Three mutilating blows to the law against violence to women

This feminist psychologist analyzes the process the Ortega government engaged in to mutilate Law 779, which sought to guarantee Nicaraguan women the right to a life free of violence.

Ruth Marina Matamoros

Nicaragua’s police stations for women and children, a relatively novel institution created in Nicaragua in 1993 for woman to denounce the violence they had suffered and thus begin the journey to justice, have now been either weakened or closed everywhere in the country. As if that were not bad enough, the Comprehensive Law against Violence to Women (Law 779), approved in 2012, began to be perverted soon after it went into effect. The assault occurred with a three-punch combination: a reform, a regulation and a set of instructions.

The origins of the women’s police stations

To give some idea of the degree to which these special police stations have been gutted, it’s useful to look at the origins of this institution, once a symbol of the State’s will to provide specialized attention to women denouncing the violence that’s so common in this country. My information comes from a 2008 study by Almachiara D´Angelo, Yamileth Molina and Nadine Jubb on the stations in Nicaragua, which was part of wider study on such institutions in Latin American countries.

In 1992, Aminta Granera, who at the time headed the National Police executive secretariat and is today its national police chief, did a study on the high incidence of sexual crimes in our country. As she was very close to the women’s movement, she promised to initiate efforts to eradicate violence against girls and women. Her first step was to travel to Brazil and Argentina with a delegation of women from the movement and female legislative representatives. Women’s police stations were already functioning as specialized police dependencies in both countries and she wanted to learn about their experiences first hand.

The product of this coordinated effort by our police and the women’s movement, these stations were conceived as a specialized institutional space to assist women filing charges for crimes of violence, a place where they could find prompt, quality and sensitive attention.

The first women’s police station opened its doors as a six-month pilot project on November 23, 1993, in Managua’s police district 5. The result of a tripartite negotiation among the National Police, the government and the women’s movement, that test run and the first permanent stations were financed not from the general budget but by the Embassy of the Netherlands in Nicaragua.

The permanent ones weren’t officially launched until 1996, when they were included in the National Police Law (Law 228) and defined as a dependency of that institution. That same year the Health Ministry issued an agreement recognizing violence against women as a public health problem. That led to the establishing of a set of health care regulations for women who turned to the women’s police stations, although it later became obvious that this meant little in practice.

The first of three stages: Getting our feet wet

The women’s police stations have gone through three stages. In that first one, from 1993 to 2001, stations were set up with financing for only three years. By 1998, ten had been created, all with foreign funds. Some of them grew out of local initiatives, with the station in Matagalpa one of the first.

The Nicaraguan Women’s Institute (INIM) represented the State on the tripartite technical committee that ran these stations, with the other two representatives being the Police and the Network of Women against Violence for civil society. INIM was also the official counterpart for the international cooperation financing the stations and directly contracted the services of women’s centers and the social workers and psychologists who staffed the stations. It was also responsible for ensuring that the police personnel working in these stations would be trained on issues of violence and on prevention and outreach work. One achievement of INIM’s management, together with the women’s centers, was that various female doctors working in the centers specialized as forensic medical examiners, thus increasing access to medical-legal examinations for women who filed charges for violence.

The Network of Women against Violence got fully involved in the functioning of the stations. It’s important to mention that for the first time the State recognized the Network’s social and political legal status. Speaking as a member of the Network, I can say that our main objective was to ensure that the attention to women took into account the particularities and characteristics of gender violence. We were particularly worried that women would be induced or encouraged to make extrajudicial arrangements, mediations or conciliations with their aggressors. The reason for our concern was that in a mediation the woman has to take some of the responsibility for the violence she receives, “do her part to solve the problem.” Accepting some deal also means abandoning her right to a trial where she can air the violence she has suffered and see it punished. This lets the State wash its hands of its responsibility regarding these crimes.

The stations were staffed with a social worker and at times psychologists who did the first crisis intervention. The women were then transferred to women’s movement attention centers where they received psychological care, a medical-legal exam and were provided accompaniment and legal advice. If a charge was filed that met the requisites, the case would be transferred to the courts. It must be said that even back in that first stage, many cases of domestic violence ended in extrajudicial deals. And we always fought that.

