The Best American Crime Reporting 2008

Dean LaTourrette: A SEASON IN HELL

FROM Men’s Journal

ERIC VOLZ WAS TRAPPED. a large crowd had gathered outside the small-town courthouse, screaming, “Ojo por ojo!”-an eye for an eye. Volz had just finished a preliminary hearing for the alleged rape and murder of his ex-girlfriend Doris Jimenez, and despite considerable evidence pointing to his innocence, the judge ruled to allow his case to go to trial. But the people in the town of Rivas, Nicaragua, wanted more than justice. They wanted revenge.

“We’re not going to let you get away with it,” they chanted in Spanish. “We’re going to kill you.” Looking out the window, Volz could see that the angry mob numbered well over 200, some of them waving sticks and machetes, their faces both enraged and excited at the prospect of violence against the gringo. His only protection was several local police officers, along with a U.S. embassy security officer named Mike Poehlitz. The plan was to escape via the back door, a scheme that evaporated moments later when a friend of Volz’s called on his cell phone and said there was a man with a gun waiting outside.

The only option was to exit via the front, where a police pickup truck waited for them, right in the heart of the unruly crowd. As they hit the street and darted for the truck the driver sped away, and the horde closed in, throwing fists and stones. All but one of the cops also fled; the lone officer yanked at Volz’s shirt and yelled, “Corre!” Run.

Though he was handcuffed and without shoelaces, Volz sprinted down the street with the officer and Poehlitz. Miraculously, they made it a block, then ducked into the doorway of a nearby gymnasium, where they barricaded the door and crept from room to room as protesters hunted for them outside. When an unmarked police truck finally arrived an hour later to escort them to the station, they dashed back outside. The crowd moved in, and people jumped on the car. The driver gunned it, hitting some protesters before speeding off toward the police station.

But Volz, a 28-year-old American who had come to Nicaragua with all of the best intentions, was far from free.

Four months later, in late March, Eric Volz sits inside a sweltering 6-by-10-foot cell at La Modelo prison, in Tipitapa, Nicaragua. He cannot feel the gentle breezes that groom and feather the incoming swells that first attracted him to Nicaraguan shores. If he serves his full 30-year sentence he’ll catch his next wave when he’s 57 years old.

The story of how Volz wound up here is every expatriate’s worst nightmare. He was a well-known resident of the Pacific coast town of San Juan del Sur, a surfer’s paradise that he’d helped promote. His ex-girlfriend Doris Jimenez, one of the prettiest girls in town, was found brutally strangled on the floor of her clothing boutique. Volz cooperated with the authorities, only to have them turn on him, he says, after he offended a local police officer. Despite numerous eyewitnesses who said that Volz was two hours away at the time of Jimenez’s murder, and the fact that no physical evidence tied him to the scene, he was convicted and sentenced to 30 years in prison. The trial, many believe, was a travesty of justice that tests the bounds of the absurd.

“I’d say this was a case of guilty until proven innocent,” says Ricardo Castillo, a well-known Nicaraguan journalist who was meeting with Volz at the time the murder allegedly took place.

“I was really angry that the judge would bend to public pressure so easily,” Volz told Men’s Journal, recalling the judicial farce that brought him here. “I did not kill Doris, absolutely not. And I had no connection to it.”

Volz is handsome, with intense, dark brown eyes. He’s six feet tall, and his muscular frame might make an assailant think twice, but he’s already had to defend himself with his fists in prison. As an American convicted of raping and murdering a Nicaraguan woman, he got into scuffles with a former cellmate, and other inmates have menaced him daily.

“The threat is very real,” he says. “It’s very simple for Doris’s family to pay $500 or $1,000 to send a message to one of these gangs to try and kill me.”

Volz’s imprisonment has sparked an unofficial diplomatic war. His parents and supporters have mounted a media campaign for his release that has resulted in segments on the Today show (among others), so far to no avail. Online, a handful of American and Nicaraguan blogs and websites offer their versions of the truth to the browsing masses. A seven-minute pro-Volz video on YouTube shows him being hustled off to the courthouse over a moody Radiohead soundtrack, while a competing version, by “Nicaraguan Films,” also on YouTube, lingers on him blinking-guiltily, we’re to assume-as the judge delivers her verdict. And Men’s Journal has learned that Volz’s family has hired private investigators to reexamine Jimenez’s murder, which was poorly handled by police.

