Are you staying or going? | Translation

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Translated by MC Editorial

[Daniel Alarcón]: Hello, Ambulante:  

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Thank you so much. Here’s the episode.

This is Radio Ambulante. I’m Daniel Alarcón.

[Samantha Jirón]: OK, I’m going to make some cheese soup. It’s a typical Easter dish in Nicaragua. It dates from the time when people believed that meat was not to be eaten and so on… 

[Daniel]: It’s Holy Thursday, 2024. Traditionally, many Catholics in Latin America do not eat meat on this date. But Samantha Jirón, the woman you just heard about, is not Catholic and does not practice any religion. She makes this dish for another reason:

[Samantha]: I make it because I love it, and since I saw pictures of it, I felt like having some. 

[Daniel]: Nostalgia. She saw the pictures on social media, and it had been a long time since she had had a typical cheese soup. She left Nicaragua almost two years ago, and, for reasons we are now going to hear, it has been several Holy Thursdays since she last tried the soup her mother used to make.

Samantha lives on the outskirts of San Francisco, California, and our producer, Desirée Yépez, visited her in her small apartment, which is something like Nicaraguan territory in the middle of the United States. In terms of food, for example, she not only makes cheese soup, but all those dishes that define Nicaraguan cuisine.

[Samantha]: That is, gallopinto and breakfast, lunch and dinner, which is something like the most typical of Nicaragua; and we always have a cocoa drink, we always eat tortillas with cheese, everything Nicaraguan, and with Nicaraguan friends, we always try to maintain the culture. 

[Daniel]: OK, but this story is not about food. It’s much more. Because Samantha is not a common immigrant. Of course, every migration story is unique, so let’s be more specific: she never imagined herself living in the United States. She never looked for it. And she didn’t even choose it.

In her case, someone, a government, made that decision for her.

[Samantha]: I still feel 100% Nicaraguan, even though legally I’m not.

[Daniel]: The regime of Daniel Ortega and his wife Rosario Murillo expelled Samantha from her country in 2023, when she was only 23 years old. And, according to their laws, Samantha is no longer Nicaraguan. How can a young woman like Samantha be left without a homeland?

We’ll bring you her story after the break.

We’ll be back.

[Daniel]: We’re back with Radio Ambulante. Our producer, Desirée Yépez, brings us the story. 

[Desireé Yépez]: Before living in Daly City, just outside of San Francisco, Samantha survived more than a year in a cell at La Esperanza women’s prison in Nicaragua. And before going to prison, she had a relatively ordinary life, alongside her mother Carolina, and her younger siblings Julissa and Julio.

She was born and raised in Masaya, the cradle of the Sandinista revolution—the same revolution in which Daniel Ortega fought to overthrow the Somoza family dictatorship in the late 1970s. 

[Samantha]: It is the place where there are more traditions, more culture, the folklore that represents everything that is the cultural side of Nicaragua. We are classified as very happy, noisy people, very argumentative, effusive, people who make a scene over just about anything. 

[Desireé]: It is a city with colonial architecture, cobblestone streets, built on the slopes of a volcano that still spews lava, and is surrounded by natural lagoons. This was the setting for Samantha’s childhood antics.

[Samantha]: I was really chinvarona. Chinvarona means playing games like a boy. So in the neighborhood, I ran around, playing with boys. I cracked my head about three times—you can imagine—and my mother would rush me to the hospital. My mother always said that I was very hyperactive and had a very difficult temper to control. 

[Desireé]: So, to try to control her emotions, her mother enrolled her in on one of her favorite things: drawing lessons. 

[Samantha]: She had to find a way to channel those emotions in a positive way, because otherwise I would go down the wrong path.

[Desireé]: She also passed along to her a passion for reading, using books to open her mind to the world. From then on, her dreams began to take shape, and one of them was to be a journalist. Samantha remembers that, as a child, she loved to pretend that she was a news presenter. She pretended to tell news stories because there were always newspapers at home. But the paradox is that politics was never discussed.

Her mother was always cooking in restaurants or at events, and no one discussed the situation in the country. There was no need. They were just another family, earning a living as best they could. But there was always a name present. 

[Samantha]: I always remember Ortega as president, and ever since I can remember, President Daniel Ortega was in the news. 

[Desireé]: Daniel Ortega has been in power in Nicaragua for almost two decades. He was president from 1985 to 1990. He won the elections again in 2006 and has since used reforms and changes in the law to consolidate a ruthless dictatorship. But Samantha didn’t hear any of that at school, either.

[Samantha]: There were never any discussions about what a dictatorship was, what a totalitarian regime was. I never heard a word of that.

[Desireé]: Until one day, when Samantha was 15, she learned at school about the existence of the Federation of High School Students. A group of young Nicaraguans who defend the principles of Sandinismo, a leftist political movement that was born in the 60s with an anti-imperialist bent, and believes in armed struggle. It is aligned with the Marxist principles of the Cuban Revolution. This is Ortega’s political base.

[Samantha]: One of the teachers made a comment about how the FES, that is, the Federation of Sandinista Students, were there and wanted to come and recruit young people. 

[Desireé]: Samantha was a scholarship student at the Salesian School, a private school run by priests from that community, who did not like the idea that the Sandinista youth wanted to recruit members there. 

[Samantha]: The priest told them no, he didn’t want anything at all, no political issues with them. So these young people met at the party headquarters, they had their activities at the party houses, they were the ones who did political proselytizing in the schools, they posted things about the party, so it was a directly political thing rather than an academic one.

