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The earthquake that destroyed Managua in the early morning of December 23, 1972, surprised a group of young people in the atrium of the Cathedral demanding the freedom of the imprisoned FSLN guerrillas, part of a yearly campaign for “Christmas without political prisoners.” Various accounts of this protest claim that Father Fernando Cardenal and other member of the Christian base communities were among the participants. Years later, many of these same Christians would go on to join the ranks of the urban guerrilla. The Somoza dictatorship didn’t block that act of protest: they didn’t detain the participants or repress the actions of the imprisoned guerrilla fighters’ family members. Today, however, this type of activity would be unthinkable in Nicaragua. The brutal repression that the families of today’s missing prisoners are suffering is the best proof of this impossibility.
If we glance through the list of the people classed as disappeared – those whose whereabouts remains unknown after their arrest at the hands of the Ortega-Murillo dictatorship – we realize that anyone, at any time, could catch the eye of the repressive forces. One day, without knowing why, uniformed and plainclothes agents of the regime could arrive at your home to take you away to parts unknown. That moment marks the beginning of the suffering of not only the person who’s been taken, but also of their family. It’s the practice of forced disappearance now raised to the category of national policy, a set of State actions designed to [try and] resolve the government’s terrors.
The list of the missing includes all kinds of people: former members of the Sandinista military who fought against Somoza; political leaders and activists; members of the Liberal Party [a longtime political party in Nicaragua]; former deputies; a former FSLN councilwoman; an administrator; a doctor; a cultural promotor; an Evangelical Protestant pastor; an artist; and even a former elementary school teacher from a remote town in Chinandega, among others. What does this social cross-section of Ortega’s repression mean? Simply that the dictatorship has become the enemy of all the people, and not the other way around. It’s the dictatorship that sees enemies under every rock, even as most Nicaraguans, in all of their expressions, are simply trying to lead a “normal” life despite the restrictions on their freedoms.
This animosity of the dictatorship towards the population is confirmed by the explicit and inferred motives for the detentions: for proposing a national dialogue (a crime of lèse-majesté), for reentering the country despite an illegal exile order, for fulfilling the medical duty of treating the injured, for organizing retired military personnel without swearing loyalty to the co-dictators, for resigning from a public office or a teaching position, or for publishing a comment recognizing the spiritual leadership of a bishop (a crime of lèse-imperatrix against the high priestess, Rosario Murillo). In other words, anyone who thinks and acts independently is guilty of living on the margins of the hacienda that Nicaragua has become. Any suspicion is enough to end up in an unknown location, in a territory where the only law is the whim of the regime’s henchmen.
A simple graph that compares the number of people imprisoned for political reasons with those subjected to forced disappearances reveals a pattern that helps explain this perverse conduct. If we consider the detentions that have occurred since 2023, we can observe a growing tendency of increased detentions for political reasons, alongside a growing number of people who have disappeared after their police abduction. According to the statistics compiled by the Mechanism for the Recognition of Political Prisoners, as of August 30, 2025, 45% of those captured for political reasons were in the category of forced disappearance. That’s brutal. It would be scandalous even if it involved one lone prisoner who was missing. But we’re seeing that the probability of going missing after being detained by the dictatorship’s repressive forces is nearly half, since the missing represent nearly half of the detentions.
And there’s more. The graph indicates that the gap between the prisoners and the disappeared is closing, thus constituting a pattern of behavior. Behind the data is the logic of cruelty, a method of hidden brutality. As can be seen, the dictatorship has been consolidating this modus operandi through a type of trial and error that’s progressed in three phases. In the first, if we go back to 2018, we note that the disappearances then had two features: they were temporary and were aimed at decapitating the underground protest movements. The second phase was in 2021, with disappearances that lasted longer (around 80 – 90 days). These were to dismantle the political opposition that was preparing for the presidential elections. The third and last phase, unleashed in 2023, has been arbitrary, apparently without logic but more merciless, because the people have been kept missing over a prolonged period of time, and the tactic has been practiced on nearly every segment of society. There are people like [indigenous political leader] Brooklyn Rivera, who has now been disappeared for over two years, and even now absolutely nothing is known about him. That is, in this third phase the conditions of the forced disappearance have hardened, including the risk of having the authorities merely return the dead bodies, as they did with Mauricio Alonso, Carlos Cardenas, and the Miskito prisoner David Medaviz Castro.
The practices illustrated in the graph have profound effects on the families. The regime doesn’t just penalize them for having a father, mother, or child among the disappeared — it persecutes them with the same brutality shown to the prisoners, in a kind of reverse vicarious violence. Family members are harassed so they won’t speak out, threatened so they won’t organize, forced into hiding, and pressured to leave the country. The best example of this is the ordeal recounted firsthand by Mrs. Rosa Ruiz, mother of Yerri Estrada. She is a “Mother Courage” of our times, impervious to despair, who has raised her voice despite the fear and precautions that other family members have taken in the hope that their missing loved ones will receive better treatment in captivity.
It must be said clearly: these practices by the oppressive state have been carried out with particular cruelty against women — the daily seekers who go from prison to prison in search of news about their loved ones. As in Mexico, Colombia, and other countries, women expose themselves to the deceit of prison guards, who day after day make them travel from one facility to another, subject them to humiliation and sexual abuse, force them to undress, and then mock them. It is the law of derision that prevails in the lawless territory of prisons under dictatorships.
These aren’t random behaviors. It all corresponds to a deliberate policy whose overall orientations have been conceived by the most twisted minds of the tyranny and carried out by heartless individuals. They seek the silence of the victims to feel immune from punishment, which is why they only release prisoners under threats.
The question of whether to remain silent or speak out confronts us at the intersection of will and reality. Faced with a regime as inhuman as Ortega’s, realism rhymes with omission, and omission with consent. History and Doña Rosa Ruiz show that the will to fight is the only alternative against the executioners.
Speaking out clearly and loudly is the first step in defeating a policy of enforced disappearance, a policy built on our silence, designed to ensure we don’t even consider ever again occupying the atriums of the cathedrals.
