Meet Vilma: Still not ready to stop fighting against torture in Nicaragua
Dec. 7, Managua (Nicaragua) – WhenVilma Núñez deEscorcia gets up in the morning, she thinksabout the many things she has to do, the cases she still hasn’t managed to doanything about. They are difficult cases to push through, because of theircomplexity and the new evidence surfacing in the news every day.
“Towork in human rights you really have to believe in them. It’s all uphill andresults are slow in coming,” she says. “You need to have a personal motivation to keep going.”
And,boy, does she have it. Vilma, 77, has been heading the Centro Nicaragüense de Derechos Humanos (CENIDH) for the past quarter of a century, assistingcivil society’s underprivileged populations and building the capacity toprotect and promote human rights. It is no leisurely occupation for this woman who only 10 years ago, was amongthe 1,000 female nominees for the Nobel Peace Prize for her work to advancehuman rights in her home country.
The first female magistrate in Nicaragua appointedVice-President of the Supreme Court from 1979 to 1987, Vilma pegsher commitment to fighting for justice to the fact that she was born outsidemarriage - a terrible thing at that time, which meant that she was barred fromthe best religious secondary school and could not inherit as much as each ofher “legitimate” siblings. She is now thankful for what she then considered asa “misfortune” as it made her realize how the legal system treated peopledifferently. This realization made her want to train as a lawyer specializingin human rights and penal law.
“Ididn’t’ want anyone else to suffer discrimination so I chose to become alawyer, to understand and stop it,” she explains.
Sheremembers her first encounter with torture when she was seven or eight yearsold. A man from her village, one Rito Jiménez, was reported disappeared.A year later, in 1947, his body was found in a lime pit in the La Libertadopen-pit gold mine. She never forgot the image of that body all covered in lime,like a white mummy, she says.
Atuniversity she later learned of the many methods of torture when visiting twoprofessors of hers who had been arrested. She saw professor Alonso Castellonhad had all his front teeth filed during his detention, and later created the first committee for his liberation.
Shethen went on to teaching and realized that Nicaraguan law completely ignoredtorture until 1985, when the Government ratified the Convention Against Torture(CAT). To this day, however, according to her the definition of torture underNicaragua law is incomplete compared to the CAT, according to her.
Vilmaherself was tortured when arrested in 1979, being considered a political opponentunder Somoza as a lawyer defending Frente Sandinista de Liberación Nacional rebels. She spentfive days without any news of her being sent to her family, just five monthsbefore the triumph of the RevoluciónPopular Sandinista. The military playedrecordings of her nine-year-old daughter saying “give me my mom back, you tookher away right in front of me!” while she was in jail. She was also blindfoldedand interrogated naked in front of a series of unknown men, or forced to do seriesof 100 squats, or to lie on the floor naked and wet while electrodes were incontact with the water.
Inspite of these experiences, Vilma continues her risky work and says fear ofreprisals or death is simply justnot part of her equation. “It’s not enough to use legal instruments to fighttorture; you have to see its behavioural aspects and identify with the victims,”she explains.
Today,Vilma’s concern is about the limits of torture’s characterization, inparticular with the forms of torture that do not leave visible traces, butstill affect individuals and families.
Vilmaand her organization initially thought that torture was no longer systematicallyused in the country from 1990-96, with the change of Government, after DanielOrtega (elected president from 1985-1990). But from 2007, when Ortega wasre-elected, torture was again institutionalized as a way to punish, bend andterrify people, and human rights defenders are not allowed into prisons. As crimehas increased in recent years, especially in the countryside, people have beentortured for being considered supporters or accomplices of politically motivatedarmed groups when in fact these peasants were forced to feed guerilleros, Vilmaexplains.
Vilma,who has held leading positions ininternational or regional human rights NGOs including OMCT, admitsthat it is hard to say that thanksto her work torture has diminished. Onthe contrary, there seems to be more torture in Nicaragua today. But at leastpeople now know they have the right not to be torture.
“Forus our greatest success is that people have now understood the concept, and thatit is a human rights violation,” she says.
-by Lori Brumat in Geneva
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OMCTwishes to thank the OAK Foundation, the European Union and theRepublic and Canton of Geneva for their support. Itscontent is the sole responsibility of OMCT and should in no way be interpretedas reflecting the view(s) of the supporting institutions.
