8 de diciembre 2024
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Henry Briceño, a journalist and small business owner in San Rafael del Sur, recounted on the program La Tertulia of Confidencial how he and his family were detained by the police in their city on Sunday, November 24, forcibly taken and clandestinely exiled from Nicaragua. As of the interview on December 6, his properties and businesses were occupied by police officers.
During the second half of November, the regime of Daniel Ortega and Rosario Murillo escalated a hunt for citizens identified as opponents, resulting in the kidnapping and disappearance of at least thirty citizens, according to the Blue and White Monitoring group on its social media.
Briceño was one of them.
In his interview with journalist Carlos Fernando Chamorro, broadcast on Confidencial’s YouTube channel to circumvent television censorship in Nicaragua, Briceño explained that on Sunday, November 24, shortly after lunch, four police vehicles arrived at his house, carrying 20 police officers, led by the chief of police from San Rafael del Sur, Lazaro Clemente Quintanilla.
The police chief questioned Briceño, telling him he was the leader of the opposition in the city and surrounding communities, and that he was being detained and exiled from that moment. He asked for time to inform his wife, who was inside the house. Instead, the 20 officers violently took control of the house.
As with other citizens, the officers did not present any judicial order, and they did not allow the Briceño family to take anything with them. Briceño highlighted the verbal and physical violence used against him and his family. “They put two policemen by my wife’s side; two more by my daughter’s side, and for my son, an 11-year-old child, they rudely told him: ‘sit there, you screwed-up kid,’ in a hammock we had,” he said.
Shortly afterward, they were taken to two patrol cars: his wife and daughter in one, and he and his son in another. When leaving the city, the police chief, Lázaro Quintanilla, driving the vehicle transporting Briceño and his son, contacted General Horacio Rocha, who ordered them to report from every point of the route, persistently asking if the target was under control. When they reached El Crucero, an officer from Managua delivered a package to them.
A few hours later, they would discover what was inside that package.
Henry Briceño endured months of persecution and harassment
The problems for the Briceño family didn’t start on November 24; they had been ongoing for a long time. The journalist explained that they had been “harassed, besieged, and persecuted for months. A member of the counterintelligence would show up at 5:30 in the morning, ringing our doorbell, demanding we open, give them our phones to inspect, and take pictures of us in our pajamas,” he recounted.
“Something very traumatic, very painful for me, was that a couple of months ago my brother Pedro died in Carazo, and we informed the intelligence services that we were going to the wake and burial in Diriamba. While at the cemetery, I received a call from the intelligence service, telling us to take photos of where we appeared, and to make sure the coffin of my brother was visible. They reached that level with us, but we were willing to resist,” he recalled.
Other officers told them they had to report wherever they went, whether taking one of their children to the doctor, going to the market, shopping in Managua, or performing car maintenance. “It was a terrible harassment that we endured because we wanted to stay in our country. We never thought of leaving Nicaragua, because we knew if we left, they would steal our properties,” he declared.
This is exactly what happened with the four properties, which have not been in his name but rather in his family’s name since 2012. Briceño said that he had been confirmed from San Rafael del Sur that his house was being occupied by two police officers; the gate of the Cabaña del Vivero was closed, as was Hostal El Central and Motel La Loma.
The cabin, the hostel, and the motel were businesses the family had built over the years, “buying land and constructing. No one gave us a stone or a building,” he pointed out. The couple purchased land and built “under the watchful eye of the authorities who control these businesses,” referring to Intur, the Police, the Government, MINSA, and DGI.
“Walk, you sons of…”
After stopping at El Crucero to await the officer delivering the package, the police vehicles entered Rivas, heading to the police station where they switched vehicles: his wife and daughter boarded one car, and Briceño and his son were put in another. From that point, the Rivas police were responsible for taking them to the border, where they arrived at 7:40 p.m. The police consulted with Rocha, who told them to leave them at the border, saying “you all know where to leave them.”
The vehicles then traveled along a path parallel to the Peñas Blancas border station, covering about two kilometers through the wilderness. Soon after, they encountered a group of Nicaraguan Army officers. When they arrived at this military group, “they told us ‘get out.’ The first thing I thought was that they were going to kill us because it was a forested area,” Briceño recalls.
After getting out of the vehicles, they were made to walk a little, cross some kind of gate, and move further into the jungle terraign. They were then told to line up, and photos and videos were taken of them with cellphones. They were called by name, and then they learned what was in the package: new passports for all four of them, issued that same day. They were then told, “Get out, sons of…,” and forced them onto a path.
It was night, and there was no lighting. The path was “muddy, full of ditches and logs, and very dark. We didn’t have anything with us. I injured my foot, where I have four nails in it. We fell three times,” he recalled.
After being abandoned by the officers in the mountains, Briceño and his family walked southward until they reached the Costa Rican border post, where a surprised Border Guard received them after seeing them emerge from the dark path. “He asked, ‘Who are you?’ I explained that we were Nicaraguans who had been expelled from our country, and we weren’t criminals. They offered us dinner and coffee and called other authorities who ordered us to be well-treated,” he added.
Next, other migration officials from Peñas Blancas arrived and took them in an official vehicle to the Costa Rican Immigration office, where they were treated with humanity, “very different from the authorities of my country.” That night, they slept on concrete benches, and the next morning, they were given breakfast and presented to the Head of Immigration at the border post.
This official explained what they would need to do when arriving in San Jose, and upon seeing them covered in mud and that they had spent the night sleeping on a bench, he made the necessary arrangements to send them to San Jose in an Immigration vehicle, where they were also treated with the sensitivity their case required.
Looking back on the exile of his family, Briceño emphasizes that his eleven-year-old son “is the first child to be exiled and confiscated because this child has assets, or he had, because the Ortega-Murillo government just snatched them away. I inherited all the assets we had obtained transparently to my wife and two children. I had given them to them because they deserved it for having accompanied me for so many years in this struggle to create this heritage that was our future, and it has been completely destroyed by the Ortega-Murillo dictatorship.”
Now safe under the protection of the Costa Rican state, Briceño plans to file a complaint with any human rights organization willing to listen to how he was clandestinely exiled, continuing to expose the brutality of the regime of Daniel Ortega and Rosario Murillo, who, unable to force them to leave the country voluntarily, expelled them with police force.
Looking back, Briceño believes the family’s decision not to abandon their properties and flee on their own is what led to this forced exile, which his entire family is now enduring. “All of this seems absurd to me, it’s an atrocity, and someone will have to answer for this in due time,” he concluded.
This article was published in Spanish in Confidencial and translated by Havana Times. To get the most relevant news from our English coverage delivered straight to your inbox, subscribe to The Dispatch.
