“Long live free Nicaragua!” shouts Francisco Arteaga, one of the 135 freed Nicaraguan political prisoners, with his fist raised upon arriving in Guatemala on Thursday.
From the window of a yellow bus outside Guatemala City airport, Arteaga smiles and says he is “doing very well” after his release.
“Thank God we are free,” adds the man dressed in a beige shirt.
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The political prisoners arrived on a dawn flight to La Aurora airport in the Guatemalan capital, where they were attended to by officials from the returnee center that each week receives hundreds of Guatemalan migrants deported from the United States and Mexico.
The group boarded several buses to go to reception centres.
The release of the political prisoners was achieved through mediation between Washington and the government of Daniel de Ortega, the White House announced.
They include 13 members of the Texas-based evangelical organization Mountain Gateway, Catholic laypeople, students and others whom Ortega and his wife and vice president Rosario Murillo “consider a threat to their authoritarian regime.”
Arteaga said he was imprisoned “for spreading on social media the actions of the government against the Catholic Church.”
– “Thank you Guatemala” –
Images released by the Guatemalan government showed the freed men getting off a white plane at the side of the runway at the capital’s airport. One of them was taken away in a wheelchair, according to the photos.
In addition to local officials, the group was assisted by staff from the International Organization for Migration (IOM), the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) and officials from the United States Embassy in Guatemala.
“I am ‘happy’, thanking the Lord,” said a woman wearing a white badge from the window of another bus.
“Long live free Nicaragua! God bless Nicaragua! Nicaragua will soon be free!” shouted this woman with glasses and a red blouse, with her fist raised, as the bus began its journey towards the reception centres.
Guatemalan President Bernardo Arévalo welcomed the group in a message on social media network X, in which he stressed that Guatemala “has shown its firm democratic conviction, which roundly rejects threats of authoritarian regression.”
“Today we reaffirm this commitment and return the international solidarity that we have received so many times, welcoming 135 Nicaraguan brothers and sisters, freed political prisoners. Only in freedom, democracy, life and humanity flourish,” said the social-democratic leader.
On another bus with the name “Travieso” on the back, one of the freed prisoners stuck out his hand to greet journalists while repeating: “Thank you, thank you Guatemala.”
– “Mixture of feelings” –
“It’s a mixture of feelings. Of joy, sadness and also concern,” Nicaraguan Santos Méndez, who has been living in exile in Guatemala since 2018, the year of the protests against Ortega, told AFP.
Méndez, who has taken refuge in the country, said that it was “happy” to learn of the release of the 135 political prisoners, but he also said that he is “sad” about the “uprooting” of Nicaragua.
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“They are leaving their country in conditions that no one would imagine, and they are also leaving their families behind,” he lamented.
“We know that in Guatemala they will find the necessary immigration facilities to determine the best destination,” Felix Maradiaga, a Nicaraguan opposition politician exiled in the United States, told AFP.
