For Nicaraguans, a painful exile
The emotional embrace between Miguel Mora, founder of 100% Noticias, and his colleague Lucía Pineda at the Westin Hotel on February 10, 2023. Photo by Dagmar Thiel
From confinement in a cell to homelessness in a foreign country
Editor's note: Two hundred twenty-two political prisoners from Nicaragua arrived in Washington, D.C. on Thursday, February 9 on a charter flight and were granted humanitarian parole by the U.S. government to enter the country. Many of them had been in jail since 2018, when student and farmworker-led protests began in Nicaragua. Others were arrested beginning in 2021, an election year in which Daniel Ortega was re-elected president, while seven potential candidates for president were incarcerated. Dagmar Thiel, an activist for freedom of expression, has raised her voice in support of journalists who have been wrongly imprisoned. In this essay, she recounts what she saw and heard when the refugees arrived in the U.S. capital.
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Prison is cruel, but exile can be an even more unspeakable fate. For political refugees from Nicaragua, arriving in the U.S. has been a roller coaster of emotions and it is fear that prevails. Those feelings pervaded the air at the Westin Hotel near Dulles International Airport in Virginia, where the Department of State established reception headquarters to take in the 222 individuals that the government of Daniel Ortega and Rosario Murillo decided to expel from jails in Nicaragua, asking the United States government “to take the mercenaries away”.
Since 2018, the dictatorship has incarcerated 245 political prisoners and sentenced them to up to 50 years in prison. Among them are seven presidential candidates and many members of the opposition. But there are also journalists, representatives of NGOs, critics of the regime, members of the business elite, bankers, university professors and elementary school teachers. There are also farmworkers and students, who led the protests against the regime in April 2018, young people who are barely more than 20 years old and have spent a quarter of their lives behind bars. There are former guerilla members who fought alongside Ortega against the Somoza dictatorship in the 1970s and Catholic clergy who have been forbidden to say Mass. There are even former members of the current repressive apparatus, five of whom were also deported to Washington.
The deportation took them by surprise when, on the evening of February 8, they were removed from their cells and transported by bus to an air base. They were loaded onto a plane, each with a newly-printed passport in their hands — a passport whose validity was unclear because the Ortega-controlled Assembly rushed to pass a constitutional amendment that strips “traitors of the homeland” of their citizenship. Overnight, the government also erased the records of all the exiles from the civil registry. Those who have asked to begin the process of transferring legal custody of children left behind to family members have not been able to do so because, quite simply, they “no longer exist.”
For the released political prisoners there are many reasons to rejoice and they have celebrated with embraces in freedom, embraces that were prohibited in jail. Embraces with families and friends who arrived to welcome a third of the refugees. Joy because they are out of the dungeon in which some were kept in isolation in 2-by-2 meter cells that were completely sealed, without the right to go out in the sun in months. Or bigger cells shared by two, four, or six people, where they took turns to exercise one by one, while the others remained still in their bunks. Cells that, depending on chance, had only a tube for defecating or perhaps a toilet and, if they were lucky, water.
But the laughter turns into pain when they remember the children, parents, and partners left behind in Nicaragua, who they do not know when they will embrace again.
It gives them enormous joy to be treated with dignity in the U.S. They know they are lucky to receive preferential treatment from immigration authorities for their humanitarian parole. They enjoy the food, the warm bath, the privilege of a window to see the sun rise or a door that leads them outside into the sun. Yet adjusting to these comforts has not been easy; many slept on their hotel room floor, because after months sleeping on a slab of cement, the soft hotel room mattress proved unbearable.
But the laughter turns into pain when they remember the children, parents, and partners left behind in Nicaragua, who they do not know when they will embrace again. The desire to tell others what they have experienced morphs into fear at the thought of their names being published and that the jails now empty of political prisoners could be filled with their loved ones. Fear that their Facebook accounts could be used to incriminate others of cybercrimes or to create a false pretext to incarcerate them.
And this cruel exile distinguishes between VIP refugees, whose names have filled pages of reports, and those who have merely been a statistic of the ruthless dictatorship. Most are men and women without any political activities who, on the whim of Sandinista sadism, were accused of false charges. The most fortunate have family members or friends who have taken them in and will help them adjust to a new country that they did not choose as their destination.
