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Daniel Ortega has decided to remove the last mask he had left. During Sunday’s ceremony commemorating the 47th anniversary of the Sandinista Revolution—a historic milestone that allowed Nicaragua to rid itself of the Somoza dynasty, which had subjected the country to its rule for more than 40 years—the former guerrilla leader uttered a phrase that cements his authoritarianism: “There will be no more elections here.” The declaration marks a point of no return of unprecedented gravity in the Americas.
Until now, the regime headed by Ortega together with his wife and co-president, Rosario Murillo, had resorted to a charade. It used elections as a cosmetic adornment to keep up appearances before the international community, while corrupting the process: rigging elections, imprisoning opponents—as occurred flagrantly in the 2021 presidential election—and stripping hundreds of dissidents of their political rights. The president claimed to win elections with 80% of the vote.
Ortega is now enshrining a single-party, dynastic tyranny, different even from that of his longtime ally Cuba, where the regime maintains the façade of voting to legitimize itself. Next in the line of succession are his wife, the esoteric Murillo, and his son Laureano, the designated liaison with the autocracies of Vladimir Putin in Russia and Xi Jinping in China.
The cynicism with which Ortega justifies this step, hiding behind the usual paranoia about “parties installed by the Yankees,” cannot conceal the nature of his regime: its determination to perpetuate itself through terror and dispossession. As international diplomats have pointed out, Ortega is eliminating any pretense of popular consent. The regime is defying the democratic pillars on which the inter-American system rests.
Ortega is counting on his control of the security forces, repression, and apparent economic stability—fueled in part by concessions to Chinese mining companies covering at least 10% of the country’s territory, according to some environmental organizations—to allow him to consolidate his model of dynastic domination without paying a price. He is taking advantage of the fact that the attention of the major powers and the global debate are fragmented among multiple crises.
The international community’s response should not be limited to the usual rhetoric of condemnation. Maintaining business as usual with Managua amounts to complicity in the suffocation of an entire people. Latin American democracies and the European Union must join coordinated actions combining diplomatic isolation, financial pressure on the ruling family’s corruption networks, and tougher sanctions against senior officials in the repressive apparatus.
Nicaragua’s is a human tragedy in the heart of the Americas. The regime has killed hundreds of Nicaraguans for protesting, forced tens of thousands of people into exile for raising their voices, and persecuted intellectuals and journalists, stripping them of their nationality and property, as happened to writer Sergio Ramírez, winner of the Cervantes Prize and a member of the Spanish Royal Academy, writer Gioconda Belli, and journalist Carlos Fernando Chamorro.
Accepting the establishment of a totalitarian regime not only condemns millions of Nicaraguans to exile, prison, or silence, but also sets a disastrous precedent in a region besieged by illiberal trends. Daniel Ortega has decreed the death of the vote in Nicaragua; democracies have an obligation to show him that tyranny comes at a price.
*This editorial was originally published in El País, Spain.
