It's prison, man. It really began to mean something about freedom, learning my limits, learning to trust myself, he told me. While Nicaraguan attitudes don't seem to condemn casual encounters between local men and female tourists, the reverse situation, she noted, isn't viewed in the same light. I want justice, too. The prosecutor asked for the maximum penalty for both men, 30 years. More than 31 million Americans visited Mexico in 2016, the National Travel & Tourism Office says, and State Department data shows there were reports of 75 American homicide victims there. In town, a two-block circumference around the courthouse was sealed off. The next day, February 15, Rojas presented the defense. Once the guards approved my papers, I walked past long cement buildings, the barred windows revealing prisoners in hammocks, clothes and towels hanging everywhere. Do you think this could happen to anyone? I asked him. The arrangement lasted several months, and both Thompson and his wife say they didn't see anything that would make them think Volz is a murderer. Many others simply say that he seemed aloof. And then there were Volz's injuries. Check with your travel company or . While I still disagreed with Alvarado that Volz killed her daughter, I understood her sorrow, her furious desire to see someone pay for this crime. It was 5:40 am on a rainy Tuesday, March 30th. Nicaragua is a World Bank and International Monetary Fund designated heavily indebted poor country, with little legal ability to control its economic future: Everything is for sale. An enemy. According to his parents, he wasn't fed for a five-day stretch; he spent a week in a medical ward; he was repeatedly threatened. Many who sold four and five years ago realized less than 5 percent of what the same properties sell for now. I didn't do anything. Hello world! On March 16, her family commemorated her birthday at the San Juan cemetery. Cell-phone records could not prove Volz was the one using the phone, the prosecution claimed, nor could instant messages. Land that was next to worthless as recently as 2002 is now flipped with ease; third-acre oceanview lots go for hundreds of thousands. And then I read the evidence regarding Volz's alibi: cell-phone records, a time-stamped instant-messaging log, page after page of statements by the ten people most of whom I would later interview myself supporting Volz's account. I was led into a spartan office; Volz was waiting at the desk. In August Costa Rica was in the spotlight when two female tourists were killed within a week. No members of his family ever appeared in the courtroom; after what had happened at the arraignment, Maggie Anthony told me in Managua in March, they were afraid. Still, few deny it comes with a price. Join Outside+ to get Outside magazine, access to exclusive content, 1,000s of training plans, and more. Cabezas alleges that Baltodano told Alvarado that if she would make a public written statement attesting to Volz's innocence, a cash settlement of $1,000,000 would be placed in her bank account, to which Cabezas, as her lawyer, would be entitled to 20 percent. In the cross-examination, the prosecution hammered away at the point that both Castillo and Purdy had incentive to see Volz free, as they had business dealings with him. The Ortega of today is not the Ortega of the past; he has been actively reassuring investors that the favorable business climate here will not change. Thailand beach death: Parents convinced son murdered - and his killing covered up to protect tourism Nick Pearson, from Derby, was found floating in the sea on New Year's Day 2014. Some of these sales are contested. Central America, between the Caribbean Sea (East), the Pacific Ocean (West), Honduras (North) and Costa Rica (South). A few men in the surfer crowd, I noticed, had turned to hustling, befriending tourists and intimidating them into paying for the night's drinks or staging phony drug deals in which the tourists got burned. A frightened Estrada testified that she cut Volz's hair. Her mother, Mercedes Alvarado, who sold her San Juan home in 2006 and moved inland to Rivas with Doris's two younger sisters, says she took exception to what she describes as Volz's lack of communication with the family, to her daughter's willingness to leap out of bed when he would call in the middle of the night. Jimnez's grandmother Jacinta Lanzas told the Diario, With these people you have to be very careful, because you don't know anything about them, nothing of their past, and in this case I always sensed something bad. He was being held in the Granada penitentiary, a facility off the highway that houses 800 prisoners on small grounds. Speculation had become so rampant by 2004 that Internet