Another point the Network was always pushing was to achieve a genuinely horizontal relationship between the stations project and women. In one meeting of the technical committee, the INIM director said: “What I want is for them to stop abusing my women.” My immediate thought was: What’s this about ‘my’ women? That protectionist vision has always predominated, with women seen as individuals who can’t defend themselves, who receive handouts, rather than citizens with full rights.

The second stage:
A network of services

The second stage ran from February 2001 to January 2004, during which another 21 stations opened in Managua’s Police Districts 1, 3, 4, 5, 6 and 7, and in the municipalities of Carazo, Granada, Masaya, Malpaisillo, León, Chinandega, Estelí, Jinotega, Nueva Segovia, Chontales, Boaco, Somoto-Madriz, Bluefields and Puerto Cabezas. Management was still in the hands of the same tripartite technical committee, which administered the funds and discussed the project’s progress and problems. In that management system, the model began to function as a network of services. The entryway in the search for justice for women could be either the women’s police stations or any of the country’s 40 women’s centers that were providing care and accompaniment and receiving funds from the project to provide services. A referral and counter-referral system between the police stations and those centers helped the women receive the right assistance.

There were two levels of attention. The primary level was done first in the stations and then in the centers, while the second level was the specialized attention. By that time territorial commissions had also been formed, with representatives from the state institutions and women’s organizations working side by side and in coordination with the Police. The commissions discussed the main problems of violence in the given territory and how to respond to them. Some functioned well, while others fell apart and closed.

As Nicaragua has always suffered statistical weaknesses, it was proposed in this stage to create a centralized and single information system to document and leave a record of all the care being provided at a national level. But it wasn’t possible. Each organization recorded the files on different forms and although an effort was made to create a computerized system, not all organizations had either the equipment or the personnel to switch over and keep up with the load. It was a very complex and ambitious project that didn’t work.

One problem we saw frequently in that stage, and protested about, was the high staff rotation in the women’s police stations, despite all the money being invested in training people to specialize in gender violence. Just as they were finally prepared, they would be transferred to some other police specialty and new, inexperienced personnel brought in to replace them. It was a waste of the efforts the organizations and stations were making and also a waste of funding. It must also be said that we always had difficulties getting enough personnel. The demand by women affected by violence always outstripped the possibilities of providing them the good attention they deserved.

In this second stage some difficulties began to be felt in the tripartite technical committee, with contradictions particularly related to the joint participation in the model, how the women were assisted, how they were referred to the women’s centers and how they were treated in the stations. At the same time, a new internal police statute in those years meant the institution could directly access cooperation funds without having to rely on the institutional mediation of others, in this case INIM. And, as was to be expected, they embraced that responsibility.

The third stage:
A substantial model change

The third stage of the women’s police stations opened in 2004 with a substantial change in the managerial-administrative model, which no longer involved coordination between the Police, INIM and the Network of Women against Violence. National communication and coordination among the three sectors of the technical committee ended and the stations were put strictly in police hands. New stations were opened, for a total of 32. Many of the organizations coordinated in an “Alliance of Centers,” which provided attention but now prioritized preventive work.

In 2006 the National Police elevated the stations’ status, converting them into a specialty by creating the Department of Police Stations of Women and Children, the new name given them. Provision 023/06 of June 20, 2006, defined their job as dealing with domestic and sexual violence. The central office of the stations was strengthened with the creation of three new departments: investigation, information and criminological analysis, and prevention.

Commissioner Erlinda Castillo, who heads this department, said in a presentation at the First Congress of Women Lawyers in September 2014 that the function of these police stations is to “provide security, protection and thus favor the empowerment of the victims and survivors of violence.” I want to underscore how important it was that she spoke of empowerment, because if that is one of the objectives of these police stations today, what we’re seeing in practice says the opposite. She also specified that it was a task of the stations to investigate criminal acts, “and when it has to do with crimes in the act of commission, whether or not charges have been filed, to take legal action to interrupt the commission of the crime and provide aid to the victim, as well as conducting urgent actions of investigation or apprehension when called for.” So the station’s police personnel may act immediately, without any denunciation, to halt the violence, get the aggressor out of the house, impose precautionary measures and protect the woman and her children.

