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.
Mr. 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 marks a new tactic, human rights groups say, in a yearslong wave of political oppression in Nicaragua. There, Daniel Ortega and Rosario Murillo, who rule as 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.
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The post A Chilling New Tactic in Nicaragua: Arrest, Then Silence appeared first on New York Times.
