brain of Rubén Darío. They are the best treasures of Nicaragua. Torture stoked on the genitals has been a constant in the history of repression in Nicaragua. We know through Pedro Joaquín Chamorro that, “in addition to the well and electricity, the Somozas used the vile record of tying the testicles of their prisoners with a fine manila rope, make a slip knot and yanked it forcefully or lightly, until the memory was refreshed of those who do not want to talk, or excite the imagination of those who do not know anything.” Chamorro reported that ”along with Teodoro Picado junior, Anastasio Somoza Debayle had hung Jorge Rivas Montes by his testicles,” and that Lázaro García “in Abril had hung Bayardo Ruiz by his testicles.” The paramilitaries and their boss showed themselves obsessed with the attributes of the manhood of the person who committed the temerity of insulting Ortega. They wanted to touch and beat – another form of touching, of weighing the potency – the balls of the ballsy. Maybe they weighed his resistance, with fascination and shameful envy that oscillated between symbolic connotation and the most immediate sexual meaning. They did it grabbing on the fly the only occasion where they could touch the testicles of another adult man without putting their virility into question. The youngest of the paramilitaries was not saying anything, but his ski mask was not able to hide his growing stupor. He was a mute participant in that rite of initiation that was merciless like in the Maras 13 and 18, and backed by the State as in the intelligence agencies. A rite of passage that has something orgiastic and a lot of blood about it.
“Pull up his pants the commissioner is coming”
“Thirty minutes had passed kicking me in the testicles and the penis without any mercy. It was horrible. When someone said, `Pull up his pants the commissioner is coming´, they whisked me off the floor and pulled up my pants without even fastening them. Because my legs were asleep from the blows, I could not stand up. They held me by my hair and shirt, which they were not able to take off. I still have that shirt that cost me a permanent injury to my left shoulder. On being lifted up, I was only seeing black. It was like my soul had been separated from my body and had left, and the only thing left on the ground was a sack of shit that they kicked as they pleased, but that had nothing to do with me, because I no longer felt myself to be in that place. Within the blackness, I saw a man coming with a bullet proof vest, accompanied by two enormous hulks, his bodyguards armed with AK-47s. He came up to me, stared at me, and raised my chin. In his vest I saw a stun grenade and a fragmentation grenade. I thought that he was a soldier because the police do not walk the streets with grenades. Afterwards I stared at him and I recognized him immediately.”
He was Commissioner Ramón Avellán, Assistant Director of the Police of Ortega. No one would recognize in him the adolescent who was a messenger during the insurrection of 1979. He was beautiful, one of the women guerrillas told me who recruited him in those days, and added that his shoemaker step-father was a daring collaborator of the FSLN in Jinotepe and not the Somocista guard that the newspapers mentioned. After a dark career in the Ministry of the Interior – some say that in Bluefields, others in the fire department- he had a meteoric rise and he was commissioned with the repression in the provinces of Masaya and Carazo. He reached the platinum level of fame when the boldness of the insurgents forced him to take refuge in the police station of Masaya from June 2-19, 2018, and from the closest roadblock, through a powerful megaphone, those who were behind it dedicated a new song every day to him. Together they would have been put together a CD that would have broken sales records if it was not for the fact that they already passed through thousands of cellphones. Now he was there, dressed in black, with grenades for epaulets and flanked by two killers. He no longer had the fleet feet of a messenger, but feet of lead, as was his skull, impervious to cries. In his hands was the life of this young man who fought to overthrow a dictator, as he had done 40 years ago with another also merciless tyrant.