Volz’s case is far more complex than that of an innocent abroad who got caught on the wrong side of a Third World justice system. At the time of his arrest he was anything but a carefree surf bum; he had fully embraced Nicaraguan culture, and his main pursuit wasn’t leisure but publishing a bilingual magazine called El Puente (The Bridge), which sought to close the gap between Central and North American cultures. Instead, Volz has become a flashpoint for the tensions between Nicaragua’s growing community of relatively wealthy Americans and locals who feel left on the sidelines of prosperity.

The trial left many questions unanswered-such as why anyone would want to harm Jimenez. How a man could be convicted of a murder that allegedly took place while he was on the phone and having lunch two hours away. Was Eric Volz singled out as part of an anti-American backlash-backed, perhaps, by the newly resurgent leftist Sandinista party? Or is the dream of surfing and living in paradise simply untenable? The only certainty is that no gringo in Nicaragua believed in that dream more than Eric Volz, and few have suffered a ruder awakening. “The more politically charged my case becomes, the more nervous I get,” he says.

THE ROAD FROM MANAGUA to San Juan del Sur is like a metaphor for life in Nicaragua: lush and beautiful, but uneven and full of surprises. There are sections of fresh pavement where cars can zoom along, but for the most part it’s a slow, potholed slalom course requiring serious navigation skills.

Once you reach the end of the road, San Juan del Sur sucks you in. Nestled by a horseshoe-shape bay, with fishing boats on the beach, the friendly and relaxed town of 18,000 is not far from some of the best surfing beaches in southern Nicaragua. There’s a magical quality about the place that you just can’t put your finger on, something that inspires first-time visitors to start dreaming about dropping out of the rat race.

“I’ve never once felt unwelcome by the locals; in fact, just the opposite,” says Bryan McMandon, who quit his San Francisco job and moved here in 2004 after visiting on a surfing trip. “Everyone has bent over backwards to help me, especially when I first got here and didn’t know a lick of Spanish.”

Real estate offices line San Juan del Sur’s main drag, and you can still find a beachfront lot for $75,000-a bargain compared to Costa Rica, just 20 miles to the south. “The first time we came here we asked Eric about buying property,” says Volz’s stepfather Dane Anthony.

A little more than 20 years ago, though, San Juan del Sur was a Cold War battlefield. In 1984 U.S. forces planted mines along the coast as part of the Reagan administration’s effort to oust Sandinista leader Daniel Ortega-who was recently reelected president.

“It’s real touchy, real delicate here,” says Jane Mirandette, who founded and runs a local library program. “There are people who don’t speak to their neighbor because of what happened in 1980. We have Contras, we have Sandinistas, we have everything in this town. Emotions run really deep, and people’s fears run deep too.”

Eric Volz first rolled into town on a backpacking trip in 1998. Like most young norteamericanos, he’d come for the surfing, but that wasn’t the only reason. Despite the tabloid headlines calling him “the gringo murderer,” Volz is only half gringo; his mother is Mexican. He spent a semester studying Spanish in Guadalajara and majored in Latin American cultural studies at the University of California-San Diego. “I think Eric always wanted to get in touch with that part of his heritage,” says his mother. “And like everything else he does, he poured himself into it.”

He moved to San Juan del Sur in early 2005 and took a job in the small but bustling local Century 21 office, earning as much as $100,000 a year selling beachfront lots and townhouse condos in developments that were beginning to dot the pristine coast. He began taking photos for El Puente, then a local newsletter, started by an expat named Jon Thompson.

It wasn’t long before he met Doris Jimenez, a slender 25-year-old beauty who worked at the Roca Mar restaurant, where Volz usually ate lunch. Her parents had split up when she was young; her mother moved to Managua, and Jimenez was raised in San Juan del Sur by her grandmother and aunt. She was beautiful, with milky brown skin and a dazzling smile. “Everyone really liked her,” says Gabriela Sobalvarro, Jimenez’s best friend, who calls her a coqueta, Spanish for flirt. She was smart, too: According to one friend she was studying business administration at a university campus in Rivas, about 30 minutes away.

There’s no such thing as casual dating in Nicaragua, at least for the locals. Couples are either juntos (together) or they’re not, without much of anything in between. According to Sobalvarro, Volz and Jimenez hit it off, and after a few weeks of being friends the relationship turned romantic. They became juntos. “They got along really well,” says Thompson, who, with his wife, shared a house with Volz and Jimenez in the latter half of 2005. “Doris was really chill, almost docile.”

