AA
Share
On September 29, 2023, officials of the Nicaraguan National Police broke into Brooklyn Rivera’s home in Bilwi, a city on the country’s North Caribbean Coast. Without presenting the family with either a warrant or statement of formal charges, and with no explanation whatsoever, they took him away. Since that day, Brooklyn – a historic leader of the Miskito indigenous people, founder of the YATAMA political party, and indispensable point of reference in the struggle for indigenous autonomy in Nicaragua – has been locked up in complete secrecy, epitomizing the cruelty of a regime that has made silence and impunity it most effective weapons.
More than two years have now passed. For fourteen of those months, Daniel Ortega and Rosario Murillo went so far as to deny that they were holding him. It was only during the UN Universal Periodic Review in November 2024, under pressure from delegations from Brazil, Norway, Canada, and other countries, that the regime acknowledged the indigenous leader’s detention for the first time. They accused him using the regime’s usual rhetoric: of treason, conspiracy, and undermining national integrity—charges as vague as they are revealing. The typical language of power when it cannot justify the unjustifiable.
There’s no political mystery here: Brooklyn Rivera represents everything the Ortega-Murillo regime fears and despises.
He represents the Miskito people who have never yielded; a region that has insisted on its right to self-governance; a voice that for decades has resisted the logic of subordination and patronage. Nicaragua’s Caribbean Coast has a long and painful history of fighting for its autonomy, and Rivera has been one of its most visible faces. Detaining him was not an impulsive act: it was a strategic decision to symbolically decapitate a resistance that the central government has failed to subdue by other means.
The international response has been unequivocal, and today it is growing louder. Amnesty International declared Rivera a prisoner of conscience and demanded his immediate and unconditional release. The Inter-Parliamentary Union, meeting at its 149th Assembly in October 2024, heard the heart-wrenching testimony of Tininiska Rivera, Brooklyn’s daughter, who implored Parliamentary representatives from all over the world to demand proof of life for her missing father.
The IPU Executive Board responded by convening a formal fact-finding mission. The UN special mechanisms and the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights have also been called upon, even though Nicaragua has systematically barred international organizations from entering its territory.
But condemnations and resolutions, on their own, do not free anyone. The jailers are Ortega and Murillo, and they must provide proof of life for Brooklyn. We celebrate the March 21st release of Nancy Elizabeth Henriquez, [indigenous leader and former YATAMA deputy, imprisoned since October 2023], but the Nicaraguan rulers still hold Stedman Fagoth and Brooklyn in their prisons.
What makes this case urgent—beyond the principles, which were already sufficient—is that recent reports indicate that Brooklyn Rivera’s health is deteriorating at an alarming rate. His life is at risk. A man who dedicated decades to building bridges between his people and the State, to defending rights that the Nicaraguan Constitution promised but never guaranteed, could die in a cell whose existence the regime took over a year to admit.
In the face of this, silence is not neutrality, it is complicity. This writer feels strongly that demanding Brooklyn’s unconditional release is a moral, coastal, and patriotic duty.
The voices that can still be heard—in international forums, in the region’s parliaments, in the independent media—have a specific responsibility: to keep the name of Brooklyn Rivera alive, because when a regime buries its prisoners in anonymity, or tries to humiliate them by displaying them in their prisons, what it seeks is not only to punish them, but to warn everyone else, their families, and their communities. Let no one move. Let no one speak. Let no one remember.
We must not let them succeed.
The unconditional release of Brooklyn Rivera is not just a demand for justice for a leader and his people. It is proof that the international community is still capable of making its values resonate when it comes to defending the most vulnerable, those who resist far from the cameras and the big headlines. Silence is also a choice. And we can still choose to speak out, to write.
