Family asks UN to help free former Peace Corps volunteer jailed in Nicaragua

After 18 months of watching her brother languish in a Nicaraguan prison cell on what many say are questionable drug charges, Janis Puracal, the younger sister and legal representative of Jason Puracal, is pulling out all the stops for his release.

Last week, Mr. Puracal’s legal team alleged Jason is being “slowly starved to death by the Government of Nicaragua” and subject to “cruel, inhumane and degrading treatment, if not torture,” in a petition filed with the United Nations’s Special Rapporteur on Torture.

The family's petition to the UN is the latest move in a case that is quickly turning into an international offensive against Nicaragua’s judicial and penitentiary systems.

The defense claims that Puracal – who stayed in Nicaragua after his 2-years of Peace Corps service to sell beach real estate for Remax, get married, and start a family – was wrongfully convicted of international money laundering, drug trafficking, and organized crime. Puracal, who was convicted last August along with 10 Nicaraguans, was allegedly involved in “national and international transactions using a great amount of money without justification to buy and sell property, especially in the departments of Rivas and Granada,” according to state prosecutors. The defense claims there’s nothing illegal about that – it’s just what realtors do.

The combination of charges landed the 35-year-old Seattle native behind bars for 22 years, with no set date for an appeal hearing.

“This has been a railroad job,” says Janis Puracal, who was in Nicaragua this week to visit her brother in jail and try to push his case forward. “This is so clear to everyone, and still Jason is dying in prison. That is the frustrating part to me; I don’t know how much more I need to do to convince people that Jason needs to go home.”

Mr. Puracal is not the only American to get into trouble in the tropics. Of the 725 US citizens in jail overseas, more than half, 393, are behind bars in Latin America, according to the State Department’s most recent statistics. That number could be much higher, since not everyone informs the US consulate when they’ve been arrested abroad.

Some believe “Uncle Sam” can swoop in and save them when they’re caught up in foreign mischief, but the US consulate’s role is decidedly less Hollywood.

“Our role in an arrest case is to ensure that the individual is not being singled out for mistreatment as a US citizen and that the conditions of his or her incarceration meet international standards,” says a State Department official. “We conduct routine prison visits to ensure the US citizen is in good health, we facilitate communication between the prisoner and his and her family, and we make sure the prisoner has access to legal representation if he or she chooses.”

In Puracal’s case, the family thinks the embassy hasn’t done enough, given Jason’s conditions. After developing serious intestinal problems from the prison food – twice-daily rations of rice and beans – Jason, who has lost 30 pounds, has become dependent on his wife’s family bringing him food from the outside, which he tries to eat or squirrel away before it's stolen by other prisoners.

So now they’ve turned to others for help, including Eric Volz, a Tennessee man who spent a year in the same Nicaraguan prison for allegedly killing his Nicaraguan ex-girlfriend in 2006. Mr. Volz had witnesses and time-stamped cell phone calls proving he was two hours away in Managua the day Doris Ivania Jiménez was found raped and murdered in the back of her clothing boutique in San Juan del Sur. The case was overturned in an appeal in late 2007, and Volz returned to the US, where he wrote a book about his ordeal and became managing director of the Los Angeles-based David House Agency, an international crisis resource group that’s handling Puracal’s case.

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