“My soul came back to my body because I went into a panic. I took a step back. `Calm down´, said one of the paramilitaries, grabbing me by the neck. And Avellán said to him, `Calm down, he is not going to do anything because he is afraid and is in handcuffs. ´ And then he addressed the boss, the big gut, `savory catch, but it doesn´t matter, you are not going to be able to take him; we called and they say that no, they are going to process them.´ Big gut hit me hard in the sternum. Process meant that we were going to be sent before a judge. Avellán asked me, `How have they treated you? Are they treating you well? ´ I no longer had the desire to continue as a big mouth. They had now reduced and demoralized me. The only thing that I said to him was, `they treated me as you ordered them to treat me.´ ´That happens´, he said to me, ´ I already know your history.´ The intelligence system of the Frente had been following us for two months. From the UPOLI they were on our tail like you would never believe. But we had been able to camouflage ourselves, change vehicles, do everything to avoid them. We had a lot of support. But the people who supported us reached a collapse from fear when they saw that everything was falling apart and that all the barricades were coming down, and they left the country. That is why we no longer had much support. We used the same car of my friend for everything. That is why they quickly identified us. In two months of being on our tails they had not been able to find us, but after the collapse in less than a week they found us and ambushed us. Avellán continued, ` I only am going to ask you one question, where were you going to leave that medicine? They found weapons on you´, he said to me. I responded to him, `you and I know that that is a lie, but if you accuse me of that, what can I do?”
They had planted on them weapons and ammunition, as they did with many other captured people, without regard to the circumstances and the history of the suspects who did not have any similarity to that version of the facts. They planted some used magazines and rusty bullets. Sixty AK-47 bullets and four magazines, according to their count. Enough for a charge of illegal possession of firearms, which implied a six month prison sentence, but way below the acceptable quantity for the charge that the prosecutor made: Illegal arms trafficking.
“`We were not carrying weapons,´ I said to him, `but if you say it, who is going to say no to you?´ `You are completely right, you see, you understand?´, he said to me, and now, `how are you?” Why was I going to respond to that. I felt humiliated, demolished, reduced. I asked about my two companions and he told me they were fine. `The white one must have skinned knees because he spent the entire time praying,´ he said jokingly and continued with the interrogation, `Who is the boss of you three?´ `We do not have a boss,´ I replied. `The curly haired one,´ he said to me… `I was talking with him and I saw that he is a little lad, and the other boy is just begging God, he is not the one, and that is why I am coming to you, you are going to tell me.´ What do he want me to tell him? I wanted to know. `Do you have weapons buried?´, he asked. `I don´t have weapons buried anywhere,´ I told him. `I know that yesterday you brought in two barrels,´ he charged, `and you told that to a man named Chilo Marimba.´ And he added, `he is one of mine, I tell you.´”
True or not, the police do not frequently provide true information to their enemies. Was this move of Avellán the last stake in the heart to tramp on the morale of someone he wanted to know had been betrayed? Or was it a tipoff to also punish Chilo Marimba? It was not likely. Avellán hoped that Cap would not leave there with that information. He would not leave the tunnel that they had pushed him into.
“Avellán continued, `Chilo was the one who told me you were seen here. What were you bringing in those barrels?´ `You don´t know?´ I said.`No, because you said that they were not given to him, that they gave them to the person that makes the powder…or did not you not do that?´ And it is true, I had done that. And it is that I preferred that less people knew what was being carried. I worked a lot of time for the communication system of the Ortegas and learned to compartmentalize information. You do not need to know everything. You only need to know that what you have to take it from point A to point B. What is it? It does not matter. Period. That is how I worked. That is why it was difficult for them to find us. Until we were left without vehicles and resources, and that is how they broke us. I knew how the police worked and that even being out in that car at some point they were going to kill us or break us because we used it for too long. But I had faith that that would not happen… and it happened, they did get us.”
“`What were you carrying in those barrels,´ insisted the commissioner. So I continued staring at him and said to him, `I was not carrying any barrels.´ `If you do not tell me,´ he threatened, `I am going to leave you with them again. Do you want to be with them for more hours’ `Leave him to me,´ said the head of the paramilitaries, `I will get whatever it is out of him.´ `No, no,´ said Avellán, `you are going to talk, right? It was chlorate´, he insisted, `for making mortars, for make gunpowder.´ `If you already know, why are you asking me?´ I said to him. `Just to confirm.´ Addressing the paramilitary, he ordered, `Do not continue to mistreat him, go bring the others and take them to the lieutenants and the investigator.´ Her name is Fabiola. I still remember her. She testified at my trial and said that she was at the roadblock and that when they stopped us, they found weapons on us there.”
