“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.