Mr. Steadman Fagoth Müller is a historic Miskito Indigenous leader (Family Photo)
Background
The Miskito are an Indigenous people of the Caribbean coast of Nicaragua and Honduras, with a language, culture, and territorial identity that predate the modern states that now divide their ancestral lands. For generations, they have sought autonomy and protection of those lands, particularly within the Bosawás Biosphere Reserve and the surrounding regions of Nicaragua's North Caribbean.
Throughout the 1980s, the Sandinista government's policies toward Miskito communities, including forced relocations and military operations, drew international condemnation and were documented in successive U.S. State Department human rights reports. That struggle for self-determination did not end with the Cold War; it continues today, as armed settlers encroach on Indigenous territory, Indigenous leaders are silenced, and the Ortega-Murillo regime treats demands for autonomy as threats to be crushed.
A Miskito leader and Father Disappeared; An American Daughter's Appeal
Mr. Steadman Fagoth Müller is a historic Miskito Indigenous leader from Nicaragua's Caribbean Coast and a lifelong advocate for Indigenous land rights and democratic governance. During the 1980s, he stood with the United States, leading the Miskito, Sumo, and Rama coalition known as MISURASATA and lending the broader resistance to Sandinista authoritarianism the moral legitimacy of Indigenous freedom fighters. He survived assassination attempts. America asked for his courage, and he gave it.
On September 14, 2024, Nicaraguan military forces detained Mr. Fagoth in Waspán and transported him by helicopter to Managua. The army later confirmed his capture but disclosed no charges, no legal basis, and no place of confinement. He was taken one day after he publicly denounced military and government complicity in the illegal sale of Indigenous lands. He has not been heard from since. He is 72 years old and gravely ill, living with insulin-dependent diabetes, hypertension, heart disease, and a history of strokes. His family does not know whether he is alive.
On October 28, 2024, before GLA's involvement in the matter, the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights granted precautionary measures in his favor, finding a prima facie risk to his life and personal integrity, and directing Nicaragua to disclose his whereabouts, condition, and legal status. Managua has neither responded nor complied. His daughter, Ms. Dina Carolina Fagoth, is a United States citizen and resides in Pennsylvania. Mr. Fagoth is the father of an American, the father-in-law of an American, and the grandfather of Americans. America asked for his courage once; his daughter is now asking for ours.
Nicaragua's June 2026 Photographs
On June 14, 2026, after twenty-one months of silence, Nicaraguan state media published a set of photographs it said were taken two days earlier, on June 12, inside the National Penitentiary System. The images show Mr. Fagoth, visibly aged and diminished, seated beside a woman the regime identified as his wife during what it described as a routine weekly visit. The family rejects the framing. Ms. Dina Carolina Fagoth, his daughter and a United States citizen, has not been permitted a single telephone call with her father; she has been denied entry into Nicaragua; and she has been obstructed at every step in her search for him. The weekly family visits the regime stages for its cameras are visits it denies to its actual family.
These photographs are not proof of life in any sense recognized by international standards. Genuine proof of life requires independent verification and direct access by counsel and by family; neither has occurred, despite repeated requests. What Nicaragua has released instead are images selected by his captors, on his captors' timeline, through his captors' television station. To parade a frail and gravely ill man of seventy-two before a state television audience while concealing him from the people who love him is not transparency; it is exploitation. It is, at most, a first sign that he was alive on a single day in June; it is not the accounting the Inter-American Commission ordered, and it does not discharge a single one of Nicaragua's obligations.
Two Disappeared Leaders; One Already Lost
Mr. Fagoth is not the only historic Miskito leader the Ortega-Murillo Communist system has made to vanish. Mr. Brooklyn Rivera Bryan, the founder of YATAMA and for decades the other towering figure of the Caribbean Coast, was detained in September 2023 and held in the same darkness. On May 27, 2026, the regime finally displayed him; not at a visit, but in a hospital bed, in critical condition, unable to breathe or to eat on his own. Days later, he was dead, and the regime ordered his burial on its own terms.
We set the two cases side by side because the record requires it. Two elderly Indigenous leaders, both disappeared by the same government, both hidden from their families and from the law: one of them is now in the ground. Steadman Fagoth Müller is seventy-two, gravely ill, and still concealed. The question Brooklyn Rivera's death leaves on the table is the only question that matters here, and it is a question of days, not of process.
How GLA Is Advocating in this Matter
The Global Liberty Alliance advises the family and Miskito communities Ms. Fagoth has been authorized to speak for. Our advocacy is deliberate, lawful, and disciplined, and it proceeds on several fronts, including with the U.S. government; coordination with inter-American and multilateral human rights mechanisms, including the IACHR; and with the government of Nicaragua.
