Six years after the murder of their sons, three family members share what it’s like to live with grief without being able to return to Nicaragua.
HAVANA TIMES – Eleven days before the first anniversary of the murder of teenager Orlando Aguirre Córdoba, his mother, Yadira Cordoba, made the decision to leave Nicaragua. “I couldn’t even leave flowers on his grave,” she laments six years later.
She explains that what pushed her to suddenly leave the country were the latest veiled threats she received through the pastor of the church she attended. “They came to tell him to talk to me because they knew I was out in the streets with the Nicaraguan flag, attending marches and sit-ins, and they asked him to advise me because they didn’t want anything to happen to me,” she recalls.
For her, the only option was exile. “It was the way not to silence myself and continue demanding justice for the murder of my child,” she reflects.
Orlandito, as she affectionately called him, was a 15-year-old teenager murdered on May 30, 2018, during the march dedicated to the Mothers of April in Managua (on Nicaraguan Mother’s Day). Since his murder, the harassment from the Daniel Ortega and Rosario Murillo regime for her and her family was constant.
“Later I realized that he attended the protests secretly, but that day of the march he insisted we go because he wanted to support the pain of the mothers whose children had been killed,” she recounts.
Since she was tired from work that day, after washing almost 12 dozen pieces of clothes, Yadira fell asleep and, with half-closed eyes, said goodbye to her son. “I never imagined that on that day I would also become a member of the Mothers of April,” she affirms.
The teenager was shot in the chest in front of the then Dennis Martínez National Baseball Stadium. “According to witness accounts, the shot was fired by a sniper. The young man was transported by another protester on a motorcycle to the Fernando Velez Paiz Hospital, where he died two hours later,” details the site Museum of Memory Against Impunity of the Mothers of April.
Grief in Exile, Suffering in Another Country
Yadira now lives in the United States, where she arrived two years ago. Before that, she was in Costa Rica. “It’s hard to think that I can’t go back, not even to put flowers on his grave,” she says while crying.
Currently, she works in the laundry of a nursing home. “It’s been tough because of the language, but little by little I now make myself understood with the residents and my coworkers,” she explains.
However, she admits that she has experienced discrimination in both countries (Costa Rica and the USA). But she finds comfort in being accompanied in exile by two of her children.
In addition to killing her son, the dictatorship had robbed her of peace. “They pursued me; first, I moved houses in Nicaragua, but they didn’t rest until they found me (…) and that’s why, to avoid being silenced, I had to leave the country,” she says.
Yadira confesses that she thought her exile would be shorter, but now she is convinced that she won’t be able to return soon. “As long as those murderers remain in power, I won’t be able to set foot in Nicaragua,” she declares.
The Mourning on Mother’s Day in Nicaragua
Relatives of the victims killed in the context of the 2018 protests, grouped in the A
