Josué Israel Mojica Velázquez

“He went to the marches joyfully and never left his flag behind”

Murdered in Diriamba on July 8, 2018 

Josué Israel Mojica Velázquez was small and thin.  He was studying at the La Salle high school.  His mother, Elizabeth Velázquez, says his passion was soccer.  “He played field soccer and living room soccer; he was a forward.  His other passion was taekwondo, and he won a silver medal.”

Josué also liked singing the songs of the Mejía Godoy brothers and other Nicaraguan music.  His love for Nicaragua was deep and his dream was that the regime would end so he could live in a free country.  He went to the marches joyfully but could never decide where to put a flag.  He painted it on his neck, he stuck it in his belt…  One day when he was leaving the house for a march with his flag, he wrote Josué M, April 19 on a wall of the little park.  He took a photo with the flag and published it on social media,” recounts his mother.

Carmen Velázquez Gutiérrez, Josué’s grandmother, recalls that on July 8 she heard shooting at 6 in the morning.  She went to see about Josué and saw that he was getting ready to go out.  “The boys from Jinotepe are coming,” he told her.  It didn’t matter that his grandmother was begging him not to go. He slung on his backpack, put his cap on and left.

Soon after, a neighbor came to tell them he had been shot.  Doña Carmen said she wouldn’t let her daughter go out and she herself grabbed a white rag as a flag and went with two nephews to look for him.  “I asked over by the cemetery and they told me there weren’t any deaths.  I went over to El Reloj and nothing there either.  Along the road I found some armed hooded men and asked if they had seen the boy.  I told them to give him over to me so we could have a wake and bury him.  Their answer was that ‘we don’t go around killing, we’re only here doing cleanup,’” she recounts with grief.

In her desperate search, Josué’s grandmother went from one end of Diriamba to the other all day, until someone finally told her there had been two bodies over by the hospital and a pick-up truck had taken them off in plastic bags. “His mother went to Managua to look for him and found him in the morgue.”

Josué Mojica’s murderers had threatened him through a message his mother later found on his cell phone.  “Boy, we’re on your case for messing with the FSLN,” said the text, according to the report doña Elizabeth filed with the Permanent Human Rights Commission (CPDH).