“I spent 606 days in solitary confinement in El Chipote prison. The first 80 days were spent missing, during which time my family knew nothing about me. The cells were under 24-hour surveillance and the electric light was on day and night, with a dark bathroom which was the only place where there was privacy. They took us out into the yard every 15 days, and that was after months and thanks to the protests of our families. We started to develop white spots due to the lack of sunlight, and some prisoners were diagnosed with a type of vitiligo. Reading and writing were prohibited. They even removed the labels from water bottles. Later, my only reading material was the ingredients in yogurt. I became an expert on its composition.”
The one who speaks thus, swallowing back tears as she recalls her captivity during a recent visit to Madrid, is Ana Margarita Vijil (León, Nicaragua, 46 years old), a lawyer and activist, former president of the Sandinista Renewal Movement (now called Unamos) founded by, among others, the writer Sergio Ramírez, arrested in June 2021, during the wave of repression unleashed by the Daniel Ortega regime on the eve of the elections held that year, when it decreed the illegalization of political parties and arrested the seven opposition presidential candidates. Her crime: “A few tweets, a few retweets and a few public statements.” Which earned her an accusation of “conspiracy and undermining of national sovereignty” and a sentence of 10 years in prison. In the hunt unleashed against dissidents, Vijil’s partner, the legendary Sandinista commander, Dora María Téllez, fell at the same time; her niece, Tamara Dávila, and Suyén Barahona, the last two from Unamos and all imprisoned and held incommunicado in the women’s wing of El Chipote, the regime’s worst dungeon —which is outside the prison system— in Managua, except for Téllez, who was sent to the men’s isolation gallery.
Vijil spent 80 days in preventive detention without any contact with the outside world or assistance from a lawyer, what they call the investigation period —which Ortega reformed by extending it from 48 hours to 90 days—, until one day, at three in the morning, she was taken along with other prisoners to the courts for a preliminary hearing. “It was a pantomime, with a public defender. That was in September 2021 and I was left without knowing anything until February 2 of the following year when an express trial was held in the same prison. I was able to speak with my lawyer for three minutes and they convicted me. Nowadays it is worse. They don’t even take the accused to the courts. The trials are now done by video calls. They call the prisoner and read him the sentence.”
Her case is not unique. During the conversation, names of other fellow sufferers come up. At the moment, there are 141 political prisoners, 23 of them women. “Víctor Ticai, a journalist, has been in prison since April 2023 for covering a religious procession; Carlos Bojorge, whose only crime was going to mass in January of this year with a blue flag calling for freedom for Monsignor Álvarez, who was still in prison. He was arrested on the way back home and remains missing. Eddy Meléndez, a friend of mine, who has Parkinson’s, has been in La Muela prison since July 2021, accused of a crime that was materially impossible for him to commit. Nancy Henríquez, an indigenous leader, who has been in solitary confinement for more than 250 days; Brooklyn Rivera, president of the indigenous political party Yatama, kidnapped on September 29 and has been missing for more than 200 days; Professor Freddy Quezada, also missing…”
The Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR) says that more than 2,000 people have passed through Nicaraguan prisons since 2018, although monitoring by the opposition party Unidad Azul y Blanco states that the real figure is closer to 5,000. There are many accusations of physical torture, rape and mistreatment by the police. In addition, Vijil adds, “there are still more than 355 families waiting to find out what happened with the murders of their relatives between April 2018 and June 2019.”
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“Ortega’s only source of power is terror, the police, the army and at this time also the judiciary. He has no popular support, we have known that for a long time. What he has is a fear of the social fabric being rebuilt. According to the Nicaragua Monitoring Mechanism (Meseni), 3,800 civil society organizations have been closed and confiscated in recent years, and more than 30 private universities have also been closed. Any leader with national projection, in any field, only faces prison or exile,” says Vijil.
She was part of the first group of 222 Nicaraguans whose nationality was stripped by the regime in 2023, like journalists Carlos Fernando and Cristina María Chamorro, among others, and who had to embark on the path of exile. Disqualified as a lawyer and her family’s businesses stolen, Vijil – who took advantage of Spanish nationality with the offer of Pedro Sánchez’s government to the opponents that the regime wanted to make stateless – resides in New Orleans with Dora María Téllez, whom she married in the US, and who is dedicated to writing her memoirs after breaking with the Sandinista Front due to Ortega’s authoritarian drift. “We met again on the charter flight to Washington. It was like a movie.”
Vijil did not suffer physical torture, but she did suffer psychological torture. She remembers that the hardest part of her imprisonment was her mother’s illness, who died after a long bout of cancer and whom she never saw again, and the death of retired general Hugo Torres, who led the assault on Somoza’s presidential palace in 1978, along with Téllez, after passing through El Chipote. “At least my mother died when I was already free. I couldn’t hug her, but we talked every day. And I know that she endured because of that.” But neither the regime nor captivity broke her. Her inner strength, despite her fragile appearance, has turned the experience of prison and exile into a source of learning. “I was convinced that I was going to win, I could be isolated, but my mind remained firm. I learned to appreciate beautiful things like seeing the sunrise or when a guard smiled at me. Every day, even in extreme situations, you have something to be thankful for.” One is never so poor that one cannot help another, nor so rich that one does not need help.”
That hope leads Ana Margarita Vijil to affirm that with each passing day the end of the regime is closer after more than a decade of impunity, of so much death, of so much bleeding inside and out. “I am convinced that it is in its final stage and that after concentrating all the power, it has begun to lose it. Nicaragua needs elections with guarantees, a transitional government that restores democratic order for a country in which everyone fits, and for this not to happen again it needs justice and truth.”
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