Once, when Volz went away for a few days, Jimenez decorated the house with balloons and streamers and baked a cake to welcome him back. “The guy was only gone a week,” says McMandon, who lived with the couple in 2006.

Volz’s mother first met Jimenez on a visit in November 2005. “She was gorgeous, and very sweet,” she says. At the time, Volz was helping Jimenez open up a clothing store, called Sol Fashion, in San Juan del Sur, and his mother helped Jimenez design and decorate the space. “There was something about Doris where you almost wanted to take care of her,” she says.

Jimenez’s friends wondered if Volz returned her affections. “I didn’t like him much,” claims Sobalvarro. “He was always busy with his work and never had time for Doris. I also think he felt that he was superior to her.”

Volz wasn’t the type to go out drinking every night with the boys. He had greater ambitions; he was spending more and more time on El Puente, which he and Thompson now co-owned. Thompson wanted to keep El Puente local and grassroots, while Volz saw it growing into a glossy travel magazine covering sustainable tourism and development in Central America. In early 2006, he wrested control from Thompson in a messy split. “I would call Eric controlling, not just with Doris but in general,” says Thompson. “He was very self-assured, very confident. I’d call him arrogant, but he probably thought he had reason to be.”

In July 2006 the new (and so far only) issue of El Puente magazine was published. That same month Volz moved to Managua, and he and Jimenez broke up. They were separated for about a month, according to friends, but then he began to visit and they would be seen hanging out together. But Volz’s main focus was in Managua, where he had an increasingly complex business. On Tuesday afternoon, November 21, 2006, Volz was working in El Puente’s Managua office with more than a half dozen others when he says he got the call from Jon Thompson’s wife. Doris Jimenez had been murdered.

THE FIRST PERSON to discover the crime was Jimenez’s cousin Oscar Blandón, who told the court he went to Sol Fashion around two in the afternoon and found her body in the back room. She had been gagged and strangled, her wrists and ankles tied. Blandón ran to get Gabriela Sobalvarro, who worked down the street. “When I entered the store, it was a mess,” she says. “Doris was wrapped up in sheets like a mummy.”

Sobalvarro called Volz. “He told me not to let anyone go into the crime scene, including the police, until he got there,” she says. It was too late. A crowd had gathered, and at least 20 people traipsed in and out of the store, touching the body and possibly even moving it, before the police arrived about 20 minutes later and finally roped off the scene.

Although Jimenez was found fully clothed, the police removed her jeans and her shirt and took pictures of her. Marks on her body led them to conclude that she’d been raped, vaginally and anally, an explosive claim that soon found its way into print but was never substantiated. Jimenez wasn’t known as a drinker, but she had a blood alcohol level of 0.30 percent-three times the DUI limit in most U.S. states. The coroner estimated the time of death between 11 AM and 1:45 PM, right during lunchtime, while people were eating at sidewalk restaurants.

“We didn’t see or hear a thing,” says Bob Merrill, whose pizza shop is directly across the street. “It just doesn’t make any sense to me.”

Meanwhile, Volz rented a car in Managua and set out for San Juan del Sur, stopping in Rivas to pick up Jimenez’s father Ivan. When they arrived at the scene at around 6 PM there was still a crowd in front of the store, but police had the entrance blocked off. A take-charge sort of person, Volz demanded to be let in. The police refused; when Volz kept asking questions, he says, they turned hostile.

“I know the rules,” says Volz. “You’re not supposed to get involved here, you’re not supposed to get hands-on with a police investigation. But Doris’s family wasn’t doing anything, the police weren’t giving them any answers.”

From this point on his actions would be carefully scrutinized. Spying Sobalvarro, he gave her a brief hug. “He was very cold, very unemotional,” she says. “He didn’t even cry. He asked me if I had eaten, if I was hungry. I thought that was strange.”

The next day, Volz says he was in Rivas when a friend called, saying he’d received a threatening text message: “Your girlfriend, is next.” Alarmed, Volz, his friend, and the girlfriend went into the police station to report it and spoke to a commissioner of investigations named Emilio Reyes. The meeting quickly turned sour. “You drink a lot, don’t you Eric?” Reyes asked, according to Volz. “Do you get violent when you drink? How many times have you hit Doris? Are you a jealous guy? Are you jealous enough to kill someone if they cheated on you?”

