Carlos Manuel Díaz
“He struggled to get by”
Murdered in Masaya on May 30, 2018
Carlos Manuel Díaz was 28 years old and worked for a company in the free-trade zone of Nindirí. Prior to that, he had worked for another company in Tisma and years before, he had worked in the market. The thing is, he struggled to get by. “He supported his seven-year-old daughter and left behind a two-month-old daughter,” relates his mother, Candelaria Díaz.
“We had a good relationship; I was a mother who gave him time and showed affection. I remember when he was little, I would grab him and say, ‘My boy, my little one, my little fatty,’” she recounts.
In his free time, he liked playing pool, he really enjoyed being with his friends and he also played soccer. He’d go out on the street and visit his friends.
“I worked from 7:00 a.m. to 8:00 p.m., and I had already been told that Carlos Manuel was with the kids in the barricades,” recalls Candelaria. On May 30, Mother’s Day, he called her around 9:30 to tell her that he was on his way to visit her, as he lived separately with his partner. That night there were confrontations in Masaya, and he had to cross from Santa Rosa to Monimbó to get to her house. “It was 10:00 p.m., and Carlos Manuel hadn’t arrived. A little later, we heard some shots. I had already gone to bed when a niece arrived to tell me that he had been shot…I raced out to the Little Plaza because there was a medical post there. I learned that he had been brought there in an ambulance, but that he had died shortly after arriving. He had been shot in his upper left chest,” explains his mother.
The other kids told her that en route to her house, Carlos Manuel had passed by the barricades where the other kids were and stayed with them a little while.
Facts
On May 30, 2018, around 9:30 p.m., Carlos Manuel Díaz left the area near Masaya’s Central Park, which had been under attack for two hours by paramilitaries and the police in an armed offensive that ended at midnight. The demonstrators had retreated. At 10:30 p.m., Diaz was in front of the Public Prosecutor’s office when he was wounded by a gunshot to his upper left chest. The demonstrators took him to the medical post at the Little Plaza of Monimbó in an ambulance, but he died shortly after arriving.
“Se hicieron las 10 de la noche y Carlos Manuel no aparece. Al rato escuchamos unos balazos. Ya estaba acostada cuando llega una sobrina a decirme que le habían disparado... Salgo en carrera para la Placita porque ahí tenían un puesto médico. Supe que se lo llevaron en la ambulancia, pero falleció pocos minutos después de llegar. Tenía un disparo en la tetilla izquierda”
Memory
Masaya
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