This day marks the 5th anniversary of the press release by the Police which prohibited public demonstrations against the government. This was followed by other measures mentioned in the article which have effectively made all protest illegal in the country. This is an important review of the current state of repression.
Five years of the police state in Nicaragua, where thinking freely was made a crime
By DIVERGENTES, Sept 25, 2023
On September 28, 2018, the regime of Daniel Ortega and Rosario Murillo declared protests illegal. Since then, a police state has been imposed which has been extended to his own Sandinista followers, critical publications on social networks and the Catholic Church. “The dictatorship took off its mask,” is the assessment of Pablo Cuevas, a human rights defender, on the crimes and suspension of citizen rights which the regime has committed since then. “All this control is explained by the fear that they have of another rebellion,” says the human rights specialist, Uriel Pineda.
This past August 19 a video was released which shows some people burning a flag of the Sandinista Party, the party of the caudillos Daniel Ortega and Rosario Murillo, in the overpass of the Central American roundabout in Managua, a central point of the capital. The video lasts just 25 seconds and is filmed from a distance. Minutes later, a group of unidentified university students took responsibility for the protest over the confiscations of private universities, the Central American University (UCA) and the Juan Pablo II University, where supposedly they used to study.
The scene portrays the only way that citizens can express their discontent in Nicaragua: quickly, completely anonymously and without prior notice. For the last five years this is how demands are made, since September 28, 2018 when the Ortega-Murillo regime declared protests to be illegal and imposed a police state on the country.
Five years after de facto prohibiting – through a press release from the Police – physical demonstrations, citizens have seen how even their virtual spaces were censored: criticisms of the Ortega-Murillo regime on social networks are punished by imprisonment and banishment. The last report of the High Commissioner of the United Nations for Human Rights (OHCHR) pointed out that there exists a “paralyzing effect on Nicaraguan society” because “any person who criticizes the government is punished.”
After Ortega imposed a State of emergency, where he did not allow space for the opposition without arrests, threats, harassment, and obstruction, he prepared a series of legal padlocks which helped him perpetuate his power.
Between November 2020 and February 2021, he approved a triad of repressive laws: Foreign Agents, Cybercrimes and Sovereignty. In addition, he made reforms to Law 1060 of the Penal Processing Code, which extended the timeline for the arrest of those jailed, which was 48 hours and now is “no less than 15 days and not longer than 90 days.”
The Foreign Agents Law created a legal framework for declaring any citizen de facto critical a “traitor to the country”, while the Cybercrimes law has been used to capture and process opponents for voicing opinion on social networks. One of the most emblematic cases was that of the sports reporter, Miguel Mendoza, who was sentenced to nine years in jail for supposedly committing “conspiracy to commit harm to national integrity.” In his trial, more than 30 publications on social networks (Twitter and Facebook) were presented as proof that “they caused anxiety.” Mendoza was freed finally in February of this year, after more than 600 days in prison for exercising his right to freedom of expression.
The executive director of the Nicaraguan Defender of Human Rights (DNDH) Pablo Cuevas, thinks that in Nicaragua “a police state of terror exists which is not just aimed at dissidents, but to the followers of the Sandinista Front, government officials and state workers.”
Cuevas is one of the victims of the Ortega-Murillo regime. In March 2022 the veteran defender of human rights fled from Nicaragua, along with his family, due to threats from Sandinista operators. After 40 days of crossing Central America and Mexico they arrived irregularly to the United States, where they currently live. There Cuevas collaborated with the founding of a new human rights organization. As an act of reprisal, the regime included him in a list of 94 people who Ortega stripped of their Nicaraguan nationality and confiscated their assets.
“The dictatorship took off their mask in 2018,” says Cuevas. He explains that prior to the rebellion the regime tried to silence critics through economic blackmail, threats and even death, but in an underhanded way. “In Nicaragua it would seem that a state of emergency exists, where all rights were suspended,” points out Cuevas.
In the press release of September 28, 2018, the Police held responsible people and organizations who “have called for and call for these demonstrations and illegal public mobilizations affecting the public order, offensive and criminal actions and aggressions which show lack of respect for the right to work, safety and the lives of Nicaraguan families.”
