Since the release of the 222 political prisoners on Feb 9, 2023 there have been several interviews of some of the more well known former prisoners. This article delves into the impact on some of the lesser-known prisoners and the impact of the “white torture” they suffered and continue to suffer as they adapt to being exiled from their country and other family members.
The sequelae after El Chipote, the prison of torture making it impossible to sleep
By DIVERGENTES, March 3, 2023
Lack of sleep, memory problems, physical and mental health problems. The people who left El Chipote are preparing for a long journey to rebuild their lives. Most reveal a pattern of “white torture.”
The plan was no other than to spend more time at home. After more than 500 days imprisoned in a cell of complete isolation with no notion of time, the first thing that Alex Hernández had in mind when he would be able to leave jail was to dedicate more time to the family, rest, watch series on Netflix or listen to music. But all in his home in the municipality of Catarina, Masaya. Nevertheless, 20 days after being freed and banished to the United States, the dissident has not been able to accomplish his plans, instead getting some sleep has become “mission impossible”. “I sleep three hours a day,” says the young man. This is confirmed by the bags under his eyes.
“I am taking melatonin to sleep, but there are so many things to see and understand since I was in prison, that I do not know where to begin…It is a type of initial chaos which I feel myself immersed in, because in jail I adapted to doing almost nothing,” says Hernández, after nearly two years in prison.
The lack of sleep has been the principal impairment that the exiled political prisoners who were in El Chipote suffer, one of the most infamous jails of Latin America, according to human rights organizations, where they suffered bad treatment and psychological torture. Now the former prisoners who are spread out over different cities in the United States live with insomnia.
In those hours of wakefulness, many are beginning to experience other psychological problems, aggravated by profound uncertainty about the future, being cut off from family and the torture that they have not yet processed. These are the sequelae of horror which loom larger with the passage of days; a wound which grows on the body and the mind.
Hernández perceives within himself suffering over grief which he does not venture to delve into. But he recognizes some, like being “far from his country”, against his will in a different country and a language that he does not speak. “I was not able to say good-bye to any close family,” laments the former prisoner, who currently resides in the state of Maryland.
Many political prisoners who have talked with DIVERGENTES agree in that they need to recover their mental health to improve their stability and physical health. Most left El Chipote with different ailments.
Specifically, prison worsened “hypertension and anxiety” problems for Hernández. And in addition, he suffered a renal disease. “It made me look completely emaciated. It is obvious that everything that they made us experience in El Chipote is reflected in the body,” says Hernández.
Even though he is now thousands of kilometers from the torture center where he remained locked up for more than a year, Hernández says that there are moments in which his mind is far from being free. “Everything happened so quickly,” he adds.
How did he survive the alterations of being under complete isolation in that jail? “Even though there are not many things to do in jail, one had a deliberate routine in order to get through the day to day. They are things which now affect you. For example, I take medicines, and now I forget that I have to take them, because I was accustomed to the fact that they (the guards) were giving them to me to be able to fall asleep,” said the dissident.
What Hernández describes is a practice that consisted in the fact that the jailers administered sleeping pills and relaxants, like Royaline, to the prisoners who “behaved well.” Those who did not they left without them, which is why they spent sleepless days and nights.
Samantha Jirón, the young woman who for more than a year was locked up in the La Esperanza women´s jail, has developed migraine symptoms. The disease she has had since she was released from jail and exiled in the United States, February 9th. Her daily life is full of anxiety, stress, uncertainty and above all mourning, for having left her country and her family. “I feel like they uprooted something from inside of me,” she confesses.
This has led her to spend long hours awake, these first days of exile. When she is able to sleep, she says, nightmares wake her up: she dreams that she is still in prison and sees the guards of La Esperanza who normally were near and the other political prisoners. “One of these days I woke up in the middle of the night frightened and shouting,” she states.
Even though these episodes now are part of her daily life, she does not hesitate to say that the hardest part has been the detachment from her family, but she keeps alive the hope that at some point she might be able to have a reencounter with her loved ones. She confesses that there are moments when she feels completely foreign to everything that surrounds her. “I feel stressed, I get so anxious that I want to run away.”
Jirón recognizes how difficult it has been to adapt to a new life, but she thinks that this transition must be accompanied by the attention of specialists. In fact, she comments that she already has begun to get general medical checkups and is about to be treated by a psychologist.
“I think that the first thing that I have to do is emotionally stabilize myself to be able to take a second step…I function a certain way, I have to have my emotions stable to be able to continue with any activity,” says the young woman, who was under arrest from November 10, 2021 until her freedom.