[Desireé]: It was around that time, in 2016, that Samantha enrolled in English classes at a public high school. She went every Saturday to a place surrounded by pro-government propaganda. 

[Samantha]: Photos of Ortega, photos of Rosario Murillo, everything. And in the office of the academic director, a Nicaraguan flag and a Sandinista flag.

[Desireé]: A red and black flag. It was clear that this was pro-government territory. And there was a specific reason: elections were coming up soon. 

[Desireé]: She didn’t think much about it until, at the end of that year, in the middle of the electoral campaign, a group of young people invited her to put up propaganda for another political movement on the streets of Masaya. She agreed to go.

[Samantha]: I went, honestly, because they invited me. I didn’t go because I had a political position or anything.

[Desireé]: She just liked to get involved in everything. A few days later, Samantha found out that the Sandinista Youth had taken down the posters of the candidate they had posted. She was so outraged that, without thinking much about it, she wrote on her Facebook wall. 

[Samantha]: I wrote, “What an outrage! How is it possible that they applaud and promote the young people of the Sandinista Youth doing this kind of thing?” And I wrote what they are: they are lazy, they should study, and I wrote they are snitches. I attacked the Sandinista Youth directly.

[Desireé]: A visceral comment, one that she considered unimportant. But it spread immediately across the social networks and became a serious problem. The director of the institute where she studied English, the one with the Sandinista flag in the office, was her friend on Facebook and, of course, he read the post. 

[Samantha]: When I arrived at school on Saturday, they called me to the office and said, “Look, why did you post this?” And I said, “Because it’s true.” I didn’t know how this could affect me.

[Desireé]: That moment of courage caused her to be expelled. It was the first sign in her life that dissent in Nicaragua, with Ortega in charge, was not an option. The punishment made her feel that something was not right. And she was not the only one. While Ortega celebrated his third consecutive victory, something inside Nicaragua was stirring. What seemed like the consolidation of a family dynasty would be more like a bomb with a short fuse. In April 2018, when Samantha was 18, something in her country broke forever.

[Archive soundbite]

[Journalist]: We are back in the capital, where university students clashed with the National Police and the agents are backed by the Sandinista Youth.

[Journalist]: Several students and police officers were injured during the clashes. So far, five people have died. The protests began last Wednesday as a rejection of the reforms of the Social Security Institute.

[Desireé]: After the government announced a decree reforming social security, increasing worker and employer contributions and reducing pensions for retirees, people took to the streets without fear. On the morning of April 18, something began to take shape, which the press described as the largest uprising in the country since the civil war ended in 1990. 

[Desireé]: By then, the Ortega-Murillo presidential couple controlled virtually all the powers of the State and, in response to that authoritarianism, young Nicaraguans promoted their version of the Arab Spring. Armed with their cell phones and their mastery of social media, they challenged the government.

The protests began in the capital, Managua, but spread quickly to other areas.

[Archive soundbite]

[Journalist]: Protests spread through the country to cities such as Matagalpa, León, Chinandega, Granada and Masaya, becoming a real national outcry.

[Desireé]: As Samantha’s hometown of Masaya rose up in rebellion, she left home to go pick up her 14-year-old sister from school. Outside, everything was in chaos. And they weren’t quite sure how serious the situation was.

[Samantha]: I didn’t realize the danger and everything that could happen. So I told her, “Let’s go.” And we went to Monimbó. 

[Desireé]: Monimbó is a neighborhood in Masaya, known as the epicenter of social uprisings in the country. And, in 2018, it was no exception.

[Samantha]: So there was a confrontation going on between the population and the riot police, the Special Forces wearing black, so I remember I just joined in with my sister.

[Desireé]: She never expected the repression she encountered. It was unprecedented. It was brutal. On the second day of protests alone, there were three deaths in the country. As the hours passed, the situation became critical. And that caused the population, led by the young people identified with the white and blue colors of the Nicaraguan flag, to not let down their guard. The next day, Samantha got a flag and went out to protest again. 

[Samantha]: And I also started writing on social media. I shared all the news, the live streams, the people who were being hurt.

[Desireé]: And she made comments… 

[Samantha]: As I said at that moment, quite boldly, “This is already like a dictatorship,” “It’s a good thing that people woke up,” “I think there will be no turning back,”

[Desireé]: What was happening in Masaya was paradoxical. The revolution that had led to Ortega’s rise almost four decades earlier had begun there, in that place. But this time, the revolution was against him.

The city was besieged with barricades made with cobblestones from the streets. The young people were not willing to forgive the government’s repression or the murder of protesters. From their trenches they cornered the official forces, who responded with bullets, and the rebels had to improvise to care for their wounded. In the following days, human rights organizations denounced that the Nicaraguan authorities turned against their own people in a cruel, sustained and lethal attack against life, freedom of expression, and freedom of peaceful assembly.

Samantha, who had taken first aid courses, was a volunteer with the Fire Department at the time. This organization was under the orders of the government. And when the repression of the protesters began, the regime ordered them not to treat the wounded, as another form of punishment.

[Samantha]: So I decided to quit because I said, “It’s not possible. How is it possible that they are forcing me to not help?” Then I received a message from a former fellow firefighter. 

[Desireé]: They had assembled a group of Red Cross workers, firefighters, medical students, nurses, and people who had been in the Boy Scouts to care for those injured by the police. 

[Samantha]: They said, “Look, we’re doing this. Do you want to join?” And I said, “Of course, let’s support them.” 

[Desireé]: She packed a T-shirt, shorts, underwear, gauze, iodine, alcohol, and gloves into a backpack and left without warning to support the rebels who had taken up residence in a safehouse. It was a place that few people knew how to access, and where they improvised a clandestine clinic. 