Three important achievements

Before analyzing the current crisis, I want to note that throughout these three stages, the women’s police stations have sometimes really facilitated women’s rights and sometimes actually rolled them back. I want to mention three very important achievements. The first was training many women to provide attention to a problem that requires specialization and sensitivity. We in the Network and in the women’s organizations invested time and resources to train station staff on gender violence so they would understand the gravity of these crimes. And even when many of those staff members were transferred to other police dependencies, the fruit of the knowledge shared with them always remained.

Another achievement was the Comprehensive Attention Model (MAI), drawn up by the state institutions to offer the women effective access to justice. The model sought to provide them health care and protection and avoid their re-victimization through repeated interviews. They proposed a single interview, so the women would have contact with only two officials and not go from pillar to post retelling what had happened to them over and over. A pilot project was launched to that effect, but didn’t always eliminate the duplication of interview, reduce the secondary victimization or even optimize the quality or promptness of the attention along the route to justice. Coordination by the institutions on that route didn’t always work either: some other document was always needed, or another interview with the psychologist or attorney, or the charge had to be detailed further… So in reality, the idea of coordinating all the institutions involved in ensuring justice in the MAI couldn’t always be applied.

The third achievement was that we in the women’s movement were able to take advantage of all the spaces available in the territories to coordinate with the state institutions and get better answers for women along that route. Whenever a space existed, we used it to improve coordination, but we had better results in some places than others, because it depended as much on the person in the institution as on the institution itself. However, we always made the effort.

From the outset, and at all stages, we never failed to point out cases of what seemed to us to be poor attention. Sometimes a given police station wouldn’t have a private space where the women could avoid seeing their aggressor. How confidently are you going to talk, to tell what happened to you if you’re feeling shame? Because all women who denounce violence are affected by the myth that “you must have done something to make them beat you”… We also fought against women being sent back to their homes again and again in the hope that everything would sort itself out, when in fact it only got worse. Think about it: how’s a man going to treat you if you’ve denounced him, then you have to go back home and he realizes what you’ve done? There’s a high risk of death in those circumstances, and that needs to be taken very seriously.

Many women also would tell us that they hadn’t been given a copy of the charge, even though it’s their right and sometimes they weren’t even given the opportunity to read the written version of what they had declared before signing it. All this influences the feeling women often experience when they leave that justice wasn’t done.

We’re now in a new stage:
The gutting of the women’s stations

The weakening of the role of the women’s police stations has been a process. It’s difficult to identify the inflection point, but we in the women’s movement began to feel that we were thinking and acting very differently, with very different convictions than before. For example, in the above-mentioned presentation by Commissioner Erlinda Castillo, she reported that the stations were beginning to treat male aggressors, applying the Duluth method and repulse, which is an anger-control method. We spoke out against this in forums and meetings and any other opportunity we had, insisting that the women’s police stations weren’t created for that, no matter how valuable it might be, and that it was more properly a task for the penitentiary system. Nonetheless, the Police was happy with its work with those men, thinking that they would stop being aggressive.

The current phase—the gutting of the women’s police stations and the change in the justice access route—makes us both sad and indignant. The information about what has happened varies from place to place. Women in the Network of Women against Violence in Managua have told us that the District 5 station, the first one created, no longer exists in practice; there isn’t a social worker, psychologist or lawyer there anymore; the station’s chief was sent to be the deputy chief of the Judicial Aid Department and the prosecuting attorney was removed. We’ve heard in the forums we’ve attended and in the Network meetings that the stations in León, El Carmen and Masaya have been closed outright. For some time now any women showing up at the station in Matagalpa wouldn’t find any staff there; they would be told they were out in the communities giving talks. They just left a Ministry of the Family official behind to counsel the women.

In many places they haven’t actually closed the station or taken down its sign; the building is still there, but the problem is the way they’re attending the women who come to file charges, despite the fact that one objective of Law 779 is to “strengthen the Women’s Police Stations.” I would like to believe that not all stations have been gutted or closed, that some are still functioning and continue accompanying women the way they used to. But in the meetings we’ve held with women from Managua, Jinotega, Matagalpa, Masaya, León, Chinandega, El Carmen, Muy Muy, even places where there were “women’s attention offices” rather than women’s police stations, the most worrying thing is the way women are being dealt with and the kind of solution they’re being offered.

