The human rights organization Amnesty International has warned that the government of Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega and Vice President Rosario Murillo is deepening repression in the Central American state.
In a report released on Tuesday, the organization stated that the government has engaged in abuses such as arbitrary detention, torture, and stripping dissidents of citizenship. The Ortega government has been accused of consolidating power and cracking down on voices of opposition since April 2018, when anti-austerity protests against cuts to social security benefits were met with a heavy-handed government response in which hundreds of people were killed and detained. The report said that the government has continued to “expand and reinvent” such patterns of repression through a variety of methods, including excessive force, attacks on civil society groups, and using the judiciary to target opponents.
Civil society organizations, human rights activists, and independent media have also suffered from harassment, loss of legal status, and raids by police forces, the report states. While Irene Cuellar, a researcher for Central America with Amnesty International, stated that human rights activists have shown “remarkable resilience” and often continue their work from outside the country, she noted that peaceful protests within Nicaragua “have become dangerous and almost impossible to exercise without facing severe consequences.”
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