Amid tears, anger and frustration, political prisoners from the Jorge Navarro Penitentiary System in Tipitapa, known as La Modelo, recounted, during family visits they received between August 12 and 13, the persistence of psychological torture perpetrated by officials of that prison, who make them believe that “they are free” and then mock them.
Relatives of political prisoners, who make up the United Group of Political Kidnapped Persons (GSPU), in an interview with Article 66detailed that on August 2, according to the account of their relatives who were unjustly and arbitrarily imprisoned, the guards of La Modelo arrived at galleries 16 and 17 at around 3 in the morning, woke everyone up and ordered them to wash the galleries because “they were going on a trip.”
“They were told that they wanted those cells thoroughly cleaned because they were going ‘on a trip’. They made them wash the entire gallery from the ceiling, the bathrooms, the floor, the walls, they demanded that they get dressed, they took them out to the patio and then they put them back in the cells and they started to make fun of them,” denounced one of the relatives who are members of the GSPU.
Some of the political prisoners were seriously affected by the persistence of this new method of torture applied in La Modelo, to the point of spending almost the entire day crying for not being able to obtain their freedom. “One of them said that he thought he was going to leave in slippers because he had no shoes and he started crying in front of his relative,” said another source consulted by this newspaper.
Political prisoners forced to “strip and squat”
In addition to this torture mechanism, the political prisoners reported that during the last week of July, after the package deliveries on the 26th of that month, the officials organized a search in the galleries, ordered them to strip naked and do squats.
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“They were searched, taken out of the cells in single file, completely naked, and made to do squats, one by one,” said one of the sources.
She added that there are relatives of elderly people who “are outraged by this cruel treatment, because some of them cannot even stand up properly, much less do this type of exercise and, worse still, in such a degrading way, naked.”
According to the relatives, La Modelo officials also maintain practices related to the interruption of the sleep of prisoners of conscience, as they spend several times during the early morning hours knocking on the bars of each cell to interrupt the sleep of political prisoners.
Without medical care or medicines
Families complain that they continue to be denied medical care and access to medicines that are delivered to political prisoners in each package, affecting even elderly people who require daily treatment for chronic illnesses.
They pointed out that there are even prisoners of conscience who have complained that they are “never” given the money or are given it “when they want it or after much pleading,” so some asked that “they not continue to take it because they are not given it and the prison officials are stealing it.”
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They mentioned that in the last month there were some political prisoners who urgently needed dental care, who even cried from severe toothache, “but they didn’t even get a pill.”
They also pointed out that prisoners of conscience live in inhumane conditions inside the prison, which include little access to drinking water, which they are given only a few hours a week; poor and often contaminated food; and few permits for sunbathing, since they are only taken out once or twice a week.
The dictatorship of Daniel Ortega and Rosario Murillo keeps more than 150 people imprisoned for political reasons in Nicaragua, according to data from the Mechanism for the Recognition of Political Prisoners. The GSPU, as it does every month of its visit, reiterated its demand for freedom for each of those deprived of liberty for political reasons in Nicaragua.
