Nicaragua’s prisoners flew to freedom – but Ortega’s not going anywhere
Georgiana Aguirre-Sacasa was at a work dinner in Oakland when her telephone rang and, after nearly two years of torment, the bombshell dropped.
“Do you believe in miracles?” she remembers Senator Chris Dodd – a close friend of the US president, Joe Biden – asking her.
“I do now, Senator,” Aguirre-Sacasa replied.
The “miracle” in question was the release of her father – Nicaragua’s 77year-old former foreign minister Francisco Aguirre-Sacasa – and 221 other political prisoners who were removed from their cells in the Central American country’s capital, Managua, on Thursday morning and deported to the US.
At Washington DC’s Dulles airport, the men and women – several in their late 60s or 70s – received tearful welcomes from long-lost relatives as they stepped off the specially chartered Boeing that had carried them to freedom.
“It was horrific, horrible. There are days where you lose hope,” said Berta Valle, the wife of the opposition activist Félix Maradiaga, as she was reunited with a man their nine-year-old daughter, Alejandra, had not seen since she was six. “This moment is just a miracle for us.”
On a human level the shock release of so many prisoners after so long behind bars was unquestionably good news, welcomed by families, campaigners and governments around the world. A spokesperson for the European Union voiced “satisfaction and relief” while noting that the detainees “should not have spent one single day in prison”. A state department official said: “It’s really the first good news we’ve had on democracy and human rights in a long time in Nicaragua.”
But as the exiles settle into their new home, observers are divided on whether Nicaragua’s unexpected move is a harbinger of positive political change in a country that has slipped back into dictatorship under its authoritarian leader, Daniel Ortega, or actually points to an even bleaker future.
“I do not want to detract from the very real human impact … we should all be celebrating,” said Christopher Sabatini, a Latin America specialist from Chatham House in London who knows one of the freed prisoners and cried when he heard the news.
“But we should also recognize that the Ortega government in some ways is doubling down on repression within its own borders,” added Sabatini, comparing the deportation to the 1980 Mariel boatlift, which saw some 125,000 Cubans flee to the US and helped Cuba’s communist dictator Fidel Castro rid himself of the “meddling voices of the opposition”.
“This is a purging not just of Nicaragua’s infamous jails – it is a purging of its political system,” said Sabatini. “It is a very troubling sign.”
Eliseo Núñez, a former opposition
lawmaker who has lived in exile in Costa Rica since 2021, also believed the deportations showed Ortega and his vice-president and wife, Rosario Murillo, were “radicalizing”, not softening – a conclusion reinforced after the bishop Rolando Álvarez was handed a 26-year jail sentence on Friday after refusing to leave Nicaragua with the 222 released prisoners.
“This is about closing the country,” Núñez said. “What on the surface appears to be a relaxation is, deep down, sending the message that all those who oppose my regime have to go.”
Nicaragua’s slow-burn slide into authoritarianism accelerated in 2018 after a failed uprising against Ortega, a former revolutionary hero who has ruled continuously since being elected in 2006 and, at 77, shows scant sign of relinquishing power.
Ortega became an anti-imperialist superstar in the 1970s and 80s after helping lead the Sandinista revolution that toppled the brutal four-decade Somoza dictatorship. He was president for 11 years after the 1979 overthrow of that regime.
But after the 2018 revolt, Ortega ruthlessly cracked down on his opponents, with the repression intensifying again in the lead-up to 2021’s widely discredited presidential election. Hundreds of objectors were imprisoned or forced to flee abroad as Ortega and Murillo fought to ensure they would win.
Not all of the prisoners would survive. Hugo Torres, a former Sandinista guerrilla who risked his life to free Ortega from prison in 1974, died in February 2022 after being jailed – like so many government foes – on charges of treason. He was 73.
“He is insanely cruel,” Sabatini said of Ortega, who called the freed prisoners “mercenaries, coup-mongers and terrorists”.
Some opposition activists hope their newfound freedom will reinvigorate the fight against Ortega, whose actions have faced growing censure, even from members of the Latin American left such as Chile’s President Gabriel Boric. Others see the deportations as a sign of weakness from a desperate and decrepit regime seeking to reboot ties with the US in order to stay afloat.
The political expert Pedro Fonseca called the releases a clear sign Ortega’s regime was willing to negotiate with the world – and make concessions. “We don’t know whether it will be in six months or five years, but the situation [in Nicaragua] has to change,” Fonseca said.
Yet many analysts reject the portrayal of Ortega’s gambit as a demonstration of frailty.
Sabatini hailed the releases as a triumph for international diplomacy and pressure – not just from the US, but from the European Union and Latin American governments such as Boric’s Chile and Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva in Brazil, who has publicly urged Ortega not to “abandon democracy”.
But in practical terms Sabatini also saw a victory for Ortega, noting how Nicaragua’s leader had, in one fell swoop, freed himself of the most human face of his assault on democracy. The released prisoners were stripped of their Nicaraguan citizenship and political rights, leaving the road clear for Ortega and Murillo to cling to power.
“If I were Daniel Ortega I would be dancing a little jig right now in the presidential palace,” Sabatini said. “This guy is wily – he really is.”
For all the celebration, Núñez also suspected Ortega’s maneuver was designed to neutralize outside pressure by meeting the international community’s main demand: the freeing of political prisoners.
“They want the [international] community to stick the issue of Nicaragua in the freezer,” Núñez said, “so that his regime can carry on.”