A group of UN experts denounced on Tuesday that the Nicaraguan government has extended its repression of critics of co-presidents Daniel Ortega and Rosario Murillo beyond the country’s borders. Ortega, a 79-year-old former guerrilla in power since 2007, and Murillo, 74, tightened control over opponents after the 2018 protests that left more than 300 dead, according to the UN, and which Managua considers an attempted coup sponsored by Washington.
In a report released in Geneva and Panama, the experts said the Managua government “has pursued thousands of Nicaraguans abroad,” many of whom fled the country after the bloody crackdown on the 2018 protests.
“The Government of Nicaragua is extending its repression against people perceived as opponents beyond its own borders […] as part of an increasingly intense campaign to silence critics in exile,” the group said in a report presented to the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva.
The group documented allegations of attacks against Nicaraguan exiles, including the killing of retired major Roberto Samcam in Costa Rica last June.
The 66-year-old officer was a strong critic of the Ortega-Murillo couple, accused of installing a “family dictatorship” in Nicaragua. “The harm suffered by Nicaraguan exiles is not the result of an isolated incident,” warned the Group’s chair, Jan-Michael Simon, quoted in a statement.
“Their entire lives are dismantled systematically, beginning with their uprooting and the erosion of their legal identity, which leads to economic collapse, social isolation, and omnipresent surveillance.” Hundreds of thousands of Nicaraguans are in exile, mainly in Costa Rica, the United States, and Spain.
“A climate of fear has spread among the Nicaraguan diaspora, since no place in the world seems safe for Nicaraguans who oppose Daniel Ortega and Rosario Murillo,” said Reed Brody, an expert with the group.
“An invisible hand pursues exiles wherever they go,” he added. Nicaragua resigned from the UN Human Rights Council on February 28 in protest of a report by the group of experts that accused the Ortega-Murillo government of having a “machinery of repression.”
