“They are going to arrest your husband, get out before the end of the week or you will regret it.” Arlene Muñoz, a former Nicaraguan prosecutor received this message last September and in a hurry she sold half a house and packed 21 years of marriage in four suitcases. Detaining him was a figure of speech, the fear was that her husband, José Arnulfo López, also a former prosecutor and defender of opponents of the Daniel Ortega regime, would be made to disappear.
Before the deadline for the tip-off, the couple and their two children, aged 19 and 21, clandestinely fled to Costa Rica on the back of the motorcycles of some coyotes, as the pins who facilitate illegal border crossings are known in Latin America. . Not even for those reasons did they manage to get rid of an infiltrated agent who followed them and recorded until they managed to avoid him in San José, the capital. “They forced us to leave like criminals,” Arlene claims.
The family ended up in Spain requesting asylum in October and their files were added to those of another 87,700 foreigners who await a response to their application.
They are still unsettled. They no longer look back to see if they are being followed, but they are afraid that it will be known where they live. And starting over from scratch after leaving your home, your jobs, your friends and your studies is costing more than you expected. In addition, they do not know if one day they will be able to return home. “All our dreams are broken,” sobs Arlene, 41.
left behind too Garden, his pet, a small Schnauzer who has just died at just three years old more than 8,500 kilometers away. “It was very sad because he was just another member of our family, but bringing him was going to delay our departure and we had to leave him,” laments Fernando José, the eldest son, who was about to finish his medical studies.
Arlene is very angry and sad. She cries nonstop, when she speaks and when she listens: “I’m torn apart.”
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The number of Nicaraguans seeking protection in Spain is one of the fastest growing in recent years, people fleeing a country where, according to the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR), there can no longer be talk of separation of powers. A “police state” in which the government rules everything and whoever opposes it is persecuted, threatened or imprisoned. Or all at once. In 2017, only 31 Nicaraguans applied for asylum in Spain, but since then, coinciding with the escalation of repression, more than 12,300 have already done so. Among Latinos, Nicaraguans have one of the highest rates of recognition of their refugee status, but it still does not exceed 25%.
The couple never hid their dislike for Ortega. They had a comfortable life as prosecutors —travel, a good house, private universities for their children…—, but they gave up their career in the Public Ministry when the Executive began to put their peers there with clear guidelines on the positions they should take. The Prosecutor’s Office, “like any public body that could have denounced the actions of the Government” is also subject to the interests of the president, according to the IACHR.
Then came the 2018 anti-government protests and the family grabbed their car and their flags to demonstrate behind the barricades under the treacherous gaze of their neighbors. The popular revolt left hundreds dead. Since then, more than 110,000 Nicaraguans have gone into exile, according to the UN refugee agency (Acnur).
Arlen and her husband soon realized that their names were already on the blacklist, but the real trouble came when he became involved in defending more than 50 opponents. Among them were peasant leaders and dissident heavyweights who ended up in jail when they decided to stand in last year’s presidential elections. “One day we were waiting for the light van. He appeared, but inside there were two men dressed as paramilitaries. They shot at our house,” she says. “It was scary because we had never seen bullets this close.”
That episode was followed by threats, attacks and surveillance even of the youngest of the children, who suffers from Asperger’s syndrome and suffered from panic attacks. According to her testimony before the Spanish authorities that will investigate her case, the National Police and para-police groups also began to instigate relatives to find out about her routines. They even questioned the doorman. “That day I was shaking all over. He told me that we couldn’t be prisoners of fear, but they didn’t hide it, they took pictures of us wherever we were, my son’s friends didn’t want to be with him anymore”, remembers Arlene.
She experienced the worst in June at a police station and has kept it a secret until a few weeks ago when she confessed it to her family. “My son spooned it out of me because he saw me cry at night without consolation,” Arlene recalls. She now she wants the whole world to know. “They locked me up and raped me with a rifle,” she sobs. “They told me it was so that I would not forget that she was a damned traitor.” She did not tell for fear that they would do something worse to them. “I was in constant fear that they would kill us,” she says.
Now, like many other families in similar situations, they are having a hard time adjusting to life in exile. The 7,000 euros they brought quickly ran out between rents, scams and warm clothes. They lived in a hotel, in a room in a flat where the owner cut off their heating, and in a cave in a ghost town where they couldn’t get a job, not even milking goats. Today they depend on the reception of the State, but the system is saturated. The arrival of dozens of Afghan families in August and the reactivation of the flow of Latin Americans has limited the places that meet the needs of families requesting asylum.
His home now is two rooms in a shelter where there are only young Moroccans and Sub-Saharans who have arrived by boat. They have a good relationship with them, but they are the only family, the only ones who speak Spanish and mother and daughter are the only women. “It scares me to be with so many men,” says the young woman, who is being treated for depression.
José Arnulfo, 46, does not aspire to practice as a lawyer any time soon. He wants to work whatever it is, maybe loading boxes in a supermarket, but he has two months to go before he gets permission. His son wants to finish his Medicine degree and his daughter wants to start Fine Arts. They have been very active in searching for study programs and scholarships, but they live far from the universities that offer them. Now, they have to convince the authorities to find another place where they don’t feel so out of place and where they believe they will have more opportunities. Nor can they pay to send their grades from Nicaragua, a requirement to enroll in Spain. It costs about 100 euros, but the last time they counted their money, it was less than 20 euros.
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