The Nicaraguan government announced on Monday the closure of 12 NGOs, bringing the total to approximately 5,600 organizations shut down since protests erupted in 2018 against President Daniel Ortega. According to the resolution published in the official newspaper La Gaceta, the closed NGOs include the Swiss Foundation for Technical Development Cooperation, two religious organizations, two medical groups, and a sports organization.
Ortega, a 79-year-old former guerrilla who led Nicaragua in the 1980s and returned to power in 2007, claims that NGOs, especially the Catholic Church, supported the protests, which he views as a Washington-backed attempt at a coup. A study published in late October by the Nicaragua Nunca Más Collective, an organization working from exile in Costa Rica, reported that Ortega’s government had shut down 5,571 NGOs, 1,235 of them religious.
The government argued that these organizations failed to submit their financial statements and subsequently expropriated their assets. For the groups closed on Monday, official information cited “voluntary dissolution of members,” “lack of funding,” or “completion of project portfolios” as reasons for the closures.
Ortega’s government recently tightened laws against NGOs, stipulating that they can only operate in Nicaragua in “association partnerships” with state entities. The UN Human Rights office labeled the measure as “extremely alarming.”
According to the UN, the 2018 protests resulted in over 300 deaths in just three months and led to thousands of exiles.