Reyes also wondered aloud, “Why don’t Americans take showers very often?”

That set Volz off. “I know my rights, and I stood up for them,” he says. “I was like, ‘I don’t like the way you’re talking to me. If you’re going to accuse me of something, if you’re implying something, do it directly. I’ll get an attorney if I need to.’” He left in a huff, refusing to sign a statement Reyes had given him.

At Jimenez’s funeral on Thursday, Volz helped carry the casket and cried at the grave site. Afterward the police asked him to come back to the station to resume his conversation with Reyes. Volz realized he was in trouble when the police put him in their pickup truck and paraded him slowly through the center of San Juan del Sur, as his friends and acquaintances gaped.

“It was a strategy to immediately build support [against me] and have people start spreading rumors,” Volz says now. The police brought him to the Rivas station and charged him with murder. “I was totally shocked,” says Volz. “I was not expecting that at all.”

The police also charged three other men, including a wealthy student named Armando Llanes, whose father owns a nearby hotel, and who Doris had dated after she and Volz broke up. They also picked up two local hangabouts, Nelson Lopez Dangla, a known drug user, and Martin Chamorro, who had a long-standing crush on Jimenez and who had chided her publicly for dating Americans. Chamorro had scratches on his face, while Lopez had marks all over his body, including his penis. According to the police, the four had allegedly raped and killed her together, led by Volz. In a statement to police, Chamorro alleged that Volz and Llanes had paid him $5,000 to help them do the deed.

It wasn’t long before all of the attention settled on Volz, especially, he says, after a local police official told Jimenez’s mother that Volz had confessed to the crime (which he hadn’t). A few days later the Sandinista paper El Nuevo Diario published a front-page story accusing Volz of leading a brutal gang-rape and murder of “this ‘sirenita’ of San Juan del Sur.” The newspaper’s version was accepted as gospel.

Jimenez’s mother Mercedes Alvarado, 45, appeared often on TV, appearing to sob exaggeratedly-despite the fact that she and Jimenez had been estranged and rarely talked. A volunteer Sandinista organizer, she lives in a small house on a dirt street with a huge picture of President Ortega on the wall. She had met Volz only a few times, but that didn’t stop her from relaying lurid tales of his disrespectful treatment of her daughter, from midnight booty calls to supposed beatings. (Jimenez in fact spent most nights at Volz’s place when they were together, and roommates say they got along well.) Alvarado organized the truckloads of protesters who were brought in for Volz’s preliminary hearing.

“This is my town, and these are my people,” she says. “It was a show of solidarity and support from the people. We knew if the judge found him innocent, he would go free.”

He ended up in El Chipote, the Sandinistas’ notorious underground torture prison in Managua. Clad only in boxers and a tank top, Volz was thrown into a tiny, windowless concrete cell, which he shared with two scorpions and a tarantula. The lights stayed on 24 hours a day, and the dripping moisture bred mosquitoes that feasted on his exposed flesh.

Volz believes Emilio Reyes, commissioner of investigation for the Rivas police-the same man he thinks ordered his arrest and leaked his “confession”-may have sent him there.

MORE AKIN TO A FOURTH-GRADE classroom than a house of law, the Rivas courtroom seats about 25 people, on metal chairs, and testifying witnesses are within arm’s length from both the judge and the court reporter. A large, colorful poster tacked on the courtroom door depicts a hand offering money to a faceless judge, with a stop sign in between. According to the U.S. State Department, judicial corruption is rampant in Nicaragua.

On February 14, the first day of his trial, Volz entered the courtroom wearing a brown long-sleeved parka zipped up to his chin that concealed a bulletproof vest. After the mayhem following the preliminary hearing, Volz and the police weren’t taking any chances. The police took the further precaution of blocking off the streets around the courthouse.

There was no jury, only the judge, a woman from Rivas named Ivette Toruño Blanco. And the four initial suspects had been whittled down to two: Volz and Chamorro. On the day of the preliminary hearing in December, Llanes had shown up with his father and a lawyer and a paper showing he had been registering for classes on the day of the crime. After a closed-door meeting with the prosecutor he was let go. Charges against Lopez Dangla had also been dropped, and in an unlikely twist, he was now going to testify against Volz.

