Christopher Mendoza, relative of the political prisoner Miguel Mendoza and member of Independent Journalists and Communicators (PCIN), presented a digital spoken portrait of the prisoner of conscience who is detained in the cells of the Directorate of Judicial Assistance (DAJ), known as “El Nuevo Chipote”.
The sports journalist and chronicler has been in captivity for more than 14 months without being able to see and communicate with his eight-year-old daughter. Mendoza looks very thin, with dark circles under his eyes, and his relatives have explained that his health is getting worse due to all the months he has spent locked up in the prisons of the Nicaraguan dictatorship. Mendoza suffers from uric acid, hypertension and diabetes.
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Pedro Vaca, Special Rapporteur for Freedom of Expression of the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR), assured that Miguel is an example of courage, of people who, for raising their voices against human rights violations, have led them to pay a very high cost of confinement and denying the population to be informed.
“We want to see Miguel Mendoza and see him free,” the IACHR official demanded. He said that the incommunicado and isolation regime, to which Miguel Mendoza is subjected, is reprehensible. He highlighted the torture to which the relatives of political prisoners are also subjected, who are notified a few hours in advance for visits due to the denial of a regular calendar for meetings with their relatives.
He stressed that the political prisoners have suffered a deterioration in their health due to the conditions in which the dictatorship of Ortega and Murillo keep them in the cells of El Chipote. He demanded that Mendoza and all political prisoners be released promptly.
Vilma Núñez, president of the Nicaraguan Center for Human Rights (Cenidh), stressed that in Nicaragua the human rights of the entire population have been violated, including the freedom of expression exercised by citizens, the media and the independent journalistic union. Mendoza, according to Núñez, is in a “torture center.” «A person who is in that confinement, isolated, needs to communicate. For Miguel, being in prison is a double violation of his rights because he needs to express himself », explained the president of the organization.
Erika Guevara Rosas, director for the Americas of Amnesty International (AI), stated that the informative work of journalists has put their lives and physical integrity at risk. “Miguel Mendoza is an unfortunate and devastating example of the victims of human rights violations. Political prisoners have been exposed to torture,” she noted. She indicated that there has been an abusive use of the Judiciary in Nicaragua by the dictatorship of Daniel Ortega and Rosario Murillo.
Guevara Rosas stressed that Mendoza has been prevented from seeing and communicating with his daughter due to a policy of repression by the Ortega regime against political prisoners. “We cannot give up on this demand for freedom for all those imprisoned for political reasons,” she added.
The journalist was captured on June 24, 2021, in the midst of a wave of arrests against opposition leaders and critics of the Government, in the context of the elections last November in which Ortega and his wife, Vice President Rosario Murillo, were re-elected. with seven of his rivals in prison and two in exile. Mendoza was found guilty of crimes of conspiracy to undermine national integrity and propagation of false news. He was sentenced to nine years in prison.
Her relatives continue to denounce that Mendoza “continues to deny her the right to see her 8-year-old daughter, she has not hugged her for 14 months. When the person he called to report the visit was asked, he rudely claimed that “without a judge’s order” he could not enter. It is worth mentioning that Miguel’s lawyer has legally sent 11 requests and to date none has received a response.
Currently, Mendoza’s family maintains a campaign that, through letters written by the daughter of the prisoner of conscience, requests that the regime allow her to see her father, with whom she has not had contact since her arrest. “I am an 8-year-old girl, who waits for her father every day, who wakes up hoping to hug him again, and who needs to be close to him,” says one of the minor’s writings.
