Torture by Police, Forced Disappearance & Other Ill Treatment In the early years of the 21st Century, 2000 to
2025 gvnet.com/torture/Nicaragua.htm
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CAUTION: The following links
have been culled from the web to illuminate the situation in Nicaragua. Some of these links may lead to websites
that present allegations that are unsubstantiated or even false. No
attempt has been made to validate their authenticity or to verify their content. HOW TO USE THIS WEBPAGE Students If you are looking
for material to use in a term-paper, you are advised to scan the postings on
this page and others to see which aspects of Torture by Authorities are of
particular interest to you. You might
be interested in exploring the moral justification for inflicting pain or
inhumane or degrading treatment or punishment in order to obtain critical
information that may save countless lives, or to elicit a confession for a
criminal act, or to punish someone to teach him a lesson outside of the
courtroom. Perhaps your paper might
focus on some of the methods of torture, like fear, extreme temperatures,
starvation, thirst, sleep deprivation, suffocation, or immersion in freezing
water. On the other hand, you might
choose to write about the people acting in an official capacity who
perpetrate such cruelty. There is a
lot to the subject of Torture by Authorities.
Scan other countries as well as this one. Draw comparisons between activity in
adjacent countries and/or regions.
Meanwhile, check out some of the Term-Paper resources
that are available on-line. ***
ARCHIVES *** 2020 Country
Reports on Human Rights Practices: Nicaragua U.S. Dept of State Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and
Labor, 30 March 2021 www.state.gov/reports/2020-country-reports-on-human-rights-practices/nicaragua/
[accessed 29 July
2021] TORTURE AND OTHER
CRUEL, INHUMAN, OR DEGRADING TREATMENT OR PUNISHMENT Although the law
prohibits such practices, cases of torture were well documented, and public
officials intentionally carried out acts that resulted in severe physical or
mental suffering for the purposes of securing information, inflicting
punishment, and psychologically deterring other citizens from reporting on
the government’s actions or participating in civic actions against the
government. Members of civil society and student leaders involved in the
protests that began in April 2018 were more likely than members of other
groups to be subjected to such treatment. On March 8, police
captured Melvin Urbina in Posoltega. When the
police released him on March 10, Urbina was unable to walk and badly bruised
in his eyes, ears, legs, back, and abdomen. He was taken to a hospital and
died on March 12. Urbina’s family reported police surveilled Urbina’s wake
and burial and at one point attempted to take the body to perform a forensics
analysis. Human rights groups documented several cases of government
supporters who tortured opposition activists by using sharp objects to carve
the letters “FSLN” into the arms and legs of opposition activists. Local human rights
organizations said men and women political prisoners were subjected to sexual
violence while in the custody of security forces. Human rights organizations
reported female prisoners were regularly subjected to strip searches,
degrading treatment, and rape threats while in custody of parapolice
forces, prison officials, and police. Prison officials forced female
prisoners to squat naked and beat them on their genitals to dislodge any supposed
hidden items. Freedom House
Country Report 2020 Edition freedomhouse.org/country/nicaragua/freedom-world/2020 [accessed 15 May
2020] F3. IS THERE PROTECTION FROM THE ILLEGITIMATE
USE OF PHYSICAL FORCE AND FREEDOM FROM WAR AND INSURGENCIES? The 2018
antigovernment protest movement was met with violent repression by police and
informally allied armed forces, resulting in the deaths of at least 325
people. In an August 2018 report on repression of the protest movement, the
OHCHR detailed severe abuses including psychological and physical torture of
detainees, including sexual violence, forced confessions, disappearances, and
extrajudicial killings. In 2019 there were reports of dozens of
antigovernment activists being killed in more remote parts of the country,
allegedly by police and paramilitaries. Additionally, in May, Eddy Montes
Praslin, who was reportedly jailed in October 2018 after complaining to
police that progovernment activists were occupying
his property, was shot and killed at La Modelo
prison near Managua. News of his death prompted the opposition Civic Alliance
for Justice and Democracy to withdraw from a dialogue with the government
until authorities released individuals designated as political prisoners by
the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC). The dialogue ended in
August when the government formally canceled it. Freed Nicaraguan
