Podcast: No Right to a Funeral in Nicaragua

The following is a transcript of episode 42 of the weekly El Faro English podcast, Central America in Minutes.

RELATIVE: No, he was just hanging around, and I’m telling you, there used to be a lot of gang members here, and the S.T.O. was here, all the special police forces were here, and they didn’t even stop him on the street.

GRESSIER, HOST: On Thursday, El Faro English ran the story of Walter Sandoval, a 37-year-old Salvadoran who died within 72 hours of being taken into custody under the state of exception. His family insists that he didn’t belong to any gang. Sandoval’s case is the earliest known death under the state of exception.

Human rights monitors estimate that the total number of Salvadorans to lose their lives in Nayib Bukele’s prisons in the last three and a half years is now upwards of 435.

Furious political ping-pong

We’ll get back to El Salvador at the end of today’s program. First, we go to Guatemala. In an explosive interview with Fox News two weeks ago, U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi claimed that organized crime is paying off law enforcement officials across the region to allow them to fly undetected.

She stated that U.S. prosecutors are investigating an “air bridge” for drug trafficking between Mexico, Guatemala, and Honduras. She linked these activities to the Cártel de los Soles in Venezuela, and all the way to the Nicolás Maduro regime.

This set off some furious political ping-pong in Guatemala. On August 21, internationally sanctioned Attorney General Consuelo Porras said that these types of investigations are consistent with those of her office and that’s why the prosecutors’ offices and agencies in both countries are in close communication.

She went on to assert that, during her seven-year tenure, the Public Prosecutor’s Office has investigated more than 8,000 cases linked to organized crime, including 3,800 convictions for drug trafficking.

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This would have seemed like a standard fare speech for the attorney general. Drug trafficking cooperation has been a talking point for the past several administrations, too. But her statements certainly caught the Bernardo Arévalo administration off guard.

The Guatemalan Ministry of Foreign Affairs retorted that “the Government of Guatemala does not allow criminal networks to use its airspace. Therefore, we reject the recent statements by the U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi.” The ministry added: “Guatemala does not recognize the legitimacy of Nicolás Maduro’s regime.”

On August 25, President Bernardo Arévalo pushed further: “We have been here for 18 months, she has been here for seven years. You do the math.”

The Public Prosecutor’s Office fired back on X by reaffirming that it is the only investigative body against drug trafficking and that the president’s insinuations are false. The next day, in her own interview with Fox News, Porras claimed that the Biden administration did not play ball with her office on drug investigations.

She also claimed to be unfairly sanctioned for ideological reasons, not for corruption — an argument Marco Rubio didn’t appear to buy when the U.S. secretary of state snubbed her on a visit in February.

In the hands of Murillo

Next, to Nicaragua. On Monday, opposition groups announced the death of political prisoner Mauricio Alonso Petri, an opponent of the Ortega-Murillo regime and religious freedom advocate who was detained along with his wife and son and had been missing for more than a month.

According to 100% Noticias, Petri was a leader of the MRS, an opposition party founded by Sandinista dissidents who drew the ire of the dictatorship in recent years and some of whom spent time in the regime’s prisons.

On its X account, UNAMOS, the new name for the MRS, mourned the death of Petri, who was in the custody of the National Police. “This tragic event has occurred without any justification provided by the authorities, which exacerbates concerns about detention conditions and respect for human rights in the country.”

That’s putting it mildly. Alonso Petri is the fourth political prisoner to die in custody of the Nicaraguan dictatorship. The dictator’s own brother, Humberto Ortega, passed away five months after being placed under house arrest in 2024. Hugo Torres, one of the leaders of the Sandinista revolution who once saved Ortega from prison, died in custody himself in 2022.

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There has also been a string of deaths of opponents of the Ortega-Murillo dictatorship in exile, in Costa Rica and elsewhere, such as the murder of Roberto Samcam last June outside his home in San José.

As for Alonso Petri, his wife was released on the same day she was detained, but their son remains missing in state custody. According to digital outlet Divergentes, he was captured in raids that took place in the departments of Carazo, Masaya, Granada, and Rivas.

Divergentes cited reports from Monitoreo Azul y Blanco that at least 28 people —including five entire families— remain detained in ‘forced disappearance conditions.’”

According to sources consulted by Divergentes, Alonso Petri was feeling ill and was taken to the Institute of Legal Medicine, but this is obviously not the first place one would think to take someone who needs first aid.

The family has declined to comment, and the government has not provided any explanations. However, human rights defender Haydeé Castillo reported on El Informante TV that the family was forced to bury him immediately, without the right to a funeral.

The State Department Bureau of Western Hemisphere Affairs commented on the matter on its X account, saying that they were “horrified by the Murillo-Ortega dictatorship’s inhumanity.” They also assured that they would not tolerate this type of cruelty and crime.

Castillo called on Nicaraguans and the international community to pay attention to political violence in Nicaragua. “A person’s life,” she said, “now depends on the decision of a dictator [Murillo] and her husband, because he [Ortega] has almost been displaced.”

“No credible reports”

Last, we turn back to the case of Walter Sandoval in El Salvador. On April 3, 2022, his corpse was removed from jail in Ahuachapán, a significant hub for the newly detained in the first days of the state of exception, with signs of torture around his wrists and legs and blunt force trauma to the chest.

El Faro published photos showing some of these physical signs, as well as information obtained from a coroner’s report — even though three and a half years later the Institute for Forensic Medicine still refuses to give his family the official autopsy.

Exactly one week before then, the Bukele-controlled legislature had approved a sweeping suspension of constitutional rights, including to habeas corpus. The right to be brought before a judge within 72 hours was extended to 15 days. But Walter would not make it that far.

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As we reported in episode 40, the U.S. State Department minimized the Bukele regime’s abuses in its 2024 human rights report, released on the 15th of this month. The top line was clear enough: The Trump administration found “no credible reports of significant human rights abuses” last year.

On April 26, 2022, right after the Salvadoran Legislative Assembly voted to extend the suspension of rights for the first time, El Faro English asked: Will the state of exception be the new normal?

We quickly got the answer to that question. Now we might update it: Is there any end in sight, and how high will the death toll have reached by then?

Yuliana Ramazzini and Roman Gressier wrote today’s episode, with production and original soundtrack by Omnionn. Subscribe on Apple, Spotify, Amazon, YouTube, and iHeart podcast platforms.