investors who'd previously never left the States were visiting regularly on real estate tours, getting the hard sell while enjoying the delights of the bay, the 70-cent beers, the heady idea of financial windfall, the sight of all the pretty girls. In 2021, 15 murder cases where land activists or environmentalists were killed were reported in Nicaragua, up from 12 the previous year. If Volz's conviction was upheld, the final decision will be decided by the Nicaraguan Supreme Court.) Bilingual, with a degree in Latin American studies from the University of California at San Diego, Eric had moved to San Juan del Sur in 2005 and become a Nicaraguan resident. He talked about the competitiveness of the real estate market. Had I a million dollars, I wouldn't have given it to her. Orlando Tercero, 23, was found guilty of last . Doris's life was worth a lot more than a million dollars. Here and there are the signs of development tarmac-long clear-cuts and completed gated communities along with modest truck-shed fincas with chickens and pigs in the yard, the municipal dump crowded with turkey vultures, and long swaths of forest resplendent with parakeets, butterflies, and monkeys. (His, he said, was unreliable.) I didn't pay to have Doris killed; I had nothing to do with her death. But by the second day, he seemed resigned to it. An appeals court in Morocco has confirmed death sentences handed down to three men for the beheading of two Scandinavian tourists in the Atlas Mountains. Meanwhile, the first international TV crews, from Dateline and the Today show, had arrived in Nicaragua. I have my version. There is a lot of jealousy here. This region had its king and both he and his. Toxicology put Jimnez's blood alcohol content at 0.3, a bizarrely high level. San Juan is small. In . No travel is risk-free during COVID-19. ACCUSED of murder, railroaded through the Nicaraguan courts and wrongly convicted, Eric Volz can be forgiven for not having immediately recognized that his ordeal would become the foundation for. An hour later, police retrieved them. I knew I wasn't going to be in Nicaragua forever, and I was always very up front and honest with Doris about that., Doris was Miss San Juan a couple years ago, Thompson said. MAJESTIC TURKEY BY CULTURE TRIP SIX months ago, tourists flocked to the Central American paradise of Nicaragua to race down volcanoes on thin, wooden boards, explore its Caribbean coast and watch turtles heave themselves onto black sand beaches under cover of moonlight. If you decide to travel to Nicaragua: Read the Department of State's COVID-19 page before planning any international travel, and read the Embassy COVID-19 page for country-specific COVID-19 information. How much could she have earned in her life? Police arrested him shortly after the ceremony. Florida man grabbed 4-year-old, threw her at column, cops say. Then she sat and began to speak. Volz's team would eventually include Jacqueline Becerra, a lawyer with the multinational firm Greenberg Traurig and president-elect of the Federal Bar Association's South Florida chapter; Simon Strong, of Holder International, a company specializing in risk management; Melissa Campbell, a music-industry publicist and family friend; private security from multinational Corporate Security Consultants (CSC); and Ramn Rojas, a prominent Nicaraguan lawyer who successfully defended Daniel Ortega in a civil case in 2001. It requires driving fast but not inordinately so.). February 14, 2018. Eric is innocent. Looking south, you can see the dense mountains of Costa Rica; just offshore, islands rise out of the ocean like the buttes of Monument Valley. I have a lot of enemies They steal my money, my food. The official police report states that the perpetrators undressed her to rape and sodomize her, then put her clothes back on because of a sentimental attachment, and finally hog-tied her the way she was found. As reported in the paper and as I later read in court documents, what Rosita Chamorro told police in an unsigned statement one that he and his lawyer would later insist to me had been coerced through torture was that Volz, apparently jealous of Jimnez's new relationship with Llanes, had offered Chamorro $5,000 to go with him around noon to Sol Fashion, where the American attacked Jimnez, then raped, sodomized, and killed her. It's disgusting to see Krusty as a witness. Eric didn't do it. Humpback whales breach in the distance. TOURIST VISA REQUIRED: No (90 days or fewer). I'd see her every day. Asked how he felt, Dangla said, Very good. 04-10-2022 09:23. in News. 