“…and now you are in the hands of the institution”
“I have been in the institution for a while”
Cap and his friends had begun a transformation: they were passing over from the threshold of the illegal terrain of the paramilitaries to begin a judicial process. They put them into an office for a lieutenant to take down their data, an act with which that metamorphosis was staged. They did not just enter an office. On going in, he entered the machinery of the judicial processing and penalization that the regime had prepared for those who it called coup supporters. But that re-enactment of the division of labor was an act of legalistic slight-of-hand. The entire time he was in the same system that had a public face and a dark private aspect.
“The policewoman said to me `their work was to grab them, our work is to process them; now you are in the hands of the institution.´ So I clarified for her, `I have been in a police institution for four hours, four hours of being kicked and beaten by a ton of paramilitaries…I have been in the institution for some time, and their work was not grabbing us, their work was to torture us and beat the shit out of us.´ `Yes,´ she said to me, ´but here no one is going to do anything to you, because right now you are in the hands of us two.´` Good,´ I said, `it is all the same to me. ´ Because literally it was all the same to me, I didn´t give a shit what might happen, I felt like I was in a point of no return.”
“They took a ton of photos of us three. And then the paramilitaries began to beat on the door: bam, bam, bam…We were just with the lieutenant and a policeman, she did not have a mask on and he had on a black motorcycle mask, and he barely cracked open the door and they pushed it. It was the head of the paramilitaries who shouted, `And these sons of bitches, what? Are they talking? Are they cooperating…or we are coming in to fuck them up?´`Calm down´, said the young woman, `we are talking to them.´`Ok´, said the boss, `give me the fat one, I am going to make that son of a bitch talk.´As soon as the guy left, the young woman locked the door very quickly. So I went up to her and asked the woman, `Why are you afraid of them?´ `Shut up´, she said to me. I can tell you that the police are afraid of the paramilitaries. Literally, they are afraid of them. And also of the people who rose up.
“The investigator began to write in the computer the arrest document. And I came up and I said to her, `Look, girl, if you help me leave I will get you across the border with your entire family. Let´s go,´I insisted, `the gate only has a loosely tied rope on it and some buildings are going to be hit, and outside I am hearing that the people are shooting off mortars and they are coming here to fuck things up. Let us go´, I insisted, `those people are going to help us, they can take us through blind border areas with your family and I have contacts with the CPDH [Permanent Human Rights Commission] and people from Costa Rica who are going to help you. Let us go, Fabiola,´I said her name which she had sewn on her uniform. And she only stared at me teary eyed. She remained hesitant. `I can´t,´she told me, `I can´t, I can´t.´She got up and called the lieutenant. He came in and locked the door again with the lock on the knob and the bolt. “
“He said to her, `You have to move them to El Chipote now, because the shit is going to hit the fan with the barricaders.´ When it became known that they had us in there, people rose up and some began to shoot mortars at the station and a shit load of people were gathering to cause a riot and get us out. They threw me into the back of a patrol pickup like a pig, along with two bodyguards with ski masks on. They fed those police purina because they were enormous and in very good shape. I who am tall only was as tall as their shoulders. They definitely were Tapir or from the Special Operations Office. They were real policemen. They put my friends in the middle of the truck and put hoods on them. I was riding with my head on the floor, thinking, where am I? Are they taking us to El Chipote? I asked them. `Shut up,´they shouted. `Just tell me where you are taking us, I have the right to know,´ I told them. And he, `you don´t have the right to shit.´ So I raised my head and was able to see that it said Plaza Veracruz, and they hit me to lower my head, and even so my heart calmed a bit because we were not going to El Coyotepe. But I got to thinking that I was going to El Chipote, which is another torture center. ´There they are going to do whatever they want,´ I thought, `even more than they already have.”
Maybe his feelings were those that the writer Vasili Grossman recorded as those of many people deported by the Soviet regime during his trip, “In the caboose there is no longer bewilderment, nor even the tired forgetfulness of the fields, there is only a heart that bleeds.”
[1] Associate researcher of the “José Simeón Cañas” Central American University of El Salvador and the author of Autoconvocados y conectados. Los universitarios en la revuelta de abril en Nicaragua, UCA Editores-Fondo Editorial UCA Publicaciones, Managua, 2019.
[2] Term used for those drafted in the 1980s.