A year after freedom flight from Nicaragua: Gracias, America
February 6 marked the one-year anniversary of a flight arranged by the U.S. government to bring 222 Nicaraguan political prisoners to this country. The chartered plane flew from Managua to Washington, D.C., and freedom!
I had been under arrest for 18 months on trumped-up charges of seeking to “undermine Nicaragua´s sovereignty.” In a kangaroo trial, I was sentenced to eight years in prison and stripped of my Nicaraguan citizenship by Daniel Ortega’s Marxist dictatorship that has been in power for 17 years. During this time, he had dismantled Nicaragua’s democracy and ruined its economy.
Like most of those freed that day, I had been held in Nicaragua´s notorious El Chipote prison. I was arrested 2021 when my wife and I were at the border with Costa Rica to fly from Liberia, across the border, to the U.S. so I could undergo surgery.
Nicaraguan authorities cleared my wife to go but confiscated my passport and told me to return to
Managua to “fix my legal problems.”
EL CHIPOTE ‘STILL HAUNTS ME’
No sooner had I left the border than a posse of Nicaraguan police vehicles pursued my car at speeds sometimes surpassing 60 mph. The chase ended after an hour at a bridge the police had closed. I was frisked, handcuffed and taken to El Chipote.
My stay at El Chipote still haunts me. We had windows with bars but no glass. When it rained, our cells flooded. Mosquitos were a constant problem. We were interrogated twice a day, with the night sessions timed to interrupt our sleep. I lost 20 pounds because the food was so bad. Periodically, we were ordered to strip, stand in the hall and searched for contraband.
While I was at El Chipote, Hugo Torres — a former Sandinista general who was also jailed — died of cancer. Perhaps because of this, my routine began to change.
I had my blood pressure checked and temperature taken three times a day. I assume that I got this special treatment because Ortega feared that I, too, might die because of hip pain and advanced age (78).
MANAGUA AIRPORT
On Feb. 9, in the early morning, a guard opened the small box on the steel door to my cell through which my two fellow inmates and I received our food rations. He yelled out my name, then handed me my civilian clothing. A half hour later, I and others were herded into a huge space with a couple of hundred other prisoners.
Eventually, we were marched to buses with papered-over windows and taken to the tarmac of the Managua airport.
Each of us was ordered to sign a paper, though it was too dark to read its contents. Unless we signed, we were told, we could not leave the bus.
I later learned that, in that document, we expressed our willingness to go to the U.S. and that it was a U.S. requirement.
Since I was sitting near the front of the bus, I was one of the first to get off. On the tarmac, I saw police and army personnel and, in the distance, a jumbo jet.
NICARAGUAN PASSPORTS
Confused and groggy, I was hustled to a person who rifled through a box full of newly issued Nicaraguan passports, handed me mine and told me to move on.
I spotted Martha Youth — a friend and former staffer at the U.S. embassy in Nicaragua —walking from the plane towards me. We hugged each other and I finally grasped that this was a U.S. government operation and that the plane was going to take us to freedom.
All I could think of was the flight of U.S. diplomats who were freed in 1981 after being held hostage in Iran.
There was, however, one big difference. Their flight was one of unmitigated joy, but my emotions were mixed. I was glad to be freed, for which I am eternally grateful to the U.S. But I was also sad to leave my beloved homeland.