“Finally I was able to reunite with my free daughter, after one year and eight months of being separated,” announced Tamara Dávila, a Nicaraguan activist and one of the 222 political prisoners exiled by the Sandinista regime to the United States. On her knees next to the airport departure lounge, between tears and unleashed emotions, her mother hugged the seven-year-old girl as if she never wanted to let go of a fact received with joy by the Nicaraguan exile.
Dávila starred last week in a moving statement before the ambassadors of the Organization of American States (OAS). Turned into the voice of all those released, the niece of Ana Margarita Vijil, one of the leaders of the Sandinista dissidence, made it clear that “terror continues in Nicaragua” and that “the dictatorship is holding our families hostage.”
“I am deeply grateful to the Government and the people of the United States for facilitating this reunification, which I hope will soon arrive for all the families of people released from political prison,” added the 42-year-old former political prisoner, who for 22 months in prison suffered the horrors of dictatorship, from psychological torture to total isolation.
Despite this, the greatest cruelty was the separation from his daughter, who witnessed her violent arrest in 2021. “It was the worst torture we suffered,” Dávila acknowledged, after more than 50 days in the US without getting the Sandinista authorities to allow daughter’s trip In July 2022, the opponent went on a hunger strike to allow her daughter access to the prison where she was imprisoned and without seeing her for more than a year.
“They should never have been separated by a dictatorship like the one in Nicaragua, which destroys the country and separates families,” denounced Arturo McFields, former Nicaraguan ambassador to the OAS, dismissed by Ortega after denouncing the horrors of the dictatorship.
The Managua authorities prevent these reunions by denying or slowing down the delivery of documents, both passports and identity cards, to the relatives of the “traitors to the homeland.” And not only that: birth certificates, old age pensions, academic records and documents from the Civil Registry have also disappeared. A many-edged sword of Damocles with which the dictatorship of Daniel Ortega and Rosario Murillo prolongs its persecution and repression against released prisoners and their families.
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