26 de noviembre 2024
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The Nicaraguan justice system failed Raquel Salinas Barahona on three separate occasions. The first time was in 2017, when she denounced her partner, Oscar Manuel Garcia, for physical and psychological abuse. That time, it took the courts more than two years to find him guilty. The second time was in 2020 when he was released, just six months after being sentenced for domestic violence. The third and last failure came in 2021, when her freed aggressor killed her, and the police allowed him to remain a fugitive for a year and a half.
Raquel, 35, is from the north-central Nicaraguan department of Matagalpa, where she suffered abuse for years, until her partner finally strangled her. That’s when the authorities “vindicated themselves” by sentencing him to life in prison.
The case of Raquel Salinas exemplifies the ways that the Nicaraguan justice system fails women who have fallen victim to machista violence. Instead of prioritizing the denunciations, it releases the aggressors as part of a program called “family coexistence.” The latter is a change in prison policy initiated under the regime of Daniel Ortega and Rosario Murillo in 2014, as supposedly a “humanitarian policy of reconciliation.”
According to the regime’s 2016 rationale, the measure grants freedom to prisoners found guilty of lesser crimes, and serving sentences of five years or less. However, there are cases where violent offenders like Gabriel Flores, whose combined sentence was for six years, eight months – four for aggravated theft and two years, eight months for physical and psychological violence – are released prematurely as well.
At least 51,021 common prisoners have been freed under the “family coexistence” policy between January 2014 and November 2024, according to Confidencial’s tallies. The change in jail policy has been baptized as “presidential pardons” in the language of the Ortega media, although such pardons aren’t framed anywhere in Nicaraguan law.
Nearly 9 out of every 100 released prisoners later reoffend
Some 8.5% of the prisoners released through such pardons later “return” to prison, as even Julio Orozco, director of Nicaragua’s Penitentiary System, admitted. Given that percentage, Confidencial estimates a total of 4,336 released prisoners have gone back to prison for new offenses.
In the view of prison head Orozco, the 8.5% recidivism rate is “relatively low.” However, the official didn’t specify what crimes those released prisoners had committed, or if the recurring offenses had involved the same type of crimes, or more serious offenses such as femicides or other murders.
Between 2014 and 2024, there’ve been ten documented femicides at the hands of prisoners who had been released by the regime. There’s been at least one other recorded case of a near-femicide, and another murder committed by a pardoned prisoner.
In 2020, the Women’s Network against Violence denounced that a group of 2,815 prisoners released in May of that year, included abusers, rapists and even perpetrators of femicide who had served less than half of their sentences. One of these was Oscar Manuel Garcia.
The first thing Garcia did upon his pardon from prison, according to Raquel’s relatives and the local media, was to go look for Raquel. A little over a year later, on June 1, 2021, Raquel was found dead. After strangling her, Oscar Manuel Garcia fled into the mountains of the Jinotega department. He later returned to his mother’s house in Santa Emilia, outside the city of Matagalpa, and dug a basement hideout to hide in. He wasn’t discovered and rearrested until January 10, 2023.
Femicides committed by brothers, nephews, and sons after pardons
Ivette Blanco would perhaps not have died on December 31, 2022, if her brother, Jesus Antonio Blanco – whose criminal history dated back to the beginning of the 2000s – hadn’t been released just nine days before under the “family coexistence” program.
Neighbors testified that Jesus Blanco came to his sister’s house that day, located in Managua’s Martha Quezada barrio, clamoring over an inheritance. He then stabbed her to death.
Maria Torrsez, 80, was murdered by her nephew, Jose Salgado, who had been sentenced to 5 years, 6 months in prison for aggravated theft, but who was released under the family coexistence program on October 16, 2023. Three months, eleven days later, he killed her.
One of the woman’s sons affirmed that the killer had threatened her with death in April 2021, because she had opened the door of her house the day the police came to take him prisoner. Salgado had hidden in her house after committing the crimes he was eventually sentenced for.
“The day of the crime, the assassin carried off my mother’s television and cellphone to make it appear that the motivation for the crime was robbery, but it really was in revenge,” Hilmer Silva, Torrez’ son, told the government-allied radio station “Radio Ya.”
On September 4, 2024, Jose Salgado, 41, received a life sentence. According to the family, this man – who reportedly raped his aunt before killing her – neither asked forgiveness nor demonstrated any remorse during the hearings.
Cristina Calix Lopez, 66, was also killed by a relative who had been favored by early release. The perpetrator was her own son, Dimas Palma, who’d been freed on March 8, 2019, when there was still two years and nine months to go on the sentence he had received for aggravated theft.
