Regime promotes new law which would allow for mining exploitation, hunting and destruction in protected areas
By Abixael Mogollón in La Prensa, April 26, 2025
Fundación del Río reports that this initiative prioritizes powerful economic interests over environmental conservation and the rights of indigenous communities.
The dictatorship of Daniel Ortega and Rosario Murillo have taken a new step toward the dismantling of environmental protection in Nicaragua.
This past April 23, 2025, the regime presented before the National Assembly a bill which, warns the environmental organization Fundación del Río, puts in grave danger the natural protected areas of the country by opening them to indiscriminate economic exploitation.
The proposal, called the “Law of Environmental Conservation and Sustainable Development Areas”, proposes a radical transformation of the legal framework which currently regulates Protected Areas, repealing Executive Decree No. 01-2007.
Exploitation activities
In its place, a model will be installed which allows for extractive activities – like mining, exploitation of hydrocarbons, fishing and hunting – in territories which previously were legally protected.
“Within these measures is allowing for extractive, geothermal, geological and hydrocarbon economic activities within the protected areas of our country,” said Amaru Ruíz, the director of the Fundación del Río.
The name change, from Protected Areas to Environmental Conservation and Sustainable Development Areas (ACADS), reflects the discursive turn toward a vision of the “productive use” of nature, compatible with the extractive economic model of the Sandinista regime.
Judge and defendant
Among the most alarming points of the initiative is the authorization of infrastructure for storing hydrocarbon and hydraulic works in sensitive territories, the elimination of the figure of community co-management with indigenous and Afro descendent peoples, and the centralization of the sanctioning power in the Ministry of the Environment and Natural Resources (MARENA), which now will act as judge and defendant in environmental conflicts.
The Fundación del Río warns that this law represents a serious threat to biodiversity, environmental sovereignty, and the rights of the communities that historically have protected ecosystems.
Acceleration of the deterioration
In addition, he denounced that behind this proposal underlie the economic interests of the regime´s elites, in alliance with national and foreign businesses dedicated to mining, tree felling and oil.
“The regime has made it clear that its priority is not nature, but capital. This law is an open license to destroy what little is left standing,” warned the organization in a recent press release.
It also warned that, if the law is approved as written, Nicaragua could face an acceleration without precedent of ecological deterioration, with irreversible impacts for the fauna, flora and climate of the country.