We know that in León only the Public Ministry has continued functioning, without much diligence, even though there have been atrocious murders there. The attention to women who have filed a charge has been transferred in many places to the Alternate Conflict Resolution Administration (DIRAC), an authority under the Supreme Court of Justice created in 1999 for “the resolution of property conflicts via alternate mechanisms of mediation and arbitrage.” Now it seems they want to give it another function…

The information varies from place to place. The changes they have made are barely getting underway. The staff is now different in many of the women’s police stations that do still exist because the equipment and personnel have been shifted to other police departments. Victims of sexual or domestic violence of all ages are now dealt with in the National Police Judicial Aid section, often by male personnel who are neither trained nor sensitized to these crimes, as happened before the women’s police stations existed.

The passage of Law 779
was a huge victory

The weakening and in many cases dismantling of these stations need to be understood as part of the executive branch’s decision to decapitate Law 779. This larger process explains everything that has changed since then and what we are seeing now.

Law 779 went into effect in June 2012 after its unanimous approval by the National Assembly. As its name implies, it is a very comprehensive law that includes aspects of prevention, punishment and compensation and even contains its own policy. This legislation is the fruit of years of struggle by Nicaragua’s women. We celebrated its approval trusting that the law would open new possibilities for Nicaraguan women to live a life without violence. The law lists and provides penalties for all the offenses we women had been demanding be recognized for a long time. It created courts specializing in violence, with judges trained to hear these cases and to apply the law taking the particularities of gender violence into account. It was a huge victory.

First blow against the law:
Reform Law 846

Almost immediately after its approval, however, the law’s detractors filed suits of unconstitutionality against it. They argued that it undermined the constitutional principle of equality under the law and that if there was a special law against violence toward women there would also have to be a special law against violence toward men. The bishop of Estelí, Abelardo Mata, went so far has to say that the number of the apocalyptic “beast” was no longer 666, but 779. Fundamentalist evangelical churches claimed the law would destroy marriage and the family and demanded restitution of the right to mediation in cases of violence. Given the proven history of mediation, it had been excluded as an obligation in the law.

We already know that maintaining good relations with the churches is very important to this government. Irrefutable evidence of this is that less than a year after its approval, Law 779 suffered its first reform: Law 846, which established mediation as an alternative in “less serious” crimes of violence based on the principle of opportunity. According to the law’s opponents, the defendant was considered guilty and denied the right to a defense. With mediation he would have the opportunity to avoid a penal process.

The reform determined that mediation would take place only before the prosecuting attorney or the judge, who would also have to verify beforehand that the woman agreed to that procedure of her own free and spontaneous will, free from intimidation, pressure or threat. And if the woman said she didn’t want mediation, she could not be obliged to engage in it. Moreover, aggressors who were repeat offenders were not given the opportunity of mediation.

The women’s movement and many others around the country denounced the restitution of mediation as a step backward. We argued that it put women’s lives at risk. In Masaya, women protested, insisting that “Mediation isn’t an obligation and isn’t a solution.”

Second blow against the law:
Presidential Decree 42-2

In July 2014, two years after Law 779 was approved, it suffered an even harder blow when a presidential decree was published in La Gaceta regulating it, even though constitutional expert Azahálea Solís argued that its contents were such that it needed no regulations.

Law 846 had given the executive branch no more than 60 days to send the National Assembly a proposed regulation that would effectively alter Law 779, but the executive didn’t do it. It thus fell directly to the legislative branch to regulate it, but it didn’t do it either. With that the President bypassed the National Assembly, issuing Regulation 42-12 by decree, modifying not only certain provisions of Law 779 but also its spirt and objective. This amounts to a violation of the juridical hierarchy, an indispensable principle of the rule of law in which no regulatory law may modify, reform or contravene the law that gave rise to it. In that regard, Decree 42-12 and the regulations it orders are illegal. From day one the women’s movement refused to recognize them for that reason. We in the Network of Women against Violence declared that we weren’t going to comply with the decree, and would tell women that they aren’t obliged to accept it.

It changed the law’s objective: The presidential decree changed the objective of Law 779, which was to act against the violence toward women, protect their human rights and ensure them a life free of violence. The regulation, however, established that the law’s objective is to strengthen the family. It is no longer women who are to be protected against this country’s endemic gender violence, but the families. That is a very drastic change.

