UN experts on Thursday identified for the first time 54 Nicaraguan officials, military personnel, police officers, magistrates, and deputies, with co-presidents Daniel Ortega and Rosario Murillo at the helm, as responsible for serious “crimes” and “systematic repression.” A report by the Group of Experts on Human Rights on Nicaragua revealed the names of those it calls “responsible for serious human rights violations, abuses, and crimes that are fueling a campaign of systematic repression” in the Central American country.
In the last seven years, they have had “key roles in relation to arbitrary detentions, torture, extrajudicial executions” and “persecution of civil society,” the report added, released in Panama and Geneva. 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. His critics accuse him of establishing a “family dictatorship,” together with his 73-year-old wife Murillo.
Both, self-designated “co-presidents” in a recent constitutional reform, increased control over Nicaraguan society following massive protests that erupted in April 2018, the repression of which left more than 300 dead according to the UN. The report “exposes the anatomy of a system of government that has turned every arm of the state into a weapon against its own people,” said Jan-Michael Simon, chairman of the expert group.
It includes in the “repressive regime” the Army chief, Julio César Avilés; the Police chief, Francisco Díaz; and leaders of Congress, the Supreme Court of Justice, Prosecutor’s Office, municipalities, and the ruling Sandinista National Liberation Front (FSLN, former guerrilla). “It is a tightly coordinated system of repression that extends from the Presidency to local officials,” said Ariela Peralta, an expert in the group.
Roadmap for Justice
After the 2018 protests, considered by the government as a coup attempt sponsored by the United States, hundreds of thousands of Nicaraguans were forced into exile. The government expelled and stripped nationality from about 450 critics (politicians, priests, journalists, writers, musicians, businesspeople), many of whom were imprisoned accused of “treason against the homeland.”
Authorities have shut down more than fifty media outlets and almost 5,700 NGOs, with massive confiscation of assets. “These are not random or isolated incidents, they are part of a deliberate and well-orchestrated state policy, which is carried out by identifiable actors through defined chains of command,” Peralta added.
Reed Brody, another expert in the group, considered the report as a “roadmap for justice,” as States and international organizations “now have the names, structures, and evidence necessary to advance accountability.” This independent body with a mandate from the UN Human Rights Council called on the international community to take “urgent” measures, including “legal actions and sanctions” against the Nicaraguan government, and “provide greater support to victims and civil society.”
With the constitutional reform in effect since February, Ortega and Murillo took absolute control of the State, as they eliminated the independence of powers, institutionalized the stripping of nationality, and surveillance over the Church and the press. They also created a force of thousands of hooded individuals to support the security forces.
A day after the team of experts published a report denouncing the establishment of an “authoritarian state” with that reform, Nicaragua withdrew from the UN Human Rights Council.
