The Nicaraguan police have redoubled their repression every April since 2018, when citizens and opponents commemorate the anniversary of those massive social protests that demanded the departure of Daniel Ortega and Rosario Murillo from power, but which in the end were crushed with a brutal onslaught. paramilitary and police. On the eve of this April 18, 2024, it has been no different: officers have detained five people and increased harassment in the main departmental capitals of the country. Those arrested are relatives of the April victims and political prisoners.
A political violence that does not cease and that still, after six years of sustained sociopolitical crisis, is responsible for reclaiming the capacity of its horror: this Tuesday, April 15, the body of the opponent Carlos Alberto Garcia Suárez was found in the city's municipal landfill. from Jinotepe. 90% of the body had burns, completely charred.
García Suárez was imprisoned for allegedly committing the crimes "of kidnapping, torture, assault, injuries and illegal possession of weapons to the detriment of the State and Nicaraguan society" during the 2018 protests. In other words, the 52-year-old political prisoner A shoemaker by trade, he was one of the thousands of citizens who participated in Jinotepe in the barricades against the Sandinista regime. The police rule out a “criminal hand” in the death, but the Reflection Group of Politically Released Prisoners (GREX) denounces a series of inconsistencies in the police version: the last time the man was seen alive was this April 13, but The authorities report a body in a state of “decomposition”, “skeletal”.
“No corpse reaches the level of skeletal decomposition in two days. Everything that comes out at this moment from the police and Forensic Medicine has no credibility,” says Ricardo Baltodano, one of the directors of GREX. “We want to highlight that he is the third politically released prisoner murdered in an atrocious manner since 2021, and there is no in-depth investigation. The Government is the main suspect, but this is to send a message to the politically released prisoners to walk carefully,” he remarks.
Baltodano refers to the terror that prevails in Nicaragua, one of the main supports of the regime. However, he is not the only support that keeps the Ortega-Murillo family governing with an iron hand, despite the political wear and tear they have suffered at the national and international level.
Six years after the outbreak of the sociopolitical crisis – a watershed for citizens that at the time put the presidential couple in check – Nicaraguans could well paraphrase Augusto Monterroso's micro-story as a mirror: the two-headed dinosaur is still there to them... with their repressive system well geared, money to operate and a dynastic succession plan in process.
“Nicaragua has changed a lot since 2018,” Manuel Orozco, a political scientist at the Inter-American Dialogue, tells EL PAÍS. “The country went from a political crisis of struggle to democratize and dismantle a clientelist scaffolding, to a tropicalized Taliban-style radicalization regime, supported by five axes: criminalizing democracy and the Constitution, capture of the State, fear with violence, international isolation and post truth to guarantee the consolidation of a dynasty,” he points out.
The repression has dismantled all types of political and social organization in Nicaragua. From NGOs, media, political parties, universities, peasant movements, environmentalists, feminists, critical businessmen and, recently, even the Catholic Church. The remnants of opposition and discontent that continue in Nicaragua are tiny, they operate in total clandestinity and their radius of action is completely nullified. Nicaraguans have become accustomed to living in fear, to not criticizing the Government in order to survive, without this being an absolute guarantee of not ending up in prison, exile or, in the worst case, dead in a garbage dump.
“All of these violations have caused, and continue to cause, multiple additional human rights violations of such scope that they are impossible to quantify, demonstrating the authorities' intention to relentlessly incapacitate any long-term opposition,” the report notes. most recent from the United Nations Human Rights Council. But apart from this absolute control of society, the presidential couple prepares the succession.
All signs point to Laureano Ortega Murillo, the opera-loving son of the presidential couple. Since 2012, his parents appointed him “presidential advisor for the promotion of investments, trade and international cooperation.” But it has been in the last two years that he has gained a lot of preponderance, to the point that in December 2023 he appeared before a delegation of the Chinese Communist Party as "special representative of the secretary general of the Sandinista National Liberation Front (FSLN)"... That is to say, a position that only his father has held in the history of the party. The one who pulls the strings of this transition plan is his mother, the powerful “co-president” Murillo.