In November 2019, the same year he was pardoned, Palma attacked another relative, Pablo Mejia. Since he failed to appear at the initial hearing for that offense, the judge issued an arrest warrant. However, he wasn’t actually sent back to prison until September 2023, after he had killed his own mother with a hatchet blow to the head. That offense caused Madriz District Court Judge Omar Engel Castellon, to sentence Palma to 30 years in prison.
Other released prisoners who reoffended
Dereck Gomez, 23, was killed by pardoned criminal Kevin Jose Gonzalez, who had been out of prison for a year and two months, after being pardoned for a theft offense. According to the police version, Gonzalez persuaded Gomez to meet him at a vacant lot near the Managua Cathedral. When Gomez arrived, Gonzalez stabbed him four times – once in the jugular vein, once in the throat, once in the chest, and finally in the head. He also beat him on his face and other parts of his body, then left the scene after taking the victim’s phone and wallet.
Gonzalez was sentenced to 22 years, 6 months for murder, and another four years, six months for aggravated theft.
Masiel Carolina Lopez, 26, escaped an intent to kill her perpetrated by her partner, known as Urbeni, yet another released prisoner. Lopez’ mother said he stabbed her because she went out to the market, although he had forbidden her to do so.
In another case, the entire country reacted with indignation against the femicide of Ericka Martinez in the area around the Military Hospital in Managua. She was murdered by her ex-partner, Geovanny Fonseca, who at the beginning of the month had been in pre-trial detention of a month for psychological violence.
Fonseca was freed with a commitment to receive behavioral therapy, report monthly and maintain a distance of 500 yards from Ericka at all times. They’d given the victim a phone number to call where she could report any incident where her aggressor failed to comply. However, none of this kept him from killing her with a knife on August 21.
Women left “in a defenseless and extremely vulnerable condition”
Nicaraguan feminist Maria Teresa Blandon noted that women victims of violence are left unprotected by the government. “The only option they have at that moment is to count on family support to protect and back them up. Many of them have even had to leave their communities and the country to find safety for themselves,” she stated with regret.
For years, the feminist movement had created a social network in the outer areas of the country in order to accompany women victims of violence. This protective net has been hugely reduced by the massive shuttering of NGOs in Nicaragua.
The little that remains, Maria Teresa affirms, are a few small initiatives or collectives “that can still do something to take on the causes and very serious impacts that gender violence has on women and children.
She criticizes the fact that “the jails are places of punishment and there’s no type of work, or new means of teaching, so that these prisoners can come to understand the seriousness of the harm they’ve committed, not only against the victims, but also against society.”
“The State,” she added, “has established absolutely no protocols for following up on sexual offenders and those who have attempted to take a woman’s life. And the victims are left in a state of defenselessness and extreme vulnerability.”
The regime conceals the size of the prison population
The Ortega-Murillo regime has also failed to reveal clear information about the number of prisoners in Nicaragua, neither those accused of common crimes nor the number of political prisoners, which began to rise following the repression against the 2018 April Rebellion.
The last information on the prison population dates from October 2018, when they informed that there were 20,918 prisoners, according to Word Prison Brief. However, since at that time the official prison capacity was 11,781; that is, there was an overflow population of 9,137. That was the last time the numbers were updated.
The pardons of common prisoners, whose numbers are announced periodically as government achievements, have totaled 51,000.
“We’d have to see how the justice system is functioning in Nicaragua. How it can be possible for them to free so many prisoners, without telling us clearly, or otherwise letting it be known what crime they committed and the seriousness of that crime, or what percentage of their sentences are actually served,” pointed out Nicaraguan feminist Maria Teresa Blandon.
Article 60 of Law 473, the “Law of the Penitentiary Regime and Enforcement of Sentences,” establishes the program of family coexistence as “a period prior to definitive release.” Upon leaving prison, the released offenders should report via mechanisms for control and registration of the National Penitentiary System.
“Under this program, citizens could be placed who generally lack a criminal history, as long as the crimes for which they’ve been tried and sentenced aren’t those which by nature do not allow bail of any type,” the law reads.
The Autonomous Women’s Movement has already declared that the presidency’s decision to free prisoners whose offenses have merited sentences of five years or less was allowing those imprisoned for violence against women to get out of prison.
“With the reform weakening Law #779, almost all the crimes contemplated – except for rape and femicide, the most serious – are part of that packet [crimes of violence against women]. (…) It’s not at all remote that cases of violence against women would figure in those granted early release,” they predicted in 2016.
The releases have occurred to mark special occasions: Nicaraguan Mother’s Day, Christmas, the anniversary of the Revolution, Independence Day celebrations, and even the anniversary of the April 2018 protests, that the regime continues to call a failed attempt at a coup d’etat.
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.