The prohibition happened the same day that a new civic protest march was convened, called the “March of rebellion, we have no president.” The Police warned that “the organizers are responsible and will respond before the justice system for the threats, criminal actions and aggressions which happen in the development of these activities.”
The last march that there was in the country was the one on September 23, 2018, when some paramilitaries shot – as evident in photographs and the stories of witnesses – at the demonstrators and caused the death of Matt Romero, a 16-year-old adolescent who participated in the march.
An independent sociologist and researcher said that since the Ortega-Murillo regime executed “Operation Clean up” in June 2018, “It was determined to impost a police state on Nicaraguan society.” Operation Clean up was an action where police joined with paramilitaries to take apart the barricades – blocked highways – which the demonstrators installed as a form of pressure. This action caused the death of dozens of citizen dissidents.
This past September 11th Ortega recognized that in 2018 he ordered “Operation Clean up.” “There was a moment at which order had to be restored, peace re-established. It was the Police with the volunteer police [through whom] we dismantled the famous barricades of death,” said the president.
In these five years of the police state, the regime has carried out a series of senseless acts with the purpose of eliminating any type of protest. In 2018 the colors blue and white were symbols of the self-convened movement against Ortega-Murillo. So, the Police arrested any citizen who carried those colors and persecuted some merchants who sold them. Also, videos were disseminated where Police appeared bursting white and blue balloons which were released on the streets as acts of protest.
Another one of the most unusual repressive acts was against Santos Camilo Bellorín Lira, a peasant from the northern part of the country, sentenced to 11 years in jail for supposedly carrying out “cybercrimes.” Bellorín, a farmer who barely knows how to read, had never been on social networks nor had a computer nor a smartphone. Nevertheless, in the trial he was described as a “digital agitator.”
The researcher explained that Police States are regimes that use state institutions and the Police to carry out a strong level of control over the citizens. Precisely, one of the first actions that the regime took, aimed at the imposition of the Police State, was that of preventing the right to mobilization of the citizens and the right to peaceful protest.
“Since then, demonstrations or marches were restricted, first of all, through lethal violence with firearms, and later, the Police with this decree of prohibiting marches or demonstrations,” he added.
Uriel Pineda, a human rights specialist, also was included in the list of the 94 Nicaraguans banished and confiscated by the dictatorship. Pineda thinks that this prohibition to the right to protest has elements to be considered as a crime against humanity, “because a police state exists which represses any demonstration.”
The expert says that to the extent that a person has been jailed for participating in a demonstration “we are in the presence of elements to accredit as a crime against humanity for the persecution and jailing of opponents.”
Pineda points out that the background for the increase of the repression is explained by “the fear that the Ortega-Murillo regime has of a new social uprising like that of 2018.”
State workers: “criticizing the Government is the worst crime”
Not just dissidents have been victims. The repression and espionage have increased in recent years against the Sandinista supporters themselves. Two public institution workers, from the General Customs Office (DGA) and the Judicial Branch, spoke with DIVERGENTES to speak about the harassment and surveillance which exists in their places of work on the part of the political secretaries responsible (each institution has a political secretary of the FSLN who sends down orders from the party; in many cases this operator has more power than the very director of the institution).
The worker of the DGA says that he is sure that his cell phone has been intervened. “That is why I do not like sending messages by Whatsapp about politics or that the family (Ortega-Murillo) be mentioned,” says the state worker.
“I am know of cases of people who were arrested for some publication or conversation where they criticized the government,” he says, in an in-person interview in order to avoid using cellphones. “These cases are not denounced because they are not dissidents, but party followers, and their families are afraid,” he continued.
The public worker says that in Nicaragua “we live in a prison.” This man says that “any crime can be committed and the punishment is not that strong,” as it is when one criticizes the government. “Talking (criticizing) or expressing some dissatisfaction against the (presidential) family is the worst crime that one can commit,” he adds.
The country arrest which state workers have was reflected in an investigation that DIVERGENTES did, which exposed several cases of public employees who were not allowed to leave the country.
