Nicaragua cop mourns son?s death in anti-govt protests

[ahlam1399]

MANAGUA: Like many Nicaraguans, police inspector Armando Reyes was shocked by the image of a young protester with blood seeping from his head being taken to the hospital on a motorcycle by his friends.Then came the gut-wrenching realization that it was his own son.Reyes, 65, used to be the kind of citizen that President Daniel Ortega, the man who has dominated Nicaraguan politics for the past four decades, could depend on for rock-solid support.He fought along with Ortega in the Sandinista rebellion that overthrew dictator Anastasio Somoza in 1979. After the guerrillas won, he joined the police force, under the new ruling junta they installed with Ortega at its head.For 39 years, Reyes served in that force, through Ortega´s first 11 years in power, his loss at the ballot box in 1990, and his return to the presidency in 2007. Now he no longer wants to be part of the Nicaraguan police.In fact, he is so enraged by the repression blamed on Ortega´s security forces that he chased his fellow officers from his son Francisco´s funeral on Friday.“It wasn´t some dog that died,” said Reyes, a plain-spoken man with short-cropped salt-and-pepper hair who lives with his large family in a working class neighborhood in the capital Managua named for late Nicaraguan revolutionary Walter Ferreti.Reyes did not realize Francisco was at Wednesday´s protests. Francisco, 34, usually spent his days as a traveling salesman — a job he invented for himself when he could not find any other.But on Wednesday — Mother´s Day in Nicaragua — he decided to join the peaceful marches in support of the mourning mothers who have lost their children in seven weeks of bloody crack-downs on the demonstrations sweeping the Central American country.Reyes was at work in his Managua precinct when he happened to catch a glimpse of a television screen playing cell phone footage of one of the many blood-soaked incidents that day.In the video, a group of young men try to load an injured protester with a bullet wound through his face onto the back of a white motorcycle.It is clear the bleeding man has little chance: his body flaps around like a rag doll and falls from the motorcycle as soon as the driver tries to accelerate.It was only after nightfall, at 8:00 that evening, that Reyes got the news in a phone call from his brother and began piecing together the horrifying truth: the wounded protester on TV was Francisco.A humble man with dark skin, Reyes has little to say about the government he spent most of his life serving.But one can feel his outrage.“The other officers tell me to be strong, be strong. OK, I tell them, but how can you kill brothers like criminals, when they were peacefully protesting?” He has asked to resign from the force, though it is a process that will take time.“They´re murderers,” Francisco´s mother, Guillermina Zapata, told AFP at his funeral, where mourners filed past a closed coffin with a small flap in the lid that only those with the stomach for it could open to view the remains.In all, 16 people died in Wednesday´s crack-down, the deadliest day in unrest that has now claimed more than 100 lives since it started on April 18.Ortega, 72, denies his government is responsible for the killings. He called Wednesday´s unrest a “conspiracy” by the opposition aimed at “terrorizing” the people.http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/World-TheNewsInternational/~4/LsNWCMogvio

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