Nicaragua
1) My name is Alvaro Orozco. I was born on July 3, 1985, in Managua, the capital city of Nicaragua, where I grew up until I was 12 years old.
2) I was raised in a family plagued by violence. My father, a violent man, without education or resources, was an alcoholic person before I was even born.
3) When I was 7 years old, my mother gathered all my brothers and my sister to discuss our financial situation. My mother said to us: “We have to work together to keep our household afloat. Your father doesn’t want to work and doesn’t care to be responsible about our family.” Ever since that moment, when I was 7 years old, I started working with my mother and my siblings selling food my mother cooked. We also had fruit trees, and sold fruit.
4) When my father realized the money we were making and that things were going well for our household thanks to our work, he started forcing my mother to give him all the money we made. As my mother resisted my father, he violently assaulted her, kicking and punching, including her face. Seeing our own father hit our mother, my brothers cried because they couldn’t do anything to help her, as they were afraid of him as well. When I saw that my siblings couldn’t do anything to defend my mother, I decided to defend her and threw myself against my father, biting his arm and yelling, “leave my mother alone, you son of a bitch”. My father reacted furiously and came after me, but I dodged the punch, ran away and cried for help from our neighbours. They intervened and told my father to stop. Since then, my father’s hatred against me grew and he would always be looking for pretexts to hit me.
5) In large part, my childhood ended, because I had to work and be responsible for my family’s livelihood. I would work from before the sun came up to support the family financially, go to school, and also do household work.
6) My father always knew I was different from my brothers. I too knew I was different, from around the age of seven. I was attracted to other boys. I would keep more clean and neat than the other kids. One day I made a garden in our house, and whatever free time I had I used to take care of the plants and flowers. During Christmas time I was the only one who cared about decorating our house and creating ornaments. A Christmas tree back then was very expensive so I would invent one, like a mango tree branch that I cut and decorated. I knew this was different than the other boys.
7) My father and my family realized that my way of thinking and doing things was different from that of any other boy my age. My brothers would insult and ridicule me, and call me queer and other degrading terms. That year, when I was only 7 years old, my father gathered all my four brothers and myself and declared that “if I realize that any one of you is a faggot I would kill him with my own hands.” My mother was present but she didn’t say anything. Obviously my parents knew I was different from my brothers – it was I they had in mind.
8) My father used to say that hitting me everyday was a good thing, because that would help me become a man and bring me to the ‘straight way’. I used to talk back at him and I once told him that if he expected to be respected he had to respect me, and that even if I was his son, that didn’t give him the right to do to me whatever he wanted. He got really angry and came after me punching me and punished me with whatever object he found that he could reach.
Beating and torturing me became an every-day habit and it was like a sport for my father. His hatred was very great and translated into extremely brutal violence: he treated me like an animal, and tortured me. He whipped me with whips meant for driving animals (horses), thick electrical cables from the street, wooden sticks, and his own belt with such force that it would break striking against me, the buckle flying off. He actually kept on buying himself new belts for this purpose. His assaults often drew blood,