It changed the law’s scope: The degree’s regulations also changed the scope of Law 779, which was applicable to all crimes against women in both the private and the public sphere. The regulations reduced it to crimes committed in the private sphere and to people with whom the woman is personally linked. As a result, the murder of women is only recognized as femicide when the killer is a man the woman was related to. This has also had the side effect of reducing the official femicide figures.

It isolated women from support. Another thing that seems to have disappeared with the regulations is the principle of trials being held in public, since many are held in private and without taking the victim into account. As a consequence, the women find themselves having to deal with the process without the support of the women’s organizations. In fact, for several years now, we have been prohibited from accompanying the women in either the courts or in the remaining women’s police stations.

And it changed women’s route to justice: The presidential decree also changed the route to justice for women who denounce violence. The first step is no longer the women’s police station, but the Family Counseling Service, a new entity whose defined purpose is to strengthen the values of respect, love and solidarity in the family and community. The second step is the Police or Public Ministry, which in turn sends the women to the Ministry of the Family, where they must seek to sort out “the conflicts that are behind the violence,” as the regulation states.

Violence has been given another name

One objective of promoting mediation in all cases of violence is to make the country’s violence rates disappear. The State doesn’t provide figures on either violence against women or maternal mortality. It wants to promote the image that we’re the safest country in Central America, even in Latin America, but our country isn’t actually safe for women or girls. Sexual abuse is of epidemic proportions in Nicaragua.

The rollback is so enormous that what we were criticizing way back at the beginning has returned: instead of being able to file charges, women now have to take on commitments to improve their behavior, as does the man because he’s behaving badly. Both are being urged to recognize the causes producing “any type of alteration in the interpersonal relations within their family dynamic and mechanisms are being provided for them to reestablish family harmony through commitments based on communication, respect, mutual support and love.” That’s what the regulations say. It’s a total change of language that reveals a complete switch in the way gender violence is being addressed. Because gender violence isn’t the expression of a conflict in personal relations; its violence; it’s a crime and it can’t be called by any other name. They’re trying to change the reality by changing the language… The women in Masaya told us that they received guidelines instructing that they must now speak of “family misunderstandings” rather than “violence.”

We wonder if the people who make up the Family Counseling Services, which are para-party community structures, have the experience and the preparation to comprehend, attend to and accompany the situations of violence women experience. Whether they do or not, the presidential regulations have invested them with the authority to intervene and keep women from filing charges and to solve the problem “in family”… The people trained by the women’s organizations weren’t taken into account when creating these counseling services, which would have been one way to make use of all the work experience we’ve had for so many years.

It should be said that the women from Bilwi’s Nidia White Women’s Movement have told us that things have gone differently in the Caribbean and many women who were trained are forming part of the counseling services. But that’s the exception, not the rule.

Speed of action hobbled by red tape

Another principle annulled by the regulations is that of speed of action. The precautionary measures established in Law 779, which the Police specified upon creating the Department of Women’s Police Stations could be applied legally to detain violence in the act, must now take a whole array of people into account. The regulations mention “the heads of district and municipal delegations or the Public Ministry, which must be aided by the Cabinets of Family, Community and Life, the judicial, pastoral and religious facilitators, volunteer and solidary promoters, counselors and other community expressions.”

Does this mean that all these people must meet to see if they agree with applying the precautionary measures, which consist of getting the man committing the aggression out of the house, applying preventive prison, and returning the house to the woman and her children who were violently thrown out of it? Must the opinion of all these people who have nothing to do with what happened to the woman be listened to?

Third blow against Law 779:
Instructions on child support

The third blow to definitively gut Law 779 is how the crime of failing to provide child support is being addressed. Both Law 779 and the Family Code treat as a form of economic violence men’s failure to provide support for children they engendered then irresponsibly abandoned. The promulgation and entry into force of these two laws obviously increased the charges brought by women against their spouses for failing to pay child support. Although it’s difficult if not impossible to get access to reliable statistics on many issues in Nicaragua, including those related to violence against women, Supreme Court data show that the number of cases of failure to provide child support that reached the courts shot up from an annual average of some 700 prior to passage of Law 779 to around 5,000 in the first year the law was in effect. The specialized courts began to resolve both these new demands and the ones gathering dust. Law 779 revealed that paternal irresponsibility is yet another national epidemic.