It appeared at first that Volz might have a fighting chance. The medical examiner and the police testified that there was no physical evidence linking Volz to the killing. None of the 100-plus hair samples matched his. There was no semen found in Jimenez’s body, but because she had been embalmed, a full examination was not performed. And the only blood found at the crime scene besides Jimenez’s was type O. Volz is type A. Also, Volz had signed credit card receipts for the rental car; the contract was printed at 3:11 PM. The only physical evidence the prosecution presented regarding Volz was photos of scratches on his back. (He claims they were from carrying Jimenez’s casket.)

Soon it was clear that this was not going to be an orderly, Law & Order-style trial, but more of a theatrical performance. After she finished answering questions, Sobalvarro announced dramatically that Jimenez had confided that Volz had threatened to kill her if she went with another man. Jimenez’s mother echoed that statement, adding that Volz’s family had offered her $1 million to drop the charges against Volz, a claim Volz’s family adamantly denies. At one point during the trial gunshots were fired outside-apparently by police trying to control the crowds-and while the judge retreated to chambers, Alvarado launched an impromptu news conference.

Things became even more bizarre when Lopez Dangla took the stand. According to defense attorney Fabbrith Gomez, he was “visibly incoherent” and “agitated” during his testimony, continually pleading his innocence to the judge even though he was not on trial. Lopez Dangla said he had seen Volz coming out of the victim’s store at 1 PM, and that Volz had paid him about $3 to dispose of two black bags he was carrying. He did not mention Llanes. “I may be lazy and a drug user,” he said, “but I’m not a liar.” (Contacted by Men’s Journal, Lopez Dangla said he stands by his testimony.)

Volz sat patiently through the testimony, consciously controlling his body language. By U.S. standards he had an airtight defense. Records from cell phone towers showed that he was in Managua at the time of the murder, as did testimony from several witnesses, including Ricardo Castillo, who said he had lunch with Volz that day. Several others had also seen him, but the judge disqualified them because they worked for him.

On Friday, February 16, the third day of the trial, Judge Toruño Blanco reached her decision. In open court she either discounted or dismissed most of the defense’s evidence. She discredited the alibi witnesses, claiming they all had business relationships with the defendant, including the journalist Castillo. She dismissed the phone records saying there was no proof that Volz had actually made the calls. (The defense did not call witnesses who could confirm having spoken to Volz on his cell phone.)

She instead chose to accept Lopez Dangla’s testimony, despite the fact that he was incoherent on the stand and had everything to gain by testifying against Volz. The scratches on Volz’s shoulder constituted further proof that he had committed the crime, she said; no mention was made of Lopez Dangla’s numerous scratches. “Nelson Dangla and [another witness] have all the credibility necessary,” she asserted. She found Volz and Chamorro both guilty.

Volz stood blinking in disbelief. “Once I heard the initial part of the verdict, I stopped paying attention,” says Volz. “I immediately started preparing for what was next. It was back to survival mode, focusing all my energy on staying alive.”

FOLLOWING HIS CONVICTION Volz was sent to the El Modelo maximum-security facility. After fighting with his first roommate, he was paired with a 35-year-old man convicted of attempting to murder his wife. “He keeps the place clean, he respects personal space, he doesn’t use drugs, and he’s not gay,” says Volz. “It’s a good situation.”

His parents have hired someone to bring him fresh vegetables and water to supplement the single plate of rice and beans he’s allotted each day. Once a week he gets two hours in the yard; he spends the whole time running. He does yoga stretches in the morning and uses meditation and visualization to try to keep himself centered. “I don’t really have time to spend with the other prisoners,” he says. “Prison is a time to self-explore and really try to make sense of it all.”

Volz isn’t the only one trying to make sense of things. His mother and stepfather Dane Anthony have launched a media campaign on his behalf, beginning with a website, friendsofericvolz.com, that’s regularly updated with news about his case, and lists of things that visitors can pray for if they choose.

The U.S. embassy is tight-lipped, but the embassy monitors his treatment in prison, and legal observers attended his trial. Volz’s lawyers have appealed the conviction, in the hope that-barring further lynch-mob shenanigans-cooler heads will prevail. (Chamorro has also appealed.) “I don’t think [the conviction] was politically motivated,” says Castillo. “This type of thing happens to a lot of Nicaraguans, and it’s really a problem. It needs to change.”

Then again, cooler heads might not prevail. The media campaign has stirred up a backlash in San Juan del Sur; one American journalist had his tires slashed, and a photographer was threatened-by an expat. Local opinion seems to have solidified against Volz. A recent headline in El Nuevo Diario condemned “Pure Lies From the Volz Family.” “I’d say about 85 percent of the Nicaraguans here think Eric Volz is guilty,” says one San Juan del Sur native. “Maybe more.”