“There is a consolidation of the dictatorship. I do not agree with the optimistic messages that the dictatorship is deteriorating. What they are doing is cleansing themselves of internal adversaries, as they did with the purge in the Supreme Court of Justice, to then launch the theory of succession, which is first Rosario Murillo and then Laureano," says Eliseo Núñez, a former opposition deputy whom The regime stripped him of his nationality.
The opposition fails to become an alternative
Political repression has hit the opposition hard. Inside Nicaragua it has been devastated, first with the imposition of exile and prison. In February 2022, the regime banished 222 political prisoners, among whom were all the opposition candidates for the presidency. Disintegrated mainly in the United States and Costa Rica, the opposition has not managed to converge into a single bloc and has become entangled in a spiral of internal differences. Perennial disagreements that have prevented them from presenting themselves as a trustworthy alternative to Nicaraguans and the international community.
“In the political archipelago of the opposition and the diaspora there are more than 250 acronyms, which compete for the issuance of statements, and not for political action,” maintains political scientist Orozco, also denationalized. “It is a movement that is hijacked by political reductionism and terrible historical revenge on the part of a screaming minority. They reduce alliances to non-existent ideologies and demand revenge for an unfinished history. Meanwhile, the Nicaraguans do not look back at what was 40 years ago, whether they like it or not. They look at the present and politically what they are clear about is democracy and not repetition, but they are not talking about right-wing democracy and revenge.”
Orozco insists that, despite the ideological differences that have bogged down opposition unity, the common denominator remains the same: creating a coalition with the capacity to achieve change, and with the capacity to govern democratically. That requires, he adds, “evicting the dictatorship from power; govern democratically; justice without impunity and a Truth Commission.”
While former representative Núñez – who is part of Monteverde, the most solid opposition movement today – resorts to self-criticism. He talks more about “personal responsibilities than organizational responsibilities.”
“It is an opposition of personalities and empty of organic structures (...) and it has not been understood that the key is to organize. Some continue to operate from pedestals and, at certain times, offer magical solutions. So the few organizations that exist are attacked because they are very left-wing or very right-wing. The opposition in Nicaragua has a difficult time because you do not have a base on which to build yourself, unlike in Venezuela, where political parties still have a certain capacity. In Nicaragua, since before 2018, political parties did not have any capacity.”
The economy still works for the regime
Finally, the economy still works for the Ortega-Murillo regime. Núñez explains that Nicaragua is a small country, but it survives on little. In that sense, the enormous injection of dollars from family remittances has revived the market. The year 2023 marked a record: remittances totaled 4,660.1 million dollars, registering an interannual growth of 44.5 percent, which meant an additional 1,435.2 million dollars compared to 2022.
“Since the protests in 2018, the country has no possibility of major changes in the economic matrix, nor of exponential growth. Ortega cannot do more than what he is doing, which is a very conservative economic policy. He is accumulating money by increasing collections at the expense of pressure,” says Núñez. “This is comparable to the Taliban government, which has managed to increase collections. But the fact that collections increase does not indicate that you have been successful, but rather it indicates that your extortion model is working and has limits. That is why there are companies that have already closed in Nicaragua.”
The Sandinista Government has also not stopped receiving loans from multilateral organizations, such as the Central American Bank for Economic Integration (CABEI). The country's main trading partner continues to be the United States and, at the same time, the Ortega-Murillos have approached Russia, Iran and China internationally.
“It is a tactical self-isolation aligned with aggressor states and its maintenance has been accidental: debt and remittances. Both add up to 35% of national income, plus foreign trade that does not affect transnational capital,” adds Orozco. The political scientist believes that a key point to weaken the Ortega-Murillo family would be to review the Free Trade Agreement between the Dominican Republic, Central America and the United States (CAFTA-DR), which until now does not have a clause to expel countries that violate human rights. .
Experts agree that, as long as these conditions are maintained, the Ortega-Murillo dinosaur will continue to be there, ruling and filling the prisons with political prisoners, in a revolving door effect that does not stop. Until April 2024, the Mechanism for the Recognition of Political Prisoners counts 138 citizens detained for political reasons.