That led to the third blow against Law 779, the coup de grâce. Just this February the media revealed that a set of instructions titled “Cases of violence, food and special protection of children and adolescents” had been issued by the National Inter-institutional Penal Justice Commission in which the judges specializing in violence and other judges authorized to hear cases about it and apply Law 799 are instructed not to issue arrest warrants against men already tried for but still failing to provide child support to their progeny. And should the judge hand down such a warrant, the instructions order the National Police not to detain the man, to disobey the judicial order. This institutionalizes paternal irresponsibility, giving a blank check to so many irresponsible men who contribute nothing to the maintenance of their children. It is nothing other than institutionalized violence, a violation of the rights of both women and children.

This set of instructions hasn’t been published in any official medium or anywhere else for that matter. What we know of its contents comes from the information journalists Martha Vásquez Larios and Elizabeth Romero published in the February 24, 2016, edition of La Prensa. They were given the instructions by a judicial source and actually held them in their hands. In their article they say that the guidelines for action were transmitted orally and that the instructions talked about monitoring to evaluate how well they were being applied.

More blank checks for offenders

If ordering judges not to issue arrest warrants against men for failure to comply with their child support obligations wasn’t scandalous enough, the instructions extended that order to “less serious” offensive listed in Law 779. That means in practice that no man may be arrested for committing them and refers to all offenses sanctioned in the law with the exception of three: femicide, rape and sexual abuse.

The instructions orient the Police and Prosecutor General’s Office, also known as the Public Ministry, to mediate and offer agreements in all the less serious offenses. The ministry must promote mediation or refer women who file charges either to DIRAC or to the Public Defender’s Office… so they can conduct the mediation. And if there’s no Public Ministry office in the municipality, the case will be taken up by the police’s Judicial Aid section, which will refer it to DIRAC or to the Public Defender’s Office. For what? Again, so they can mediate, because the instructions say so: “The Prosecutor General’s office and the Police are oriented to mediate in all cases.” Wherever a woman chooses to go to file her charge, the endgame will always be mediation. According to the instructions, if the woman doesn’t want to mediate and the Public Ministry doesn’t take penal action, then she may file her accusation directly with a competent judge, who must promote the resolution of the case. How? Through mediation! In any event, how many women could pay a private lawyer to present their suit?

Offering mediation as the State’s only response for dealing with the generalized violence against women is a violation of their human rights, their right to live without violence. It is very serious and dangerous. With these instructions the aggressors are going to feel not only impunity, but actually support from the State for returning to their homes where they can again exercise violence, knowing they will get off.

These instructions are the final mutilation of Law 799, and have been preceded by various signs. Ever since the presidential decree we had seen officials leaving some of the remaining women’s police stations so there were either no personnel or only some Ministry of the Family official. Those left behind began counselling women to mediate or sending them to the barrio or community counseling service.

The MAI has been another
victim of all these changes

In a forum held in Matagalpa last year, the head of the women’s police stations expressed great pleasure that they would now be out of the offices giving preventive talks in the communities. But what about the women who need to go to the station? They’ll be attended by the Ministry of the Family. But of course, that’s only if its officials happen to be there, and even then they’ll only say “Señora, what you have to do is figure out how to improve the situation in your house.” The regulations and the instructions automatically repeal the comprehensive attention model, the MAI, and alter rather drastically the access route to justice. It has been some time since the women’s police stations transferred women to centers where they could work on their emotional recovery and that practice has now been totally eliminated.

It has also been some time since women have been permitted to be accompanied when they go to try and file a charge. Neither family members nor anyone else can go in with them. We aren’t even allowed to pass the door. Nor are we allowed into the courtroom to accompany them during trials. The women very often sit there all alone because even their own family may choose not to accompany them if they decide to file charges and speak up about what has happened. The woman’s family often even supports the aggressor or at best asks what the woman did to cause this, why she’s getting mixed up in all of this, pushing her to just sort it out, figure out how to patch things up with him…

With all these changes, people in the territories are saying that Law 779 no longer exists. There’s evidence everywhere that it’s not being complied with. In Ciudad Darío a man was sentenced to only two years in prison for attempted femicide. He was sentenced, but is currently working in the local Police offices as a gofer. They send him to buy snacks at the local stand, to fill in for the transit cop, or leave him to take care of the station at night. When the ombudsperson for the Network asked the Police why this was being allowed, the officers told her: “Yes, he does some errands for us because he’s a trusted prisoner.” Such things increase women’s insecurity and discourage them from filing charges, because it produces no results and only exposes them more.