[Samantha]: So we started to organize ourselves in a room, setting up a stretcher, mixing water with bicarbonate to mitigate the tear gas. We began putting together small backpacks where we carried painkillers, injections, things, suture material.

[Desireé]: Outside, the scene was apocalyptic, a war. The joy of Masaya had turned to anger and fear. While some people took shelter in their homes from the gunshots, mortar and explosions, the chavalos, as they call young people there, were fighting a pitched battle. Samantha attended to people who came in with bullet wounds or gas poisoning, or she went out to look for them in the streets when it was her turn. And so days passed, until she returned home.

[Samantha]: My mother was in a very bad state, and she didn’t know when she would get a call telling her that I had been killed or something.

[Desireé]: The dead were counted in the dozens, and, instead of stopping, the resistance grew. There was no longer room for negotiation, even though the government offered to reverse the measures that had triggered the outbreak. The outcry got louder. 

 [Samantha]: And the April Mothers movement began, with all the young people who were being murdered, and of course there was no turning back from everything that had happened, and the demands were growing: justice, freedom, democracy.

[Desireé]: A protest that had become a rebel movement was now a growing threat to the Nicaraguan regime. Months passed. It was open hunting season against anyone who could be considered an opponent. And one day, retaliation for having helped the insurgents knocked on Samantha’s door. 

[Samantha]: As a volunteer firefighter, I knew many police officers and people from all the institutions, because they work together. And a police officer I knew wrote to me and told me, “Flee, because there is an arrest warrant in the system here with your name on it, and I think it is you,” he tells me. 

[Desireé]: A high school student, only 18 years old, in the sights of the government. So on July 8, 2018, Samantha decided to leave Masaya and go to San José, Costa Rica. She crossed the border by bus, abandoned her art classes, science fairs, chess tournaments, and traveled about twelve hours to exile. In that country she had to start from scratch, alone. 

[Samantha]: It was my first forced separation from my family, leaving my house, my home, my siblings. And it was also when I began to feel that emotional burden, a burden that was not only a personal burden, but a collective burden, and the helplessness of wanting to change something and not being able to do it.

[Desireé]: For the first few months, she lived with her boyfriend, who had also fled the country. She managed to enroll in a school and graduate. She then began studying Political Science at college, and became involved in the creation of feminist organizations for exiled Nicaraguans.

[Samantha]: I began attending all the marches that were held outside the Nicaraguan Consulate, and also all the events and vigils, and that’s when I started to meet people, get involved with young people, and that’s when my activism began in earnest in late 2018.

[Desireé]: Despite the hardships of distance and separation, she was putting the pieces of her new life in place. When she was finally living alone in a small studio, 2020 came and everything fell apart.

[Samantha]: COVID came and COVID screwed us all equally. The confinement and isolation did a lot of damage to me. I mean, I fell into a very deep depression. I started to lose weight, I didn’t eat, so I found myself in a very complicated emotional situation.

[Desireé]: And it was then that she thought that since she had already spent two years away from Nicaragua, and the intensity of the protests, the violence and the harassment had decreased, she felt that the risk was no longer the same. Although her mother was a little afraid, she supported her return on the sole condition that Samantha would promise not to draw any more attention to herself.

[Samantha]: So I decided to leave everything and return to Nicaragua in 2020, and I came back the way you normally do. I went through the border, they registered me, they took photos of me. But one thing I couldn’t do was stay still. I mean, I always kept getting involved.

[Desireé]: And contrary to what she thought, it was a very relevant moment. The atmosphere in the country was tense. While the world was shutting down, Daniel Ortega was resisting the coronavirus quarantine and not only rejecting the isolation measures, but disregarding them by organizing massive public events. It was a crisis within a crisis. Medical personnel were not even allowed to wear masks. 

[Desireé]: Samantha resumed her studies in Political Science and also enrolled in Journalism, combining both professions with her activism. She chose to make herself heard instead of remaining silent. She gave interviews in international spaces about the Nicaraguan social uprising. Here she is at a virtual event organized by a Bolivian platform:  

[Archive soundbite]

[Samantha]: The issue of irresponsible handling of a pandemic, and the lies of a dictatorship, and a regime, cannot be separated. And the country was already experiencing a very serious political and economic crisis. And then the COVID-19 health crisis was added to this.

[Desireé]: She also wrote articles for local media. In one of her texts she described Ortega as an anachronistic, outdated dictator, stuck in the 1960s and the Cold War, following the example of Fidel Castro. So Samantha’s political profile, instead of going unnoticed, became more noticeable.

Nicaragua, which at that time was the second poorest economy in the continent, saw no respite. Everything was in decline. And the passage of two devastating hurricanes in late 2020 made everything worse. The opposition was organizing to remove the Ortega-Murillos from power, and the opportunity was the election that would take place in 2021. But the government unleashed an unprecedented persecution of potential presidential candidates. Seven candidates were arrested. Despite everything, Samantha did not feel that her activism could be risky.

[Samantha]: Honestly, I never saw myself as a target. Because, look, I said, “A 20- or 21-year-old college girl, who has just started her activism and her political work in 2018, 2019, cannot represent a threat to a regime, right? To a dictatorship.” 

[Desireé]: In addition, there were other targets who were much more politically relevant: presidential candidates, leaders of social movements… Why would they target her?

[Samantha]: A lot of people warned me, “Samantha, be very careful. They can catch you.” I didn’t think so. I mean, I always thought there were other people on the list and I wasn’t going to be one of them.

