Nicaragua: News & Updates

President Ortega was elected to a fourth consecutive term in November amid government repression of critics and the political opposition. To pave the way for his re-election, authorities arbitrarily arrested and prosecuted government critics and political opponents. Police abuses committed during a brutal crackdown by the National Police and armed pro-government groups in 2018 have gone unpunished. Persistent problems include severe restrictions on freedom of expression and association, political discrimination, and stringent restrictions on abortion. This is the Human Rights Watch 2022 World Report on Nicaragua.

Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega and the Sandinistas, who dared to overthrow a US-backed dictatorship and choose their own allies to defend their revolution, represent a direct threat to the Monroe Doctrine. And now Ortega, who has been in office since 2007 and was re-elected again as president in a landslide victory in November, has thrown down another gauntlet to challenge American domination. One of the biggest fears of the US, and one of the greatest threats to the viability of the antiquated Monroe Doctrine, is that Ortega will partner with China to build a major shipping canal which would link Nicaragua’s Pacific and Atlantic coasts.

The US apprehended over 50,000 Nicaraguans trying to cross the U.S. border illegally in 2021, up from 2,291 in 2020, according to Customs and Border Protection (CBP) data. In immigration court, the number of Nicaraguan cases waiting to be heard has exploded from 4,145 in 2018, when mass protests engulfed the country, to over 34,000 last month, according to data from the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse of Syracuse (TRACS), a research group at Syracuse University. Over 19,000 of those cases were added this year, a record. Most cases end in deportation. Over 60% of deportation proceedings for Nicaraguans led to removal from the United States in 2019, when over 14,000 deportation cases were filed. Only 1,253 Nicaraguans were allowed to stay in the United States, and many cases from 2019 remain unresolved, TRACS data show....Nicaraguans once made up a tiny fraction of migrants in U.S. immigration courts. For decades, annual deportation filings were below 5,000. But in the fiscal year 2021, it had the sixth-highest number, just behind Mexico, according to TRACS data.

Thank you to the more than 120 people who attended the IRTF annual Commemoration of the Martyrs online on Sunday, November 7. You helped to create a beautiful and moving tribute to human rights defenders throughout southern Mexico, Central America, and Colombia. Here you will find links to (1) Commemoration program book 2021, (2) Zoom recording of the event, (3) Facebook livestream recording, (4) playlist from the social hour, (5) an additional play list, (6) how you can add your name to urgent human rights letters, (7) donations for the Honduras support fund, (8) IRTF Legacy Circle planned giving fund, and (9) highlights from the speakers' presentations. Thank you!

The RENACER Act would place more unilateral coercive economic measures (aka Sanctions) on Nicaragua, facilitate greater coordination of the US’ economic war on Nicaragua with Canada and the European Union, create stricter oversight of financial institutions doing business with Nicaragua and impose greater visa restrictions.

From the September 2021 newsletter of Jubilee House/Center for Development in Nicaragua: The first Sunday in November Nicaragua will have its general elections. If you keep up with international news you may be reading a great deal of misleading information. After the attempted coup in 2018, everyone who had been arrested - whether it was for vandalism, looting, demonstrating without a permit, blocking roads, torture, or even murder - was granted provisional amnesty. The provision was that if they broke the law again, they would be arrested and stand trial. That seems logical…and generous…and yet many of these people who committed crimes before and were released are now breaking the law again and as a result are being arrested, while the international press continues to scream “repression.” Of course we do not know all the people arrested. We do not know all the crimes they are charged with, but we do know that the United States State Department had a paper leaked in 2020 that outlines how the State Department plans to disrupt the elections here and if the Sandinistas are elected again how the U.S. plans to create violence and havoc attempting to accomplish another coup since the one in 2018 failed.

The capital city of Managua is a good lens through which to view Nicaraguan history. Its expansive views, shaded buildings, and streets with no name give us physical places to anchor our stories of colonization, inequality, insurrection, revolution and resilience. After the Sandinista government was pushed out of power by elections forced by the US in 1990, the new neoliberal government worked to erase the revolutionary history of Nicaragua, of the Sandinista movement in particular. After the elections in 1990, Nicaragua went into a kind of societal depression and the vast majority of families were crippled by extreme poverty, unable to plan beyond the next meal. While the country was incapacitated, the somocistas who had supported the former dictator oozed back into the country and violently stole back properties they had forfeited when they had fled Nicaragua a decade earlier. Violeta Chamorros’s government quietly erased the social gains of the Revolution, selling nearly all public enterprises at concessionary rates and effectively privatizing health care and education. She welcomed the World Bank and IMF and followed the letter of their structural readjustment programs, refusing to raise wages for teachers, police, or any public worker. She all but erased cooperatives by taking away their access to financing – when they could no longer work, they began to fold, and as those in the countryside lost their land they began to move into the cities looking for work. Gangs took hold in the cities, and crime rates – which had been all but nonexistent in the ‘80s – skyrocketed. The poor got poorer and the rich got richer until Nicaragua became one of the most unequal societies in the world. Desperate to find a way to earn a living, people began to leave in droves to Costa Rica and the U.S. until this small country had nearly 1 million citizens living outside its borders...And yet, not everyone forgot. In hidden neighborhoods around Managua, the people kept watch over their Revolutionary murals at night, saving them from Alemán’s gray brush. Concealed from the public eye, new murals were born inside walls where they could stay safe. We’ll find some of these murals on our next Managua tour.