The death of a Brazilian student in Managua, the criminal protection of the Ortega regime and a plea for help from Lula
After five years, the confessed murderer, a Sandinista paramilitary, is still free and works for the Mayor’s Office of the Nicaraguan capital.
A young woman shot to death on a Managua street. A mother asking for justice for five years. A confessed murderer who, nevertheless, is acquitted by justice. A story of impunity. Two countries: Nicaragua and Brazil. A book.
The case of Raynéia Lima, a 31-year-old medical student murdered by a paramilitary of Daniel Ortega’s regime, turned five years old this month. Her mother, Maria Jose da Costa, is fighting to see her daughter’s killers in jail. She has written a book, “Dream Interrupted.”
“It is a very sad story. First, the death of a girl in the prime of her life, who is very soon to graduate. The daughter of a single mother, a very self-sacrificing woman, poor, a nurse, who raised this girl with a lot of sacrifice and who had all her hopes placed in her and, suddenly, she is snatched away from her in a brutal way. And the treatment given to the case. For this lady, she has been suffering the death of her daughter practically every day”, says Ernesto Medina, who was the rector of the university where Raynéia Lima studied.
Raynéia Gabrielle da Costa Lima Rocha was 31 years old and studying the last year of Medicine at the American University (UAM), when she was murdered on the night of July 23, 2018, in a Managua rioted by citizen protests, barricades in the streets, and police and paramilitary repression.
That night, Raynéia Lima was on her way home, escorted in another vehicle by her boyfriend Harnet Lara Moraga, when, according to the latter’s first testimony, three hooded men jumped her at the height of the exclusive Lomas de Monserrat neighborhood, near where Francisco López lives, a powerful figure, personal friend of Daniel Ortega, treasurer of the ruling Sandinista Front party and administrator of the Ortega Murillo family businesses.
The gray Suzuki Alto, license plate M170620, was shot at and the young woman was seriously wounded. Harnet Lara Moraga got out of his own vehicle and with his hands up came to the rescue of his girlfriend. The hooded men left, and Lara Moraga took the wounded girl to the Military Hospital, where he found fellow students and professors of the unfortunate young woman who were on duty.
At that moment, Rector Medina received a call from his students alerting him to the events. “They told me that this girl had just arrived wounded by a bullet and asked me to do what I could to make sure she was treated as well as possible at the hospital,” he said.
Harnet Lara Moraga, the boyfriend of the murdered young woman and an eyewitness, mysteriously disappeared after the crime. (Courtesy photo)
Raynéia Lima died that morning.
From then on, strange things began to happen around the case. Daniel Ortega’s regime set out to protect the murderer and deny justice to the victim. The young Brazilian woman’s car mysteriously disappeared. The same thing happened to all the videos in the area. The girl’s boyfriend vanished shortly after he was released the next morning. The Police released a vague statement reporting the event where they attribute the death of the young woman to the shooting of a private security guard in the area, who they do not identify.
“It was a brutal blow. I could see the suffering of the boys, the rage when the first statement from the police came out. Above all, because the boys talked to the only witness (the boyfriend) there was to that barbarity. They had a first-hand version of what happened. So when the police statement came out, they were furious,” said Medina.
Three days later, the police issued a second statement identifying the killer as Pierson Gutiérrez Solís, 42, a former Army soldier and taekwondo instructor, who used an M4 carbine to shoot at the Brazilian girl’s vehicle. The M4 carbine is a war rifle, restricted for military use in Nicaragua.
The police version was, to say the least, fanciful. According to what was explained, Gutiérrez Solís, at that time, around 11:00 p.m., was looking for a place to open a martial arts school and was talking with the security guards when he saw the car coming under suspicious circumstances. He pulled his rifle out of the trunk of his vehicle and fired.
María José da Costa has dedicated these five years to seeking justice for her murdered daughter. She has written a book with her story. (courtesy photo)
A week later, Pierson Gutiérrez Solís pleaded guilty to the death of the Brazilian woman in a closed hearing that lasted 35 minutes and was subsequently sentenced to 15 years in prison for “homicide, carrying and illegal use of a firearm”.
