When the mutiny against Nicaragua’s septuagenarian president, Daniel Ortega, broke out in April, Matías Velásquez was barely a month old.
Two months later he is dead, the youngest victim of a spiraling conflict some now fear could plunge what was until recently considered one of Central America’s most stable nations into civil war.
On a recent afternoon, Matías’s charred corpse lay in one of two tiny white coffins inside Managua’s Fuente de Vida (Source of Life) evangelical church; the other contained the body of his two-year-old sister Daryelis.
The infants were killed hours earlier when their family home was torched – allegedly by police and masked members of a pro-Ortega militia – in one of the most horrific episodes to have been caused by Nicaragua’s political convulsion.
“We weren’t guilty of anything,” sobbed their aunt, Jeaneth, as she stood in the blackened ruins where they had perished, surrounded by rubble and ash.
“They didn’t care that there were children,” added the 29-year-old, her face smeared with soot and tears. “They didn’t care about anything.”
Nicaragua’s vice-president and first lady, Rosario Murillo, blamed the atrocity – in which the children’s parents and grandparents also died – on groups of perverse and abominable “vandals”. Nicaragua’s UK embassy claimed the family was killed by “violent criminals” from the opposition in punishment for failing to support a nationwide anti-Ortega strike.
But friends, relatives, witnesses and activists rejected those accounts as government disinformation and painted a very different picture of how Matías Velásquez and his family came to die.
According to their account about 50 masked men – some wearing black, others police uniforms covered by bulletproof vests – descended on Managua’s Carlos Marx neighbourhood early on the morning of Saturday 16 June in a convoy of pickup trucks. The pro-government paramilitaries – known as “turbas” – appeared to have been tasked with destroying barricades erected to keep them out.
Witnesses claimed the group set fire to the Velásquez home after Matías’s grandfather, Óscar, refused to let them use its balcony as a sniper’s nest. “[They] told my father that we had to support them, and my father said: ‘The only thing I have to support is Jesus Christ,’” said Jeaneth. “They were furious.”
An uncle, Óscar Velásquez Júnior, confirmed that account: “The police and the government are totally [to blame]. There’s nobody more to blame than Daniel Ortega and his followers. There’s no bigger murderer than Daniel Ortega.”
As the fire spread, Jeaneth recalled leading her 13-year-old sister, Maribel, who also survived but sustained severe burns, upstairs in search of an escape. “Everything exploded and we threw ourselves off the balcony.”
A neighbour who asked to remain anonymous for fear of reprisals recalled trying to help. “The flames leapt out from the third floor of the house and we ran [towards it], but the police began shooting to stop anyone from getting close to the house to help.”
“When they thought that everything had finally been burned down they left … so we went to help [the family]. But they were already dead,” she said.
Another neighbour, who also declined to be named, said: “This was beyond reason. What happened to this family is a crime. It is not repression – it’s murder.”
Human rights activists say at least 309 people have been killed and 1,500 injured since the start of protests against pension reforms, that have since swelled into a national insurrection against Ortega, on 18 April.
On Monday, the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR) – whose members include Claudia Paz y Paz, Guatemala’s former attorney general, and Sofía Macher, the former head of Peru’s truth and reconciliation commission – announced it had sent a team to Nicaragua to investigate those killings.
The violence has infected daily life, leaving residents of Managua tense and terrified. Shops once open all night now close at sundown. Neighbourhoods across the country have erected barricades to keep police and paramilitary groups out.
Hours after the Velásquez home was torched, residents of one nearby neighbourhood reportedly lynched and burned one paramilitary in an apparent act of retaliation. Graphic footage of his public cremation was posted on the internet.
But the brazen daytime attack on the Velásquez family – and the deaths of two small children – has caused particular indignation. “In the name of God – no more death!” Rolando Álvarez, the bishop of Matagalpa, pleaded during televised talks between the government and the opposition designed to defuse the crisis.
The United States condemned “the ongoing government-sponsored violence” including the arson attack on the Velásquez family. “Attacks and threats against peaceful protesters and the general population are unacceptable, and must cease,” state department spokeswoman Heather Nauert told reporters.
The relentless escalation of violence bodes badly for an ongoing “national dialogue” designed to find a political solution to the crisis but participants insist it is their only option. “It’s necessary to prevent more bloodshed – although there’s already been so much,” said Azalea Solís, a 59-year-old civil society leader who is part of those talks.
Friends and neighbours described the Velásquez family as devout Christians who shunned politics and had worked their way out of rural poverty. “When we worked in the mountains, sometimes we had no food; it pains me to say, but we stole yuca in order to eat,” remembered Francisca, a great aunt of Matías’s father.
After years of struggle, the family managed to open a mattress shop on the first floor of their home.
“My father was an exemplary man,” Jeaneth said. “He always told us that we have to get ahead without owing anything to anyone, and that when he passed away, we’d need to take up the family business.”
That business, the man who started it, and most of his family are now gone. In their place: the heavy stench of smoke and soggy wreckage and six coffins in the church across the street.