The Miskito are an Indigenous people of the Caribbean coast of Nicaragua and Honduras, with a language, culture, and territorial identity that predate the modern states that now divide their ancestral lands. For generations, they have sought autonomy and protection of those lands, particularly within the Bosawás Biosphere Reserve and the surrounding regions of Nicaragua's North Caribbean.
Throughout the 1980s, the Sandinista government's policies toward Miskito communities, including forced relocations and military operations, drew international condemnation and were documented in successive U.S. State Department human rights reports. That struggle for self-determination did not end with the Cold War; it continues today, as armed settlers encroach on Indigenous territory, Indigenous leaders are silenced, and the Ortega-Murillo regime treats demands for autonomy as threats to be crushed.
A Miskito leader and Father Disappeared; An American Daughter's Appeal
Mr. Steadman Fagoth Müller is a historic Miskito Indigenous leader from Nicaragua's Caribbean Coast and a lifelong advocate for Indigenous land rights and democratic governance. During the 1980s, he stood with the United States, leading the Miskito, Sumo, and Rama coalition known as MISURASATA and lending the broader resistance to Sandinista authoritarianism the moral legitimacy of Indigenous freedom fighters. He survived assassination attempts. America asked for his courage, and he gave it.
On September 14, 2024, Nicaraguan military forces detained Mr. Fagoth in Waspán and transported him by helicopter to Managua. The army later confirmed his capture but disclosed no charges, no legal basis, and no place of confinement. He was taken one day after he publicly denounced military and government complicity in the illegal sale of Indigenous lands. He has not been heard from since. He is 72 years old and gravely ill, living with insulin-dependent diabetes, hypertension, heart disease, and a history of strokes. His family does not know whether he is alive.
On October 28, 2024, before GLA's involvement in the matter, the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights granted precautionary measures in his favor, finding a prima facie risk to his life and personal integrity, and directing Nicaragua to disclose his whereabouts, condition, and legal status. Managua has neither responded nor complied. His daughter, Ms. Dina Carolina Fagoth, is a United States citizen and resides in Pennsylvania. Mr. Fagoth is the father of an American, the father-in-law of an American, and the grandfather of Americans. America asked for his courage once; his daughter is now asking for ours.
Nicaragua's June 2026 Photographs
On June 14, 2026, after twenty-one months of silence, Nicaraguan state media published a set of photographs it said were taken two days earlier, on June 12, inside the National Penitentiary System. The images show Mr. Fagoth, visibly aged and diminished, seated beside a woman the regime identified as his wife during what it described as a routine weekly visit. The family rejects the framing. Ms. Dina Carolina Fagoth, his daughter and a United States citizen, has not been permitted a single telephone call with her father; she has been denied entry into Nicaragua; and she has been obstructed at every step in her search for him. The weekly family visits the regime stages for its cameras are visits it denies to its actual family.
These photographs are not proof of life in any sense recognized by international standards. Genuine proof of life requires independent verification and direct access by counsel and by family; neither has occurred, despite repeated requests. What Nicaragua has released instead are images selected by his captors, on his captors' timeline, through his captors' television station. To parade a frail and gravely ill man of seventy-two before a state television audience while concealing him from the people who love him is not transparency; it is exploitation. It is, at most, a first sign that he was alive on a single day in June; it is not the accounting the Inter-American Commission ordered, and it does not discharge a single one of Nicaragua's obligations.
Two Disappeared Leaders; One Already Lost
Mr. Fagoth is not the only historic Miskito leader the Ortega-Murillo Communist system has made to vanish. Mr. Brooklyn Rivera Bryan, the founder of YATAMA and for decades the other towering figure of the Caribbean Coast, was detained in September 2023 and held in the same darkness. On May 27, 2026, the regime finally displayed him; not at a visit, but in a hospital bed, in critical condition, unable to breathe or to eat on his own. Days later, he was dead, and the regime ordered his burial on its own terms.
We set the two cases side by side because the record requires it. Two elderly Indigenous leaders, both disappeared by the same government, both hidden from their families and from the law: one of them is now in the ground. Steadman Fagoth Müller is seventy-two, gravely ill, and still concealed. The question Brooklyn Rivera's death leaves on the table is the only question that matters here, and it is a question of days, not of process.
How GLA Is Advocating in this Matter
The Global Liberty Alliance advises the family and Miskito communities Ms. Fagoth has been authorized to speak for. Our advocacy is deliberate, lawful, and disciplined, and it proceeds on several fronts, including with the U.S. government; coordination with inter-American and multilateral human rights mechanisms, including the IACHR; and with the government of Nicaragua.
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