The unified machinery of repression of the Ortega Murillo regime
In La Prensa, March 13, 2025
Nearly seven years after the beginning of the human rights crisis which Nicaragua faces, the Ortega Murillo dictatorship continues improving the mechanisms for repression and establishing their totalitarian power. With the purpose of subjugating the citizenry in order to exercise their power and full control, the dictatorship places all institutions at the service of the control of society and established a unified machinery of repression.
The repressive model of the police terror state and the mechanism of coercion, manipulation, intimidation, surveillance, discrimination, regulation, propaganda, economic management and imposition of official ideology, turn each citizen into their own police, paralyzed by fear, even afraid to think, and expecting that at any moment, for cause or without cause, their lives and subsistence will be affected.
The updating of the report of the Group of Human Rights Experts on Nicaragua (GHREN) presented at the end of February within the framework of the 58th period of sessions of the Human Rights Council of the United Nations, identified four phases of repression.
The first characterized by the violence which neutralized the protests and the amount of people killed, wounded and jailed which it caused: the second was more selective, focused on arresting and arbitrarily trying dissidents who might block the third reelection of Ortega; in a parallel fashion they continued closing the spaces for participation, freedom of expression and pushing thousands into exile.
In the third, they did away with any vestige of opposition, the escalation of repression against the Catholic Church included the detention and exile of religious leaders, including three bishops and the repression even reached previous collaborators of the regime. In addition, with the closure of thousands of Non-Profit Organizations (OSFL) and political parties, they eliminated spaces for participation.
The goal is eliminating all criticism
GHREN thinks that now, in the fourth phase the objective is eliminating all criticism and establishing the absolute control of the Ortega Murillo regime over State entities and the population. The refinement of the repression mechanisms includes the expulsion and prohibition of entry of hundreds of Nicaraguans, who are arbitrarily deprived of their nationality. In addition, they accelerated the confiscation of assets of organizations and people who are victims of the repression, subject businesses to fiscal terrorism, and deny dissidents rights, public services and social benefits.
The systematic repression consolidated absolute power over the population through generalized repression and an extensive network which includes surveillance, harassment, arbitrary detentions, unfair trials and forced disappearances.
The FSLN party and the entire state apparatus participate in this scheme, and it is regulated by a totalitarian Constitution which recently took effect. It undermines the protection of fundamental rights, and grants unlimited and absolute power to Ortega Murillo, under the figure of co-presidents.
With the new Constitution Ortega Murillo consolidated their dynastic power, eliminated the separation of the Legislative, Electoral and Judicial branches, and with that, suppressed the counterweights characteristic of democracies. They eliminated the constitutional prohibition of censuring the communications media; and by subjugating freedom of expression to security, peace and well-being, closed all possibility of debating and disseminating true information.
Ortega and Murillo are the nucleus of the repression
Ortega Murillo constitute the nucleus of the repressive structure, and their collaborators perform vital roles in the transmission of instructions and the chain of command of the different levels of their immense repressive apparatus.
The Ministry of the Interior and its different dependencies, as well as the Police and the Army, carry out the fundamental work in the human rights violations and always are ready to act when the subjugation by terror is not enough to ensure social control.
This happens while the international community continues not to accept the recommendations of international human rights organizations which, in the face of the seriousness of the abuses, suggest activating the mechanisms of international justice, so that Daniel Ortega, Rosario Murillo and their accomplices might pay for the crimes which they commit and end the permanent violations of human rights, which offend all of humanity.
In the face of the escalation of the repressive mechanisms of the Ortega Murillo dictatorship, the Nicaraguan Democratic Concertation joins the call of the GHREN which calls on countries to quit being witnesses and to move to urgent global action, putting into practice the recommendations which they, the European Parliament and other international organizations make to stop these abuses, but also to have those responsible tried in international courts.
