Jessner Josué Rivas

“We are prisoners in Nicaragua”

Murdered in Managua on April 22, 2018

Jessner Josué Rivas was 16 years old and lived in the home of his grandmother, Maritza Yamileth Rueda Sáenz. He went to primary school in the Japón School and helped his grandmother with the little family store. Sometimes, when there was some mechanical work to be done, he also helped his uncle, Norlan Geovanny Rodríguez Rueda.

In his free time, Jessner played marbles or spinning tops; other times, he would go to the field to play soccer with his teammates, who nicknamed him “Pepito”.

At approximately nine o’clock in the morning on April 22, the young man was on his way to the PALI Supermarket in La Fuente Neighborhood, at the time when residents of that area were facing Sandinista Youth activists that were intending to loot the store. The police began to shoot people and wounded Jessner, his uncle says.

The family went to look for him in the Manolo Morales Hospital and they told them that he was in the operating room; a little later, the doctor told them that he had died, due to lack of blood. In the hospital, they asked them to file charges in the District V Police Station, but once they were there, they were forced to sign a document withdrawing the charges against the police for the murder of Jessner. The death certificate issued by the hospital was altered, indicating that he had died from a knife wound.

The family waits for justice to be done. “We want the killers to pay in prison for the crimes that they committed, because they killed unarmed people. I am a Sandinista, but I am not a Danielista and it hurts me that they have sullied the Sandinista Front,” Norlan says.

And he adds, “In Nicaragua, we have a dictatorship, we are prisoners and we want to be free. My gentle one… I will remember you in my heart.”

Facts

On April 22, 2018, at around nine o’clock in the morning, Jessner Josué Rivas went to the PALI Supermarket in La Fuente Neighborhood, which was being looted by mobs. When he was traveling on the north side of the Japón School, west of the commercial establishment, he was hit with a bullet in the upper part of the left nipple, without an exit wound. According to the family’s accounts, the shots were fired by police that had entered the annex of the Adolfo Reyes Neighborhood, popularly known as El Nancite. Wounded, Rivas was transported to the Manolo Morales Hospital, where he died in the afternoon. His grandmother, Maritza Rueda, denounced that the doctor changed the evidence, stating on the death certificate that he had a “knife wound” (stab wound). The police recorded him as having a criminal history and, in order to receive the body, the family had to sign a document indicating that they would abandon all legal processes.