[Desireé]: International organizations questioned the validity of the electoral process because the opposition was prevented from participating. As everything indicated, as planned and designed, Ortega won. All his opponents were in prison or in exile.

During the elections, Samantha supported the coverage by a group of journalists who were staying in a hotel in Managua. Two days after the vote, on November 9, 2021, still working from the hotel, Samantha went down to breakfast, and the attitude of one of the waiters caught her attention. 

[Samantha]: The waiter kept looking at me. He kept staring at me like he was nervous. But he was apparently the one who gave the heads up; he was an informant.

[Desireé]: After eating, she went up to her room, and when she came out of her room…

[Samantha]: I ran into a man who stared at me, and I just kept on going. I continued walking normally. 

[Desireé]: So far, nothing really worried her. Except that she felt uncomfortable. At noon, her fellow journalists decided to have lunch outside the hotel. So they left together in a white van. She was wearing a mask with the logo of the media outlet where her friends worked. 

[Samantha]: I remember just grabbing my phone and getting in the van, on the right-hand side.

[Desireé]: As they left the hotel, they turned onto a busy avenue. There were cars and slow traffic. A police officer who was directing traffic, seeing the van, told them to stop.

[Samantha]: My friend pulls over normally, and the traffic cop approaches him and says, “Give me your documents.”

[Desireé]: Samantha’s reaction was to duck her head behind her seat, an instinct as if to avoid being seen. She removed her mask, so as not to be identified with the press team…

[Samantha]: I grabbed my phone and put it in the glove compartment, in the back, and I’m left with nothing. The traffic cop tells my friend, “Unlock the van or I’ll take you to jail,” he says.

[Desireé]: The driver turned off the car. Within seconds, a red car with no license plates was parked next to them. A man and a woman wearing face masks got out and opened the door on the side where Samantha was.

[Samantha]: And the woman said, “Let’s see, get your friend out.” Then they pulled me out of the van by force and the man and the woman grabbed me from one side, and they had the back door of the car open, and they put me in.

[Desireé]: Then they returned to the van and demanded that Samantha’s companions hand over her cell phone. They kidnapped her. They did not show her an arrest warrant, and when they put her in the back of the car, they hit her in the face. 

[Samantha]: I remember I had a leather bracelet with the Nicaraguan flag on it, and they ripped it off. They also ripped off a silver chain with a charm of Nicaragua on it.

[Desireé]: The man she had crossed paths with hours earlier in the hotel hallway was behind the wheel and connected to a video call.

[Samantha]: And at that moment, the man turns on the camera and a voice asks, “Is that her?” “We have her. Yes, confirmed, it’s her.” 

[Desireé]: And they took her away. On the way, which seemed like an eternity, they threatened to kill her and asked her about other people. Samantha, paralyzed by panic, didn’t know what they were going to do to her. Her captors turned her over to the police at a detention center. 

[Samantha]: They put me in a room where they stripped me, took my picture and fingerprints, dressed me in a blue suit, and placed me in a cell. At that point, they forced me to unlock my phone and took me to sign a bunch of papers.

[Desireé]: Samantha is less than 1.6 meters tall, and she was swimming inside that enormous blue suit, which smelled bad. Dressed like that, she signed a document enumerating the accusations against her: undermining national sovereignty to the detriment of the State, and spreading fake news, according to the Cybercrime Law. This law was passed in 2020, and has been used to condemn people who spread information that the regime may consider false or distorted. It was then, after signing, that she was shown the arrest warrant.

Samantha was in that detention center for a month. From there, she was transferred to La Esperanza, the only women’s prison in the country, where, in a maximum security cell, she was to await her trial.

[Samantha]: Where the beds were glued to the floor, welded, and the cells were very high and there were only small bars where light came in. We couldn’t see absolutely anything, we didn’t see anyone, we had no contact with anyone.

[Desireé]: She was there for eight months, alongside Evelyn Pinto, a veteran human rights defender. At first they were told they were in isolation for only fifteen days as a safety measure due to the coronavirus.

In March 2022, four months after her arrest, the trial took place and she was sentenced to eight years in prison. One of the pieces of evidence used against her was the interview we heard earlier, in which she spoke about the handling of the pandemic. 

[Samantha]: I knew they were going to sentence me because it was all scripted. I told the judge that he already had instructions and that in the end he should sentence me to whatever time he wanted and however many years he wanted, because there was no evil that could last 100 years and no body that could endure it.

[Desireé]: At 21, Samantha was one of the youngest political prisoners in Nicaragua. She was held in cell number five, a pressure cooker where the heat, which can reach 35 degrees Celsius, cooked her alive. And when it rained, the roof did little to protect her from the water that seeped in. It was a room for political prisoners, sealed with a solid door, and it had a small window secured with bars at the top, through which almost no light came.

The days began at five in the morning, when the guards came to check that they had not escaped. Then they were served breakfast, which consisted of rice and beans. They were not allowed to go out into the yard or see anyone. Samantha spent the day sleeping.

After months, when they were reunited with the common prisoners, they were allowed to have their relatives, whom they saw every 21 days, bring them books, but none related to politics or psychology.

[Samantha]: So my mother brought a book by Isabel Allende called De amor y de sombras that we had at home. I remember that later my mother brought another book; for example, she brought Les Misérables, by Victor Hugo, and they didn’t let it in. They said no to that book, I mean, maybe they felt identified with the title; they were a miserable bunch. 

