Trials by video calls, disappearances and plagues: what political prisoners suffer in Nicaragua

The jailers at La Modelo prison in Managua took student leader Jasson Salazar out of his cell on August 8 and sat him in front of a computer.

On the computer screen, through a video call, was Judge Ulisa Yahoska Tapia Silva, head of the thirteenth criminal court of the Nicaraguan capital.

At that moment the trial began, a “Zoom trial”, in which the young man did not have a defense lawyer who knew the accusation.

In the same session he was found guilty of the alleged crimes of “undermining national integrity and spreading false news.”

Salazar is one of the more than one hundred political prisoners held in Nicaraguan prisons by the regime of Daniel Ortega and Rosario Murillo, after Bishop Rolando Álvarez and 17 other Catholic clerics were exiled to Rome on January 14.

His trial illustrates one of the new arbitrary practices of justice obedient to the Sandinista Executive: political prisoners are not even taken to a court to be prosecuted and, instead, are declared guilty through video calls.

Lawyers also cannot know the file numbers or accusations, so it is impossible to formulate any defense.

The Legal Defense Unit (UDJ), an organization that monitors the judicial processes of political prisoners in Nicaragua, catalogs telematic trials as a new repressive pattern used by the regime, but it is not the only one found between August of last year until January 2024. According to a report from the organization, these repressive patterns reveal “the instrumentalization of the state apparatus to repress in Nicaragua.”

“During the last six months we have identified the following repressive patterns in the arbitrary detentions perpetrated by the State of Nicaragua: illegal raids, forced disappearances against people considered opponents or critics of state party politics.

Also the holding of trials through video calls, the coordinated action between the Penitentiary System and police in interrogations, to the critical prison conditions that include plagues of jelepates,” he summarizes.

The president of Nicaragua, Daniel Ortega and the first lady Rosario Murillo.Esteban Felix (AP)

The arrests

The chain of arbitrariness begins with the arrests of opponents.

With the anguish felt by family members, such as those of Freddy Quezada, a retired professor, arrested on January 29, 2023 for critical publications of him on social networks.

The arrest of the university professor was coordinated by civilians, who commanded three police officers.

Since that date his family does not know where he is.

Initially, Adriana Quezada, daughter of the professor, tells EL PAÍS, they learned of a transfer to Police District III, in Managua.

However, the final whereabouts of the teacher have not been revealed by the authorities.

“As a family we have been in and out of the El Chipote prison and in La Modelo and we don't know anything;

They don't tell us anything,” says the woman, who lives in Panama.

What Professor Quezada's daughter relates is common among relatives of political prisoners.

Another of the patterns, one of the most serious, that the UDJ includes in its report: “All information is denied to the relatives of political detainees and their defense lawyers, including verification of their whereabouts.

This practice implies the imposition as a State policy of forced disappearance due to concealment of whereabouts.”

The organization denounces a “worsening” of forced disappearances of short or medium duration, and cites the case of the indigenous representative and former Sandinista ally Brooklyn Rivera;

also that of the young Carlos Bojorge.

“In these cases, the authorities have refused to provide information about their reliable whereabouts (...) In such a way that there is no certainty about their conditions of detention, nor confirmation of their state of health and life.

It was identified that prison authorities recommended that relatives look for political detainees 'in the morgues', increasing their anxiety, which constitutes another type of torture," the UDJ documents and highlights that the Judiciary rejects the appeals for discovery. personal (

habeas corpus

) of those detained for political reasons.

Another modality is that when opponents are detained they are immediately transferred to the Penitentiary System, without formal charges against them, as required by the laws in Nicaragua.

“Detainees are now interrogated and tortured in the Penitentiary System, unlike the previous pattern in which the police were the ones who carried out these repressive acts.

Currently, coordinated participation was identified between interrogators from the Penitentiary System and agents from the National Police,” documents the UDJ.

Plague in cells

The report presented by the lawyers' organization on February 15 also states that cruel and inhuman treatment against political prisoners persists in the regime's prisons, most of them people with low public exposure.

Political prisoners are given spoiled food, do not have access to adequate medication for their chronic illnesses, and their families are harassed during visits.

“In addition,” adds the UDJ, “we have been reported the presence of infestations of jelepates [bed bugs] in the different prisons of the country where there are political prisoners.

Several political prisoners show skin conditions, such as black welts and rashes that cause constant itching and burning [...].

In prisons, more security cameras have also been placed inside the galleries or maximum security cells for permanent surveillance of people detained for political reasons.”

Adriana Quezada says that the anguish of not knowing how and where her father is torments her entire family.

Not being able to bring him clothes, food and his diabetes medications is what they would like most.

“This is the world upside down, because people who do commit real crimes, that is, common prisoners, do have all those benefits.

Their families know where they are.

But my dad, who has been a professor all his life and now a political prisoner, is not allowed anything at all.

Not even a book and that, I'm sure, is what must hurt my dad the most….

because he has had a book at his side to read all his life, because he is a philosopher, a professor, a reader.”

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