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The journalist who wrote this report from Managua cannot sign it for security reasons.
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Nicaragua is a country dominated by fear;
a country taken over by a police state;
a country in which even waving the blue and white of the flag can be seen as a crime, like saying mass in a rural church or celebrating the triumph of a beauty queen.
Expulsions, prohibitions on returning, prison sentences, confiscations, harassment, threats and, in hundreds of cases, the loss of nationality are common punishments under a regime, imposed by Daniel Ortega and Rosario Murillo, that does not tolerates no hint of dissent.
That is why, as a journalist, I write under the condition of anonymity.
This article composes a fresco of those catacombs inhabited by those who oppose the regime.
The sources consulted are journalists, Catholic religious, former members of political parties or active members of movements that emerged as a result of the rebellion.
They are citizens who ask to be quoted with pseudonyms to protect themselves and their families.
Their testimonies show an internal opposition that is disjointed, inactive, and above all fearful, even after having fled the country.
“God forbid I say I am a journalist”
Lucy, in her early 50s, hasn't gone to the movies for five years for fear of what might happen to her in a public place.
She is a journalist and critic of the Government, a forbidden cocktail.
Even something so simple and seemingly minor is “painful” to him.
Going to watch movies was her favorite pastime before the 2018 protests, when she was involved in several opposition movements active in the marches against Sandinismo.
Later, she participated in the committees to help the families of the murdered, the injured and the political prisoners.
When I met her, in mid-2019, she was delivering groceries to La Modelo prison, in Tipitapa, on the outskirts of Managua.
She would wake up at dawn and pick up the mothers of political prisoners who lived far away in her vehicle to give them a ride to prison.
Lucy had to withdraw from solidarity movements when repression worsened.
But her face had been seen in the jail in her city, where she helped call for marches.
So, she decided to disappear.
“I live as locked up as possible,” admits this opposition member who moved house two years ago.
She now only leaves the house to attend family events.
“I don't go out to public places because I don't want to meet people I know who are related to the regime,” he justifies.
In fact, many of his acquaintances believe that he left Nicaragua, that he went into exile or that he migrated to the United States, as more than 600,000 citizens have done since the crisis broke out.
Her greatest fear is that Sandinista sympathizers will recognize her and denounce that she is in the country.
The consequence would be immediate: arrest or exile.
Of course, the decision to stay involved stopping practicing his profession.
“God forbid I say that I am a journalist,” she says, as if being one were a crime.
The journalists who remain in Nicaragua are few and we take measures similar to those she has taken: not publishing on social networks or in WhatsApp groups anything related to the Ortega Government or attending meetings with other colleagues or critical unions that are still in the country.
The latest report from the
Foundation for Freedom of Expression and Democracy,
published in October 2023, revealed that at least 222 journalists have been forced into exile due to harassment and repression.
Miss Nicaragua Sheynnis Palacios after being crowned Miss Universe during the 72nd Miss Universe pageant in San Salvador.JOSE CABEZAS (REUTERS)
On May 3, the police carried out a massive hunt for opponents.
Dozens of officers were deployed across 13 of the 15 departments and two autonomous regions of Nicaragua in simultaneous raids shortly before six in the afternoon.
In a matter of hours, they captured 57 citizens, including informants, political activists and peasant leaders.
They were immediately taken to Managua to be accused in secret sessions and returned to their homes the next morning.
During the 12 hours in which they were detained, they were interrogated.
Early in the morning, they were returned to their homes with the condition of reporting periodically to the police authorities.
From time to time they sign a document stating that they are in Nicaragua, under control.
During the raid, I hid as a precaution.
I slept outside my house for several days.
I was afraid that the police would look for me.
It's not the first time I've hidden to avoid being captured.
In mid-2022, when the homes of a La Prensa
journalistic team were persecuted and raided
, I lived in another address for months.
But I came back.
The nostalgia of seeing my family outweighed the fear of being arrested.
One of those arrested in that raid was Juan, an opponent from a northern department who was involved in the 2018 protests. I met Juan in those turbulent days, when he told me his version of the police attack against some protesters who had blocked the access roads of a town highway, in which three young people were shot to death.
At that time, I interviewed him in a clandestine house, while patrols were patrolling outside.
When I called him for this chronicle, Juan told me that he no longer got involved “in those topics” and ended the conversation.
EL PAÍS tried to communicate with other people who were detained during the massive raid in May, but none of them wanted to talk about it.
“We have decided that it is better to be still and silent than to go into exile,” says Lucy, who clarifies: “The truth is that people are so afraid that they no longer even want to report when a family member has been arrested for political reasons.”
The taking of the municipalities
The last time I spoke with Julio, a 60-year-old farmer from the center of the country, he was working on his farm with his family.
The town where he lived was one of the most opposed to the Ortega Government.
When I arrived at his house at the beginning of 2021, he belonged to a liberal political party that until then had won every election in which he had participated.
Sandinismo had never governed there.
Julio used to meet at his house with other colleagues to talk about politics.
He said without fear that his people should “be an example so that throughout Nicaragua there is no longer any fear against tyrants.”
But everything changed with the results of the municipal elections in November 2022, when the country's 153 mayoralties were left in the hands of the Sandinistas, accelerating the implementation of a single-party regime, in elections without real opposition after several parties were disqualified. .
“When we lost the mayor's office, Sandinista militants began to harass me.
The police came to park outside my house, to threaten me so that I would not continue in politics,” Julio recalls.
In February 2022, hooded men entered a plot where corn was planted.
Without saying a word, they threw him to the ground, held him down with their hands behind his back, took his cell phone to check it, and threatened to kill him if he continued in politics.