[Desireé]: The guards did not know that De amor y de sombras talks about arbitrary arrests, disappearances, executions, people willing to risk everything for justice and truth. And, in addition to literature, her mother, who never missed a visiting day, managed to bring her colored pencils and paper. She was able to draw for a few months until those materials were taken away. Samantha could not show her drawings or give them to her family. The torture was constant.

[Samantha]: As if the world stopped inside. Nothing was happening. I mean, we didn’t know anything. 

[Desireé]: The little information they received was what their relatives told them.

And that was how they found out that in a speech, Ortega had said:

[Archive soundbite]

[Daniel Ortega]: Those who are imprisoned there are the sons of bitches of the Yankee imperialists. They should be taken off to the United States, because those people are not Nicaraguans. They stopped being Nicaraguans a long time ago. They have no homeland.

[Samantha]: I joked with my cellmate and said, “Imagine if they put us on a plane and sent us to the United States,” and we laughed. “No, that’s not going to happen.” But that’s what happened.

[Daniel]: A diplomatic negotiation changed the course of this story—the story of Samantha Jirón and 221 other political prisoners.

We’ll be back after a break.

[Daniel]: We’re back with Radio Ambulante. I’m Daniel Alarcón. Before the break, Samantha Jirón was serving an eight-year sentence in a women’s prison in Nicaragua for spreading fake news. But one night, something so crazy happened that no one could have anticipated it.

Desirée Yépez continues the story.

[Desireé]: In prison, every day was the same. There was no news from the outside world, nothing that could break the harshness of the routine. Inside, no one could imagine that a phone call would be the first step in an operation that, at least in Latin America, had never been seen before.

In late January 2023, Rosario Murillo, the vicepresident of Nicaragua and wife of Daniel Ortega, called the US ambassador in the country, Kevin Sullivan. This is how he described it in the documentary Operación Guardabarranco, which reconstructs what happened:

[Kevin Sullivan]: She wanted me to go talk to Foreign Minister Denis Moncada, who had something important to discuss with me. 

[Desireé]: The Foreign Minister put forward a proposal.

[Kevin]: He raised the possibility of whether the United States was willing to receive the prisoners. 

[Desireé]: It is said that this approach was a political maneuver to remove the pressure or attention that existed on the presidential couple, accused internationally of kidnapping, arbitrary arrests, torture, expropriation, and violation of human rights of dissidents who at the same time filled the prisons to capacity.

The American ambassador revealed in the documentary that both the Secretary of State and President Joe Biden were aware of this offer. And they accepted the list with the names of more than 200 people who would be released. The group included social leaders, journalists, former Sandinista militants… The next step was to take advantage of every minute, before anyone could change their minds.

[Archive soundbite]

[Kevin]: This is not something that happens every day. We have a lot of requirements and procedures for entering the United States. Some of these people had visas. Many of them did not. 

[Desireé]: Many had never even flown on a plane before. The operation, which was officially called Nica Welcome, had to be kept under strict confidentiality. One misstep, and everything would fall apart.

To carry out the mission, the State Department sought out the International Institute on Race, Equality and Human Rights, which is based in Washington D.C. and works in countries like Nicaragua and Cuba. Logistical support and humanitarian assistance were needed in order to receive hundreds of political prisoners who would come to the United States directly from prison. This is Carlos Quesada, director of the organization, who was in charge of such logistics:

[Carlos Quesada]: Two weeks earlier, they contacted us and told us that there was a possibility that around 200 political prisoners would be released from some country in Latin America and that they needed our organization’s support for the logistics of welcoming them. 

[Desireé]: Carlos received a call from someone at the State Department asking for his support, but he was given no further details. Although they did not know where the liberated people would come from, they were tasked with obtaining more than 200 hotel rooms, cell phones for each person, SIM cards so those phones would work, clothing and shoes for women and men, without even knowing the sizes. Only one thing was clear: it was winter and the temperatures in Washington are freezing. The situation was not easy. 

[Carlos]: It wasn’t just coats; it was underwear. At least one change of clothes. Personal hygiene items, soap, getting sanitary pads for the women.

[Desireé]: Carlos didn’t even know when they would arrive. It could happen at any moment, and they had to be ready. They worked almost 24 hours a day for a week.

But meanwhile, in La Esperanza prison in Nicaragua, Samantha lived in a state of lethargy that prevented her from suspecting that something was about to happen. So the stifling night of February 8, 2023 seemed just like any other night behind the bars of the women’s prison in Managua.

[Samantha]: Nine o’clock is the curfew. So they would turn off the lights, and I had some sort of pain or something, so I had asked for some medicine. I had been given a very strong painkiller, and that had helped me fall asleep earlier, because I usually fell asleep at dawn, because I had a lot of insomnia, a lot of problems sleeping.

[Desireé]: At around 10:30 p.m., one of the guards came and ordered her to get up.

[Samantha]: She tells me, “Come on, get up. You’re going to be transferred.” And at that moment I get scared.

[Desireé]: Samantha didn’t understand what was happening. She was very anxious; she felt like her chest was going to explode. Transferred? Where? Why almost at midnight? She barely had time to put a Bible her mother had given her, her suit and her drawings in a bag, and put on her glasses. She was in her pajamas. But there was no time for more. She left the cell, along with Evelyn, her companion, also a political prisoner. They were taken to a room where other political prisoners were waiting, and they were given clothes to change into. Samantha put on a pair of gray leggings and a brown T-shirt, both second-hand. An hour later, they were all put on a bus. The windows were covered. They had no idea where they were going.

[Samantha]: I remember we were all nervous, looking at each other.

