On Father’s Day last year, Octavio Enriquez shared pizza and soda with his two children. Then he told them he was leaving.
A Nicaraguan journalist known for his rigorous investigations, his most recent reporting had brought him dangerously close to President Daniel Ortega, a former left-wing revolutionary whose country, one of the poorest and most corrupt in the Western Hemisphere, had no mercy on.
Enriquez, 42, was preparing a series of articles exposing Ortega’s ties to some two dozen corporations that had won millions of dollars in government contracts. But the journalist feared imprisonment before he could publish.
“Never be ashamed of your father,” Enriquez said as she hugged her children and walked under a cloak of darkness toward a border crossing. “I’m on the right side of history. “
Since Ortega and his wife, Vice President Rosario Murillo, violently repressed democratic protests in 2018, the couple has tightened their grip on power, jailing political opponents, leaders and members of civil society and attacking freedom of expression from all fronts.
They raided newsrooms, imprisoned hounds and ordered the closure of dozens of media outlets. They pushed through a series of laws that criminalized the spread of “fake” news and the publication of legal data through the government, and even banned newspapers from uploading paper and ink. .
The offices of Confidencial, the news magazine where Enriquez worked, had been occupied by police forces and its editor faced money laundering charges that human rights defenders called “absurd. “
Enriquez then called police wondering about his connection to a nonprofit that trained hounds, which the government called a CIA front.
He and his wife, who is also a journalist, that the only way for him to continue reporting on Ortega’s finances was to flee the country. No one was told where he was going, neither the young men nor his twin brother, with whom he shared a hobby for social justice and writing.
As Enriquez walked for hours in the dark, achieving protection in Honduras as the sun rose, he joined the estimated 200,000 Nicaraguans who have fled the country since 2018, a mass exodus of at least 140 journalists.
With virtually more independent media within the country and the entry of banned foreign journalists, Nicaragua has “a black hole of information,” said Natalie Southwick of the Committee to Protect Journalists. Government propaganda is all that remains. Ortega’s circle of relatives and allies own several radio and television stations that paint the United States as the “Yankee empire” and pro-democracy protesters as “coup plotters,” “terrorists” and “termites. “
“Even Orwell couldn’t have imagined a country like this,” said Gioconda Belli, a guerrilla veteran who was president of PEN Nicaragua until the discursive organization was expelled from the country last year. “It’s a dystopia. Reality is absolutely distorted. “
For Enriquez and other new members of the Nicaraguan diaspora, the message is clear: it’s up to them to divulge the fact of what’s at home.
This mandate is shared through more and more hounds these days, as many media professionals around the world have been forced to flee their countries. narratives for their own benefit.
Even from exile, the dangers to a journalist in an authoritarian state are considerable.
When Enriquez escaped, traveling from Honduras to Bogota, Colombia, and yet to San Jose, Costa Rica, he continued to investigate, analyzing official documents that exposed Ortega’s secret ties to various companies. Last August, Enriquez sent an email to Murillo, the government spokeswoman, asking him to comment on the evidence.
She didn’t answer. Instead, police arrived at Enriquez’s home in Nicaragua and knocked on the door. Officers told his surprised wife and children that Enriquez was looking for the back to question them.
He knew at the time that he had to do two things: complete his research and take out his circle of relatives.
Ortega, 76, has been one of the main protagonists of Nicaragua’s history since the 1970s, when he and his motley army of Sandinista revolutionaries helped topple Anastasio Somoza, a right-wing dictator whose circle of relatives controlled the country for decades, enriching themselves as Nicaraguans languish in misery.
Ortega served as president in the 1980s in a bloody civil war that pitted Sandinista fighters against U. S. -backed Contra rebels. He was ousted in the 1990 presidential election, but returned to power in 2007. By rigging elections, he has remained president ever since. fitting into the leader with the most years of service in Latin America.
Many of Ortega’s friends in the revolution opposed him, claiming that he had betrayed their dreams of a socialist utopia and that he had come to resemble the dictator they had helped overthrow.
This is not the story Ortega needs to tell. He has long been hostile to the independent press, once shutting down a newspaper about the Civil War that he accused of “supporting American aggression. “
But in recent years, reporters have been functioning more or less freely and a multitude of new online media has emerged, encouraged by a generation of idealistic young journalists. They were tolerated by a government that sought at least the façade of civil liberties.
That replaced on April 18, 2018, when national protests erupted, driven, in part, by media reports about a sweeping Social Security reform that would raise taxes and reduce benefits. As outraged citizens gathered in the streets, police and pro-Ortega paramilitary teams opened fire, killing dozens.
Nestor Arce, 31, live-streaming protests in the capital, Managua, still wearing pants after training a university journalism elegance that morning. He knew himself as a journalist but assaulted himself 3 times, one of dozens of reporters and photographers injured that day. .
As Arce reported during months of protests and fatal repression, his colleagues were beaten and one of them was shot. When the police occupied two media outlets and began dragging the hounds into the prison, they made the decision that it was time to leave.
Arce returned to Nicaragua the following year to open a news site, Divergentes, with several friends. But in the run-up to the country’s presidential election in 2021, Ortega began jailing conflicting parties and resumed his attacks on journalists.
Two of Arce’s colleagues at Divergents were cited for wondering through police. Arce learned that he was under surveillance and did not wait for his summons, he fled for a moment.
