Those who attended the ceremony witnessed a militaristic scene: at the end of February, the Nicaraguan government, led by President Daniel Ortega and his wife Rosario Murillo, swore in 30,000 members of the “voluntary police” in the capital Managua. Clad in balaclavas and marching in columns, the police units that took the oath are widely considered to adhere to a paramilitary structure which was established for the purpose of intimidating and exerting heightened control over the population. As such, the ceremony served as a stark reminder that the ideals of the leftist Sandinista revolution of 1979, which overthrew the Somoza dictatorship, have been completely eradicated.
Gerold Schmidt directs the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation’s Mexico City Office.
The volunteer police force was one outcome of a comprehensive constitutional reform consisting of some 100 articles, the majority of which further concentrated power in the hands of Ortega and Murillo. Forgoing any kind of public debate, the Nicaraguan Congress ratified the changes on 30 January 2025. Now the constitution codifies a “co-presidency” that has been tailored to suit the couple. The presidential election scheduled for the end of 2026 has been postponed by a year, and the term of office has been extended to six years. All future state institutions, including the legislature and judiciary, will be directly answerable to the presidential couple both de facto and constitutionally.
The military is completely loyal to Ortega. It used to be the case that the head of the army retired after five years in office. General Julio César Avilés, on the other hand, has been leading the army for 15 years. He was re-appointed by Ortega at the end of December 2024 — this time for six years under the new constitutional reform. An additional 20 high-ranking generals have also held their posts for at least ten years.
For years, Ortega and Murillo have also been appointing their children to important positions in the public and private sectors. In doing so, they are clearly trying to establish the basis for a family dynasty. “They want to control everything, absolutely everything,” says a German commentator who lived in Nicaragua for more than 30 years but is now forbidden to enter the country. To avoid compromising her contacts in the country, she declined to give her name.
After an initial term in office from 1985 to 1990 as part of the collective government of the National Sandinista Liberation Front (FSLN), the now 79-year-old president has held power since 2007. His repeated re-election is due in part to an electoral law put in place to favour him, and in part due to his skilful building of political alliances. He has deftly sidelined opposition both within and outside the party.
Fighting Criticism Tooth and Nail
In April 2018, massive protests against cuts to social security benefits culminated in a popular rebellion against the regime. The latter violently crushed the protests, resulting in more than 350 deaths. This occasioned the regime to escalate its crackdown on oppositional forces: the outcome can unambiguously be described as a climate of fear. It ordered the arrest of more than two thousand people who were deemed to be politically disagreeable. In 2021, which was an election year, these included seven presidential candidates. What’s more: habeas corpus has been abolished and the whereabouts of prisoners are often withheld from their relatives for long periods of time. Many prisoners spend months in solitary confinement, while others are placed under house arrest and are required to report to the police on a regular basis, and their relatives are monitored via phone calls. Even civil servants have been subject to arrest in recent times. In some regions, teachers must assume that their cell phones are being monitored.
The Nicaraguan human rights organization Colectivo Nunca Más has documented torture in the country’s prisons. The new constitution has removed the prohibition of torture from Article 36 in the constitution. In addition, these changes to the constitution are applied retroactively in these and other cases, which is — to say the least — an extremely unusual legal practice.
One means of getting rid of political opposition is by deporting individuals to the United States and Spain. In most cases, this has been combined with the revocation of citizenship, seizure of assets, and forfeiture of pension rights. The deportees include former fellow travellers of Ortega, representatives of the Catholic Church, and members of the conservative opposition.
According to the Nicaragua Information Office, the government has closed more than 5,500 NGOs, universities, schools, and educational centres since 2018, in most cases also seizing their assets. This included the prestigious Jesuit university UCA, which the government designated a “centre of terrorism”.
There is virtually no investigative journalism left in the country. Faced with limited options, many of the media outlets forced into exile accepted funding offers from the United States, including from USAID. In light of Donald Trump’s decision to cut off foreign aid, these media outlets are now on the verge of collapse.
The Nicaraguan law pertaining to foreign agents classifies any international cooperation as unlawful interference. A critical report published by the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) on the worsening hunger crisis in Nicaragua, for example, prompted the country to withdraw from the organization in February 2024. The government ordered the closure of the FAO’s offices in Nicaragua. The same happened shortly afterwards to the offices of the International Organization for Migration (IOM) and the International Labor Organization (ILO). The International Red Cross had already been targeted in 2023. On 28 February, Rosario Murillo also announced the country’s “irrevocable” withdrawal from the UN Human Rights Council.
