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Being a woman, a migrant and an exile is not an easy path. Nicaraguan Heyling Marenco knows this well, for she had to leave Nicaragua forcibly for Costa Rica due to persecution and threats from the Daniel Ortega regime. She fled on August 4, 2018 when she was a Social Work student. But for having participated in the protests against the government that began in April of that year, she was expelled from her university. These massive demonstrations, which were violently repressed, resulted in more than 300 deaths and marked the beginning of the sociopolitical crisis that Nicaragua is experiencing.
Crossing the border by land into Costa Rica was the easiest option after Nicaraguan authorities denied him “the right to a passport,” according to his account. The arrival was not easy. She was alone in a country that was not hers and where she initially thought she would spend only three months. Marenco, 29, has been living in San José for five years and since last December she has refugee status.
The difficulties she faced were not unrelated to those of many other Nicaraguans who had migrated for similar reasons and with whom she met in San José, such as Génesis Herrera or Ximena Castilblanco, among others. The women began to meet and chat. They talked about their experiences, their experiences, their needs and their duels. They were looking for a safe place to share and at the end of 2018 the Volcánicas feminist collective emerged from those meetings, which promotes and defends the rights of Nicaraguan migrant and exiled women in Costa Rica through various actions.
In total, the co-founders of Volcánicas are 12 all Nicaraguan women, young, feminists, migrants and exiles. “We have held workshops with the aim of informing about the refugee application processes and the legal process to denounce gender violence… One of our central axes is healing, because Nicaragua is a historically violent and wounded country, we consider that we cannot change a place without working on the wounds that that place has left us,” says Génesis Herrera, 24, who left the country in August 2018 after being arrested for demonstrating in Chinandega and receiving threats from people allied to the regime.
As a collective, Marenco says, they seek to guide and help other women through those processes that they themselves have already gone through. “That another colleague who is going through the same thing can be useful to her”, she assures. They want to be able to “make visible the experiences of migrant and exiled women in Costa Rica. We ourselves are the ones who are talking about our own stories. He is not someone foreign to our experiences, ”says Ximena Castilblanco, 28, Volcánicas’ Communication coordinator and also exiled for her participation in the protests.
historical migration
Nicaraguan migration to Costa Rica goes back a long way. However, since the outbreak of the sociopolitical crisis it has increased. According to official figures, since 2018 the Government of Costa Rica has received more than 200,000 refugee applications.
Until February 2022, according to figures from the UN Refugee Agency (Acnur), the number of Nicaraguans seeking protection in Costa Rica exceeded the total number of refugees and asylum seekers in the 1980s with the Central American civil wars, when Costa Rica became a sanctuary for those fleeing violence.
The members of Volcánicas, whose name is a reminder of Nicaragua, known for being a “land of lakes and volcanoes” and that strength of each one of the members, assure that being a migrant woman and being able to help others in the same situation feels like a claim process.
“Is tucker when we meet and go on this migrant path together with others who have the same demands and needs. It allows us to have a response to reality and be able to rebuild ourselves from there,” says Herrera, who acknowledges that her own process has not been difficult, but that she has found friends who have made her adaptation “a process of tenderness and affection.”
Being a co-founder of Volcánicas, says Castilblanco, feels “super powerful and demanding” because it is being part of a collective where “I am a woman with a voice in a space that we created from scratch and where we feel safe.”
For Marenco, the process of going into exile has been very difficult. There was a time when he didn’t buy things because they gave him the feeling of permanence, but now, he says, he has known how to recognize the here and now. “The most beautiful thing for me has been all the learning, feeling accompanied after many fears, not feeling alone and building this network that in the end is not just us… there are a lot of Nicaraguan women. This community saved my life ”, she assures.
Now, for them, it is not just about their own stories and needs, but about accompanying other Nicaraguan migrant women, asylum seekers and refugees in their processes.
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