‘We are in this nightmare’: Nicaragua continues its brazen crackdown
It has been a fortnight since Georgiana Aguirre-Sacasa last heard from her elderly father: a terse WhatsApp message in which Nicaragua’s former foreign minister said border guards had stopped him leaving the country and seized his passport, and that he was on his way home.“What ???? ” she replied from her home in Denver, Colorado. “Why ???? ” No answer came.By then Aguirre-Sacasa believes Nicaraguan police officials on motorcycles had intercepted her father’s vehicle on the highway as he headed back to the capital, Managua. After searching it, they placed the 76-year-old retired diplomat in a pickup truck and spirited him away to an unknown destination. “We are in this nightmare,” his daughter said this week as she desperately sought news of her father. “Right now, I just need proof of life.”Francisco Aguirre-Sacasa is the oldest target of a brazen political crackdown being waged by the government of Daniel Ortega ahead of the Central American country’s next presidential election on 7 November. Police have arrested at least 32 people since late May, including important opposition figures who were challenging the revolutionary heroturned-autocrat as he seeks a a fourth consecutive term.
“This guy is doing something that nobody believed was possible in the 21st century. He is systematically removing from the political scene each one of the politicians who could potentially challenge him,” said José Miguel Vivanco, Human Rights Watch’s Americas director.Some of the targets are prominent rivals of the septuagenarian Sandinista, including the 44-year-old political activist Félix Maradiaga and Cristiana Chamorro, the 67-year-old daughter of former president Violeta Barrios de Chamorro. Chamorro, who is under house arrest after being detained on 2 June, was widely seen as the candidate best placed to defeat Ortega, who successfully smothered a dramatic 2018 uprising against his rule.
Others, however, appear to have had little direct involvement in November’s vote.
Aguirre-Sacasa described her father, who like many of those arrested is facing investigation for alleged national security crimes, as a political pundit and nerd, who wrote columns for La
Prensa, an opposition newspaper at the centre of an ongoing media clampdown by Ortega’s government. “He geeks out on elections,” she said.
But according to his daughter, Francisco Aguirre-Sacasa had no political aspirations and at the time of his detention was heading to the United States,
where he served as Nicaragua’s ambassador in the late 90s, to see family and have hip replacement surgery.
After leaving his home in Managua on the morning of 27 July, the retired World Bank official headed south by road towards the border with Costa Rica. From there he and his 74-yearold wife had planned to take a Delta Air Lines flight to Washington DC. But Nicaragua immigration officials refused to allow him through the Peñas Blancas border crossing, forcing the couple to return home. About 45 minutes into their journey they were intercepted near the town of Ochomogo, and Aguirre-Sacasa was detained.“My father was taken … with no just cause. He is 76 years old,” said his daughter, 45, a political consultant and US citizen. “We want him back – and we want all the other political prisoners released immediately.”
For now that looks unlikely, with Ortega apparently doubling down on his roundup despite growing international censure, including from onetime allies such as Brazil’s leftist former president, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva. In a recent interview Lula, who first visited Nicaragua in 1980 – a year after the Sandinista revolution forced the rightwing dictator Anastasio Somoza from power – warned of the dangers of leaders considering themselves indispensable and irreplaceable. “Don’t abandon democracy,” Lula urged Ortega.
In early June, after Cristiana Chamorro’s detention, the US secretary of state, Antony Blinken, denounced Ortega’s “assault on democracy” on Twitter. Last week, after the EU announced fresh sanctions targeting Nicaragua’s vice-president and first lady, Rosario Murillo, and other top officials, Blinken tweeted that the “decision to ban all democratic competition from the 2021 presidential election means Nicaragua’s election cannot be considered credible by Nicaraguans or the international community”.
“What Ortega deserved was a really strong and bold reaction from the [US] administration. What he got was a tweet,” Vivanco, from Human Rights Watch, said. “A good tweet, a nice tweet – but a tweet at the end of the day.”
With no sign of the clampdown easing, many dissenting voices are choosing exile over jail. Carlos Fernando Chamorro, a prominent journalist who is the brother of Cristiana Chamorro, said he had fled over the border into Costa Rica for fear of being arrested himself.
“Staying in Nicaragua was too much of a risk,” the editor said on Tuesday after the crackdown claimed its latest scalp: Nicaragua’s former ambassador to Costa Rica, Maurício Díaz.
“Had I been there I would have been arrested and silenced,” said Chamorro, whose brother, Pedro Joaquín Chamorro, and cousin, Juan Sebastián Chamorro, have also been detained. Like Georgiana Aguirre-Sacasa, Chamorro said he was unsure where his two relatives were being held, though he suspected they were in Managua’s notorious El Chipote prison, where Ortega was once incarcerated by the Somoza dictatorship he helped overthrow.Vivanco said he believed the US had been caught off guard by the intensity of Ortega’s anti-democratic offensive. “This is really, really unprecedented. It’s something we haven’t seen in the last 20 or 30 years … and the worst thing is, it looks like Ortega is managing to get away with it,” Vivanco said, calling the charges being leveled at targets of the crackdown “groundless nonsense”. Speaking from her home in the US, Aguirre-Sacasa said she felt “sick to her stomach” about the situation unfolding in Nicaragua and was determined to speak out on behalf of a man “who is guilty of nothing, except loving Nicaragua, his country, his children and his grandchildren”. “If that is reason for him to be in prison then we should all be in prison for that, for loving our country and loving our family and loving the democratic process,” she said.