The Panhispanic Dictionary of Legal Spanish defines a prisoner as a “person admitted to a penitentiary facility by virtue of a sentence or a measure of pretrial detention.”
Meanwhile, Guillermo Cabanellas (1911–1983), in his Encyclopedic Dictionary of Usual Law, explains that a prisoner is “a person detained on criminal suspicion after pretrial detention has been ordered.” Likewise, it refers to “one who serves, in a penitentiary establishment, a custodial sentence imposed by a final judgment.”
Both definitions are neutral and objective, free of value judgment. Yet every condition of imprisonment carries, at its core, a moral dimension. The case of someone jailed for committing one or more crimes—receiving the punishment society deems deserved—is fundamentally different from that of a person imprisoned for their political ideas, religious beliefs, or demands for freedom and democracy. In the latter case, the individual is clearly a political prisoner, a victim of arbitrary power, and thus radically distinct from the common criminal punished for offenses committed.
There is, however, a third category of prisoner that could be called “karmic prisoner.” This refers to someone “who, having been part of the repressive, administrative, or propaganda apparatus of a dictatorship—or having actively collaborated with it through political opportunism, such as party-switching—ends up being imprisoned by the very system they helped sustain.”
The term “karmic” derives from karma, an Eastern religious and cultural concept according to which “every physical, verbal, or mental action generates a consequence—positive or negative—that shapes a person’s present and future, functioning as a mechanism of self-responsibility.”
Karma, a word from Sanskrit, means “action,” referring to the law of cause and effect whereby every intentional physical, verbal, or mental act produces future results. It is not divine punishment, but the natural consequence of one’s actions.
Thus, individuals such as Bayardo Arce, Álvaro Baltodano, and other Sandinista figures who once operated within the dictatorship—even at the highest levels—but who are now victims of the regime, are not political prisoners. They have not been repressed for expressing ideas or undertaking actions in favor of freedom, democracy, or justice.
They are called karmic prisoners because they are now paying the consequences of their various actions in support of establishing, maintaining, and operating the dictatorship that now repays their services with repression.
Nor are they being persecuted because of a late-blooming democratic conviction. Rather, they have simply lost the trust of the power circle to which they once belonged, or fallen due to the failure of some self-serving maneuver gone wrong.
Karmic prisoners are jailed, prosecuted, and sentenced under the same arbitrary laws and spurious judicial procedures applied to political prisoners. This can create confusion, leading some to believe they too are political prisoners. The truth, however, is that a regime operator overtaken by his own shadow—or karma—may be behind bars, but does not possess the moral standing of a political prisoner.
Political doctrine suggests that labeling a fallen regime insider as a “karmic prisoner” strips away any aura of political victimhood and underscores their prior responsibility within the system. As such, it becomes “a powerful verbal tool to prevent yesterday’s executioners from presenting themselves as tomorrow’s democrats.”
Editorial of LA PRENSA daily published on March 17, 2026.
