The Mothers of April Association (AMA) recalled that this June 27 marks three years of “impunity” for the murder of carrier and merchant Yalmar Antonio Zeledón Olivas, who was shot while traveling with his foster father Edgard Montenegro. According to the report, motorists shot him in the back with long-range weapons.
Father and son were in Honduras providing support to find employment on farms to other Nicaraguan refugees, who were also fleeing the regime of Daniel Ortega and Rosario Murillo, despite the fact that the Montenegro family did not have the conditions to live in Honduras either. On June 27, 2019, Edgard along with Yalmar left the Los Trojes community to look for a telephone signal and call Nicaragua to ask for food support, but both were ambushed by motorists who shot at them.
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Both were found lying in the middle of the road. One was shot in the neck and the other in the leg. Zeledón had participated in the protests and the roadblocks that were erected in El Cuá, municipality of Jinotega, since the outbreak of the sociopolitical crisis.
Yalmar Zeledón’s mother remembers him as a man who “gave his life for his father, followed him everywhere.” He was born in Yalí, Jinotega. From the age of seven he lived with his parents in Wiwilí, he was married to Mayra Villagra, originally from El Cuá and they lived with his four children until January 2019, when he moved to Honduras seeking refuge. . He worked as a transporter and merchant, he drove the family truck, he handled the retail distribution of the products that his mother traded, and he supported his father in the work of the farm.
«Although he had the surname Zeledón, given by his biological father, for him his real father, the one who raised him from the age of two, took care of him, loved him all his life as if he were his own son, was Edgard Montenegro Centeno, with whom he his mother Cándida Olivas Rivera married”, highlights the association.
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The Montenegro Centeno family suffered three more murders in just eight months. The other victim of the Montenegro Centeno family was Francisco Blandón, brother-in-law of Edgard and Oliver Montenegro. Blandón was shot by an unknown person who was traveling on a motorcycle, in the San José de Maleconcito community in the municipality of Wiwilí, department of Jinotega.
His relatives denounced that it was the work of the paramilitaries of the Ortega regime who infiltrated the shelters of the exiles. AMA has denounced that four years after the civic rebellion they have “lived” under a police state, in constant harassment and intimidation, “especially during the anniversary of the murders of our relatives.”