Families and supporters embrace during an event organized at the Westin Hotel. Photo courtesy of Efecto Cocuyo
At least 100 of them didn’t have contacts in the U.S. and rely on humanitarian assistance from the Nicaraguan diaspora and sympathetic NGOs. They face the enormous challenge of going from a jail cell to the endless open skies of the homeless, and to a lack of guidance on how to start a new life with the $300 given to each refugee. To the dilemma of choosing between buying a toothbrush and shoes or sending the money to Nicaragua so their children can eat. In Nicaragua, those $300 are more than a basic salary, and here it will be gone in the blink of an eye.
From Virginia they have departed for homes in different states, but they are all aware that house guests become a burden after a few days and they look toward a stateless future with uncertainty. Expelled from their homeland and their lives, they carry the wounds of physical and emotional torture. They struggle with the toll the abuse had on their health. They try to focus their ideas after months of not being allowed to speak, while answering the thousands of questions that reporters ask. They attempt to string together their thoughts or control the stuttering that torture left them with. And with donated clothing they have been given, they shield themselves from the cold winter that reminds them how far they are from their Caribbean country.
It’s a country that one refugee said farewell to by kissing the ground with his hand before climbing the stairs to the plane on February 9, with total uncertainty regarding when he will return to his “Nicaragua, Nicaragüita.” And through tears, the exiles intoned the song written by Carlos Mejía Godoy to celebrate the defeat of the Somocistas in 1979 “Nicaragua, Nicaragüita, now that you are free… I love you much more.”
A Qatar final
Not even in prison would he relinquish his duty as a sports journalist. Though part of the torture of isolation was to deprive them of all news, Miguel Mendoza narrated the 2022 World Cup final in Qatar from a place of complete unawareness. He did so by listening from a small window in the top bunk of a cell at the police station known as “El Chipote”, which he shared with other detainees, among them Juan Lorenzo Holmann, general manager of the newspaper La Prensa. That day, every three minutes, they could hear the shouts of residents who lived near the jail and bet on which countries had made it to the final. Miguel said to them, “Neymar has scored three goals in six minutes.” Upon listening to him narrate the Brazilian victory, Juan Lorenzo said, “I doubt it. It must be Germany that’s winning by penalties.” Miguel's offer to “give his oceanside home” to wardens or nurses who brought them medicine did not yield results or break the silence. They learned of Argentina's victory during family visitation on December 25, a week after the final game in Qatar. In exile in the United States, Miguel Mendoza will go from imagining a field to narrating his greatest passion: baseball. He has been credentialed to cover the World Baseball Classic in Miami in March.
Miguel Mendoza, a sports writer released after 600 days of imprisonment, accused of cyber crimes. Photo by Miguel Andrés
A spectacular exit with an uncertain future
Miguel Mora, founder of the channel 100% Noticias that was shut down by Daniel Ortega’s regime, describes his release as “spectacular.” Like a movie. “The way the Boeing 747 crew welcomed us was spectacular. The faces of the people there, of the Nicaraguan politicians, of Nicaraguan society, were spectacular,” he said. What struck him the most was the number of young people on the plane who had been detained since 2018 when the protests that triggered the brutal repression took place. “The majority were not those of us in the headlines but young people. It was like a rescue of young people of unknown faces,” he said.
The two Marías seated at a bar at the Westin Hotel, where Nicaraguan refugees stayed upon arriving on a charter flight. Photo by Dagmar Thiel
But the future is uncertain, as two women named María told palabra. After 15 months of incarceration, they are still not sure why they were detained. They share the same name and the same misfortune. Like many of the exiles, they won’t provide their full names out of fear of retaliation. They were arrested on November 6, 2021, a day before the presidential elections, and sentenced to eight years in prison for “terrorism against the state.” Sitting at the bar of the hotel where the exiles were received, they look toward their future with complete uncertainty. They don’t know anyone in the United States. A jail cell brought them together during those months of suffering. Aid organizations found them homes in different states, and they will have to continue without each other, despite being the closest thing to family that they have in this land faraway from their native Nicaragua, where, despite being jailed, each month they saw the faces of their children and other loved ones who they do not know when they will see again.
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Dagmar Thiel is an Ecuadorian-German journalist. Since 2018, she has been the U.S. director for Fundamedios, helping to promote freedom of expression in the region. Since 2019 she has worked to support an independent press in Central America and the Caribbean through the development of survival plans and business models for digital media. In 2020 she published a study about discrimination against Latino journalists in the U.S. and in 2021 the investigation “Street Surveillance Cameras in Ecuador Endangers Citizen Rights.” Dagmar is a regular contributor to palabra and an Altavoz mentor. She has extensive experience in communications, public affairs, institutional reputation, and corporate sustainability.