Nicaragua is the largest country in Central America by area and among the poorest in the hemisphere by income. Years of centralized economic management and entrenched single-family, Communist-rooted rule have left its institutions hollow and its economy underperforming relative to its neighbors and its potential.
The country's modern crisis dates to April 2018, when protests against the government were met with lethal force. The Inter-American Commission on Human Rights documented scores of deaths and tens of thousands displaced into exile; domestic and international human rights organizations have placed the figures higher. Among the dead were at least two United States citizens, killed in circumstances that were never independently investigated.
In the years since, the government of Daniel Ortega and Rosario Murillo has consolidated control over the courts, the police, the military, the electoral apparatus, and the press. In the November 2021 general election, the principal opposition candidates were detained before the vote; international observers and the Organization of American States did not recognize the result as free or fair. The Catholic Church has been targeted with a level of brutality not seen in Nicaragua since the Cold War.
Priests and bishops have been detained, expelled, or stripped of citizenship; religious processions have been banned; and Church-run charities and media have been shuttered. In 2023, the government imprisoned and then exiled Bishop Rolando Álvarez of Matagalpa after he refused to leave the country, a case that drew condemnation across the hemisphere and from the Vatican. Other religious groups have also been targeted, and, of course, students, business leaders, and Indigenous leaders have been detained, exiled, stripped of citizenship, or disappeared. For most, domestic legal recourse exists only on paper.
What happens in Nicaragua matters to the United States for reasons of both principle and interest. The country sits in a strategically significant corridor of the Americas, and a stable, lawful Nicaragua serves U.S. national and security interests directly: in legitimate trade, which remains a fraction of what a free Nicaragua could sustain; in cooperation against transnational crime, including human trafficking, narcotics, and irregular migration; and in resisting the deepening presence of external authoritarian powers on the isthmus. The case for engagement is not charity; it is the recognition that a captured state on this coast is a problem that does not stay on this coast.
The Global Liberty Alliance has done targeted legal advocacy on behalf of those the system has tried to silence. Our current work centers on the enforced disappearance of historic Miskito Indigenous leadership and the broader assault on Indigenous land, autonomy, and life on Nicaragua's Caribbean Coast.
The country's modern crisis dates to April 2018, when protests against the government were met with lethal force. The Inter-American Commission on Human Rights documented scores of deaths and tens of thousands displaced into exile; domestic and international human rights organizations have placed the figures higher. Among the dead were at least two United States citizens, killed in circumstances that were never independently investigated.
In the years since, the government of Daniel Ortega and Rosario Murillo has consolidated control over the courts, the police, the military, the electoral apparatus, and the press. In the November 2021 general election, the principal opposition candidates were detained before the vote; international observers and the Organization of American States did not recognize the result as free or fair. The Catholic Church has been targeted with a level of brutality not seen in Nicaragua since the Cold War.
Priests and bishops have been detained, expelled, or stripped of citizenship; religious processions have been banned; and Church-run charities and media have been shuttered. In 2023, the government imprisoned and then exiled Bishop Rolando Álvarez of Matagalpa after he refused to leave the country, a case that drew condemnation across the hemisphere and from the Vatican. Other religious groups have also been targeted, and, of course, students, business leaders, and Indigenous leaders have been detained, exiled, stripped of citizenship, or disappeared. For most, domestic legal recourse exists only on paper.
What happens in Nicaragua matters to the United States for reasons of both principle and interest. The country sits in a strategically significant corridor of the Americas, and a stable, lawful Nicaragua serves U.S. national and security interests directly: in legitimate trade, which remains a fraction of what a free Nicaragua could sustain; in cooperation against transnational crime, including human trafficking, narcotics, and irregular migration; and in resisting the deepening presence of external authoritarian powers on the isthmus. The case for engagement is not charity; it is the recognition that a captured state on this coast is a problem that does not stay on this coast.
The Global Liberty Alliance has done targeted legal advocacy on behalf of those the system has tried to silence. Our current work centers on the enforced disappearance of historic Miskito Indigenous leadership and the broader assault on Indigenous land, autonomy, and life on Nicaragua's Caribbean Coast.
Gla Advocacy
Miskito Nation
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GLA Nicaragua News
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Nicaraguan Dispatches (Soundcloud)
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