20 de April 2025
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The regime of Daniel Ortega and Rosario Murillo resorts to various strategies to build a façade of normalcy in Nicaragua. Through rigged polls, false narratives or manipulation of public discourse, the regime tries to convince the population that it is looking out for their welfare, while persecuting, imprisoning, expelling, confiscating and reforming the laws of the country to suit the regime.
In their parallel reality, Ortega and Murillo claim to enjoy an 86% approval rating for their administration and to be the most highly regarded leaders of the last 45 years, according to surveys published in their propaganda media.
Their tactics include allowing some religious celebrations while banning others, like processions, and attempting to legitimize confiscations by inaugurating supposed medical or cultural centers in stolen properties.
The official propaganda also highlights the political support of supposed “leftist solidarity groups,” ignoring the call of the international community that condemns their crimes against humanity.
CONFIDENCIAL analyzed the various actions the dictatorship is using to present a dual reality of a country they govern at will.
M&R: the pollster at the service of the dictatorship
Every year, the polling firm M&R Consultores, owned by engineer Raúl Obregón, publishes four to six national opinion polls, the results of which are amplified by the dictatorship’s propaganda media.
Between January 2018 and January 2025, the pro-government media El 19 Digital published 57 articles and interviews on the results of these polls.
M&R Consultores’ surveys are periodically disclosed and the narrative that accompanies the consultations to the population induce answers that openly favor the regime or replicate the narrative of the ruling couple.
The pollster uses biased statements without context, mainly related to the protests of 2018. The population was asked if “it does not matter that the roadblocks prevent people from going to work, prevent the transfer of merchandise and damage the economy because it is the price that must be paid to overthrow the Sandinista government”.
This statement follows the political discourse that the dictatorship has maintained about the protests and completely ignores that the barricades served to protect the population from the “caravans of death”, white Hilux vans, without license plates, with hooded men who entered the neighborhoods to shoot and kidnap. They were also a focus of resistance so that the dictatorship would listen to the demands presented in the National Dialogue, to which it was forced by social pressure and not by will as it tries to convince in its speeches.
Another of the statements was “at this moment it does not matter that people are unemployed, the important thing is to overthrow the Sandinista government”, this consultation was included in an opinion poll conducted during the last quarter of 2018.
In the M&R polls there is also a persistent interest in showing the population’s supposed support for repressive institutions such as the National Police and the Army, with supposedly more than 77% approval.
The polls even show alleged support for repressive laws such as the Special Law on Cybercrimes, the Law for the Regulation of Foreign Agents and the Law on the Rights of the People to Independence, Sovereignty and Self-Determination, and support for relations between Nicaragua and China.
They also state that more than 92% consider that fundamental rights are respected in Nicaragua, more than 82% think that Ortega is a “democratic ruler who abides by the laws of the country” and 97% affirm that there is peace in Nicaragua.
Hate speech and manipulation
In their speeches, Ortega and Murillo present themselves as “victims” of an alleged “coup d’état” in 2018. Under this narrative they try to convince the population that the repressive measures are necessary for the continuity of their government.
“It was a plan configured to sow false and sickly nationalist ideals, to create “leaders” who were ready to lead the incendiary chorus through the streets of a country that is by nature peace-loving,” describes a chronicle published in El 19 Digital, in which the dictatorship gives its version of history to victimize itself and blame the NGOs for spearheading the alleged coup attempt.
In this version, businessmen, independent media, NGOs and even the Catholic Church and its priests are singled out as those responsible for snatching peace from Nicaragua. Consequently, they justify, they have earned persecution, banishment and confiscations.
“Every day we prove that times are different, that the people who have failed Nicaragua are out of Nicaragua, by the grace of God, because they themselves have left and because the people have also decided that they do not belong to Nicaraguan families,” said Rosario Murillo, August 14, 2023.
“The people decide” is another lie of the dictatorship to justify its actions as a supposed response to the popular will. As it did with the creation of a new Political Constitution made to its measure, which is “sold” as a partial reform and an achievement for Nicaraguans.
“It is the people who have the power”; “it is a reform that responds to the interests of the people”; “it is direct democracy”, maintains the dictatorship through its propaganda media. But they hide the fact that the new Constitution strips Nicaraguans of several of their rights and leaves them even more defenseless.
Attempt to hide persecution of the Catholic Church
More than 11 760 religious activities of the Catholic Church have been banned by the Ortega-Murillo dictatorship since 2019, according to lawyer Martha Patricia Molina. However, the regime tries to hide the religious persecution by allowing some activities controlled by the mayor’s offices.
“The authorities of the commune take out in procession images of saints without blessing them and this action tends to confuse the population and the international community, because they consider that they are religious activities when the reality is that they are pagan acts”, assures Molina, in the fourth installment of his study “Nicaragua: a persecuted Church”.
The number of bannings may be up to three times higher, Molina assures, because the bannings that have been executed in the chapels of each parish are not included.
In addition, the National Police, in charge of prohibiting processions, now avoids leaving written evidence of their orders, opting instead for telephone calls or “courtesy visits” to bishops and priests. In this way, they are trying to make the population believe that it is the decision of the parish priest to hold processions only inside the churches.
Thousands of activities every weekend
The dictatorship promotes every weekend an average of 23,950 cultural, sports and recreational activities nationwide in an attempt to show normality and to keep the population “happy”, which lives under repression and with its freedoms curtailed.
