Regime subjects to torture indigenous found guilty for the massacre of Kiwakumbaih
Even though the indigenous state that the attackers were settlers, four indigenous are serving a life sentence for supposedly murdering nine Mayangnas. The case is before the IACHR.
By La Prensa, Jan 31, 2023
With their hands and feet in chains, half naked and separated into maximum security cells is how the four indigenous have been held since this past December, for being the supposed authors of the massacre in the Kwakumbaih community of the Sauni As Mayangna community in the Northern Caribbean of Nicaragua. That massacre happened in August 2021.
“The four are still alive,” is the report that the Center for Legal Assistance to Indigenous Peoples received recently (CALPI) – who have closely followed this case – after it became known that the indigenous Argüello Celso Lino, Ignacio Celso Lino, Donald Bruno Arcángel and Dionisio Robins Zacarías are facing terrible conditions of imprisonment, as well as physical, emotional and sexual torture.
The four citizens are serving time in the Jorge Navarro Penitentiary System in Tipitapa and their life in that jail is one of constant suffering. They are kept chained 24 hours a day, they are bathed with buckets of water thrown on them in the afternoons, and they are beaten and even sexually abused. If they have any pain or illness, they are denied medical attention, CALPI denounced.
Their relatives have been able to see them once a month and only for five minutes, but from a distance, not close. In other words, the prisoners cannot receive a hug from their families.
For CALPI the brutality with which the guards torture these indigenous is nothing more than a way to “terrorize” the Mayangna communities, of whom they were leaders. It is also to send a message to the indigenous who want to defend their lands from the invasion of the settlers.
“(The torture is) so that the people from the communities do not continue resisting the attacks that they are suffering at the hands of armed bands of settlers, who act with complete impunity for years now in their territories of Bosawas, Waspam and the Río Coco, or Wangki, as they call it,” pointed out CALPI.
The massacre
On August 23, 2021 armed men arrived where 37 Mískito and Mayangna indigenous were present and they attacked them while they were carrying out small-scale mining work in the Kiwakumbiah mine in the Pukna mountain in the Sauna As Mayangna territory.
13 people were counted among the dead in the attack and two women survivors who they raped. Among the dead victims were two women, one of them had her leg mutilated. As of now it is believed that really there were 18 people killed.
In that time the survivors shared with CALPI that they denounced to the Police that the attackers were some 30 people who arrived heavily armed with knives, pistols, shotguns and even AK-47 rifles. They were mestizos or settlers, who spoke Spanish and were wearing military clothing.
“Those who fled did so when they began to hear the bursts of gunfire and the shots from the arms of the attackers,” explained CALPI in one of their reports on this attack.
CALPI pointed out that prior to this massacre, the Government and the Mayangna Sauni As Indigenous Territorial Secretariat (GTI) on August 11, 2021 sent a letter to the Police of Bonanza, in the Northern Caribbean Coast, requesting the accompaniment of the institution to the Kiwakumbaih mine due to “an emergency situation (…) of conflict that presented itself,” nevertheless, the authorities did not respond.
The Police distorted the statements
On September 8, 2021 official media reported about the arrest of the brothers Argüello Celso Lino and Ignacio Celso Lino, and of Bruno Arcángel. Later they captured Robins Zacarías. According to the information from the Police, the motive for the massacre was “bickering among the criminals, who wanted to take by force this mine where the people murdered were working.”
The Police – the principal repressive arm of the regime of Daniel Ortega and Rosario Murillo – stated at that time that the Celso Lino brothers were the material and intellectual authors of the crimes, and in addition the brothers of one of the sexual abuse victims.
Nevertheless, information gathered by CALPI points to the fact that the Police “falsified the statements of the survivors of the massacre.” One of the survivors, who was raped and is the sister of Argüello and Ignacio Celso Lino, held the mestizos responsible for the deeds, and not the indigenous, just as the rest of the witnesses had stated. The Police pointed out that the 14 indigenous were involved, of who 4 have been arrested.
“We have her testimony (from the sexual abuse victim), when she talked about how the men arrived and killed her husband, her father and took her daughter to rape her. She testified, but she never said that (those guilty) were her brothers,” countered CALPI.
Case is before the IACHR
This case is before the Interamerican Commission of Human Rights (IACHR), where they requested cautionary measures for the people involved in this event, and also to defend the indigenous territory.
“These people are under arrest for defending their territory, they accused them unjustly to get them out of the way and continue taking over the indigenous territory, between miners and settlers, and to inflict terror on the rest, so that they do not defend their land. It is like saying, `Look, I am taking your leader and I am doing this with your leader (imprisoning him)´, that is the message that the State is sending through these men (who were found guilty),” says CALPI.
Since the end of 2015 the Miskita and Mayangna communities in the Bosawas Biosphere Reserve and in the Northern Caribbean Coast of Nicaragua have been suffering constant attacks. The attacks are systematically carried out by criminal bands composed of non-indigenous men – mestizos, ispel or Ispayul, settlers or third parties – with military equipment, clothing and training, carrying weapons of war or high caliber weapons, without the State so far protecting these communities.
Since then, the indigenous are in constant fear of being attacked, and in recent years the migration of indigenous has increased due to the fact that they can no longer plant their land or carry water from far away, out of fear that the women might be raped and the men murdered, CALPI said.