For the time being, there is no realistic alternative to Ortega.
In hindsight, it is clear that Daniel Ortega worked painstakingly to plan his comeback after losing the election to the conservative opposition in 1990. His hegemony within the FSLN has gone unchallenged since 1992. Only in 1998, when his stepdaughter Zoilamérica publicly accused him of sexual abuse with the backing of the strong feminist movements in Nicaragua, was Ortega’s political career in jeopardy. However, Zoilamérica’s mother Rosario Murillo sided with her husband and against her daughter, allowing Ortega to escape conviction.
The current co-presidential couple did not forgive this humiliation. Starting in 2007 and especially after 2018, it took particularly harsh action against feminist organizations and almost universally forced their leaders into exile. The best-known example is the former guerrilla fighter and Sandinista health minister Dora María Téllez. After being arrested, spending a year and a half in solitary confinement and more time in prison in general, the regime deported her to the US in February 2023 along with 221 other political prisoners and revoked her citizenship.
In persecuting critical voices, Ortega did not even spare his own brother. Humberto Ortega, one of the nine leading commanders of the Sandinista revolutionary government, was placed under house arrest in May 2024. Cut off from the outside world and from the medication he needed to survive, he was taken to a military hospital shortly afterwards, where he died at the end of September 2024.
Some now compare the Ortega-Murillo regime with the Somoza dictatorship, which was defeated by the Sandinistas in 1979. This is not entirely accurate. The German observer quoted above says that Somoza’s dictatorship was more heavily reliant on direct bloodshed. Furthermore, the control mechanisms in place today are much more sophisticated thanks to electronic surveillance instruments. She uses the term “modern dictatorship” to describe the Ortega-Murilo regime.
Is the Economy in Danger?
Nicaragua’s economic situation is uncertain. Almost 40 percent of Nicaraguan exports go to the United States. Additional money comes from granting international companies mining rights, especially for gold. It is estimated that more than 20 percent of the country’s territory is now subject to such arrangements, including parts of nature reserves.
Even though the presence of Chinese companies in Nicaragua has overshadowed that of Taiwanese companies, there is still no indication that China will play a dominant role in the country’s economy. Nicaragua’s economy also relies more heavily than other Central American countries on remittances from migrants to their families. Since 2018 alone, an estimated 800,000 Nicaraguans have gone abroad for economic or political reasons, most of them to the US. Young people in particular are fleeing the country to this end.
Under Trump, more than half a million “Nicas” are now at risk of losing their right to stay in the United States. The CHNV (Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua, Venezuela) Parole Program, which granted Nicaraguans the right to stay in the US for a limited period of time, was terminated by the Biden administration in autumn 2024. The country’s economy could be undermined by mass deportations and a plunge in remittances, punitive tariffs, and the loss of key US import quotas under the Central American Free Trade Agreement with the US (CAFTA-DR).
For the time being, there is no realistic alternative to Ortega. The political left appears to be too fragmented and scattered abroad after years of persistent repression. Attempts to form a broad opposition alliance have failed so far, since there is too large a gap between conservative entrepreneurs on the one hand and representatives of social organizations and feminist groups on the other. Most of those in opposition camps believe that no real changes can be expected until the death of the ailing Ortega. When that happens, Co-President Murillo is not expected to be able to retain the reins of power. After all, the elites who benefit from the regime are loyal to her husband, not to her.
Some, such as the exiled sociologist and economist Oscar-René Vargas, hope that the family regime will simply implode. Others, such as the aforementioned German observer, are banking on a return of the forms of democratic self-determination at local levels which were being actively practiced in the early 2000s and which she herself witnessed. “The positive experiences of living under democracy are like weeds, you can’t get rid of them. The seed is still there under the ground, buried deep, but ready to germinate.” Unfortunately, many of those involved with these democratic efforts at the time were persecuted, arrested, and driven into exile. Given the current global context, she fears that if the government falls, the conservative forces from the business-owning class will seize the opportunity to govern. But for many people in the country and in exile, even this seems to be better than the continued reign of the presidential couple — and this attitude reveals a lot about the character of the regime.
This article first appeared in nd.Aktuell in collaboration with the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation. Translated by Hunter Bolin and Ryan Eyers for Gegensatz Translation Collective.