Reynaldo Urbina rides his motorbike around the streets of Masaya, Nicaragua, with agility, despite having only one arm. Nearly seven years ago, at the height of a US- supported coup attempt against Nicaragua’s left-wing Sandinista government, Urbina was one of those guarding the city’s municipal warehouse when it was attacked by around 200 armed protestors. Warned of the impending attack, the guards had been ordered to hide their weapons and not resist capture, to minimize casualties.
But Urbina was suspected of knowing the whereabouts of the city’s mayor, whom the hooligans sought to assassinate, so they threw him to the ground and smashed his left arm with a rifle butt until it was practically destroyed. Urbina escaped, but his arm could not be saved, and was later amputated.
When a team was sent by the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights to Nicaragua to collect evidence on human rights abuses a few weeks later, Urbina was among those offered by the government as a witness. But the team refused to meet him.
The UN’s 40-page report, issued in August 2018, devotes just five paragraphs to violence by anti-government factions; the rest blames the government and its supporters for practically every other violent incident, including many (like an arson attack on a pro-Sandinista radio station) that were clearly part of the coup attempt.
Some time after the coup attempt, Nicaragua’s then vice-minister for foreign affairs, Valdrack Jaentschke, described an exchange with Paulo Abrão, who was the Executive Secretary of the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights. The IACHR was another of the bodies which had launched investigations of human rights abuses in 2018. Valdrack had asked Abrão why visiting investigators were not collecting evidence of the severe opposition violence which had taken place. Abrão gave two reasons: that human rights abuses can only be carried out by the state, and that violence by civil society groups is just “common criminality” and therefore not within the investigators’ mandate.
Hellbound and Down 