“Journalism has a crime,” Arce said. We had to close before they took our offices, took our computers and sent us to jail. “
With more than 150,000 Nicaraguans fleeing the Ortega regime, Arce and his ilk settled in Costa Rica, long a beacon of peace and democracy in a conflict-torn Central America.
He and his team report on a coworking domain in a domain in the country’s capital on a popular café.
Arce, who on a recent rainy afternoon took a sip of latte while typing on his laptop, said he enjoyed Costa Rica but spent so much time thinking about Nicaragua that he forgot it was no longer there. He wonders about all the stories that are not told at home, and the lies invented by an unresponsible government.
His online page features the news of the day, such as a backlog of remittances from Nicaraguans abroad or the ongoing case against a Catholic bishop whom Murillo has accused of committing crimes “contrary to spirituality,” but is also tackling larger projects. A recent piece of multimedia examined, in unprecedented scope, what precisely happened in the 2018 protests.
He named the government officials who led the crackdown and detailed many of the protesters’ prosecutions for terrorism. Video testimonies from eyewitnesses were published along with stories about the legions of parents of student activists who were killed and forced to flee the country. This year, the assignment won the Ortega y Gasset Prize, one of the distinctions of Spanish-language journalism.
“We all cover the protests as breaking news,” Arce said. “We seek to have everything in one place and give a contribution to the structure of ancient memory. “
He hopes the series will be a bulwark against collective amnesia and that it can one day be used to help prosecute those who have committed crimes. However, he often wonders about the effect it has, wondering who can suffer. the longest: authoritarian leaders or loose press.
“Of course there are times when you feel frustrated,” Arce said as he strolled the streets of San Jose with a navigation app. “We all think and dream of a long career without Ortega. “
Lucía Pineda is also in exile in Costa Rica. The other day, without any emotion, I was interviewing the wife of a political prisoner detained in Nicaragua for more than a year.
“What impression do those photos give you?” Pineda asked, referring to two photographs of the prisoner, a worker from the NGO Walter Gómez. One showed Gomez before he was imprisoned, strong and smiling. bony shoulders.
“It’s scary,” said Consuelo Cespedes, Gomez’s wife. “I’m afraid he’ll die. “
Pineda, 48, has made known the plight of the nearly two hundred political prisoners languishing in Nicaragua’s prisons. She herself is one of them.
The news channel pineda works for, one hundred percent Noticias, extensively covered the 2018 protests, broadcasting images of the government committing human rights violations.
It wasn’t long before the police showed up at his barracks. Authorities cut off the station’s sign and took away its owner, Miguel Mora. While Pineda reported what happened through Facebook Live, the police returned to the station and arrested her. “They sought to silence the truth,” he said.
He spent six months in prison, some of them in the infamous El Chipote prison, where the Somoza regime had tortured Sandinista fighters. He was in solitary confinement and questioned continuously, adding 30 times in a week of singleness.
“You incited violence,” insisted his jailers, the channel had encouraged the protests. “Where does the money come from?”
Pineda and Mora were released in 2019. She immediately fled to Costa Rica, where her mother suggested she change her profession. But Pineda returned to work immediately, reactivating the online channel Only Computers Borrowed by Costa Rican Journalist Friends.
Pineda succeeded Mora after he broke away from the channel and announced he would run for president. He spent time in jail last year and remains in prison.
Sometimes it turns out Ortega is tougher than ever, Pineda said. But she’s proud that she “didn’t give Ortega the thrill of destroying the canal,” now one of the top data resources on Nicaragua. The country has a population of 6 million, of which about 600,000 live abroad. Its online page receives 23 million visitors a year.
Enriquez would never have imagined that he would have to organize shelters for his circle of relatives in Nicaragua. But after police showed up at his home last year, he had them move in every few weeks.
This at the time his twin brother died after contracting COVID-19. Enriquez doesn’t blame Ortega for his brother’s death, but says the government’s reaction to the pandemic has demonstrated the risks of a dictator who is on the loose to tell whatever he wants. .
While nations around the world have locked themselves in to face the coronavirus in 2020, Ortega has confided to his country that there is nothing to worry about.
Schools and businesses remained open as Ortega encouraged citizens to attend concerts, parades and events. “If the country stops working, it dies,” he said.
Journalists showed how the government intentionally underestimated infections and deaths. But no one knows precisely how many Nicaraguans have died in the pandemic.
As Enriquez mourned his brother’s death and kept money to help his family get out, he found solace in his work. “Journalism kept me,” he said.
He nevertheless took out his circle of relatives before the winter break. They crossed Costa Rica on foot and spent the next few days kissing and decorating a Christmas tree.
Enriquez published his survey in February. The stories caused a stir in Latin America, but in Nicaragua the president and his circle of relatives remained silent.
Enriquez if the stories had any impact.
“I make a difference,” he said. I just don’t know how fast. “
But then he remembers 2018, when a protest song seemed like a rallying cry to those marching through the streets. The song was referring to an investigation Enriquez had published a year earlier into social security fraud.
Enriquez knows that in Nicaragua it is too harmful for other people to blatantly communicate government transgressions. But Enriquez is convinced that they stick to the news produced through independent media and that foment unrest beneath the surface, like a volcano that can erupt at any time.
This story gave the impression in the Los Angeles Times.
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