Beaten and Broken — Part 2. How I was forced to witness torture
By: Mark Farnsworth
Tags: Nicaragua, Police Brutality, Beyourself, Travel, Torture

“Hey,” Jen said. I looked up. “Are you okay?” she asked. I nodded, even though I wasn’t.

I looked around us. There were half a dozen people walking around us now; most of them must have witnessed the mugging. “Why didn’t they do anything? Why aren’t they helping?” I asked. Jen didn’t answer me. I stared at the ground, helpless.

“We have to go get them,” she said. “Those gangbangers need to die.” Searching for them seemed like the worst thing we could do, but I gave her a small nod anyway. Part of me did want revenge.

Jen started screaming and waving her arms at the police officer. His reaction was subtle. His stride increased but not by much. He was still only walking at a snail’s pace. I couldn’t believe it. “Why is he so slow?” I asked Jen. I decided to run towards him. I sprinted as fast as I could. When he noticed me running, he stopped walking altogether.

When I got to him he had a smile on his face. I was too upset over the mugging to ask him what in the hell he thought was so funny. In broken Spanish, I succinctly told him that two men had just robbed me. As I tried to explain what had happened, Jen caught up to us. Her Spanish was superior, so I let her describe the whole event to him. He nodded but said nothing. He then dramatically took out his pistol, making a big show of it like a terrible actor in a B-movie.

I didn’t have a good feeling about this. The cop started walking up the sidewalk, back the way we came. We followed him. We pointed at the neighborhood where the two thieves had run off to, so he turned onto the side street and led us there. He occasionally waved his gun in the air as he walked, almost as if he was batting at flies. There were a few dozen people sitting outside; everyone stared at us. A small boy dressed in nothing more than glorified rags walked up to Jen and asked her what was going on. After she answered him in a few words, he grabbed a wooden stick and followed us. Many other boys saw him and decided to follow suit.

The cop clearly had no idea what he was doing. He brought us to the back of a public school — a building so decrepit that I was concerned that pieces of discolored brick would fall on us if we got too close — and made a spectacle of waving his gun around as if he was looking for the men who robbed me. Meanwhile, a small band of nearly a dozen stick-carrying boys followed closely behind, pretending to shoot at invisible robbers. It was laughable and pathetic. At the moment I wanted that cop to drop dead for not taking this seriously.

I wanted someone competent to help us with the situation. “Back-up?” I asked the police officer. He looked confused. “No hablo inglés,” he said, chuckling. [“I don’t speak English.”] “Okay, then,” I said. “Can you please bring more policia? More police?” He closed his eyes and laughed, hard. I struggled not to punch him as hard as I could in the jaw.

I pulled on my hair out of frustration. “Yes,” he said in Spanish. “More police are coming.” He took his radio out of his pocket and spoke into it. All of the boys got excited upon seeing this. I grew more frustrated. I wondered if the back-up would even do any good.

The policeman brought us away from the school building and back to the side street that had led us into the neighborhood. By now enough commotion had been brewed by the children that a crowd of roughly a hundred people had formed. Seeing such a large number of people horrified me. Jen kept muttering to herself. I could tell she was about to lose it.

People started to approach us, asking what had happened. She would tell each one, “La muerte a los ladrones!” [“Death to the robbers!”] Many people thought this was hilarious. Some people mocked her for being of Asian descent: “China!” [“Chinese!”] Some people pulled their eyelids back and uttered racist nonsensical gibberish that was supposed to sound like Chinese. This made her furious. She started to chant the same words over and over again, screaming it at the crowd louder and louder. “Death to the thieves!” The crowd laughed back. The policeman laughed too. I was mortified.

I wanted this to be over. I wanted to be anywhere else but there. I didn’t believe in what we were doing; I understood that we were hunting these robbers in vain, and that even if we caught them it was likely that they had guns as well and would use them against us. On top of that, I didn’t trust the policeman, either. I didn’t want to die over what had been in my pockets.

For a moment, I longed for my home. I wanted to be back in Québec, gorging myself on vegan poutine and paté chinois, watching DVDs, hanging out with friends, cold but comfortable in knowing that I could go outside any day of the week without feeling anything even remotely associated with fear. But I knew in my heart that this situation had to be dealt with now, and that I had to use everything I had in order to make it out okay. I couldn’t give up, just then. Not yet.