The confinement of political prisoners Roger Reyes Y miguel mendoza has directly affected the health of his daughters, all under ten years of age, for which the lawyer and the sports writer started a hunger strike in El Chipoteso that the regime allows them to see them and thus try to improve them.
“Girls (three and five years old) constantly get sick and I think it’s a way for his body to say: ‘I have a depressed immune system because I feel the absence of my father’”, explains Fernanda Guevara, kings wife.
Margin Pozo, Mendoza’s partner, explained that her nine-year-old daughter has gotten sick more often since the journalist was arrested on June 21, 2021. According to the mother, the girl suffers from anxiety, suffers from headaches and in the last month he has been sick twice.
“The pediatrician and the psychologist agree that this is due to tension or the emotional part because he does not have a fever, he does not have any infection that we can associate with these headaches. We are very concerned, as relatives of Miguel, for the girl’s health, for the emotional part, ”she laments.
Guevara and Pozo spoke with the program This week —which is broadcast on YouTube and Facebook Live, due to government censorship— and explained the decision to start a hunger strike made by the political prisoners to their relatives during the last visit. For Mendoza and Reyes, this would be the extreme measure they would take in the face of the authorities’ denial of requests from prisoners of conscience. Their family fears that their health will deteriorate further due to the poor conditions they find.
With Reyes and Mendoza, there are five political prisoners who have resorted to a hunger strike since last August. In that condition were the activist Tamara Davila and the journalist Michael Morathat they suspended the measure after getting to see their children.
The former guerrilla Dora María Téllez began last week a hunger strike to demand an end to solitary confinement and the torture to which she has been subjected for more than 15 months in the Judicial Assistance Directorate (DAJ).
Concerned about the health of political prisoners
Well comments that She is very worried about the decision that her partner made, so she told him not to put his health at risk, but knowing that his daughter suffers from his absence, he decided to sacrifice himself. Mendoza is a chronic patient and has lost over 30 pounds at El Chipote.
“He (Mendoza) sent word to me with other relatives of prisoners, who share a cell with him, that if they did not let the girl see him before September 19, he was going to make the decision to start a hunger strike. When Miguel expresses something he fulfills it. We are very worried, above all because, as everyone could see on September 1, how Miguel is physically and in health,” warns Pozo.
Guevara indicates that, in the case of Reyes, the decision had been considered for a month. “I feel that Róger found himself between a rock and a hard place because they left him no choice but to go on a hunger strike, to be able to see his daughters. Personally, I am very concerned about his physical health.
Reyes has presented various physical and psychological ailments in prison. He has suffered from depression, stress, severe headaches, was in isolation and on a hunger strike to demand mental health care, according to relatives.
In recent months, Guevara has had to deal with questions from minors about the whereabouts of his father, mainly on special dates. Last June, when Father’s Day was celebrated in Nicaragua, was one of the difficult dates for her eldest daughter, who attends preschool and saw how the other children celebrated with her parents.
It reveals that, until three weeks ago, the two minors found out that Reyes is in prison because he wanted to spare them pain and worry. “I think they feel a lot of peace (to know the whereabouts of their father) because they don’t know the whole context behind it. I can’t deal with these issues with them because, after all, they are girls. My job as a mother has been to protect them as much as possible.”
They ask for “at least one call”
CONFIDENTIAL has confirmed, with reports from human rights defenders and relatives of political prisoners, that at least 18 minors still do not see or have any kind of communication with their parentsunjustly imprisoned in 2021.
One of them is the son of Suyen Barahona, president of the Democratic Renovating Union (Unamos), formerly called the Sandinista Renovating Movement (MRS). The minor has had to remember his mother, whom he has not seen for more than 460 days, through photographs and videos. The five-year-old boy asks about her every day and for her father, César Dubois, it is increasingly difficult to explain her absence.
“It has left a huge void. She (Suyen) is everything in his life. So, these 467 days have been very terrible because we have not been able to count on her, we have not been able to talk, we have been able to see her, hear her laugh. My son always asks about her and the days go by and it is increasingly difficult to justify that absence”, Dubois confesses to This week.
Relatives of Barahona last Thursday they asked the Government of Daniel Ortega and Rosario Murillothat they allow the political prisoner at least one phone call with her son.
“They are violating not only the rights of political prisoners, but also the rights of all these boys and girls who are growing up with that emptiness in their lives,” claims the husband.
