With his health deteriorating and without medication, journalist Victor Ruiz Ticay spent 517 days and nights sleeping on a cement floor in the suffocating heat of an overcrowded Nicaraguan prison cell.
The 6-by-9-foot cell, which he said he shared with 24 other inmates, was a nightmare of inhumane conditions: Toilets were little more than holes infested with insects. The food sometimes arrived rotten or with fragments of cockroaches.
Ticay, 32, found a way to hold on, he told Capital News Service in a recent interview from exile in Guatemala. He came to believe that survival was the only form of resistance left to him by the authoritarian government of President Daniel Ortega.
“We had to make it out alive and stay strong,” he said through a translator. “They want to keep you there to see you deteriorate, to see you suffer. And in the best case, once you’re out… you come out with no intention to be against them.”
Ticay, who was released and exiled from Nicaragua on Sept. 5 along with 134 other political prisoners, said he was able to stay strong, despite bouts of vomiting and diarrhea, because also believed he did not commit any crime. He had simply recorded a Holy Week procession in his small hometown of Nandaime and shared it on the Facebook news page he had created.
“I took out my cell phone, and I started filming, which any journalist would have done,” he said “All I did was document it. It’s absurd, because in no country in the world would they imprison you for a year and a half for this.”
Ticay was arrested the next day, April 6, 2023, because Nicaragua had banned public Catholic celebrations. Ticay was charged with undermining the sovereignty of Nicaragua, treason against the homeland and cybercrime. He was tried June 9 and sentenced to eight years in prison.
After 17 months, he was freed and forced into exile in Guatemala.
The government has forced at least 223 Nicaraguan journalists out of the country, according to a 2023 report from the Foundation for Freedom of Expression and Democracy, a civil society organization. Many of them lose their Nicaraguan passports and citizenship as well.
“Nicaragua independent media does exist…It ends up being media in exile,” said journalist Aurora Martínez, now a City University of New York graduate student. Originally from Nicaragua, Martínez has documented how the Ortega government has cracked down on independent reporting.
The Embassy of Nicaragua in Washington,. did not respond to requests for comment.
Ticay’s arrest
The April 5 Easter celebration in 2023 featured a traditional Catholic procession with participants carrying religious icons. They chanted prayers and reenacted the Stations of the Cross. Held in a public square, the procession attracted a large crowd, reflecting the community’s deep-rooted faith.
During the ceremony, Ticay decided to pull out his camera and livestream the procession on La Portada, a Facebook-based news outlet he founded in 2019.
La Portada began publishing after widespread anti-government protests of 2018, which critics say marked the beginning of the government’s consolidation of power.
Ticay founded the outlet as a way to share stories on sports, local news, religion and culture in Nandime, a population of 40,000.
On the day of his arrest, the streets were unusually quiet, with many residents away at the beaches. Yet something felt off, he said. There was an increased presence of motorcycles, commonly affiliated with government operations, that swarmed the area, he said.
The police who came to his home questioned him about his coverage of the religious celebration and demanded he accompany them to the local police station.
When he resisted, they forced him into a vehicle.
“I told them I would go on my own…they told me no….that was not an option,” Ticay said. He was wearing only shorts, slippers, and no shirt. He was taken not to the local station, as he expected, but to Managua, nearby an hour and a half by car away, where he was held at Managua’s Police Station Three.
He underwent exhausting interrogations over 10 days and nights, he told CNS. “They asked if I had financing from Western Europe and the United States” in connection with his coverage of the religious event.
Then he was put in detention. For two months, Ticay had no communication with his family, who did not know where he was. “My family searched for me in every police station in Managua,” he said.
Of the conditions he endured, he said: “I wouldn’t wish it on a dog.”
Ticay said his treatment throughout the process violated his legal rights. He had no access to a lawyer, he said, and his family was not permitted to send him food or soap.”
After his conviction, he was transferred to Tipitapa Prison outside Managua and allowed to see his family for the first time since his arrest.
Prison conditions for political detainees were harsher than those for common criminals, Ticay said. “Common prisoners had more privileges.” They were allowed more family visits and better food, he said. Political prisoners, on the other hand, were isolated and allowed only a 30-minute visit once a month.
Nicaragua’s media landscape
The U.S. State Department’s 2023 Human Rights Report on Nicaragua cites “serious restrictions on free expression and media freedom, including threats of violence against journalists, unjustified arrests and prosecution of journalists, and censorship.”
Political activists are also targeted.
In 2023, activist and academic Félix Maradiaga, along with over 200 other prisoners, were released and rendered stateless by the Nicaraguan government, then deported to the United States under a humanitarian parole program.
Maradiaga, a prominent critic of the Ortega regime, said he had endured years of persecution, including canceled passports, assassination attempts and a 13-year prison sentence for efforts to organize an opposition party against Ortega in 2021.
“What we’re seeing right now in Nicaragua is an attack on liberal democracy,” said Maradiaga, who lives in Florida with his family.
“Any organization, group, assembly, that could conceivably be a focus of any type of opposition would be persecuted, disappeared and exiled,” said Christopher Hernandez-Roy, senior fellow and deputy director for the Americas Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a non-profit bipartisan policy think tank in Washington, D.C.
Hernandez-Roy emphasized the Ortega administration’s determination to root out dissent at all levels, describing Nicaragua as a “totalitarian state” akin to North Korea, where dissent is neither tolerated nor left unpunished.
“He [Ortega] is against anything that can be organized and that can have a message different from the government’s message,” said Hernandez-Roy, “Anybody that has a different opinion is immediately censored at best and, at worst, is thrown in jail or forced into exile.”
Says Ticay, “My only crime is to practice my profession, to love Nicaragua, to have that commitment to the truth.”