Ángel Ernesto Gahona López
42 Years Old - Journalist
Ángel Ernesto Gahona López
“His legacy: he exposed acts that needed to be condemned”
Murdered in Bluefields on April 21, 2018
Ángel Ernesto Gahona López was a journalist, and directed the news program El Meridiano, founded nearly a decade ago. Ángel was 42 years old, father of a 4-year-old girl and a 14-year-old boy. He had studied law at the university, explains his mother, Amanda López, because “he wanted to support his journalistic work with knowledge of the law.” His spent his free time on the weekends with his family.
“Happiness for him was to be with his family, take them to the pool, go around with his friends on a motorcycle and relax,” she adds. His father, Ángel Augusto Gahona, points to his son’s love of work. “Even as a boy he was a hard worker, always looking for something to do to earn money and not be a burden to his parents,” he says. His father adds that Ángel’s dream “was to complete his law studies and have his own house. He also dreamed of seeing his kids grow up, study and find their vocations in life.”
“Ángel was the note of joy, the one who put the flavor into family gatherings. He liked to cook, to cook Christmas dinners and special things for the entire family,” his father adds.
His mother describes him as an objective, balanced journalist. “When the crisis began,” she remembers, he wanted to report about it. He was well informed about what was happening in Managua and passed the information on in his news program. And when he was prohibited from broadcasting the news of what was happening in Managua in Bluefields, he continued doing so on Facebook Live.”
Ángel and his father were very close; they talked to each other a lot as friends. Don Ángel recalls his son saying he was seeing a lot of injustice around him, especially toward poor farmers and the poor in general, who had difficulties getting lawyers when any legal problems arose.
“He said several times in front of the family that he thought they were going to kill him,” says his father. “My son was investigating a lot of things and they had threatened him, until they finally killed him. They took advantage of the moment to murder him.”
For him, Ángel Gahona López’s legacy “was to be objective and upstanding and to expose things that needed to be condemned.”
On April 21, Ángel didn’t participate in the anti-government demonstration in Bluefields. The call had gone out to support it, but it was Saturday and he had homework to do for his class the following day at the university, so he stayed home. In the afternoon he went out to print the work he had done and headed over to the park. When he got there he saw the destruction the protest had left behind and went closer to gather more information about what had happened. The place was guarded by police officers, as demonstrated in a video in which they are only a few meters from the journalist while he filmed. Ángel parked his motorcycle on the corner in front of Optica Munkel and crossed the park to the Municipal Government building, reaching it just before two shots struck him down.
Gahona’s mother blames the police for his murder and claims that a police commissioner was on the scene at the moment of the crime. “It’s simple,” she says. “There’s not much to investigate. If the shot had come from the area of the park, the police would have captured those who fired the shots. But there was no one in the park and in the video you can see the police moving away from the scene of the crime.”
She describes how the same commissioner came a week later to offer condolences to the family and she told him, “It was a murder. In the video you can see the police fleeing the crime scene instead of capturing the killer who fired the shots.”
On recalling her encounter with the police chief, she adds, “I said it right to his face, just like I’m saying it right now. ‘‘Condolences for my son’s death make no sense since it was murder. You were only a few meters from Ángel’s body and could see when the police ran away.”
Gahona’s mother also spoke about the arrest and imprisoning of Glenn Slate and Brandon Lovo, the two young Bluefields residents accused of killing her son. She is convinced that “the police looked for a scapegoat in order to provide a response to the Bluefields population and the national and international press. It is in no way the truth. It’s all a lie, a pure cosmetic cover-up, part of the corrupt situation we’re living through in the country.”
I want to know more