This summer marks the 45th anniversary of the Nicaraguan Revolution, when the guerilla forces of the Sandinista National Liberation Front (FSLN) overthrew the Somoza dictatorship, the U.S.-backed dynasty that had ruled the country for more than 40 years. On July 19, 1979, after nearly two decades of struggle, armed Sandinistas entered the capital of Managua victorious, their red and black bandanas heralding a new era of socialist transformation.
The jubilation of victory was quickly tempered by the exigencies of war. From 1980 to 1989, a coalition of counterrevolutionary forces known as the Contras—who were financed and trained by the United States during the Reagan administration—waged a ruthless but unsuccessful terror campaign to unseat the revolutionary government. Between 30,000 and 40,0000 people died in the ensuing violence.
FSLN commander Daniel Ortega emerged as the leader of the revolutionary junta, and he was elected president in 1984. Six years later, Ortega was voted out by a coalition of opposition groups. In 2007, he was reelected and has served as president ever since, since the National Assembly modified the Nicaraguan Constitution in 2014 to allow for his indefinite reelection in contests widely recognized as shams.
Today, 17 years into Ortega’s rule, the 1979 revolution’s promise of liberation and equality has become little more than window dressing for another iron-fisted dictatorship. It is not one of the proletariat or of the people, but of another all-powerful family, led by Ortega and his wife, Rosario Murillo, who is often referred to as his “co-president.” But as the two tighten their grip on power, it seems to be slipping through their fingers, and their rule appears increasingly precarious.
For nearly two decades, “the commander” and “comrade Rosario” have consolidated power through a series of radical legislative and constitutional changes. Murillo has steadily increased her influence since 2008, when she was appointed president of the Councils of Citizen Power, party-state committees that ensured loyalty to the regime and distributed resources at the local level. She assumed Nicaragua’s vice presidency in 2017 after a constitutional reform allowed for her election despite being the president’s wife.
“Ortega’s dictatorship is unique insofar as he is singularly uncharismatic and is uninterested in direct appeals to the Nicaraguan people that other more personalist populist leaders rely on to bolster support,” said Michael Paarlberg, an associate fellow at the Washington, D.C.-based Institute for Policy Studies and a professor of political science at Virginia Commonwealth University. Instead, Paarlberg added, Ortega “has had to rely chiefly on repression, both to create fear and to shrink the pool of potential rivals within civil society, religious institutions, and NGOs,” or nongovernmental organizations.
Any inkling of dissent in Nicaragua has been met with ruthless military violence. In 2018, soldiers, police, and paramilitary death squads crushed a civil rebellion, leaving more than 350 people dead, at least 2,000 injured, and thousands more imprisoned, disappeared, or exiled. Ortega and Murillo have since further entrenched their dictatorship, clamping down on the opposition, securing control of the judiciary and legislature, purging the party-state apparatus of perceived traitors, and criminalizing civil society.
The government has outlawed public protest; seized the offices and assets of dozens of news outlets; revoked the legal standing of thousands of nonprofit organizations, universities, and churches—most recently in mid-August, when the regime banned 1,500 nonprofit organizations in a single day—and denounced hundreds of students, journalists, literary figures, and human rights defenders as “foreign agents,” stripping them of their citizenship. Since 2018, more than 300,000 Nicaraguans have sought asylum in neighboring Costa Rica—and U.S. Customs and Border Protection has encountered nearly 440,000 at the southern border of the United States. Many hope to win an asylum claim. Today, 1.5 million Nicaraguans—roughly 22 percent of the country’s population—live outside the borders of their homeland.
Recently, however, the Ortega dictatorship has appeared increasingly precarious as the presidential couple pluck away at the base of their own house of cards. Ortega and Murillo are getting old—they are 78 and 73, respectively—and the prospect of a democratic opening hangs over their hopes for smooth dynastic succession. All signs indicate that the couple is positioning their son Laureano to succeed his mother after she inherits the presidential crown from her husband.
But as Ortega and Murillo grow more isolated and self-destructive—executing mass purges and banning civil society groups—their popularity continues to wane, down to about 15 percent by last Gallup count in 2023. As their inner circle shrinks and their enemies multiply, a seamless succession appears increasingly unlikely.
For many observers, the question is not whether the dictatorship will implode, but when and how.
“There is no question that the dictatorship of Daniel Ortega and Rosario Murillo is getting weaker and weaker every day,” said Tamara Dávila, a leader of the opposition coalition Blue and White National Unity who is now exiled in the United States. Dávila believes that Ortega’s death or departure from office could create the possibility for a democratic opening despite the regime’s hopes for dynastic succession.
“The question is what that possibility will look like,” she said.
Since February 2023, when the regime released, banished, and denaturalized Dávila and 221 other political prisoners, Nicaragua has drifted out of the international spotlight. But repression and terror continue apace; according to the most current and commonly cited estimate, at least 141 political prisoners languish in Nicaragua’s prisons, according to the United Nations, enduring isolation, torture, and other inhumane conditions.