“There I decided to leave the party because I didn't want to be arrested or killed,” he continues.
Armed police patrol the streets of the city in Jinotega, Nicaragua.Cristobal Venegas (AP)
In September of that year, he emigrated to the United States, but things have not gone well for him.
He fell while working, broke his pelvic bone, and was bedridden for four months recovering.
“I'm hoping to return, but I see that the situation is getting more and more difficult,” says Julio by phone from Indianapolis.
—How is the opposition in Nicaragua?
–I ask him.
—Deactivated… because these people [Ortega and Murillo] are satanic.
Only they want to have the [political] organizations.
For us there is nothing.
There is no way to have a space.
They realize something a little, and are already looking for a way to neutralize you.
The fear of the priests
Fear.
This is what Catholic priests experienced when the police carried out a hunt at the beginning of last October in which they captured six parish priests from the north of the country.
Then there was another, last Christmas, which ended last Sunday with the expulsion of the 17 arrested priests and seminarians and two bishops: Isidoro Mora and Rolando Álvarez, a symbol of the resistance against Ortega and Murillo who had been detained since August 2022. They were all exiled to Rome.
A police source told me that the October arrests occurred after Australian journalist Prue Lewarne, from the SBS News network, published an interview with a priest – without showing his face or identifying him – in which he spoke about the repression he is experiencing. the Catholic Church in Nicaragua.
The arrests were made to identify who spoke to her, according to that source.
The Catholic Church has become a target of repression.
After destroying the opposition - more than 1,300 have been imprisoned in the last five years and at least 300 exiled - and eliminating political parties and more than 3,000 NGOs, the Ortega Government focused its attacks against critical bishops and priests.
Investigator Martha Patricia Molina keeps a detailed record of the attacks.
Until the end of 2023, it had registered 275 attacks, the highest number since this data systematization began as a result of the political crisis of 2018.
Priests have been the subject of permanent surveillance and damage to churches, shooting with firearms, exorbitant charges, cuts to basic services, fires, looting, suspension of masses, confiscations and immobilization of bank accounts of Catholic organizations have also been documented.
In addition, more than 100 priests have been expelled from Nicaragua.
Daniel Ortega and Rosario Murillo lead a demonstration in Managua, Nicaragua.Alfredo Zuniga (AP)
Last December 7, I walked through my neighborhood while one of the most important and massive Catholic traditions in the country was celebrated: La Gritería.
Thousands of people take to the streets to sing to images of the Virgin Mary placed on home altars.
After the song, the hosts give a toast in exchange for a sweet, a juice, a box of matches, whistles, headbands, nacatamales or plastic corduroys.
It was an atypical day for Nicaraguan Catholics, because several of the processions, for example those of Holy Week, were suspended by the police.
Screaming, however, is still tolerated.
Control via WhatsApp
Roberto is a young political activist from a movement that emerged in 2018. He was one of the organizers of the marches in the town where he lived.
In the first months of the revolt, he was captured along with other members of his family and sentenced to five years in prison accused of “attacking members of the National Police.”
It came out six months later, in June 2019, with an amnesty law approved by the National Assembly for those who were imprisoned during the protests.
But that didn't mean the end of the harassment.
“I was left with the mark of being a political prisoner,” laments Roberto, in his early twenties.
In fact, he was captured four more times, although on no occasion did he spend a night in jail.
“They captured me and released me quickly… they just told me not to keep getting into more trouble,” he says.
Roberto continued meeting secretly with several young activists, while police patrols laid siege to his house.
“They always arrived on commemorative dates of the rebellion because they didn't want to let me leave the house... But they never caught me at any political meeting,” he says.
One day a police inspector came to his house.
The man threatened him: “Don't get into trouble or you'll go to prison.”
The police officer told him that from that day on he would report monthly through WhatsApp.
On a specific day of the month, Roberto sent a photograph and the location where he was to the inspector.
“If you don't answer me, the patrol will come to your house immediately,” the man warned him.
Protest posters with the message 'SOS Nicaragua'.PETER MARSHALL / ZUMA PRESS / CONTACTOPHOTO
Roberto reported to the inspector for four months, until in mid-September there was a raid in which several colleagues from his political movement were captured.
“I thought they were coming for me,” Roberto recalls.
And he fled the country the next day.
Weeks later, he managed to cross irregularly into the United States.
He is now in Texas, where he works in construction.
One afternoon, however, she received a message from the inspector.
Roberto had forgotten that it was his turn to report that day.
He told him everything, and he responded that he needed a photo and the exact address of his home in Texas.
With some fear, Roberto wrote him the last message to end the conversation: “You can send the patrol to the house so you can see that I am no longer in Nicaragua.”
Roberto's fear, like that of most emigrants and exiles, did not end when he crossed the United States border.
Despite being thousands of kilometers away, he does not want to be identified and he still speaks softly on the phone because he is afraid of what his wife and his two small children, who are still in Nicaragua, may suffer.
With the internal opposition devastated, Ortega and Murillo's new strategy to sow terror has turned against the relatives of critics who had to flee.
In recent weeks, for example, and coinciding with Christmas, relatives of dissidents were prohibited from entering and leaving the country, leaving entire families divided and in limbo.
It also happened with Miss Universe, Sheynnis Palacios, and with the owner of the Miss Nicaragua franchise, Karen Celebertti, and her family.
It is the same helplessness that parishioners feel when their parish priest is arrested, the feeling of emptiness that a family feels when the police knock down the door of a house to take one of its members into custody for opposing the regime.
Ortega and Murillo have made Nicaragua a country silenced by fear, a place where repression rules.
Rolando Álvarez in the National Penitentiary System of Nicaragua.Ministry of the Interior Nicaragua