The situation of Hernández and Jirón is not different from that of the former political prisoner Yubrank Suazo, who still cannot speak of Nicaragua without his voice cracking. His tormentors are no longer nearby, but his warning system is still active and sensitive. “My body reacts to any noise, even a simple image can cause me some type of reaction,” points out the young man from Miami, where he currently resides.
Suazo also cannot sleep, despite the fact that he no longer sleeps on a cold concrete bed, but on a big, soft bed. It has been progress to be able to sleep a little more than four hours a day in his first 20 days in exile. Suazo left jail with lower back pain that is now being treated with analgesics and physical therapy.
Nevertheless, beyond the physical ailments, the young dissident thinks that what has been most difficult for him has been dealing with the emotional crisis that the distance from his family has caused. “I never had worked on that possibility of exile; so the banishment has been a harsh blow,” he recognizes.
Even though Suazo had already been jailed in 2018, he says that on that occasion, where he was imprisoned for nine months, he felt that he was able to deal with the entire emotional process after getting out of prison. Nevertheless, this last liberation, accompanied by exile and being stripped of his nationality, did produce in him a strong emotional sense of grief which he believes “can only be treated from the spiritual and professional dimension.”
“From my formation, from my beliefs, I believe that psychological attention is important, but my fundamental pillar, my support is the spiritual aspect that I am reinforcing with the sacraments. I want to heal myself in a holistic way, because I do not want to leave this sorrow without closure, because it can affect my decisions on a personal level as well as family level, and in the area in which I decide to develop,” points out Suazo.
“I am not crazy”
I felt good, I did not feel weak,” says the sportswriter Miguel Mendoza. I thought that I was not suffering from any sequelae after his imprisonment. But it was not until his friends asked him insistently whether he felt well mentally that he realized that his health situation was getting worse, on seeing himself in interviews with his emaciated body, flaccid skin and difficulties in expressing himself. He tried to look for words and was not able to find them.
“I told them that I was not crazy,” was the first thing that the sportswriter said to the questions of his close family. “The experts who I have consulted about my case tell me that it is the result of a lack of reading, and not speaking to anyone makes the brain lose agility,” maintains Mendoza.
Even though in the last days of February he has a better appearance, he has not been able to completely sleep. He falls asleep after midnight and gets up when the sun comes up. “I never have taken pills to sleep, but they gave me some when I arrived in Washington, I tried them for three or four days and they did not work,” he confesses.
Other effects of the torture
The sleep problems and other effects that these Nicaraguan dissidents present are not produced just from having remained in prison, but as a consequence of the psychological torture that they were subjected to. “Small cells, little light, without access to reading material, without permission to be able to talk among themselves, are situations that suppress the sensory system of a person,” explained a forensic psychologist from the Institute of Legal Medicine (IML) to lawyer Yader Morazán in September 2022, when the regime presented the political prisoners to the public.
The specialist explained that, due to these prison conditions, people can even suffer from losses of cognitive capacities, like those of expression and memory. The fact of prohibiting them from speaking or reading books has the effect of “turning off” the brain. “The strategy of silence makes the brain become similar to one with a learning disability,” continued the expert.
This crisis possibly the lawyer Roger Reyes suffered during the time he was imprisoned in El Chipote: “When I was in the isolation cell I forgot the faces of my daughters, the names of my daughters and that is something that cannot be forgotten: forgetting that you forgot your family. It is something that is going to help me to value my family,” said the former political prisoner.
The Permanent Commission for Human Rights (CPDH) pointed out that there are many cases of Nicaraguans freed from jail and expelled from their country who suffer emotional and psychological sequelae. In addition to the common problems of sleeping, some “are sleeping on the ground, they still do not feel comfortable sleeping on a bed,” said the organization.
Some of the forms of torture referred to by the political prisoners are those of being subjected to complete darkness for 24 hours a day, or, on the contrary, under bright lights, without mattresses nor covers or pillows, among other bad treatment.
Edgar Stuardo Ralón, ombudsperson for the Rights of People Deprived of Freedom and for the Prevention and Fight against Torture of the Interamerican Commission on Human Rights (IACHR), uses a term about the conditions in which Ortega keeps political prisoners “white torture.”
“The term is used when there are (penitentiary) regimes of extreme isolation,” states Stuardo Ralón. The objective is that the person (prisoner) can have their mental health affected, even getting to the point of losing their own identity,” added the ombudsperson in a previously published report in DIVERGENTES.
Even though Hernández, Suazo and Mendoza have different perspectives about their future, all agree that for now the priority is to treat the emotional and psychological sequelae that they are facing after more than 500 days of imprisonment under torture.
“I am accepting the distance from the people that I lost and that the road to the return to Nicaragua is going to take a lot of time. It is going to be very long. I need to prepare myself,” reflects Alex Hernández.