In July 1979, the 43 year dictatorship of the Somoza family in Nicaragua was brought to an end when Anastasio Somoza Debayle was overthrown by a rebel army led by the Frente Sandinista de Liberación Nacional, the FSLN or Sandinistas, as they were widely known. In the 47 years since then, Nicaragua has experienced a civil war throughout the 1980s which pitted the Sandinista government against rebels, many of them backed by the United States, an uneasy transition to democracy which saw successive democratic presidential elections in 1990, 1996 and 2001 and in 2007, the return to office of the Sandinista cacique Daniel Ortega, who had previously served as Nicaragua’s leader, both defacto and directly as president, from 1979 to 1990. Since the return of the Sandinistas and Ortega, now closely advise by his wife, Rosario Murillo, who served as Vice President from 2017 until 2025 and Co-President since then, Nicaragua has spiraled down in a maelstrom of corruption, state violence and dictatorial repression.
In April 2018, a proposal to increase taxes and cut social security benefits ignited long-standing grievances. Protests broke out around Nicaragua and the government responded with immense force which Amnesty International concluded consisted of “a strategy of violent repression not seen in the country for years.” The Inter-American Commission on Human Rights concluded that at least 355 people were killed during the protests. In December 2018, the Grupo Interdisciplinario de Expertos Independientes (GIEI), a collection of independent analysts selected by the IACHR, published a report concluding that the Ortega government “committed crimes against humanity” and that Ortega used “public institutions and pro-government armed groups to establish a repressive state apparatus, with the intention to kill and persecute those who opposed their policies.” In February 2023, the regime freed 222 of the more than 250 political prisoners it then held. At once, almost all of them were put on a plane to the United States, with the Nicaraguan government announcing shortly thereafter that those expelled would be stripped of their nationality. Tens of thousands of Nicaraguans have fled to neighboring Costa Rica, where the regime has pursued them. Following the June 2025 murder of retired military officer and fierce regime critic Roberto Samcam in San José, former Costa Rican president Laura Chinchilla referred to Samcam’s murder as an example of the Ortega-Murillo regime “using hitmen to execute exiles or refugees.”
The documentary evidence of the regime’s atrocities has grown ever-more extensive. Earlier this year, a report by the United Nations Group of Independent Human Rights Experts on Nicaragua concluded that “since 2018 government funding earmarked for social assistance, cleaning projects, and operational expenses was redirected to fund violent security operations” including “an extensive transnational surveillance and intelligence architecture used to monitor, intimidate and attack hundreds of thousands of Nicaraguans who live abroad.” The previous year, the group had found that the Nicaraguan government had committed serious human rights violations and international crimes that “constitute crimes against humanity.” In its 2025 annual report, the IACHR asserted that Nicaragua’s civic and democratic space remained “completely closed” amid the “cancellation of thousands of social organizations [and the] criminalization and de facto prohibition of any public meeting” along with an “intensification of transnational repression.”
To discuss the situation in Nicaragua, today we are joined by three guest: Juan Pappier, the Americas deputy director at Human Rights Watch; Carlos Chamorro, the founder and editor of the Nicaraguan news outlet Confidencial; and the journalist, social researcher, and feminist activist Sofía Montenegro.
