Experts accuse 54 top Nicaragua officials of grave abuses

PANAMA CITY: Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega, his wife, and dozens of senior officials were responsible for arbitrary detentions, torture and extrajudicial executions, a report by UN experts said Thursday.

The report compiled by the Group of Human Rights Experts on Nicaragua names 54 people it said played key roles in an escalating campaign of repression in the Central American country.

“This report lays bare the anatomy of a governing system that has weaponized every arm of the State against its own people,” said Jan-Michael Simon, the chair of the group of three independent experts commissioned by the UN.

The 234-page report accuses Ortega, his wife and co-president Rosario Murillo of co-opting all branches of government into building a repressive regime over which they have total control.

It also names dozens of judges, mayors, army colonels and police chiefs allegedly responsible for gross rights violations.

The report was presented to the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva on February 28, but the names of those accused in the document were not published at the time. The team, made up of independent experts who do not speak on behalf of the United Nations, found Ortega and Murillo had “deliberately transformed the country into an authoritarian state where no independent institutions remain”.

“Opposition voices are silenced, and the population - both inside and outside Nicaragua - faces persecution, forced exile, and economic retaliation,” they said.

A sweeping constitutional reform granting the couple control of all state entities “represented a final blow to the rule of law” in Nicaragua, they added.

The report said Ortega´s leftist government had recruited ex-combatants, retired soldiers and police, judges and public employees for a “volunteer” force to support the national police.

The 47-member rights council on Thursday overwhelmingly voted to renew the expert team´s mandate for another two years.

Raphael Viana David of the International Service for Human Rights hailed the renewal, ensuring “the Nicaraguan government´s brutal human rights crackdown does not go unchecked.”

Nicaragua, which pulled out of the Council over the expert report, was not in the room for the vote.

The members of the 30,000-strong force, sworn in by Ortega in February with their faces masked, echoes the groups that led a crackdown on anti-government protests in 2018 in which more than 300 people were killed, one of the experts, Reed Brody, told AFP.

The Managua government considers the protests an attempted coup sponsored by Washington. Ever since, 79-year-old Ortega has tightened control over the state with the support of Murillo.

Ortega first served as president from 1985 to 1990 as a former guerrilla hero who had helped oust the US-backed Somoza regime.