Despite the fact that the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR) certified the murder of 355 citizens in 2018, and that a group of experts sent by the OAS documented the participation of police together with paramilitaries in the repression of citizen protests, Pierson Gutiérrez Solís was the only paramilitary to reach prison.
The official discourse always alleged that it was a common crime, unrelated to the heated political and repressive atmosphere that existed at the time in Nicaragua. The same line was maintained by Gutiérrez Solís’ defense lawyers.
However, in June 2019, Pierson Gutiérrez Solís was released from prison and all his criminal record was erased, thanks to an Amnesty Law enacted by Daniel Ortega for crimes committed in the context of the 2018 protests.
The murder of Raynéia Lima shocked public opinion. The Brazilian government, at the time in charge of Michel Temer, attributed the death of the young woman to “a pattern of systematic violation of individual guarantees and fundamental rights” in Nicaragua. The Nicaraguan writer, Sergio Ramírez, wrote an opinion column about it entitled “The girl from Pernambuco”.
Rayneria Lima had arrived in Nicaragua six years earlier. Her dream was to study cardiology and she chose Nicaragua because of the economic facilities she found to live and study, said her mother, Maria Jose Da Costa, in the book she wrote in her memory.
The night her daughter died, she recounts, she felt an impulse to get up to pray. “God was preparing me for my daughter’s death,” she noted.
The return to power in Brazil in January 2023 of Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, someone who has been close to Daniel Ortega, revived Da Costa’s hopes for justice. In March of this year he wrote a letter to Lula da Silva asking for support.
“We were only able to repatriate my daughter’s body thanks to the support of the former governor of Pernambuco, where we are from, Paulo Câmara. Since then no one has helped us, and I want Lula to help me,” asked the mother, who confirmed to the Nicaraguan newspaper La Prensa that “unfortunately there was no response” to her letter to the Brazilian president.
On the fifth anniversary of this murder, Nicaraguan lawyer Yader Morazán made an analysis of the process in which he emphasizes that the judges “misapplied” the Amnesty Law, because “the paramilitary was condemned for admitting accused acts not included in the law”.
He adds that in the process four favors were done to Pierson Gutiérrez Solís. “The first was to omit facts that place him in paramilitarism. Then, they convicted him for a less serious crime than the one that corresponded according to the facts admitted by him; on top of that, they imposed a low sentence and finally, they amnestied him”.
The first act of impunity, he says, occurs “when the Police in collusion with the Public Prosecutor’s Office omit circumstantial facts that would aggravate the conduct of the accused at the crime scene. All this in order to charge him with a less serious crime that carries a lesser penalty. The Prosecutor’s Office took it out of the political context, making it look like an isolated act, without foreseeing that later they would need to say the opposite, in order to amnesty him”.
According to an investigation by the Nicaragua Investiga platform, Pierson Gutiérrez Solís is free, works as an official of the Managua Mayor’s Office and has been seen in official activities.
For Ernesto Medina, the protection that this paramilitary has received from the regime of Daniel Ortega seeks to demonstrate that nothing happens to those who he gave “license to kill” during the repression of 2018. “I believe that this subject, because of the way he acted, was someone important within the paramilitary structure. Therefore, he has for Ortega a special importance, they could not leave him in the hands of justice because obviously they could disrupt the entire paramilitary apparatus that they had developed.”
Maria Jose da Costa, the mother of the murdered girl, believes that there are more people involved in the murder of her daughter, and that possibly Pierson Gutierrez Solis is covering up for the real murderer with his confession.
“I want to know who the real culprit was, so that he can be arrested. The Nicaraguan government must take responsibility for the murder of my daughter, because I am sure that the confessed murderer is covering up for a military man who works for the state,” said Maria Jose da Costa in an interview to the Brazilian network Globo.