Caribbean & Central America - November 2023

The recent closure of two prestigious higher academic institutions – the Nicaraguan campus of the Instituto Centroamericano de Administración de Empresas (Incae) business school and the Jesuit-run Universidad Centroamericana (UCA) – has sparked international outrage regarding President Daniel Ortega’s continued efforts to silence dissent and independent thinking. With the assets of these institutions seized by the government, regional think tank Centro de Estudios Transdisciplinarios de Centroamérica (Cetcam) has warned of a strategy of “converting universities into indoctrination centres”, with “implications for the country’s development”.

On 25 September the Ortega government announced that it had closed down Incae’s Nicaraguan campus for failing to meet regulatory requirements such as preparing and submitting annual financial accounts in 2020, 2021, and 2022, as well as inconsistencies detected in its financial accounts from 2015-2019.

Sometimes referred to as ‘Harvard South’, Incae (which also has a campus in Costa Rica), was created in 1963, following a visit to Costa Rica that year by former US president John F. Kennedy (1961-1963), and was set up with the initial assistance of professors from Harvard Business School. It ranks second in Latin America MBA rankings in the latest World University Rankings compiled by global higher education analyst Quacquarelli Symonds (QS). Its closure drew major condemnation, from 25 former leaders from Latin America and Spain who comprise the Iniciativa Democrática de España y las Américas (IDEA), a non-governmental forum, as well as from Ecuador’s President Guillermo Lasso.

The shuttering of Incae’s Nicaraguan campus took place weeks after the closure of the UCA, also considered one of the sub-region’s top private universities, which, on 16 August, was shut down on charges including terrorism. A hub for anti-government protests in 2018, UCA’s closure was condemned in a 21 August statement by Cetcam and a string of academics, teachers, and university workers from Latin America as well as the US, Europe and Canada. The statement highlights that “in its 63 years of existence, UCA has become one of Nicaragua’s leading [universities]…even the leading university [italics our own]”, describing it “as a model of the kind of university that should be established in poor countries with poor education systems, weak democracies and development models based on extractivism and the supply of cheap labour”.

The 21 August statement notes that in 2010, the World University Ranking, published annually by the Spanish national research council (CSIC), a Spanish government agency, ranked UCA first among the 52 institutions and higher education centres operating in Nicaragua and “among the top ten on the long list of universities in Central America”. The statement adds that UCA achieved another important academic recognition in 2012, when it was included by the QS ranking in the list of 250 institutions considered the most prestigious centres of higher education in Latin America, where over 7,000 higher education institutions operate, of which nearly 2,000 are universities. According to the statement, UCA is the only Nicaraguan university to be included in this list.

The 21 August statement also goes on to warn more generally of a “new escalation of the offensive” that the Ortega administration “has launched against Nicaraguan universities”. A separate bulletin published in August by Cetcam notes that in December 2021, the government ordered the closure of Universidad Hispanoamericana (UHISPAN), a private university, and since then, up until August 2023, had closed 27 universities in various parts of the country, affecting nearly 43,000 students. It highlights as among the most important universities now under control by the government, Universidad Politécnica (UPOLI), Universidad Católica Agropecuaria del Trópico Seco (UCATSE), linked to the Catholic Church, Universidad Nicaragüense de Estudios Humanísticos (UNEH), Universidad Paulo Freire (UPF), and Universidad Popular de Nicaragua (UPONIC).

The crackdown on independent academic institutions was also flagged up in a 12 September update by a three-member panel of human rights experts on Nicaragua (GHREN) appointed by the United Nations (UN), which noted that a “new wave of human rights violations in Nicaragua over the past six months” had “seriously stifled dissenting voices and increased persecution”. The panel highlights that the government “has intensified its targeting of universities as spaces for critical and independent thinking”. It said that this has been done “invoking supposed breaches of regulations, reflecting the instrumentalisation of the State apparatus to suppress academic freedom and diversity”. The statement cites GHREN chair Jan-Michael Simon as saying that “Nicaragua is being stripped of its intellectual capital and critical voices, leaving the country’s prospects and development on hold”.

Moving against the Jesuits

The move against UCA, since re-named Universidad Nacional Casimiro Sotelo Montenegro, after a student activist assassinated in 1967 by the right-wing dictatorship of Anastasio Somoza (1967-1972, 1974-1979), came days after reports that UCA’s bank accounts had been frozen. On 23 August the Ortega government then declared the Jesuit religious order illegal, and closed it down. It justified the closure by alleging the Jesuits had failed to present proper tax returns for 2020, 2021, and 2022, and that its board of directors had not been renewed as required by law.

This is the latest instance of the government targeting the Catholic Church – a prominent critic of the Ortega administration [SSR-22-11]; relations between the two have significantly deteriorated since the conviction of Nicaraguan bishop Rolando Álvarez in February 2023 on charges widely considered trumped up, precipitating a rupture in relations with the Vatican. The latest edition of a research report by Martha Patricia Molina, a local lawyer and rights activist, published on 4 October, found that there had been 667 attacks on the Catholic Church between April 2018 and August 2023.

More US sanctions

On 19 August the US State Department, which has slapped various sanctions on Nicaragua in response to the ongoing crackdown, announced that it was imposing visa restrictions on 100 Nicaraguan municipal officials who “participated in efforts to repress civil society organizations, close civic spaces like that of the [UCA] and unjustly detain courageous individuals who support a free civil society, including Bishop…Álvarez.”