Caribbean & Central America - November 2024

On 4 October Spain’s foreign minister, José Manuel Albares, confirmed that Spain had offered nationality to 135 Nicaraguan political prisoners taken from a prison in Managua the previous month and flown to Guatemala where they were welcomed by Guatemala’s President Bernardo Arévalo and Eric Jacobstein (a top US State Department Western Hemisphere Affairs diplomat). As with political prisoners previously expelled from Nicaragua, they have all been stripped of their citizenship.

The group of Nicaraguans flown to Guatemala City on 5 September included Catholics and students, among others. Five days later they were stripped of their nationality and their property was confiscated, after being accused of “inciting and promoting violence, hatred, terrorism, and economic destabilisation, and conspiring against peace, security, and the constitutional order”. This was the second such mass release from Nicaragua negotiated by the US. In February 2023, a total of 222 political prisoners were released and deported to the US and were similarly stripped of their nationality and assets [SSR-23-04].

While the release of the 135 political prisoners was welcomed, the decision to deprive them of their nationality has drawn condemnation. A joint communique dated 13 September by Ecuador, Costa Rica, and the Dominican Republic for instance slammed the decision as “arbitrary and illegal”. In response to the citizenship-stripping of the first group of prisoners in February 2023, the United Nations Refugee Agency (UNHCR) underlined that “international law prohibits the arbitrary deprivation of nationality including on racial, ethnic, religious or political grounds”. It underlined that “the exercise of fundamental rights, including freedom of expression, freedom of assembly, or other rights associated with a person’s political views, can never justify the deprivation of nationality”. According to a 1 October update by Netherlands-based NGO Institute on Statelessness and Inclusion (ISI), in total over 450 political opponents of President Daniel Ortega’s government have now had their Nicaraguan nationality revoked since 2023, in contravention of human rights law.