[Desireé]: After about ten minutes, they made their first stop. The bus stopped and the eight women were dropped off at the Sistema Penitenciario La Modelo, the maximum security prison where tens of male political prisoners were. The women were taken to a room where more female political prisoners, from other cities, had been gathered.

There, they spent several hours. There was food, drinks. Everything was very strange and suspicious, so they didn’t even dare eat. 

[Samantha]: And then they started saying, “Okay, get up and you’re going to leave in line one by one.”

[Desireé]: While the bodyguards took pictures of everything, they were handcuffed with zip ties, those plastic strips that are used to secure things, and the women were put back in a white minibus, and the men in a larger vehicle. Covered windows and no information. They set off on the road to uncertainty again, with a caravan of police cars. 

[Samantha]: I realized that we were entering something that had to do with the airport when I heard a plane take off. So, at that moment, as the saying goes, “a light went on” and, I don’t know, something happened to me, but I realized that we were leaving the country, but I thought we were being sent to Cuba, to Venezuela, because it’s not normal. I mean, we were in handcuffs; we were being mistreated up to the last minute, always with contempt. 

[Desireé]: And then the head of the guards made an announcement:

[Samantha]: She takes out a folder with some documents and says, “I’m going to start calling you by name. When I call you, you get up and sign.” So I’m the second one they call, and when I see the document, I felt my blood pressure drop, my blood turned twice, I don’t know, because it said: “Ministry of the Interior, I, Cynthia Samantha Padilla Girón, voluntarily agree to travel to…” a blank line.

[Desireé]: It did not say where they were being expelled to or the conditions under which they would be released. Furthermore, on what appeared to be an airport runway, they were surrounded by heavily armed people.

[Samantha]: The moment the curtain moved, I managed to see someone from the army with an AK, a weapon, I don’t know, but a big weapon that he was loading. Then it occurred to me, I said, “They are going to shoot us. They are going to kill us.” I mean, we saw so much cruelty, we saw so much repression in 2018 that we know what they are capable of and we knew they could do anything to us. And there was so much hatred, they were venting so much frustration, so much hate. I mean, it was like… it was like we weren’t Nicaraguan; it was like they had no family, it was like we or the prisoners couldn’t have been their children, their siblings, their parents, whatever. So we thought they were going to kill us.

My only thought was my mother: “Our family doesn’t know where we are…” 

[Desireé]: But there was no choice. It was a matter of either accepting the uncertain thing she was being proposed or staying in jail. So she signed blindly.

While this was happening, the chats of Nicaraguan journalists lit up. Among the hundreds of political prisoners were well-known people and public figures, such as former presidential candidates. Figures who constantly generated news and who, because of their standing, had been allowed to serve their sentences under house arrest. This is how Nicaraguan journalist Tifani Roberts, one of the first to find out about the mission, remembers it. She was in San Francisco, in the United States. 

[Tifani Roberts]: For example, Cristiana Chamorro, Pedro Joaquín Chamorro, the children of the former president, so they were internationally recognized people. We didn’t know whether they were canceling their house arrest and returning them to the Chipote dungeon, or whether this was a sign that something was happening.

[Desireé]: El Chipote is an emblematic prison in Nicaraguan history, which has been used by dictatorships to imprison and torture. Today it continues to operate as a torture center for political prisoners. But this time, they were not being taken there. 

[Tifani]: We learned that many of the political prisoners who were being held in jails in different departments had been transferred to Managua. They were all basically concentrated in the city.

[Desireé]: At that point, Tifani, who has been a journalist for over 30 years, began searching for information from all her sources. She contacted relatives of the prisoners, diplomats, and people in the government. It was clear that something out of the ordinary was brewing. The main clue was that, as she recalls, there had been no news about the political prisoners for months, and that night, suddenly everything seemed to come back to life. 

[Desireé]: Hours passed as the journalists investigated what was going on. It was past four in the morning when Samantha and the other prisoners got off the bus. When she got out, she found herself in the middle of an airstrip surrounded by men wearing face masks and carrying automatic weapons, in front of a huge white plane that said OMNI AIR INTERNATIONAL in red letters.

The aircraft, which was used on other occasions to transport people such as kings, heads of state or celebrities, had taken off hours earlier from a naval base in Virginia, outside Washington D.C., along with 10 officials from the United States Public Administration and the Foreign Service. And the only thing needed for takeoff was for that group of women to board.

[Samantha]: Then a State Department official approached me and asked my name. I told her my name, and there was a little box where they had all the passports and they had a sheet with the lists and some pictures of us.

[Desireé]: More than 200 passports had been printed in the preceding few hours. In the case of prisoners who had never gotten one, the regime replaced the picture with the one from their police record.

[Samantha]: The people who came on this mission all spoke English and Spanish. Then I was asked my name and I was asked, “Do you voluntarily agree to travel to the United States?” And I said, “Yes,” because what else could I do?

[Desireé]: It was not an easy decision. Many political prisoners, who had been imprisoned for years, hesitated before boarding, and the State Department’s order was clear: only those who agreed to do so voluntarily would travel. But taking that step was more difficult than you might imagine. They did not know what would happen to them once they were out of Nicaragua, nor whether they would be able to see their families again. There were too many questions and very few certainties, all under pressure, in a hurry. The situation was disconcerting even for the American agents who had learned that they would be flying to Managua just a few hours before. The last thing they had was time for was process what was happening.

So Samantha got on the plane. She was one of the last to do so, and almost all the seats were occupied.

[Samantha]: I started seeing everyone, friends of mine who had been captured weeks before. I saw Kevin Solís, and I actually told him I was glad he was free. I knew about his case; I had followed him. 