Rosario Murillo, who proclaimed herself as co-president, is the one who announces in her Friday noon speeches how many activities will be carried out.
“This is joy, happiness and thanksgiving to the Heavenly Father, because we live in peace, tranquility, security and because we live as dignified human beings,” Murillo celebrated in her February 7, 2025 monologue.
In the first quarter of 2025 they have promoted 311,359 activities, according to a CONFIDENTIAL count of official announcements.
The promotion of these activities was carried out even in times of pandemic, when the rest of the world promoted social distancing, in Nicaragua, agglomerations were encouraged.
Confiscations to “restore the rights of the people”.
Forty-five days after journalist Henry Briceño was banished from Nicaragua along with his family, the dictatorship inaugurated a branch of the White Cross, as the Red Cross was renamed after being forced to leave the country, in his home.
The property was occupied by the police since November 24, 2024, when Briceño and his family were taken against their will to the Costa Rican border, where they were ordered to leave with only what they were wearing.
Briceño also lost two other properties that belonged to his children. Like him, more than a hundred Nicaraguans and NGOs have been dispossessed of their properties by orders of the dictatorship.
But to justify the illegal confiscations, the dictatorship tries to convince the population that these properties come from money laundering and are now returning to the hands of “the poor” through social programs.
“All these properties are several millions, they are in the hands of the Nicaraguan State (…) for the benefit of the poor, to invest it in all social programs, from housing, health, education, social security,” said Ortega, on May 20, 2024.
In the first quarter of 2025 there were at least 12 inaugurations of “public works” installed in properties confiscated from NGOs. These properties are supposed to provide medical care, cultural events and educational programs.
One of the new works was the Ciro Molina National Physiotherapy Center, installed in the confiscated Club Campestre Las Colinas where supposedly in its first month they provided 13,239 consultations, to reach that goal they should have given 358 consultations per day, from Monday to Sunday. However, this center operates from Monday to Friday from 8:00 a.m. to 4:00 p.m.
Since 2021, the dictatorship began to install so-called health centers, maternity homes, universities or cultural centers in some of the stolen properties, claiming a “restitution of rights”.
As of mid-2024, the Observatorio Pro Transparencia y Anticorrupción estimated that a preliminary inventory of 135 confiscated private properties exceeds US$250 million.
Mayors “purged” in silence
At least 31 mayors and five deputy mayors of 28 municipalities in Nicaragua have been dismissed, without official explanation, since January 2023, according to an analysis by CONFIDENTIAL based on its own data and others provided by the observatory Urnas Abiertas.
Among the mayors are 28 who were elected during the 2022 municipal elections and three others who were appointed to replace those who were ousted, but were soon purged by the dictatorship.
The dismissals occur after alleged corruption investigations by the Attorney General’s Office, but there are no details of any of them. Simply, one day the mayors photographed in inaugurations of projects or cultural celebrations were some and, days later, they were others, without anyone saying anything, as when in a series they replace a totally different actor and everyone acts as if nothing happened.
This was the case in the mayor’s office of Ciudad Sandino, where Reynaldo Flores Genet appeared delivering cleaning materials to the mayor’s office crews on January 23, 2024. Three days later, María Elsa Guillén was the new mayor, presented as “legendary educator, FSLN militant, (and) former councilor of the Sandinista bench”. Not a single word was said about Flores Genet.
In Moyogalpa, Rivas, mayor Xiomara Barahona Galarza and her vice-mayor, Raúl Dinarte Álvarez, were replaced by councilors María Lidieth Mena Rodríguez and Sergio Bone Mora. The defenestration was reported through independent media on September 19. Three days later, on the mayor’s Facebook page, the new authorities appeared inaugurating a ford and a stretch of drainage. The changes were never reported, and the mayor’s page was deleted days later.
Support in solidarity groups
The regime also uses international backing from leftist groups, especially from countries that have pointed out human rights violations.
This was the case during the electoral fraud of 2021, when Ortega was reelected for the fourth consecutive time, after imprisoning the opposition pre-candidates.
In the absence of observers from the Organization of American States (OAS), the European Union and the U.S. Carter Center, who were declared non gratos, 232 “electoral observers” and 600 allied journalists were invited to these polls.
The “electoral companions” were received with souvenirs, strolled around Nicaragua’s tourist sites and met Ortega at the celebration of his reelection, where he danced and took selfies with them. The guests, of course, “denied” that the elections were illegitimate and assured that it was a “calm, peaceful and democratic” process.
The groups that seek to replace the participation of official delegations, including those of diplomats and presidents at State events, seek to show an international backing that the dictatorship does not really have.
At the last meeting of the UN Human Rights Council, at which the mandate of the Group of Experts on Human Rights in Nicaragua (GHREN) was renewed, the only countries advocating in favor of the dictatorship were China and Cuba.
The Cuban representative said that “Nicaragua showed its political will and willingness to dialogue and participated in the initial phase of the Universal Periodic Review, but only received more hostility and more confrontation”.
However, the reality is that the dictatorship lied in the report it submitted for the fourth round of the Universal Periodic Review (UPR) of the United Nations (UN).
Lies are a constant used by the dictatorship to hide the human rights violations and repression it exercises in the country, of which they act as “lords and masters”, expelling, taking away nationalities, properties and imprisoning whoever they consider an enemy.
