Jason Puracal Nicaragua 22 Years – An American being held in a Nicaraguan prison said he is innocent and described his treatment in a “hellhole” in an exclusive phone interview with CNN’s Anderson Cooper on Thursday.
“I don’t know the reason that I’m here,” Jason Puracal said. “That’s been a mystery from the very beginning. What the motives behind the police and the prosecution have been.”
Puracal, a 35-year-old from Washington state, has been behind bars since August 2010, when Nicaraguan authorities raided his real estate office in the coastal tourist city of San Juan del Sur.
In November, a Nicaraguan judge found Puracal guilty of money laundering, drug trafficking and organized crime and sentenced the American to 22 years. But a chorus of supporters say that there is no evidence to support the charges and that Puracal’s prosecution was rife with legal mistakes and misconduct.
Puracal’s family and supporters have said that while visiting him at La Modelo, they’ve been shocked to see he’s gotten very ill and is disturbingly underweight.
“We’re really afraid that his body won’t be able to take this much longer,” said Janis Puracal, who was allowed to visit her brother in prison several months ago.
Puracal described to Cooper what it’s like at La Modelo prison near Managua.
“It’s basically a hellhole,” he said. “There are concrete cells that are overcrowded.
“I’ve been in a cell with anywhere from 9 to 12 people in a 12-by-15-foot cell,” Puracal continued. “It’s hot; it’s dirty; it’s festy. There’s lots of insects, including chiggers and ants and mosquitoes. There’s no running water. I have to fight every day to get your two buckets of water. There’s no good food. We get rice and beans three times a day, and it has a bicarbonate added to it to make the prisoners feel full, so I can’t even eat this stuff.
“I had to go to the hospital,” he said. “So, basically, right now, I survive on crackers and peanuts and raisins.”
Those fighting to free Puracal include the director of the California Innocence Project, the human-rights attorney who helped win freedom for Burmese Nobel Peace Prize laureate Aung San Suu Kyi and an ex-FBI agent who was one of the early champions of Amanda Knox’s innocence.
Read More:http://edition.cnn.com/2012/06/14/world/nicaragua-american-prisoner/index.html