My brother, Pedro Joaquin Chamorro, writes of his one year, seven months and eighteen days in Nicaragua’s “El Chipote” jail and under house arrest.
By Carlos F. Chamorro (Confidencial)
HAVANA TIMES – Destinos Heredados [“Inherited Destinies”] is the testimony of my brother, Pedro Joaquin Chamorro, on his ten months and nine days in the infamous “El Chipote” jail, and the nine months, nine days of house arrest that followed, when he was transferred after losing 50 pounds and with his health seriously deteriorating.
It all began as a cruel act of political vengeance imposed against him and dozens of others, both male and female: political and civic leaders, university students, rural activists, business leaders, intellectuals, journalists, priests, and human rights advocates. All at a time when the dictatorship of Daniel Ortega and Rosario Murillo determined that imprisoning all the opposition leaders was the most effective way to annul any kind of competition in the November 2021 elections. Otherwise, the dictator was destined to lose.
The book is also a minutely detailed narrative from a journalist determined to describe with rigor, honesty, and truth the events he lived through. I read this manuscript for the first time when Pedro Joaquin – now banished to the United States – was sending me freshly written drafts of each of the book’s fifteen chapters. I read it again, now as a finished book, in one straight sitting. Its value as a historic document impacted me immediately, as well as the portraits of his relations with his cellmates, including Víctor Hugo Tinoco, Arturo Cruz and Jose Adan Aguerri. But, above all, it ensnared me as a reader because he has achieved the difficult feat of bringing alive what life is like in the dungeons of Latin America’s worst dictatorship. Moreove