[Desireé]: Kevin Solís was a student leader and human rights defender who was imprisoned twice. The second time, he was subjected to torture in La Modelo prison. He had been locked up since 2020. Also on the plane were the seven candidates who had tried to oppose Ortega and Murillo in 2021. 

[Samantha]: There was so much euphoria, no one sat down—crying, looking at each other, all thin, emaciated; sometimes we didn’t even recognize each other. 

[Desireé]: As the plane began to move, the voices of the 222 liberated people began to sing the Nicaraguan national anthem.

At 6:31 am, the sounds of the turbines taking off were mixed with shouts of “Long live free Nicaragua!” “Long live Managua!” “Long live Masaya!”

In San Francisco, Tifani Roberts had not slept all night. With the clues she got from one of her sources, she found the number of the plane and plotted the route of flight OY 379. That’s how she discovered that it was due to land at Dulles Airport in Washington D.C. after 11:30 a.m.

Tifani did not want to announce anything, despite her impulse to do so, until the plane was clear of Nicaraguan airspace. She was afraid that anything could hinder the trip. She waited for her source to tell her it was safe to communicate what she knew. Then she finally tweeted: 

[Tifani]: “Breaking news: 213 political prisoners were released this morning from Nicaraguan jails. They were taken to the international airport, where a plane was waiting to take them to the United States. They are currently on their way to Washington D.C.”

[Desireé]: She was the first to announce publicly to the world what was happening. As we have already said, it was not 213 but 222 political prisoners who got off the plane that winter morning in the capital of the United States. This is how Carlos Quesada, one of those in charge of humanitarian logistics, recalls the scene: 

[Carlos]: There were students, there were women, there were LGBT people, there were politicians, there were poor people, there were rich people. In other words, it was the whole of Nicaraguan society that had, in one way or another, decided to speak out, not even against the government. Some of them were taken to jail just for walking around with a Nicaraguan flag in the street.

[Desireé]: At the airport, an entire operation was ready to receive the former political prisoners. A lot of people had worked on this. Now they were there to ensure the entry of the Nicaraguans into the United States without incident.

[Samantha]: As we were getting off, I remember them staring at us, I don’t know, like weirdos, I don’t know, scared. I mean, it’s not normal. I think you’ll see it once in your life. I mean, so many political prisoners coming straight from prison and getting off a plane.

[Carlos]: And many of them came disoriented, I mean, many of them arrived in a state of shock.

[Desireé]: There are no precedents in Latin America for an operation of this magnitude, where a government takes on the task of freeing hundreds of political prisoners through a practically clandestine operation. For this reason, since several of the liberated people did not have a visa to enter the United States, the government facilitated the option of giving them a ‘humanitarian parole.’ This is a permit to enter and remain in the country legally for two years, with the possibility of applying for asylum or some other procedure that allows them to become residents in the future. But there are no guarantees; it is a whole process.

Once the immigration paperwork was completed, they were transferred to a hotel where they would stay for six days. There they were given clothes, a little money, and a cell phone to communicate with their families. This is Carlos Quesada: 

[Carlos]: Their families don’t know where they are. Some of them think by now that they have left, but they don’t know exactly where they are. Many had not spoken to their families in months. One of the young men who had gone in when he was a minor, and left when he was an adult, called his mother and said, “Mom, they say I’m in the United States, but I don’t know whether it’s true.” 

[Desireé]: They were completely overwhelmed. They had been behind bars a few hours earlier, and now they were walking around DC.

When Samantha switched on the phone she was given, the first thing she did was call her mother. The others did the same, looking up their relatives to tell them that they were alive, that they were safe and out of the country.

But from one moment to the next, while updates of what was happening were arriving, a piece of news changed the panorama. On February 9, 2023, a Nicaraguan judge announced that the political prisoners had been deported and declared traitors to the country.

[Archive soundbite]

[Judge]: The deportees were declared traitors to the country, punished for various serious crimes, and permanently disqualified from exercising public office on behalf of the Nicaraguan State Service, as well as from holding elected office, with their civil rights being suspended in perpetuity.

[Desireé]: But that was not all. That same day, the Nicaraguan Assembly approved a reform to the Constitution.

[Archive soundbite]

[Assembly man]: It is necessary to expand the provisions of Article 21 of the Political Constitution of the Republic of Nicaragua, in the sense that traitors to the homeland will lose their status as Nicaraguan nationals for harming the supreme interests of the nation. 

[Desireé]: This announcement took everyone by surprise. The Ortega-Murillo regime was known to be implacable with those it considers its enemies, but this possibility of losing nationality was never contemplated. No one had mentioned it in the negotiations. Not even the United States ambassador in Nicaragua thought that something like this would happen.

The UN is clear in stating that the right to nationality is a fundamental human right. This implies that every person can have, change and maintain a nationality. Accordingly, the power of States to decide who their citizens are is not absolute. Taking away a nationality from a person and leaving them in limbo makes them ‘stateless,’ without a country. This is Samantha Jirón recalling how she took the news when she found out:

[Samantha]: I was like, look, I was lost… they took away our nationality, how could they take away our nationality? No, I didn’t think about it. I didn’t pay attention or anything until two or three days later.

[Desireé]: It was a whirlwind. Those who had relatives in the United States went to join them in those other cities. It was just a few hours, a few days, to set the pillars on which they would build a new life, again from scratch. Starting by understanding who they were after prison, in a foreign country. For example, as soon as it was announced that Nicaragua had taken away their nationality, countries like Spain immediately offered them citizenship. Samantha accepted immediately. 

