Danny Ezequiel López Morales
21 Years Old - Salesman
Danny Ezequiel López Morales
“There are causes it’s worth dying for, but not for which it’s worth killing”
Murdered in León on July 5, 2018
Ileana del Socorro Morales León says that her son, Danny Ezequiel López Morales, dreamed of a future for his family. “He shared his pig butchering company with his sisters and brothers,” she says. “‘You sell this, you sell that,’ he’d tell them so they could all earn something. He was very united with his siblings. When they killed him, he left a two-year-old son.”
His sister Jani says that Dany liked playing soccer and having fun, like any young person. He also wrote poems. He had big plans and kept an eye out for repairs that had to be made to the house and for ways of guaranteeing the title deed because their mother had inherited that house.”
Another of his sisters, Dolores, recalls him as “social” and friendly with the companions he hung out with. “We had a really lovely relationship, a really great one…,” she says. “He was more like a father, practically, than my brother; he looked after me and gave me everything. When this all started, he didn’t get involved in anything, but he said, ‘I’m against (the repression) because I wouldn’t like them to do anything to my son or for him to have any problems because of what was happening in the country.’”
Ileana explains that starting from April 19, Danny felt very brave and wanted to help in one way or another. He was at the barricades and when they told him that “Operation Clean-Up” was coming, she asked him to stay at home. “I tell him not to go and give his support because I’m afraid they’ll hurt him,” she says. “But he tells me, ‘Mom, I can’t turn back now.’”
His sister Dolores was also really worried about her brother that day: “The first thing I told myself was, ‘I’m going to look for mom; Dany shouldn’t go out.’ I was always thinking about him because he was going around with his home-made mortar protecting the roadblocks. And one day before he was murdered, he wrote on his Facebook page: ‘There are causes it’s worth dying for, but not for which it’s worth killing. Nicaragua united will never be defeated!’
“The day they killed him I told him not to go, but when I came out, Danny wasn’t there anymore,” explains his mother. “The paramilitaries were outside and they caught him by surprise. He was on a bicycle and they shot him there. The bullet went through his back and came out were his stomach is.”
Dolores says that he continued pedalling his bicycle toward his house after he was wounded. “He possibly went a block or a block and a half before he passed out because of the pain,” she recounts. “My other brother went out from behind the block to try and help him, but some paramilitaries were coming and they aimed at him, so he waited for them to go before going out to Danny.”
According to Ileana, a neighbor helped them to take him by motorbike to the Sutiaba health center, some three blocks away, but the place was surrounded by police officers and riot police and the doctors had been ordered not to attend to any injured young people who turned up. “And my son, the one who took him there, said, ‘You know what, mom? They kept turning to look at each other, like they felt bad; they wanted to help him, but they looked at me as if to say they were being threatened.’…”
Nobody attended to Danny and he died. The neighbors told Ileana that before he passed away, he asked her to forgive him, “but he also asked for God’s forgiveness, as I taught my children to do.”
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