In Nicaragua, human rights violations have become a part of the population's daily life. Last year, it was one of the world's least democratic countries, ranking 143 in the EIU Democracy Index, beating authoritarian regimes in Venezuela, Russia and Iran.
But Nicaraguans are fighting back. For the past decades, the Central American nation has been flooded with social uprisings in attempts to overthrown the Ortega-Murillo regime. President Daniel Ortega and his wife, vice president Rosario Murillo, both leading Nicaragua since 2007, have responded with censorship and repression of all forms.
At its peak, hundreds of thousands of Nicaraguans took to streets in various cities in marches organized by Catholic churches calling for Ortega to step down. In September 2018, Ortega declared protests of any kind to be illegal. And by February 2019, thousands had already been arrested and over 300 Nicaraguans killed by their own security forces.
2018
“In 2018 the majority of politically motivated prisoners were charged with complex crimes such as organized crime and terrorism and they were imprisoned all together in the cell blocks,” Nicaraguan lawyer Elton Ortega Zúñiga told Amnesty International. "In Nicaragua there are two types of prisoners: political prisoners and regular prisoners. The government is playing politics with imprisoned people."
A few months ago, an influential Catholic bishop was placed under house arrest and eight of his colleagues were jailed. By cracking down on the church, Ortega is sending a clear message to Nicaraguans: no dissent, no criticism, no disagreement will be brooked.
2021
"If you're seeing this message it means that I've been detained," Juan Sebastian Chamorro said in a video published after his arrest. "When you want freedom, you sometimes have to lose it temporarily."
“Nicaragua is a big jail,” Victoria Cardenas told me in September 2022. Her husband Juan Sebastian Chamorro was one of seven politicians planning to run against Ortega for president in 2021 who were arrested and unceremoniously imprisoned. “If you want to speak up, you either go to jail, or you speak up while you’re in exile.” She, for now, is in exile.
As the November 2021 presidential elections approached, Nicaragua's second wave of arrests began.
Renata Holmann and Victoria Cardenas are two of the many family members of political prisoners who have spoken up against Ortega’s regime and denounced its many human rights violations inside Nicaraguan jails and prisons. But they can only speak from the relative safety of a foreign country. “I have the opportunity to talk about the situation in Nicaragua now that I live in the United States,” Renata said. “Anyone in Nicaragua who dares to speak against the government, or just tell the truth, is in danger.”
Juan Lorenzo Holmann.
Juan Chamorro.
“La dictadura no puede ocultar la verdad,” read the last words of a defiant frontpage headline last year in La Prensa, the near century-old Nicaraguan daily, one of Central America’s most venerable newspapers. The dictatorship can’t hide the truth!
Denied supplies of paper and ink, that headline, on the morning of August 12, 2021, was the last time La Prensa appeared in print. Ortega had been tightening his already vice-like grip on the country’s throat, squeezing the life out of its once voluble press. La Prensa might be going out of print, the headline asserted, but it was still in business.
As La Prensa prepared to go digital, their newsroom was seized by police. Renata Holmann texted her father, Juan Lorenzo Holmann, the newspaper’s publisher, to say she was proud of him and his efforts to keep the paper running. “Don’t worry,” Holmann texted his daughter back, “I will be okay.”
On August 14, 2021, in the early hours of the morning, Holmann was detained. He was held in pretrial detention until March 2022, when behind closed doors he was convicted of money laundering and sentenced to nine years in prison. His cousins, Cristiana Chamorro Barrios and Pedro Joaquin Chamorro, both on La Prensa’s board, were also imprisoned by judges that week for money laundering and the misappropriation of funds.
2023
It had been months since I had last spoke to Renata and Victoria, but they had only been able to visit their relatives in prison once. Isolation is one of the many techniques of torture used in Nicaraguan prisons. The conditions inside Nicaraguan prisons have been denounced by NGOs and activists for years. Incarcerated people are often held in solitary confinement for years, unable to leave their cells. They are deprived of any human interaction, including with themselves: no access to mirrors, reading and writing material, not allowed to speak or sing, no or little access to showers, medicine, doctors and sometimes deprived of food for days.
The conditions are so inhumane that in March 2022, Hugo Torres, a critic of the Ortega-Murillo government, died in custody.
In February 2023, a rumor started spreading in the group chats of the political prisoners' relatives: they were put on a plane and no one knew the reason why, nor the flight destination.
That day, the Ortega-Murillo government released
222
political prisoners
The 222 political prisoners spent altogether over 147,030 days behind bars, which would be equivalent to nearly 403 years deprived of their freedom.
They were politicians, activists, journalists, religious practitioners and their family members.
Although the majority of young activists were released during the pandemic, a large proportion of the incarcerated people were young adults. Ezequiel de Jesus Gonzalez Alvarado, for instance, was only 19 when he was incarcerated for participating in a student protest against the government in 2019. By the time had he was released in February, he had already spent three years and a half behind bars.
“I've been traveling to Washington for over 20 years, and I have never seen the awareness or the attention that we're receiving now,” Felix Maradiaga said to NPR after his arrival in the U.S. He is a former Nicaragua presidential candidate and spent 611 days in Nicaragua’s notorious El Chipote prison.
But Maradiaga’s freedom, like the one of 93 other released political prisoners, came with the revocation of his citizenship.
Revoking someone's citizenship can lead to catastrophic consequences:
The UNHCR estimates that there are
10M
stateless people in the world
Victoria Cardenas reunited with her husband in February 2023 for the first time in years. But the reunion is bittersweet. "The majority of the prisoners left their families behind," Felix Madariaga said in an interview with Christine Amanpour.
Juan Sebastian Chamorro is with his wife Victoria, but he can no longer return to Nicaragua. In the interview with Amanpour, Chamorro added that he continues to feel repressed by the Ortega-Murillo government as he is unable to fight back from his country.
In Javier Corrales’ book “Autocracy Rising,” the author explains how governments become fully autocratic by eliminating all opposition leaders.
By sending all those political prisoners abroad, Ortega is, in a way, successfully getting rid of his enemies, all while avoiding international pressures that condemn his government for human rights violations.