Ordeal Recounted : Freed Couple Accuse Nicaragua of ‘Piracy’

A former Orange County couple said Saturday that the government of Nicaragua committed piracy in stopping their boat while they were sailing to California and detaining them for almost three weeks.

Leo LaJeunesse, 53, a former assistant dean at Orange Coast College, also accused the Central American nation of playing “some sort of silly political game” in charging them with arms trafficking and invading its territorial waters.

The couple, who lived in Costa Mesa during Leo LaJeunesse’s tenure with OCC, was detained Aug. 6 when their 65-foot boat was towed into the Atlantic port of Bluefields, Nicaragua.

Nicaragua’s Foreign Ministry last week denied that the couple had been under house arrest.

LaJeunesse and his wife, Dolores, also 53, were interviewed at a yacht club here one week after they were released from Bluefields and allowed to resume their trip.

They said they sailed from Fort Myers, Fla., where they are temporarily living, on July 25, planning to travel through the Panama Canal to Southern California to look into job possibilities.

Their motor broke down Aug. 5 and they proceeded under sail, reaching the Corn Islands about 40 miles off the Nicaraguan coast the next day, they said.

A large fishing vessel with four heavily armed soldiers took them under tow, LaJeunesse said, adding that he did not need help and was outside Nicaragua’s territorial waters.

An “act of piracy is what it was,” LaJeunesse said.

In Bluefields, Nicaraguan authorities searched the boat and found a .22-caliber rifle and a 12-gauge shotgun. Charges of gun-running were added to the accusation of violating Nicaraguan waters, LaJeunesse said.

He called the charges “some sort of silly political game” and said the couple never understood why they were detained.

For most of the first 12 days in Bluefields he and his wife were kept apart, LaJeunesse said. He said authorities subjected them to “interrogations at a rather intense level” and charged them $470 in cash for their food and lodging in a hotel.

They also had to pay for the food of plainclothes security officials who watched them when, after 12 days, they were allowed to walk around the town and call the American Embassy in Managua from a pay phone, LaJeunesse said. He did not explain why the Nicaraguans let them go or what happened to the charges against them.

The couple sailed from Nicaragua Aug. 24 and reached Panama late Thursday.

LaJeunesse said he had been indifferent about the Sandinista government and “maybe even a little sympathetic” to it before the incident. The detention, however, gave him “a real political education about the conditions in that part of the world.”

“We need to do something positive about getting that police state out of Central America,” he said. “In fact, I’m going to do whatever I can do to destroy that government. . . . Whatever my talents will allow me to do, I’m going to do to try to bring them down.”

LaJeunesse said he and his wife probably will complete the 3,000-mile voyage to California in about two months.