Dora María Téllez, a celebrated former Sandinista commander, was one of the 222 dissidents imprisoned and then exiled by the Ortega-Murillo regime. She said that the real number of political prisoners in Nicaragua is much higher than 141. “Families are afraid to report people as political prisoners. So there’s probably a little over 250 in total,” she told me in a recent interview. “But it’s a system of revolving doors: They let some out, they bring more in. … It’s a mechanism of repression that the Ortega-Murillo regime uses to keep the whole country intimidated.”
As recently as April, police intensified patrols in Nicaragua’s major cities, detaining five family members of protesters who were killed during the 2018 crackdown. On April 15, the body of opposition activist Carlos Alberto Garcia Suárez was found in a garbage dump in the city of Jinotepe. His corpse was badly burned, but police ruled out foul play, and the coroner ordered an immediate burial without an autopsy.
What is left of the opposition in the country is small and operates in secrecy.
Power in Nicaragua is structured vertically. Members of Ortega and Murillo’s loyal inner circle have some influence over decision-making, but their main role is administrative: All policy decisions lie in the hands of the ruling couple. Dismissals for perceived disloyalty are routine, and purges are increasingly common. Often, they are carried out under the personal direction of Murillo, maneuvering to eliminate perceived threats to her presumed succession.
No one is immune: Friends and close relatives of the couple have been branded traitors and remanded to El Chipote prison or exiled. In 2021, the former Sandinista commander Hugo Torres Jiménez, who risked his life securing Ortega’s release from prison in 1974, was prosecuted by the regime as a traitor. Torres had served as vice president of an opposition party led by ex-Sandinistas and was a vocal critic of Ortega and Murillo, calling the dictatorship “fiercer and more totalitarian than that of the Somozas.” He died in prison two years after his arrest, at age 73.
The presidential couple even went after Ortega’s brother, Gen. Humberto Ortega, a hero of the revolution and the former head of the Nicaraguan Army, accusing him of treason for criticizing the regime’s authoritarian drift and for questioning Murillo’s dynastic succession. On May 19, police surrounded Humberto’s home, placing him under house arrest. Later, after suffering symptoms of a heart attack, he was transferred to a military hospital in Managua.
“Just because we’re blood brothers, that doesn’t mean that Daniel and his group aren’t extremely uncomfortable with someone like me,” Humberto said in a recent interview with Infobae. “Some have even thought about eliminating me. I’ve never heard it from Daniel himself, but I’ve heard it from people who are close to him.”
In October 2023, the regime dismissed 10 percent of all judicial branch employees, including the president of the Supreme Court, a devoted Sandinista militant personally disliked by Murillo. Even the judge who had dismissed charges brought against Ortega for sexually assaulting his now-exiled stepdaughter, Zoilamérica Ortega Murillo, was caught up in the mass firing.
High-level officials continue to fall as the dictatorship closes ranks around Murillo. In the past six years, she has assumed an increasing share of power in areas once managed by her husband, such as the judiciary and Foreign Affairs Ministry. She has also maneuvered to eliminate intermediaries between her and the leaders of key institutions, such as the Interior Ministry, the attorney general’s office, and the national police. The resulting loss of power among Sandinistas loyal to Ortega has increased internal struggles within the party.
Last month, Nicaraguan police raided the office and home of Finance Minister Ivan Acosta, who was forced to resign—allegedly for acts of corruption, but more likely because he had fallen out of favor with the presidential couple. Employees in the Finance Ministry now fear a wave of dismissals, similar to those that occurred following Murillo’s purge last year of the Supreme Court, which resulted in the mass firing of some 900 government workers—including magistrates, secretaries, janitors, drivers, and even Ortega’s first-born son, Camilo Ortega Herrera, who led the court’s technical services department.
On Aug. 6, Nicaraguan news outlet Confidencial reported that in late July, Murillo dismissed Ortega’s chief police escort, Commissioner-General Marcos Alberto Acuña Avilés, who had served as a loyal member of the president’s security team since the 1990s.
All this reveals “an internal crisis tied up with the growing power of Rosario Murillo,” said Téllez, the former FSLN commander, who served as Nicaragua’s health minister from 1979 to 1990. “Rosario is not satisfied with appointees who are unconditionally supportive of Daniel Ortega. She wants people who are unconditionally supportive of her.”
The dismissals, surveillance, harassment, and imprisonment—not only of opposition figures, but also of Sandinista partisans, including high-level members of Ortega and Murillo’s inner circle—are dramatically reconfiguring the makeup of power in Nicaragua. The presidential couple has generated discontent, distrust, and fear at every level of the party-state apparatus.
With institutions in chaos, what little support and perceived legitimacy the regime has remains tied to the increasingly frail and marginalized figure of Ortega, who is a lingering symbol of the revolution. The vast majority of the Nicaraguan population disfavors the dictatorship, and it appears increasingly unlikely that Murillo would be able to fill his shoes without creating a power vacuum that could very well spell the regime’s end.
“Murillo is perhaps the only person in Nicaragua with a less credible claim on authority than Ortega, given her deep unpopularity and having never been popularly elected in a legitimate election,” said Paarlberg, the fellow with the Institute for Policy Studies.
“She would have no choice but to double down on repression,” he continued. “Should she fail to hold power, such as by failing to maintain the loyalty of the Sandinista security apparatus, it would create the conditions for a regime transition.”
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