A chilling new tactic in Nicaragua: Arrest, then silence

By FRANCES ROBLES

The police arrived at José Alejandro Hurtado’s house in Nicaragua’s capital one night in January, telling him he had to come to their station house because someone had rented a car using his ID, and the vehicle had been stolen.

That’s the last anyone saw of him.

Hurtado, 57, a computer systems engineer and a longtime political activist, is one of nearly three dozen people who human rights groups say have been disappeared by Nicaraguan authorities — taken away with officials refusing to acknowledge their detention or disclose their whereabouts.

Such disappearances are a violation of international law and are especially resonant in Latin America, where the practice has been a hallmark of brutal dictatorships. In Nicaragua, they have been happening within the past two years, the majority of them more recently.

Nearly half of the 73 political prisoners that human rights groups have officially documented in Nicaragua appear in no public court database. They have had no contact with their families, and the crimes they were charged with are unknown. Families have gone from prison to prison, police station to police station, seeking their loved ones, without success, human rights groups say.

The flurry of arbitrary detentions with no transparent judicial process represents a new tactic, rights groups say, in a yearslong wave of political oppression in Nicaragua. There, Daniel Ortega and Rosario Murillo, who are co-presidents, have since 2018 eliminated nearly any vestige of opposition that could threaten their grip on power.

It shows how even after arresting and killing hundreds of protesters and sending hundreds more into exile, Nicaragua’s authoritarian government finds novel ways to stifle dissent and sow dread among the populace.

Relatives of the missing prisoners now fear the worst, after two of the disappeared were recently returned to their families — dead.

On Aug. 25, the body of Mauricio A. Petri, who had been arrested 38 days earlier along with his wife and son as part of a sweep of members of a church targeted by the government, was turned over to his family.

Authorities summoned relatives to a coroner’s office and escorted them to a cemetery to bury Petri without the opportunity for an autopsy, human rights groups said.

Four days later, the body of Carlos Cárdenas Cepeda, a lawyer for the Catholic church, which has also been targeted by the government, was given back to his family. He had been detained for 15 days. No cause of death was given in either case, and the government has made no public pronouncements about them.

These deaths have alarmed the families of the others detained about whom authorities have revealed nothing. Of those 33 missing prisoners, at least a dozen are older than 60, and several, such as Hurtado, have diabetes and high blood pressure. One of the missing detainees is 81.

The police officers who showed up without warrants to arrest Hurtado and search his home in Managua suggested five police stations where the family might later find him, said Hurtado’s brother Adolfo.

Hurtado’s wife and his two brothers spent weeks visiting police stations and prisons, where they said they faced bureaucratic runarounds and hourslong waits.

“At first, two brothers and she went once a week, so three times a week, for more or less a month and a half,” Adolfo Hurtado said, referring to José Alejandro Hurtado’s wife. “That rhythm was unsustainable for the family.”

Adolfo Hurtado said he believes his brother was targeted because he had publicly released a proposal for national dialogue and elections to address the country’s political crisis.

Nicaragua’s co-presidents, but particularly Murillo, seem fixated on clearing the political landscape of any independent voices who could threaten her ability to govern if Ortega, who will turn 80 next month, dies.

Murillo, 74, who also acts as a government spokesperson, did not respond to requests for comment.

Forced disappearances have a long and painful history in Latin America. The term “desaparecido” became synonymous with political repression between 1976 and 1983 in Argentina, when a military dictatorship abducted as many as 30,000 accused dissidents, tortured them and, in hundreds of cases, threw them from airplanes into the sea.

While hundreds of people eventually faced trial in Argentina, many cases of the disappeared went unpunished, said María Adela Antokoletz, who heads the Latin American Federation of Associations for Relatives of the Detained-Disappeared.

“We realize that the abhorrent practice of enforced disappearance continues as a means to silence complaints,” she said.

Mexico, El Salvador and Colombia are three countries in the region where the practice still occurs, though more often perpetrated by gangs or cartels with the acquiescence of local police or mayors, Antokoletz said.

Authorities are obligated under international law to inform family members if they are holding someone, said Barbara Frey, a retired University of Minnesota professor who coedited a book about disappearances in contemporary Latin America.

“If the state has taken them and won’t tell the families where they are, that’s a disappearance,” Frey said. “That’s exactly what the definition says.”

The term historically applied to people missing for prolonged stretches of time, said Reed Brody, a member of the United Nations Group of Human Rights Experts on Nicaragua. But international authorities have increasingly recognized that it also applies even to short-term secret detentions, like those in Nicaragua, he said.

Brody said the 33 documented cases in Nicaragua were believed to be an undercount because many families are too afraid to file a complaint with human rights organizations. The families have reported being harassed and threatened with arrest or having their property confiscated if they persist in trying to track down their loved ones, human rights experts said.

The missing include community leaders, teachers, Indigenous leaders, journalists and pastors. In at least five cases, multiple people in the same family were arrested. Many were detained over the summer, when more than 50 people were arrested in simultaneous roundups.

“It’s hard to know why some people are arrested and some people are disappeared,” Brody said.

Angelica Chavarría was last seen in May 2024, the same day her partner, Daniel Ortega’s brother Humberto, was placed under house arrest, according to human rights organizations.

He died last year.

Thelma Brenes says she has a theory behind the disappearances. Her father, Carlos Brenes Sánchez, 70, and his partner, Salvadora Martínez, 67, Brenes said, were taken Aug. 14 from their home in Jinotepe, about 90 miles north of Managua, Brenes said.