'Do you think he really loves me?' He began our interview with this statement: I've been misquoted a lot; that's why I'm recording I have an army of attorneys that are willing to step up in any way that I ask. Downward spiral: Nicaragua's worsening crisis. If we don't get help from the national government, we are going to have critical situations with drainage and electricity., The mayor is not anti-development. These awful swindles took place around the international airport and in the cities of Rivas, Granada, and Masaya. lvaro was a student at the Loyola Institute. In Nicaragua at least 322 people have . I need my daughter., Other witnesses were brought forth to call Volz's alibi into question, including the Hertz delivery driver, Victor Morales, who testified that one of Volz's friends had asked him to say that he saw Volz at the EP office that day when he didn't, at which point the prosecution spoke at length about why Leidy de los Santos would have signed Volz's rental agreement. Judge Toruo went through the charges against the two men in a loud and emphatic way, rolling her r's just a touch longer than necessary, letting the names of the accused settle around us in their length. The expats need not speak Spanish or even notice much that they are in Nicaragua. This was my fourth attempt to get into the prison in two weeks; what was different about today was that I finally had a letter from Judge Toruo extending me access to visit Volz, for which I'd had to lobby all the way to the office of a Supreme Court magistrate. When Cantamar is eventually finished, it will be a sprawling community of luxury homes, but when I went back in March, it still looked like what it was: deforested land. He was jubilant, laughing. ), Just as Rojas was about to finish, there was a sudden commotion, and the special-operations officers barricaded the door with their bodies. In May 2015, two American men were murdered in a suspected drug-related armed robbery. I've lost a lot. They all of a sudden feel very appreciative for what they have Those are the kind of things that really make me feel this is not all for nothing. They have the money to win any lawsuit. We shook hands and sat in folding chairs; a guard observed us from a chair in the corner. The most amazing part about visiting this active volcano is how close you can get to the lip of the crater in a private vehicle - you simply drive right up to the edge and park . (Ramn Rojas filed Volz's appeal shortly after the verdict; by press time, in mid-April, the Rivas court had sent the paperwork up to the appellate court in Granada, where three judges were expected to rule on the case by the end of the month. He told me about his films, that he'd been a DJ, Thompson said of his onetime friend. He has a younger sister, plus a stepsister from his mother's second marriage. Petty theft is a persistent annoyance. Staff and tourists near the Mexican resort city of Cancn have been sent rushing for shelter after a group of armed men entered the beach outside a . I'm stripped down, he said. And that's the incredibly tragic irony of this case. Five days before the murder, he told the court, he'd overheard an angry Chamorro say, I don't give a damn about this Doris; she's a gringo chaser. We are friends of her family, they explained. While still in police custody, he told me, he'd been tortured, but he refused to elaborate. Binghampton University student Haley Anderson, 22, went missing in March 2018, and it later emerged she had been killed by Orlando Tercero, 23. With sentiment tilted so heavily against Volz and because a jury trial rules out the possibility of appeal, the defense opted for a judge; the trial was set for January 26. He worked in carpentry, took classes at Lake Tahoe Community College, DJ'd at a local bar, and built a reputation as an exceptional free climber. When a local beauty turned up dead in Nicaragua's San Juan del Sur, the dream of paradise became a nightmare for one expat American surfer. In official physical exams recorded in the files, the police say that both Chamorro and Dangla bore fingernail scratches on their arms. EPA. Check if you need one below. Judge Toruo pronounced both defendants guilty. His powerful family is trying to buy him out! became a local mantra. And once Nicaraguans decide to cash in and sell their houses or farms, they have to look far inland for anything affordable. What I can say is this: The reading of the verdict was long and theatrical. She admitted that the police lab had done a terrible job and chastised them for it. He thought Nicaragua was the place to do this. Fifty dollars a day? It was utter chaos, Jan Volz told me this spring. Volz's cell-phone records precisely match his account of what happened next: that he left Managua and drove to San Juan. The murders last year shocked the North . 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