The activist and president of the Unión Democrática Renovadora (Unamos), Suyen Barahona, was able to reunite with her five-year-old son and share a moment with him, after being forcibly separated for 19 months.
Previously, the president of Unamos was able to speak, via video call, with her little son who was outside Nicaragua in charge of his father.
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For more than 18 months, the authorities of “El Nuevo Chipote” prevented the boy’s letters and drawings from being delivered to his mother, despite the fact that the lawyer for the former politician filed several appeals before the Court of Appeals of Managua.
In interview with Article 66the president of the Unión Democrática Renovadora (Unamos), expressed feeling “absolutely happy” for having been reunited with “colochito” as she affectionately calls her little son, after a year and eight months of forced separation.
“Since they took me out of my house in the presence of my son, it was one of my great concerns and my main demand, to be able to see my family and my son, my son whom I left four and a half years old and who is now six. », Barahona said.
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She also regretted not having been able to attend her son’s two birthdays because she was a prisoner of the Nicaraguan regime. “I always demanded the right of any mother to see her son,” she stressed.
She emphasized that Ortega’s action of not allowing political prisoners to see their children is “one of the greatest cruelties and tortures, because they denied us that right, but today I feel happy and absolutely grateful to each one of the people who contributed so that I could see it for the first time on December 25 – 2022 – ».
“Isolation was cruel”
The former political kidnapped highlighted that the isolation suffered by the four captive opponents in “El Nuevo Chipote”, which she considers to be the harshest and cruelest thing she could experience.
“The fact of not being able to interact with anyone, of not being able to read and write for more than a year and a half, in addition to being fed, were the cruelest treatments we suffered,” he added.
She also indicated that due to the precariousness that was experienced in prison, many opponents left with skin fungus “and in my case many problems sleeping (…) —but— I left deeply committed so that in Nicaragua there is freedom and justice that has been the main demand for many years.
«In addition, I am committed so that no other mother has to experience this immense pain of being separated from her children; I am also committed so that in Nicaragua we do not have to live through another dictatorship,” she stressed.
Regarding the fact that the regime took away the Nicaraguan nationality of the 222 former political prisoners, the opposition member said with aplomb that “that will never be possible because I will always be Nicaraguan and I will never stop aspiring or fighting to return, because we know that this dictatorship — that of Ortega—is unsustainable.”
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Suyen Barahona was sentenced by Ulisa Yaoska Tapia Silva, head of the Thirteenth Criminal Trial Court of Managua, to eight years in prison for the crime of “undermining national integrity.” The Sandinista dissident was also disqualified from holding public office.
She was released on February 9, in a group of 222 political prisoners, who were sent into exile in the United States. In addition, she ordered her deputies to urgently approve a constitutional reform to withdraw the detainees’ Nicaraguan citizenship. Now those people are in the United States, under humanitarian parole.