There is total control over requests for vacation and traveling outside the country for state workers. Once again it is the political secretaries who are responsible for following the steps of the public employees who have sensitive information and the “desire” to leave Nicaragua.
The blockage also is extended to “allies of the government.” In November 2021 migration authorities blocked the departure of Álvaro Baltodano Monroy, son of retired general Álvaro Baltodano Cantarero, Presidential Delegate for the Promotion of Investment. Another one who was blocked from leaving was Leonardo Torres, the president of the Nicaraguan Council of the Micro, Small and Medium Enterprises (CONIMIPYMNE), whose legal status was revoked last year by the National Assembly.
On November 23 of that same year “country arrest” was imposed on Daniel Rosales, the son of deceased magistrate of the CSJ, Francisco “Chicón” Rosales. According to a source in the Ministry of the Interior, he attempted to travel to the United States, but was sent back home. Rosales says that he was traveling for medical reasons, but he was not allowed to leave.
The worker in the Judicial Branch says that “terror exists” among even party supporters because “spying is everywhere.” This source believes that foreign intelligence organizations from Cuba and Russia are collaborating in the espionage work, two of the international allies that support the Ortega-Murillo regime in its authoritarian drift.
During the act of the 44th anniversary of the founding of the National Police of Nicaragua, Daniel Ortega confessed that the secretary of State and assistant director of the federal troops of the National Guard of Russia, Olega Anatolyievich Plokhoi, were in Nicaragua “to better confront the coup supporters, the terrorists”, the nicknames that the president uses to refer to the dissidents since the political crisis of 2018. “We are defending peace,” justified the dictator this past September 11th.
The worker in the Judicial Branch says that these intelligence organizations “are responsible for keeping the leadership of the party informed” about any insurrection movement, because they know that the level of discontent which currently exists is very high. “We Nicas are being spied upon by foreign organizations, our country is at these levels,” he underlines.
Repression of religious freedom
The abuses of the regime of Daniel Ortega and Rosario Murillo go beyond the political sphere. In the last two years, the Catholic Church has been an objective to dismantle.
A study titled “Nicaragua: a Persecuted Church? done by Martha Patricia Molina, a specialist on religious issues, recorded 529 attacks on the Church since 2018, the year when the crisis exploded in the country. Just in the first three months of this year 90 attacks were recorded. In addition, at least 85 religious have fled the country due to the persecution, according to Molina, who documents these attacks.
Currently, the dictatorship holds eight priests as political prisoners, among them the bishop of Matagalpa, Roland Álvarez, who was sentenced to 26 years in jail in a maximum-security cell in the Jorge Navarro Penitentiary System known as La Modelo.
This caused Pope Francis to say in March of this year that the couple in power in Nicaragua “has an imbalance” and that it would seem that they would want to “install a communist dictatorship of 1917 or the Hitler one of 1935.”
As part of this vengeance, since August of this year the regime carried out an onslaught against the Jesuit order in Nicaragua. The dictatorship confiscated the Central American University (UCA), because it supposedly “functioned as a center for terrorism.” One week later, the regime approved the revocation of the legal status of the Society of Jesus and ordered the confiscation of their properties.
Nevertheless, the onslaught is extended to the faithful. Catholic processions are prohibited in Nicaragua. For example, this year the processions of San Jerónimo, the patron saint of Masaya, will not leave the church by decision of the Police. Since 2018 this feast has not been celebrated, first because of the political crisis; then because of the pandemic, and in the last two years by decision of the Sandinista regime to not grant permission for the religious procession.
Ortega justified these attacks against the Church because the religious hierarchs led “the coup attempt” in 2018. In February of this year the president said that the Catholic Church was a “mafia organized by the Vatican,” and two months later called Nicaraguan priests “coup supporters.” The sociologist and researcher thinks that the level of radicalization of the regime is expressed in this annulment of the right to express beliefs and religious faith. “The repression moved from the political sphere to blocking any type of religious expression, which does not have to do with politics, but with people´s beliefs, professing a religious creed,” he weighed in.