Exiled and stripped of citizenship, Nicaraguans look to Canada for chance to begin new lives

Manuel de Jesús Sobalvarro Bravo says Nicaraguan National Police took him during the early morning darkness into the courtyard of the Managua jailhouse known as El Chipote, placed a hood over his head and pressed the barrel of a pistol against his temple. 

"They'd tell me, 'Today we're going to kill you,'" recalled Sobalvarro, an exiled political dissident. "I thought it was my last day alive."

He then heard the hammer strike the empty chamber. This went on for five days after his arrest in November 2019 on what he says were trumped up charges of attempted sabotage. 

During the first three days, National Police agents showed him cellphone videos of his children going to school. "They'd tell me they were going to kill my daughters," he said. Sometimes he heard an AK-47 being cocked, a sound he knew well from his years serving in elite Nicaraguan units battling U.S.-backed counter-revolutionaries known as "Contras" throughout the 1980s. 

He said that at one point, the barrel of a rifle was pushed into the back of his neck before it was aimed next to his head. "And they would fire," said Sobalvarro in an interview with CBC News. 

"They tried to break me, my will, my mind."

He recalled a National Police officer handing him a list with names of government opponents. 

"They wanted me to accuse people … they would point them out, 'Accuse them and you'll go free,'" said Sobalvarro, 60. "I wouldn't do it."

He was then charged, convicted and sentenced to six years in prison in December 2019 for planning to blow up a bridge. Sobalvarro says the government of President Daniel Ortega fabricated the evidence against him and sent him to La Modelo, regarded by many to be one of the worst prisons in Latin America.

On Feb. 9, Sobalvarro landed in Washington, D.C., on a flight among 222 political prisoners exiled from Nicaragua and stripped of their citizenship by the Ortega government. The move rendered the exiled political dissidents essentially stateless, with the UN Refugee Agency saying it contravened "human rights law."

Sobalvarro, whose case was taken up by the Inter-American Court of Human Rights, said he'd like the opportunity to possibly come to Canada and begin a new life. 

During the 1980s, many Nicaraguans fled to Canada to avoid the war with the Contras. 

"I make a call to Canadian authorities that you open your doors again," said Sobalvarro, who became a lawyer after his more than decade-long military career. "Please open the doors so we have this option." 

He is currently staying with his brother near Austin, Texas. The U.S. is allowing the 222 freed political prisoners to stay for two years on humanitarian grounds. Spain has also offered them citizenship.