The government of Nicaragua swore in 30,000 hooded civilians as “volunteer police” on Wednesday, who are considered by the opposition as paramilitaries intended to collaborate in political repression tasks. Dressed in white shirts and black pants, the hooded individuals formed lines at dusk in the Plaza de la Fe in Managua, the country’s capital, to swear with raised hands before President Daniel Ortega and his wife, “co-president” Rosario Murillo.
“We swear in this heroic volunteer police, guerrillas of peace,” said Murillo. The “volunteer police” was created as part of a comprehensive reform to the Constitution, sealed on January 30 by a Congress controlled by the ruling Sandinista Front (FSLN, left). For several weeks, about 50,000 men and women from various provinces have joined this “auxiliary and support body” to the security forces.
In a report published in Geneva on Wednesday on human rights in Nicaragua, a group of UN experts indicated that “the Government recruited ex-combatants, retired military and police, judges and public employees to join the ‘volunteer police’.” “The so-called ‘volunteer police’ […] evoke the nefarious role of masked groups that carried out the lethal repression of anti-government protests in 2018,” Reed Brody, one of the experts said.
During those protests, which according to the UN left more than 300 dead, heavily armed hooded men, whom the government called “the people,” intervened to remove the barricades that had been placed in the streets by protesters, many of them university students. The Ortega government considers the 2018 protests as a coup attempt sponsored by Washington.
In the same ceremony, Ortega and Murillo swore in the police chief, Commissioner Francisco Díaz, to continue for another six years in his position, which he assumed in 2018 amid the protests. “I receive the baton of command […] to guarantee and defend peace and security,” said Díaz, who is a co-father-in-law of the presidential couple and is sanctioned by the United States.
Brody expressed that “these groups now join the National Police and the Army, which, according to the new Constitution, can be deployed in police tasks, thus consolidating the repressive power of the government.” Ortega, a 79-year-old former guerrilla who governed Nicaragua in the 1980s after the triumph of the Sandinista revolution, has been in power since 2007, and his critics accuse him of establishing a “family dictatorship” together with his 73-year-old wife.
Ortega reviewed passages of the revolutionary struggle in a speech and at the end said some slogans, which were echoed by the “volunteer police.” “We know we have the strength to transcend all challenges,” Murillo declared after the ceremony.