To their minds, everything adds up. Volz and Jimenez had split, she was seeing someone else, and he was jealous. He also was said to show no emotion at the murder scene, which struck people as suspicious. He asked too many questions, acted too bossy, and dared to tangle with the cops, which any Nicaraguan knows is tempting fate. Something was up. And, finally, the judge found him guilty. “Justice was served,” says Jimenez’s mother.

In the short run some Nicaraguans might see the case as a victory against the rich Americans who are buying up the country, one quarter-acre beachfront lot at a time. “The locals are starting to realize how much money the gringos are making in Nicaragua,” says one expat. “I don’t think they really knew before. Maybe there is some animosity when a gringo buys land for $20K from a local and turns around and sells it for $50K to another gringo. The local made $20K for land they’ve owned their whole life and the gringo made $30K in five minutes. This has happened plenty, and I’m sure the locals have felt ripped off as a result.”

“I think locals are starting to realize that they’re getting left behind,” Volz agrees. “There’s been more crimes and other things that seem related to the social inequity. I think there’s an underlying tone to the whole real estate boom, and me being a member of that community working for Century 21. They just chose to see this so-called privileged, moneyed real estate guy.”

Volz is annoyed that fellow expats are keeping quiet about his case; he thinks they’re afraid to spoil their budding boomtown, which local real estate websites liken to Cancun in the ’60s. There are miles of unspoiled coastline waiting to be snapped up. One day there will be highways and condos, and the pristine kilometer-long beach that’s listed for $2 million will seem like an incredible bargain. Or so they hope.

DEAN LATOURRETTE is a freelance writer living, working, and surfing in San Francisco. He has written for Men’s Journal, San Francisco magazine, Sunset, and The Surfer’s Journal, among others. He is coauthor of Time Off! The Upside to Downtime and Time Off! The Leisure Guide to San Francisco, and considers himself a leisure connoisseur.

Coda

Unlike most real-life crime stories, “A Season in Hell” actually has a happy ending. On December 21, 2007, after spending a harrowing year in a Nicaraguan prison for the reputed rape and murder of his ex-girlfriend, Eric Volz was released-his case having been overturned by a Nicaraguan appeals court. Thirteen months after Volz’s nightmare first began, he enjoyed Christmas dinner in the United States with his family.

Volz phoned me out of the blue, about a month after his release. He would not divulge his location-he was still in hiding, fearing repercussions due to his release (a substantial portion of the Nicaraguan people still believe he’s guilty). It was only the second time I had ever spoken to him, the first being within the walls of La Modelo maximum-security prison in Tipitapa, Nicaragua, in March 2007. It was hard to believe the voice I heard on the other end of the phone belonged to the same individual I had interviewed in prison, when hope for a just outcome in his case was running thin. If speaking to him was surreal for me, I could only imagine how the implausible events of the prior year must have felt to him.

The absurdity surrounding the Volz case is difficult to describe. When I first learned about the story, I was convinced that there had to be more to the investigation than was first reported-that Volz somehow was guilty-and I set off for Nicaragua determined to dig up a smoking gun. That all changed, however, on my first day there, sitting in the courthouse, poring through the case files. What I found was shocking, as much for its incompetence as for its injustice. By U.S. legal standards, it was a slam dunk: The case should have been thrown out before it ever went to trial (in actuality it was originally thrown out, by a judge who was later “dismissed” from the case). But this wasn’t the U.S. legal system; it was a relatively callow and unsophisticated Nicaraguan system finding its way. And this wasn’t just any crime: it was the supposed rape and murder of a beautiful, innocent Nicaraguan woman, presumably by a rich and successful “gringo.” In many ways it served as a metaphor for U.S.-Latin American relations over the past two hundred years, and Nicaraguans were not about to take things lying down. Did anti-American sentiment play a significant role in the trial? Absolutely. But so too did primitive police work, botched legal processes, and small-town justice.

In the end, despite the stirred up anti-Americanism and strained U.S.-Nicaragua relations; despite a bungled investigation, irresponsible media reporting, and a trial gone awry, some very brave Nicaraguans ultimately risked their reputations, their careers, perhaps even their lives-to step up and fight for justice.

And that’s something Nicaragua should be proud of.