prisoner tells of torture Agence France-Presse AFP, 23 April 2019 ticotimes.net/2019/04/23/freed-nicaraguan-prisoner-tells-of-torture [accessed 13 May
2019] One Nicaraguan guard
pinned his hand to a table with his knee while another ripped out a nail with
a pair of pliers. Opposition supporter Lenin Rojas, recently released from
prison to house arrest, says he screamed in pain. The 36-year-old
says his cry was heard throughout the El Chipote
prison in Nicaragua’s capital, Managua. But his torturers
weren’t finished. “They started
hitting me again. They left me almost unconscious, they put me back in that
same position, and ripped out two more nails,” said the father of four, showing
his mutilated fingers. “The beatings got
ever more brutal to the point that I asked them to kill me, to put a bullet
in me, rather than continuing to torture me. “They were annoyed
at not getting a reply to their questions… an inspector said they were going
to throw all of us — the arrested demonstrators — into the crater of the
Masaya volcano.” That’s an active
volcano 20 kilometers (12 miles) south of Managua. It emits huge amounts of sulphur dioxide. In Nicaragua,
Torture Is Used to Feed ‘Fake News’ Charles Davis, Daily
Beast, 4 October 2018 www.thedailybeast.com/in-nicaragua-torture-is-used-to-feed-fake-news [accessed 4 October
2018] A gun was pointed at
her head, one of her comrades was on his knees threatened with execution, and
Dania Valeska Alemán
Sandoval told her interrogators what they wanted to hear. Nicaragua’s Chief
of Torture Center Promoted José Miguel Vivanco, Executive Director, Americas Division, Human
Rights Watch HRW, 11 September 2018 www.hrw.org/news/2018/09/11/nicaraguas-chief-torture-center-promoted [accessed 12
September 2018] Pérez Oliva directs
the "El Chipote" detention center, the
"main place" where authorities perpetrate egregious abuses against
anti-government demonstrators, according to a recent report by the Office of
the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR). The human rights body
documented allegations of rape, electrocution, lacerations with barbed wire,
beatings with steel tubes and strangulation – among others – against
protestors across the country. Hundreds have been detained in El Chipote since the crackdown on dissent began in April
2018. Human Rights Watch
obtained testimony of two cases where El Chipote
authorities repeatedly refused to comply with court orders to provide medical
attention to detainees or allow a judge to verify the detention conditions.
News reports and testimony obtained by Human Rights Watch indicate detainees
have been forced to record confessions incriminating themselves or other
protestors to obtain release. In one case, El Chipote authorities refused to disclose the whereabouts
of four activists for several days after police took them into custody. OHCHR
considered this a case of enforced disappearance. Two male activists were
beaten and forced to hold straining positions for several hours and a female
activist was forced to remain in her underwear, relatives said. The four
activists were accused of crimes including terrorism; they remain in
detention in another facility. UN condemns
Nicaragua government 'repression and torture' BBC, 29 August 2018 www.bbc.com/news/world-latin-america-45341578 [accessed 3
September 2018] WHAT ALLEGEDLY
HAPPENED IN DETENTION?
- The UN Human Rights Office says that it has received numerous accounts alleging
acts of torture and ill-treatment of detainees carried out by police or
prison authorities. It says that there
are indications that some detainees were burned with Taser guns or
cigarettes. Female detainees
alleged that they were raped and that threats of sexual abuse were
"common". Male detainees reported being raped with rifles and other
objects, the report says. WHAT DOES THE
NICARAGUAN GOVERNMENT SAY? - It has strongly rejected the report and says that it
has ignored the violence aimed at overthrowing the democratically elected
government. The government
statement denies there have been any documented cases of torture or sexual
assault and states that all detentions were carried out in accordance with
the law. The government also
argues that the killings of the 22 police officers prove that the
anti-government demonstrations had not been peaceful. Nicaraguan
protester recounts gruesome torture amid widespread violence Lisa Riordan
Seville, Grace Gonzalez and Belisa Morillo, NBC News, 22 July 2018 www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/alex-jones-compares-himself-woodward-bernstein-move-dismiss-sandy-hook-n893841 [accessed 23 July
2018] [accessed 9 January
2019] For eight days,
night and day bled together as Marco Novoa, 25, lay on the muddy floor of his cell. First he was
beaten, the Nicaraguan protester said, then stripped and electrocuted. Bones
in his feet were broken under the butt of automatic weapons. But he said his
torturers, who he believes were men aligned with the repressive government in
Nicaragua, did not stop there. When they did not get the answers they sought,
