By Editors of La Prensa, July 10, 2022
Josefine “Pinita” Gurdián recovered from COVID-19 one month ago. She was hospitalized for five days on since June 10, 2022. “Right now, I have low levels of sodium. I have cancer and the treatment is very harsh. It takes away my appetite. I makes me nauseous, and that is how it is for me, but I cannot die without being with them.”
Pinita talks about her youngest daughter, Ana Margarita Vijil, and her oldest granddaughter, Tamara Dávila. Both were arrested in June 2021. She overlooks her ills to demand the liberation of all political prisoners. Her illness is progressive, but it is not the worst happening to her. “The cancer that is killing me most is the jailing of my daughter and my granddaughter.”
Pinita Gurdián suffers firsthand the jailing of her youngest daughter Ana Margarita Vijil and her oldest granddaughter Tamara Dávila
She is convinced that her relatives were arrested because they did not stay silent. “What happens it that they are true leaders and if I end up dying…I would like to be with them.” She does not want them to receive that news in jail, it would be too great a blow, something she cannot allow. “I do not want to hasten my death,” she says at the age of 78.
Anyone can die in prison
She is afraid that the death not be hers, but one of her relatives in prison, like what happened to the political prisoner Hugo Torres in February 2022. “They let Hugo die. He had symptoms in jail that they did not know how to treat when they took him to the hospital, because there no longer was a cure. He was a man who entered completely healthy. I think that being closed up in there he did not receive enough sun. Being in that situation makes people deteriorate,” she regretted.
Pinita Gurdián states that the death of Torres marked her, because in the past she and her husband, the former minister of Housing, Miguel Ernesto Vijil, agreed with the Sandinista revolution. Nevertheless, it was disappointing that the man who risked his life to free Daniel Ortega from jail nearly fifty years ago would die in prison at the hands of his executioner.
“Oh no! That was terrible! Above all, because I knew Hugo Torres well. He was a very good man. Pleasant. Very congruent with his ideals. Learning about his death was tremendous. That can happen to anyone of those who are there because at times the heat is unbearable and at times the cold is unbearable, depending on the climate.”
Pinita Gurdián denounces the “scandalous” weight loss of all the political prisoners. Her granddaughter lost more than 40 lbs and her daughter tells her that the food portions are extremely small.
The only peace that this mother and grandmother feels is that recently the authorities of El Chipote allowed a mattress to be brought in for Tamara Dávila. It was achieved after several refusals to receive bedding. “All the political prisoners who are in El Chipote have gotten scandalously thinner. Tamara used to weigh more or less 140 lbs, now she weighs approximately 94 lbs.”
White torture
Through her social networks, Pinita denounces the human rights violations committed against the more than 190 political prisoners. She complains that they do not have the basic conditions of a prison. She points out that all have been condemned to solitary confinement.
“I think that it is an invisible cruelty. White torture. Physical damages are not seen because they are not beaten. But they do not let them talk to anyone nor make hand signals. They do not have a pencil nor paper not even a Bible to be able to read. So, it is a terrible torture,” she says by telephone to the Magazine Domingo.
She is concerned that, in the case of her granddaughter, they continue denying her visits and calls from her six-year-old daughter. “Tamara cannot receive even a drawing from the girl. She is completely closed off. The sun comes in through a hole and it is the only sun she has received in this entire year.”
Pinita denounced that they have tortured her granddaughter Tamara Dávila denying her the visit of her daughter who she has not seen for a year
In November 2021 Pinita Gurdián thought that the regime of Daniel Ortega would free all the political prisoners in light of the presidential elections. She was mistaken. “There was voting. Everything was arranged in order to win. I thought that they were going to free them. Nothing happened. We have been in standby.”
Harsh criticism of the Church
Pinita Gurdián regrets the expulsion from the country of the Missioners of Charity on July 6, 2022. “The only thing they had was the intention of doing good.” Nevertheless, she questions the passivity of the Episcopal Conference (CEM) of Nicaragua by keeping silent and avoiding the injustices committed in recent months against the church itself. She recalled that they did not even speak out with the trial of the priest Manuel García who was accused of violence against a woman, in spite of the fact that the victim herself refuted it.
She says that there is no point of comparison between the CEM of today and the mediator work of the deceased Cardinal Miguel Obando y Bravo who played that role first with the dictatorship of the dictator Anastasio Somoza and later in the first Sandinista regime between the years of 1979 and 1990.
“Obando in his time was not afraid to talk about what was happening in the Sandinista revolution. He always protested. Afterwards he moved to their side, but at least in that time he protested strongly. Now that voice is not heard. Strong. That would make people recover hope and that would make their voice be heard. I do not know what could be happening to them. I do not think they take the risk of doing much. Surely, they have them threatened, maybe with their families. I do not know to say, but that is what one thinks. Why have they become silent?” Pinita asks, trying to understand the silence of the clergy.
Even though up to now solutions to the political crisis are not seen, she considers herself a woman of faith and believes in miracles.
If Pinita was in front of Daniel Ortega and Rosario Murillo, she would ask them to have “a little heart” to free all the political prisoners. “I do not wish evil on these people. What I do wish is that their hearts be changed. That they would leave us in peace. That we might live in peace, in democracy and freedom.”