Leonor Zúniga never imagined the importance that her final thesis would have. She wanted to show, in the form of a documentary, what happened to those Nicaraguan families who reported situations of sexual abuse within the family.
“I was very interested in understanding what happens to the family structure from the point of view of a structure of oppression that silences the victims,” he said during an interview with the voice of america from Los Angeles, California, where he presented the documentary “Exiliada” at an event within the framework of the IX Summit of the Americas.
The “complicities” of the ruling party
It was at that moment that he discovered the case of Zoilamérica Ortega Murillo.
She was the stepdaughter of Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega, whom she had targeted for alleged sexual abuse since she was a child. She began to pull the thread, with the aim of discovering “not only how the family, but the State of Nicaragua itself, makes a series of complicities to hide the truth.”
“I wanted to know what the consequences of this culture of silence and impunity were for a person who reported sexual abuse,” Zúniga told the VOA.
How has Ortega and his circle handled it?
Daniel Ortega spoke of his stepdaughter’s case when he had not yet come to power, in 1998, interviewed by the journalist Lucía Pineda Ubau, and classified it as “totally false.”
“The accusations that [Zoilamérica Ortega Murillo] has been telling lies,” Ortega told Ubau, persecuted and detained by the Ortega government and now in exile in Costa Rica.
In 2019, one of Zoilamérica’s brothers, Juan Carlos Ortega, called her a “mythomaniac” on Twitter, when she recalled what she experienced.
Documentarian Zúñiga told the VOA that at least she has not had an official response. “On the part of the ruling party we have not had any reaction. The Government of Nicaragua never refers to the case of Zoilamérica and in the last 20 years they have treated it with total silence.
A system in your favor
In the opinion of Zúniga, who lives in exile in Costa Rica, the Nicaraguan president acted in this way, aware that he was not going to have any legal consequences because the entire system was working in his favor.
“There is a whole system that protects the sexual abuser from receiving the punishment he deserves and rather attacks and punishes the victim for making the complaint,” he said.
The parallelism to “silence the critics”
According to Zúniga, the “strategies” used to silence Zoilamérica Ortega Murillo after the allegations of sexual abuse against Ortega are the same ones used by the Central American president to repress the Nicaraguan people.
“All those tactics that were mounted to hide the truth, to persecute and punish her, are more or less the same strategies that the State of Nicaragua, with the Sandinista Front at the forefront, has been exercising over the country.”
Regarding this parallelism, Zúniga maintains that the Government of Nicaragua “does not want to talk about the human rights violations” that exist in the country, with “more than 350 people murdered, with more than 120,000 exiled and the 183 political prisoners who receive torture today”.
“Not only that, there is also a distortion of reality that is made with the victims of abuse, since the abuser blames the victim for being the one who tempts, for being the one who originated the abuse. In a way, Daniel Ortega and the Sandinista Front tell Nicaraguans that they deserve these human rights violations because they wanted to stage a coup instead of accepting that what was happening was a genuine social protest,” he explained.
A documentary made in secret
Making a documentary of this type was not an easy task. She was studying at Stanford University, California, when she was presented with the opportunity to do this audiovisual work as a final project. But she had to do it in secret to avoid possible reprisals from the ruling party when she set foot in her native country again. “I did it in total silence,” she confessed.
At first he thought “of launching the documentary at the beginning of 2018”, when he was already back in Nicaragua, but he preferred to “wait a bit to change some scenes”.
“In April the humanitarian crisis exploded and later, in 2019, when I was already in exile in Costa Rica, I premiered it in several countries.”
Although she prefers not to give personal details to protect her integrity, Leonor Zúniga assures that she does not consider returning to Nicaragua “until the conditions of protection of human rights change radically.”
“All of us who want to use our voice to tell our truth cannot have a space in Nicaragua,” she said, and said that she decided to leave the country to be able to use her voice.
“And this is the way I use my voice, presenting these uncomfortable movies, but they talk about the issues that are very important to talk about,” he concluded.
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