Caribbean & Central America - May 2026

Nicaraguan and international human rights organisations have marked the eighth anniversary of the brutal crackdown on dissent which began on 18 April 2018 by the authoritarian Frente Sandinista de Liberación Nacional (FSLN) government led by President Daniel Ortega and his wife, now co-president, Rosario Murillo. In a statement marking the anniversary, the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR) warned that the human rights situation in Nicaragua remains “among the most serious in the Americas, amid the total concentration of power in the hands of the Ortega-Murillo family”. However, a recent report by regional think tank Centro de Estudios Transdisciplinarios de Centroamérica (Cetcam) highlights continued fissures in the regime which is facing external pressures following the US military action in Venezuela to remove former president Nicolás Maduro (2013-2026), and as Washington is tightening the screws on Managua’s other key ally in the region, Cuba [SSR-26-03].

In its 16 April statement marking the anniversary of the 2018 protests, in which at least 355 protesters were killed during the unrest and its aftermath, the IACHR lists among the continued human rights violations “arbitrary arrests and political and religious persecution (even beyond the country’s borders)” – as illustrated in the case of retired major Roberto Samcam, a political dissident murdered in Costa Rica last June [SSR-25-08].

According to the IACHR, “in a context with severe civic space restrictions, persecution – both physical and digital – persists against journalists, rights defenders, indigenous leaders, artists, and anyone considered a government critic”. It adds that this repression “extends to the families of its original targets, who face restrictions of their freedom of movement (in the form of refusals of entry into the country or of access to travel documents), arbitrary deprivations of citizenship, and confiscations of property”.

The IACHR also cites local human rights observatory Mecanismo para el Reconocimiento de Personas Presas Políticas (MRPPP) as estimating there are currently at least 46 individuals in “arbitrary detention”, and casts doubt on the impact of the prisoner releases announced since the start of the year which were widely considered an attempt to appease US President Donald Trump’s administration [SSR-26-03]. According to the IACHR statement, these prisoner releases have not led to “full, effective liberty”, as these individuals are still subject “to various forms of State control”.

In mid-April however, Cetcam claimed “the regime is far from consolidating its authoritarian family project”, and “today it faces one of its most critical moments, pressured from within by increasingly evident signals of discontent and discomfort among its own ranks because of the purges pushed by Murillo”. This is a reference to the purges which began in October 2023 in the judiciary, widely linked to Murillo’s preparations to take over from her 80-year-old husband, and since extended to officials in other realms, including FSLN veterans and former Ortega-Murillo allies [SSR-25-10]. The Cetcam report states that the pretext for the removal of many key officials has been to fight corruption, with at least 35 mayors and six deputy mayors removed on corruption charges over the last two years, along with many state employees. However, it describes these efforts, whereby those loyal to Ortega have been replaced by allies of Murillo, as a “political boomerang”, triggering a cycle where those close to power witness the cruel treatment of those they once worked alongside, provoking a “discontent and simmering anger that can erupt at any moment.”

Lashing out at Trump

On 20 April President Ortega, hitherto tight-lipped on his US counterpart, broke his silence and called President Donald Trump “mentally unstable” in relation to events such as the war in the Middle East. Two days earlier, Washington had marked the anniversary of the April 2018 repression with sanctions on Nicaragua’s deputy interior minister, Luis Roberto Cañas Novoa, for involvement in “gross violations of human rights” relating to it. This followed sanctions imposed by Washington on 16 April on Daniel Edmundo Ortega Murillo and Maurice Facundo Ortega Murillo, two sons of the presidential couple, along with five other individuals and seven companies linked to the country’s gold sector. The US has previously sanctioned Nicaraguan officials, more generally, and in relation to the booming gold sector [EB-22-11] which Ofac said “help[ed] the Murillo-Ortega dictatorship generate money and maintain political control in Nicaragua.”