A video shared on TikTok shows a Nicaraguan woman, in exile and visibly distressed, asking for help to find her daughter and her two granddaughters. She identifies herself as Elpidia Castillo and recounts that since the night of March 21, 2025, she has lost all contact with Elvia Junieth Flores Castillo and the two girls, Camila and Melissa.
He speaks from exile, against the Government of Nicaragua, and asks that the case be made public because, he asserts, he has already exhausted private channels to obtain a response.
Elvia Junieth Flores Castillo is not just any missing person for the Flores Castillo family. Her name became publicly linked to Daniel Ortega in 2017, when several of her siblings, based in Miami, reported to the press that the president of Nicaragua had sexually abused her since she was 15 years old.
Elvia Junieth herself, then 28 years old, participated by phone in that conference and publicly declared that she was a victim of Ortega. The siblings also denounced that one of them, Santos Sebastián Flores Castillo, had been imprisoned in retaliation for exposing the case.
In the video, Elpidia Castillo speaks through tears and does not avoid the question that haunts her. “I don’t know what situation they are in, how they are, two innocent girls,” she says about her granddaughters. “Why have they been so cruel to them if they are little girls who don’t even go to school yet,” she insists, adding that they are stealing their childhood.
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The mother recounts that the last time she heard from her daughter was the night of March 21, 2025, when Elvia Junieth managed to contact the family shortly before, according to her version, she was taken along with the two minors. “That was the last time I heard from her,” she states. “Since then, I have not heard anything else.”
“I hold the Government of Nicaragua responsible and I demand that they give me an answer about my daughter and my granddaughters,” “I don’t sleep or eat,” she says, and attributes to faith the strength she has left to keep searching. “I am here because God is great and powerful, otherwise I don’t know how I would be. I am going to go everywhere until they give me my girls. I will not stop until they give them to me.”
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Elpidia Castillo, mother of Elvia Junieth Flores, states that she has had no communication with her daughter since March 2025
Elvia Junieth’s case had been documented years ago by Diario Las Américas and the press conference that four of her siblings, and her own telephone testimony, held in 2017 in Miami.
According to information from EFE, Elvia Junieth identified herself in 2017 as a victim of Daniel Ortega. The young woman said that she no longer maintained any ties with Ortega, although at that time she was the mother of two daughters born from that relationship, a five-year-old girl and an eleven-month-old baby.
Her sister Martha recounted at that same conference that Elvia Junieth was just beginning to dare to speak about what she had lived through, despite the fear she still felt. Another sister, Sujey Flores, described the case as an open wound in the family for more than ten years, and explained that this pain had forced several of the siblings to seek refuge in the United States.
According to her account, she and her brother Santos had filed a formal complaint with human rights organizations as soon as they learned, from Elvia Junieth herself, what was happening. The family also accused Ortega and Vice President Rosario Murillo of subjecting them to harassment, with arbitrary imprisonments, evictions, and confiscations of property.
Behind this story is a code name: Néstor Moncada Lau, a man close to Ortega, currently in prison as a result of the purge undertaken by Rosario Murillo. Moncada appears as a cover-up for the sexual abuse that Ortega allegedly committed against Elvia Junieth Flores in 2005, when she was just 15 years old.
Néstor Moncada Lau, a close associate of Daniel Ortega, legally appears as the father of the daughter attributed to Daniel Ortega. (File photo)
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The investigation by Diario Las Américas published in 2015 states that the teenager caught Ortega’s attention during a campaign event, which she had attended with her sister as members of the Sandinista Youth.
The then-candidate ordered her to be located, obtained her phone number, and did not take long to establish contact with her family circle, composed of long-time Sandinistas in the north of the country, whom he even had brought to the FSLN Secretariat.
The closeness between the Sandinista leader and the family was maintained for three years, a period in which, according to what was reported by the relatives themselves, a girl was born as a result of that relationship. According to that account, it was Moncada Lau who ended up legally recognizing the minor to protect Ortega from the scandal.
The journalistic work of Diario Las Américas incorporated as support a civil registry document from Managua and the trail of several money transfers for large amounts that Marcos Martínez Mejía, another close collaborator of Ortega, allegedly sent to Santos Sebastián Flores, brother of Elvia Junieth.
The person who paid the highest price for upholding those accusations was precisely Santos Sebastián Flores Castillo, a lawyer and notary. According to the case that the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR) presented to the Inter-American Court in July 2024, Flores Castillo reported in 2005 that Daniel Ortega had begun a relationship with his sister when she was 15 years old, from which a daughter had been born.
Following that complaint, he and his family suffered sustained persecution by the State, which in 2013 led to a prison sentence against Flores Castillo, handed down, according to the petitioners before the IACHR, in direct retaliation for having spoken out.
Santos Sebastián Flores Castillo was accused and sentenced to 15 years in prison for the crime of rape against an employee of the Judiciary, charges that he and his family always rejected. The case was heard by a judge identified as being aligned with the regime of Daniel Ortega and Rosario Murillo and who, according to 100% Noticias, also maintained a friendship with the complainant.
Santos Sebastián Flores died under suspicious circumstances in a Nicaraguan prison after reporting the abuse of his sister.
During his imprisonment in the Tipitapa penitentiary system, Flores Castillo and his mother repeatedly reported torture and inhumane conditions of confinement. On November 8, 2021, he died in prison at the age of 52, officially from a heart attack, although his family questioned that version by pointing out that the body showed injuries, signs of torture, and malnutrition.
The IACHR, in its merits report on the case, documented prolonged isolation, lack of adequate food, drinking water, and medical care, in addition to repeated reports of physical and psychological mistreatment by state agents and sexual abuse committed by other inmates.
The Commission concluded that the marks found on Flores Castillo’s body, added to the absence of a clear autopsy, constituted elements of torture, and determined that the State never opened an investigation despite the gravity of what was reported.
Based on those findings, the IACHR established that Nicaragua is responsible for the violation of the rights to life, to personal integrity, to the protection of honor and dignity, to the protection of the family, and to judicial guarantees and protection, recognized in the American Convention on Human Rights, to the detriment of Flores Castillo and his family members.
Among the recommended reparation measures are financial compensation, a psychological rehabilitation program for the family, a thorough investigation to sanction those responsible, and reforms to the detention conditions of the Nicaraguan prison system, including La Modelo prison.
Although she does not mention it, that is the record that weighs behind the video that Elpidia Castillo posted on TikTok.
Towards the end of the video, Elpidia Castillo can no longer hold back her tears. She repeats that her granddaughters have done nothing to deserve what is happening to them, that they are innocent, that they were just beginning to live. “It is a sadness that I cannot bear,” she says between sobs, before insisting again that she will not stop searching until they tell her where Camila and Melissa are.