Thousands of prisoners
silently released

Alongside sending out the set of instructions, the government announced on February 22 that as of 2014 the penitentiary system had released more than 8,000 prisoners convicted of “less serious” crimes based on a “humanitarian policy for the reconciliation and unity of Nicaraguan families.” Another 845 have been released so far this year. Those freed include prisoners sentenced for “psychological violence, patrimonial violence, intimidation and threats against the woman, among other less serious offenses.” The Ministry of Government executed the release orders under the legal concept of “family coexistence.”

Some legislators in the National Assembly’s Government Commission tried unsuccessfully to get a debate on this issue on the agenda because prisoners were being released without the knowledge of the judge who had sentenced them. They viewed it as risky that legal criteria were not being used to grant them their freedom: for example if they are repeat offenders, if their conduct in prison has been incorrect, how much of the sentence remains to be completed, etc. Failure to advise either the judge or the family of the victim is a violation of the law.

Why such a massive early release of these prisoners? Each time an election rolls around, women’s rights become a bargaining chip. It happened in 2006, when a month before that year’s November elections all parties colluded to criminalize abortion for any reason and under any circumstance. The Supreme Court has never responded to any of the many suits filed against the law criminalizing therapeutic abortion, previously legal since the late 1800s. The freeing now of thousands of prisoners could also be a way of reducing the costs of the penitentiary system and decongesting the jails, thus avoiding escapes and riots. But it could just as easily have electoral reasons.

One woman from Masaya explained to us that “in a meeting of officials they told us that 8,000 prisoners had been released because the government needs their votes and knows that behind those 8,000 men is their entire family, and that’s thousands more assured votes. And when someone asked if the government wasn’t risking losing the votes of these men’s victims, they were told: ‘that doesn’t matter so much; the women who denounce always do so alone.’”

All other state branches
answer to the executive

CENIDH and the CPDH, Nicaragua’s national human rights organizations, charged that people serving time in prison who have been declared innocent or already serviced their sentence are still there and the penitentiary system doesn’t respect the judges’ orders. Independent Liberal Party legislative representative Carlos Langrand argued that the order to free thousands of prisoners “is an invasion of the judicial branch by the executive branch and blatantly reveals the lack of independence among the branches of State, with all the others only responding to the executive.”

Victims have the right to be informed of the sentence their aggressor has received and how the sentence is or is not being served. There are very great risks if this right isn’t respected. In the reflection session we held in March in Matagalpa, a psychologist from Jinotega told us about the case of a woman who was nearly macheted to death by her husband some two years ago. Seeing her bleeding profusely he believed he had killed her and buried her in a very shallow grave, covered with just a bit of dirt and some branches. Fortunately the woman was found alive and survived. She spent several months recovering in the hospital, although with serious lasting effects. The man was caught and jailed. Recently the woman was walking down the street on an errand when a motorcycle pulled up beside her. The man removed his helmet and said: “I thought you were dead! If I didn’t kill you last time, I’m going to make sure this time!” No one knew he had been released, and he hadn’t even spent two years behind bars despite being convicted of “attempted femicide,” which carries a sentence of between 25 and 30 years. Why was he out? Was it favoritism? And why wasn’t his release communicated to the judge who handed down the sentence. And even more importantly, why wasn’t it communicated to the victim? How is that woman going to live from now on?

Attacks on women’s
organizations and defenders

Some women’s rights defenders have actually been threatened for supporting and accompanying the victims of violence. Sometimes those threats come from individual men, but they also come from structures close to power. The following testimony from a human rights defender from Chinandega appeared in a report by the Mesoamerican Initiative of Human Rights Defenders. It says: “Permission needs to be requested of the FSLN political secretaries for our activities. In Somotillo I was the victim of institutional aggression. I was studying with a scholarship from the municipal government and when I began to work as a defender they took the grant away. The FSLN political secretary in Chichigalpa called me and my brother in and questioned my participation in the women’s movement because it is against the governing party. He told me to get out of it because otherwise I’d regret it.” The report adds that: “Since 2007, when the current governing party took office, women’s defenders and organizations have experienced a closure of spaces, discrediting actions, aggressions and threats, all aimed at impeding free expression and mobilization and their work in defense of women’s rights.”

