On Monday, November 8, 2021, the La Modelo Penitentiary Center in Managua reported that, during the morning tour of the cells, they found prisoner Santos Sebastián Flores Castillo dead. According to the dictatorship’s jailers, the man died of a heart attack.
His family, a good percentage of public opinion and human rights organizations did not believe the version of the prison guards for a gigantic reason that opposes all “coincidence”: the man found dead was nothing more and nothing less than the lawyer who a few years earlier had publicly denounced the Sandinista dictator Daniel Ortega of having sexually abused and impregnated his sister when she was 15 years old.
Another reason convinced the family of the man who died in prison that it was not a “natural death” or suicide, as they wanted to make out at the beginning, but rather a slow, gradual, progressive murder, through torture, humiliation and cruel and inhuman treatment until taking his life to “silence” him. The family assures that the body of their relative showed marks of torture, extreme thinness and blows.
Both family members and human rights organizations demanded that the prison authorities perform a new autopsy and make the results public, but this was never achieved. The man paid with his life for having defended his sister from the sexual abuse to which she had been subjected by Ortega, who had previously been denounced for another sexual abuse against his own stepdaughter or legal daughter, because he had adopted her, Zoilamérica, his daughter. woman, today vice-dictator, Rosario Murillo.
Origin of the tragedy
Santos Sebastián was a lawyer and notary public who litigated in the courts of Managua and led a life like the average Nicaraguan: working to live. She was part of a brood of 8 siblings, among whom was Elvia Junieth, a young girl who was 15 years old in 2005.
That year, when Ortega began his “pre-campaign” with a view to the 2006 presidential elections, the Flores Castillo family, like the good Sandinistas that they were, joined all the proselytizing activities and that’s where the tragedy began.
The young girl Elvia Junieth had the bad luck that Ortega noticed her and, after photos and closeness with the Sandinista leader, according to the brother in his complaint to human rights organizations, they began a “relationship” that, although it was with The young woman’s consent was illegal because she was a minor.
Related news: Santos Flores, who accused Daniel Ortega of raping his 15-year-old sister, dies in Tipitapa prison
In 2010, Elvia Junieth became pregnant, supposedly as a result of the relationship with the dictator, and it is as a result of that pregnancy that the girl’s lawyer and brother decided to file complaints about the case, first before the Nicaraguan Center for Human Rights ( CENIDH) and before the Presidency of the Republic itself. Furthermore, the case becomes public, and that is when Santos Sebastián begins to suffer reprisals while his sister, already in 2011, gives birth to a girl, who was supposedly the biological daughter of the tyrant.
Although Santos Sebastián continued his work as a trial lawyer and notary, he continued to report threats of all kinds, and even warned that he could be the victim of a judicial setup to take him to jail and end his life in prison.
Indeed, in 2013, the jurist was accused by the state official, who worked as a public defender, Lucila Narcisa Cortez García, of “aggravated rape.” Flores Castillo was arrested, subjected to an accelerated judicial process and that same year he was sentenced to 15 years in prison, which, according to the sentence, he had to serve in the La Modelo Penitentiary Center.
Torture, humiliation and inhuman treatment
Santos Sebastián’s relatives maintained at all times that their relative was imprisoned “unfairly” for having defended his sister.
On repeated occasions, both the lawyer’s mother and he himself pointed out to the CENIDH the mistreatment and torture to which he was being subjected.
In a letter to CENIDH, Flores Castillo recounted details of the torture he suffered in prison and described his suffering for having reported Ortega’s sexual abuse against his sister as “revenge.”
“I can no longer stand this torture and this unjust imprisonment (…) I hold Daniel Ortega responsible for anything that happens to me in this prison or anywhere in Nicaragua,” the prisoner said in the letter sent to the human rights organization.
Related news: Nicaraguan political prisoners who died in police custody
Among the tortures reported is even sexual abuse against the lawyer, at the hands of common prisoners and with the knowledge of the prison guards who did nothing to protect him.
Likewise, they limited his food, drinking water, and access to medical care and medicine to the minimum possible.
Despite all the suffering to which the lawyer was subjected, he never retracted the accusation against Ortega. He maintained his point until the end. He lost his life while six of his brothers had to leave the country to be safe from the dictator’s reprisals.
