Nicaragua’s journalists are under government attack
More than 130 days have passed since Miguel Mora and Lucía Pineda Ubau were dragged out of their Managua newsroom and into Nicaraguan jail cells.
The two journalists, the director and news director of independent outlet “100% Noticias,” spent the end of 2018 in pre-trial detention, charged with crimes including “inciting violence and hate” for reporting on the political and human-rights crisis in their country. Recently, their scheduled trial, which had already been delayed twice since January, was postponed yet again.
Nicaragua offers a cautionary tale of what happens when censorship goes from subtle to violent — and how the world allows that to happen.
Since demonstrations began just over a year ago, the Committee to Protect Journalists has documented a constant stream of press freedom violations. Reporters covering the protests faced harassment, injury, equipment theft and detention at the hands of police and pro-government paramilitary groups.
In April 2018, shortly after protests began, a mob attacked the offices of Radio Darío, a critical radio station in the city of León, and burned it to the ground, sending staff into hiding and its director into exile.
TV reporter Ángel Gahona was shot and killed while covering a protest on April 21, 2018, in the coastal city of Bluefields. His Facebook Live stream broadcast the moment he was shot to a live audience — including his wife, watching from home. In a lightning-fast trial last summer, two young men were convicted of Gahona’s murder, despite significant flaws in the judicial process. Gahona’s wife and others close to him have fled, fearing they are no longer safe in their own country.
The harshest wave of arrests and media shutdowns came in December, part of a cynical government strategy to hide its repression at a time when much of the world was celebrating the holidays. In just over a week, Nicaraguan authorities raided the offices of two major independent media outlets, confiscated documents and equipment and arrested journalists, including Mora and Pineda Ubau.
The raids were the product of an increasingly vicious campaign against the country’s media, unfolding over months of anti-government protests and a brutal official response that led to the deaths of at least 300 civilians, according to local human-rights groups.
Though Gahona was the only Nicaraguan reporter to lose his life for his work last year, journalists continue to work under constant threat, from local officials who call them “terrorists” on pro-government radio programs, to drone surveillance, police raids or arrests. Dozens of journalists have left their jobs or fled the country entirely, choosing self-censorship or exile rather than waiting to become the next target. More than 50 Nicaraguan reporters are currently in Costa Rica, trying to figure out how to cover events in their home country from across the border.
Under President Daniel Ortega and his wife, Vice President Rosario Murillo, Nicaragua has suffered tight media control, with many outlets, owned by Ortega family members or allies, little more than mouthpieces for government propaganda. Ortega and Murillo control most aspects of government, including the National Assembly, judiciary, police and the public prosecutor’s office.
As protests diminished near the end of last summer, the Nicaraguan government had an opportunity to open a dialogue with opposition groups. Instead, they chose tear gas and terror.
Hope arose again in March: After a series of negotiations, the government announced it would release hundreds of political prisoners within 90 days and implement a series of important reforms. Yet almost two months later, many of the prisoners released were people charged with low-level misdemeanors; many others have only received conditional release to house arrest.
Mora, Pineda Ubau and hundreds of others are still behind bars.
Despite these clear human rights violations, the response from the international community has been, at best, tepid. Except for neighboring Costa Rica, which has taken in thousands of fleeing Nicaraguans and consistently called on officials to free Pineda Ubau, a dual citizen, the leaders of other Central American countries have remained quiet.
Other countries have offered some intermittent attempts at pressure — economic sanctions by the United States; calls for action through invoking the Inter-American Democratic Charter at the Organization of American States — but none have been sufficient to persuade the Nicaraguan government to change its tactics.
Ortega and Murillo are getting away with surveilling, threatening and now even jailing journalists, undermining prospects for a political solution to the current crisis. The world, distracted by the crisis in Venezuela, regional migration or Brazil’s political meltdown, has moved on.
What happens when a nation’s journalists are forced to fall silent and when the world fails to find ways to ensure that their voices are heard and that they can continue to tell their stories? Nicaragua is dangerously close to this reality — we owe it to the country’s brave reporters to support them and keep the country from becoming another of Latin America’s silent zones.
Natalie Southwick is South and Central America program coordinator for the Committee to Protect Journalists.