he said, they waterboarded and sodomized him. “They destroyed me
completely,” he told NBC News and Noticias Telemundo Investiga in an
exclusive interview. “But the thing I was most afraid of was that my body
wouldn’t be returned to the arms of my mother and father.” Told at times in
painful detail, Novoa’s story offers a window into
the brutality of the government crackdown against protests that have
convulsed Nicaragua. Since April, the government has taken an iron-fist
approach to street marches held against an overhaul to the country's social
security system. Conclusions and
recommendations of the Committee against Torture U.N. Convention
against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or
Punishment -- Doc. CAT/C/NIC/CO/1
(2009) www1.umn.edu/humanrts/cat/observations/nicaragua2009.html [accessed 15
Aug 2013] Arbitrary detention 20. The Committee
shares the concern expressed in the report of the Working Group on Arbitrary Detention
(A/HRC/4/40/Add.3) regarding the lack of effective, clear and systematic
registers in police stations that would make it possible to establish with
clarity and certainty when detainees have entered and left police stations,
before which authorities they have been brought and where, and which of the
competent authorities is currently responsible for them (arts. 2, 11 and 16). The State party
must arrange for substantial improvements in the system of registers kept in
its police stations. These registers should make it possible to accurately
determine, inter alia: the situation of all detainees, including the date and
time of their arrest; the police officers responsible for taking them into
custody; the date and time on which the Office of the Public Prosecutor, the
detainees’ families and their defending counsel were notified of their
arrest; the date and time on which they were physically brought before a
judge; and the date and time on which they left the police station and the
authority into whose charge they were handed. AMNESTY
INTERNATIONAL From an old article -- URL not available Article was
published sometime prior to 2015 ARBITRARY DETENTION,
TORTURE AND OTHER ILL-TREATMENT - Human rights organizations reported that
PLC supporters were arrested by the police and ill-treated in custody.
Detainees reported being beaten, and women and girl detainees said that they
were forced to remove their clothes in front of male officers, who humiliated
them and threatened them with sexual violence ***
EARLIER EDITIONS OF SOME OF THE ABOVE *** Freedom House
Country Report - Political Rights: 4 Civil Liberties: 3 Status: Partly Free 2009 Edition www.freedomhouse.org/report/freedom-world/2009/nicaragua [accessed 6 February
2013] LONG
URL ç 2009 Country Reports begin on Page 21 [accessed 13 May
2020] The judiciary remains
dominated by FSLN and PLC appointees. Many judges are susceptible to
political influence and corruption, and the courts suffer from long delays
and a large backlog of cases. There is only one public defender available for
every 60,557 people in Nicaragua, and access to justice is especially
deficient in rural areas and on the Caribbean coast. Forced confessions
to the police remain a problem, as do arbitrary arrests. Insufficient funding
of the police affects performance and has led to a shortage of officers.
Prison conditions continue to be poor, and the facilities are underfunded. Human Rights
Reports » 2005 Country Reports on Human Rights Practices U.S. Dept of State Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and
Labor, March 8, 2006 www.state.gov/g/drl/rls/hrrpt/2005/61734.htm [accessed 6 February
2013] 2009-2017.state.gov/j/drl/rls/hrrpt/2005/61734.htm [accessed 4 July
2019] TORTURE
AND OTHER CRUEL, INHUMAN, OR DEGRADING TREATMENT OR PUNISHMENT – Although the law
prohibits such practices, there were credible reports that some police
physically mistreated detainees, particularly to obtain confessions. The IG's
office reported receiving 480 complaints of human rights violations by police
officers during the first half of the year, including unlawful killings (see
section 1.a.) and complaints forwarded by the Office of Civil Inspection for
Professional Responsibility; the IG's Office found that 126 complaints had merit.
The IG's office punished 204 officers for violating human rights. As a
result, police discharged three officers dishonorably, remanded six to the
courts on both human rights and corruption charges, and gave the rest lesser
punishments, including demotion, suspension, and loss of pay. All
material used herein reproduced under the fair use exception of 17 USC § 107
for noncommercial, nonprofit, and educational use. PLEASE RESPECT COPYRIGHTS OF COMPONENT
ARTICLES. Cite this
webpage as: Patt, Prof. Martin, "Torture by Police, Forced Disappearance
& Other Ill Treatment in the early years of the 21st Century-
Nicaragua", http://gvnet.com/torture/Nicaragua.htm, [accessed
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