Another obstacle women’s organizations are suffering is the withdrawal of international cooperation to civil society organizations and women’s organizations in particular. This lack of financing means the closing of spaces for both attention and the prevention of violence. Many organizations are currently barely surviving and the shelters for the many women who flee the violence in their home are in danger of closing for lack of funds.

The damage is even wider
than it appears on the surface

The weakening and closure of the women’s police stations, the regulations and the set of instructions that have mutilated Law 779 have taken away the possibilities of access to justice, restitution of our rights, indemnification and any assistance by the State. How are the more than 300 families that were victims of femicide since 2012 living? What’s happening to the children left orphaned? Who’s taking care of them? Sometimes it’s the grandmother, but other times it’s the family of the aggressor himself. What is the State doing to address the effects on these children, often even witnesses to the criminal violence that left them without their mother? How will they ever have any confidence in the effectiveness and impartiality of the justice system?

What has remained of all the specialization and training for justices, judges, prosecuting attorneys and women’s police station personnel? What remains of the comprehensive model of attention designed by the State; all the financing obtained to begin to seriously deal with the violence against women; all the energy and joy we felt thinking that so many women and girls in our country were going to be able to live better, more peacefully and happier?

Now more than ever there’s a lot to be done. All of society, all individuals have to work to question and move beyond the cultural model that underpins the violence. It’s not only a task corresponding to the women’s organizations.

Messages against violence need to keep being sent to the communities and this subject needs to be discussed person to person. Alliances need to be made with sensitized men and with women so they will learn their rights. We can’t let Law 779 turn into a dead letter. What’s happening to it needs to be made known, as do all the rights and crimes that appear in it.

We women need to overcome victimization and exercise the right to protest. We have to keep going out to denounce all the violations of human rights. We have to make the denunciation internationally because all these measures by the Nicaraguan State have damaged not only the national laws but also international treaties and conventions.

To avoid women remaining silent and men feeling untouchable, we have to work to explain that every type of violence is a crime and that the impunity reigning in our country must end.

We can’t give up. This institutional setback demands our mobilization as citizens and alliances among the social movements. Each person must do something to help change this situation in Nicaragua.

Testimony from Masaya

The following testimony is from a women’s activist in Masaya, who tells us how this rapid backpedaling has been experienced there.
“Still in the first stage of the current government, we went to inaugurate various women’s police stations in the smallest municipalities of the department. They were smaller offices with smaller staffs, but they at least attended women. But that didn’t last long.
“In 2012 Law 779 gave a lot of coherence to the women’s movement. We believed that this government was more afraid of the women’s movement than of the political opposition. Moreover, the reaction to Law 779 from the evangelical churches and the Bishop’s Conference, which pressured verbally and in writing, carried a lot of weight in getting the idea of mediation imposed on us. That’s when we felt the backpedaling really begin. Prior to the law there was already mediation in the police stations and the crimes that remained most hidden were those involving psychological violence.
“But then came the regulations. In Masaya the route to justice was already beginning to vary. We saw it when the Ministry of the Family began to put its own officials into the women’s police stations. When women came into the station, that official was the one who would say how serious the offence being denounced was. Then one day we woke up and the women’s police station was gone. Another day there were no longer even Ministry of the Family officials. Now one has to go the Police’s Judicial Aid section, like in the nineties when you had to go there like the victim of any other crime.
“Many years before Law 799, we used to say that they only attended women if they came in bleeding. The same thing is happening now. The forensic clinics have increased their staff with more psychologists and more doctors, but they’ll only attend to you if the consequences of the violence are evident and you stagger in there in a deplorable state. All the rest are left outside, because everything else is now defined as a less serious crime for which the only thing is mediation, mediation, mediation…”

Ruth Marina Matamorros is a member of the Matagalpa-based women’s organization Grupo Venancia.

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