[Samantha]: But, well, for the moment I don’t feel Spanish or identify with it, because I don’t even know Spain. 

[Desireé]: Because, although it may sound very abstract, having your nationality revoked is complicated in everyday life.

[Samantha]: Being here in the United States on a humanitarian parole doesn’t allow you to leave and enter normally, you see. With a passport that we don’t know which countries will accept or not accept, because of the issue of statelessness. So we are in a legal limbo, and legally it is also difficult.

[Desireé]: Many legal procedures suddenly become impossible, like having an ID, a record of your grades from school or university, a death certificate in case of death. Basically, it’s as if you don’t exist.

But while Samantha was deciding on her next steps, the hotel was a space for resocialization, for being reborn after so much time of being like the living dead. There, she met up with Kevin Solís, the college student she had greeted on the plane. 

[Samantha]: When we got to the hotel, I remember we started talking. The next day, when we were at the hotel, I remember Kevin came up to me and said, “Look,” he said, “do you have a charger?” Then we went out for a walk by ourselves, I remember, but there was already some chemistry, like flirting and everything… And he was supposedly shy.

[Desireé]: And there, in the middle of the chaos, a bond was born, and they decided to trust it, to this day.

After the days at the hotel, Samantha went to New Jersey, to the house of some family friends, and Kevin went to San Francisco, where his grandmother was. Samantha experienced snow and freezing cold, and that was one of her first clashes with an unknown reality. It wasn’t just a matter of the weather, of course. She missed Kevin. So, a couple of months later, she moved with him to the West Coast.

It’s a paradoxical freedom. She is no longer a prisoner, but she doesn’t feel completely free, either. She and Kevin accompany each other in this new attempt to rebuild themselves, to be each other’s homeland.

[Samantha]: And it has been a challenge all this time, because, I mean, we are both affected by everything we have experienced. But sometimes it has been an advantage and a disadvantage, but at least we can understand everything we have both experienced and understand it better than someone who has not gone through that situation.

It feels like when something is stolen from you. That feeling that something that is yours has been taken from you, that you are being robbed. I think that is the feeling. Personally, it has made me angry and it has hurt me because it takes away a sense of belonging, and everything you have known since childhood is taken from you, that is, your life, your memories, your family, your home.

[Desireé]: At age 24, which seems like a short time, Samantha has already lived several lives—exile, prison and now banishment. Words like “homeland” and “nationality” feel so old-fashioned. I, who left my country willingly, have not stopped asking myself what the meaning of those terms is, and I believe that, basically, it is linked to the ties, the affections, the culture, the history, the people who connect us to a place. I want to believe that we are our homeland, but I am sure that it does not feel the same when you are in a place that you did not choose, but were forced to be. Like Samantha. For her, the price of having a voice has been to truncate the life project that she designed and adapt it to her circumstances… Samantha never planned to live in the United States, nor does she plan to do so.

[Samantha]: I never believed, and have never believed, in the American dream. And being here today, I repeat that. I mean, I am very grateful to the United States government, very grateful for its support, for everything they did for us, but it was a bittersweet blow to our freedom. I mean, they gave us something, but they took a lot away from us. You can’t imagine how much it has weighed on me, day after day, to be here in this country, and how many times I have wanted to run away and leave, just go. And no, I can’t. I mean, I have often even felt like I was dead in life, because, I mean, I don’t want this.

[Desireé]: At home, she keeps the drawings she did while in prison, drawings which she managed to put in her bag on the night of her release. Also, in one of her drawers is the blue suit that she packed without the guards noticing.

In her day-to-day life, she works on projects related to Nicaragua, and started a business selling traditional Nicaraguan desserts. Of course, she talks on the phone for hours every day with her mother, whom she has not been able to see since she was expelled from her country. Her mother is still in Masaya.

During our conversation, Samantha showed me her tattoos. She has six of them: 

[Samantha]: Well, this tattoo, this design, I practically did it myself. 

[Desireé]: One is a woman’s body that takes root and blossoms. One has a Van Gogh Starry Night. A scene from The Little Prince. Her mother’s name. And perhaps the most relevant: one that is simply an outline of her country. She carries Nicaragua on her skin. So no one can take it away from her.

[Daniel]: Six days after the 222 political prisoners were banished, Daniel Ortega’s regime stripped the nationality of another 94 people, including writers, journalists and human rights defenders. In January 2024, the National Assembly ratified the constitutional reform used to apply this sanction for “treason.” And in September of this year, the regime again released and expelled a group of political prisoners from Nicaragua on a plane, but this time to Guatemala.

Samantha and Kevin have Spanish passports and were accepted into a Spanish university to continue their studies. They moved to Madrid with their cat.

Desirée Yépez is a producer for Radio Ambulante and lives in California. This story was edited by Camila Segura, Luis Fernando Vargas and me. Bruno Scelza did the fact-checking. Sound design is by Andrés Azpiri with music by Ana Tuirán.

The rest of the Radio Ambulante team includes Paola Alean, Lisette Arévalo, Pablo Argüelles, Lucía Auerbach, Adriana Bernal, Aneris Casassus, Diego Corzo, Emilia Erbetta, Rémy Lozano, Selene Mazón, Juan David Naranjo, Melisa Rabanales, Natalia Ramírez, Barbara Sawhill, David Trujillo, y Elsa Liliana Ulloa.

Carolina Guerrero is the CEO. 

Radio Ambulante is a podcast by Radio Ambulante Estudios, produced and mixed on the Hindenburg PRO program.

Radio Ambulante tells the stories of Latin America. I’m Daniel Alarcón. Thanks for listening.