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Nicaragua: They Kill, Attend the Wake and Kidnap the Dead!

The crime against Indigenous leader Brooklyn Rivera in Nicaragua marks the seventh political prisoner to die in state custody since 2019.

By Carlos F. Chamorro (Confidencial)

HAVANA TIMES — The release of photographs showing Miskito Indigenous leader Brooklyn Rivera emaciated and in critical condition, intubated in a hospital bed after having been disappeared for 971 days as a political prisoner of Nicaragua’s dictatorship, foreshadowed a fatal outcome. Yet his family never imagined that, after his death three days later, the torture would continue.

At 8:30 p.m. on May 30, Rivera was declared dead by the Ministry of Health, although the government did not officially announce the news until 24 hours later. Authorities attributed his “physical and neurological deterioration to a bacterium generated by the Covid-19 virus,” without acknowledging that he had been imprisoned by the state for two years and eight months, during which he was never allowed contact with his family or visits from international human rights organizations — the UN Group of Human Rights Experts on Nicaragua (GHREN), the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR), and Amnesty International — all of which had expressed deep concern over his disappearance and demanded his release.

The official version was refuted by his daughter, Tininiska Rivera, who lives in exile in Costa Rica. She recalled that although “he had Covid in 2020, he recovered and lived a normal life. A few days before his arrest (in 2023), we had a very long conversation about everything he was dealing with, and he was fine. He walked well, ate well… They cannot claim, after three years, when we don’t know where they kept him or under what conditions, that this was the cause. What they did to my father was murder him over the course of three years. We do not know what kind of torture he endured to reach that condition and die.”

Brooklyn Rivera’s body was never subjected to an independent autopsy to determine the cause of death. Even after his death, he remained a prisoner under the dictatorship’s control. The web of power directed down to the smallest detail by “co-president” Rosario Murillo refused to hand over his remains to his family so they could bury........

© Havana Times