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In Nicaragua, everything changed on April 18, 2018.
The national uprising that erupted without warning in April 2018, demanding an end to the dictatorship, and the brutal response of state repression and political persecution marked a turning point in the country’s history.
The strained relationship that Daniel Ortega’s regime had maintained with the independent press for over a decade was also altered forever. With the imposition of the police state that eliminated all freedoms,came the imprisonment of dozens of journalists, the confiscation of CONFIDENCIAL, 100% Noticias, and La Prensa, the closure of more than 50 media outlets, and the criminalization of press freedom and freedom of expression, causing the exile of more than 180 journalists.
Even under the authoritarian drift of a dictatorship, never in my more than four decades as a journalist had I ever contemplated the possibility of going into exile. But in these last seven years, I have been forced to go into exile twice in Costa Rica. The first time was on January 1, 2019, after the police raid on the editorial office of CONFIDENCIAL in late 2018. That exile lasted 11 months, and I returned to the country on November 25, 2019. My second exile began on June 15, 2021, during the police crackdown in which the regime imprisoned all the opposition aspiring presidential candidates along with dozens of political and civic leaders to cancel the elections. This exile has now lasted more than four years. In both cases, the trigger was an extreme situation of threats against my personal integrity, which pushed me to preserve my freedom in order to continue doing journalism; the difference is that the second exile ceased to be an emergency situation and became a permanent condition, not only for me as director of CONFIDENCIAL, but for all journalists of my newsroom and other media, who in the last three years were also forced to go into exile to avoid imprisonment.
Journalism under a decade of dictatorship
During the first decade of the Ortega-Murillo family dictatorship, from 2007 to 2017, the regime waged a campaign of harassment and intimidation aimed at silencing the independent press. Long before the rise of Donald Trump in the United States or Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil, Daniel Ortega had already labeled the press as “the enemy” and dismissed journalists as “children of Goebbels.” In August 2007, following Esta Semana and CONFIDENCIAL’s exposé “Extortion in Tola“, the first public corruption case of the state-party-family regime—I was targeted in a smear campaign broadcast on the official TV channels. Every day, they aired segments featuring my photo under a “Wanted” sign, accusing me of being a “drug trafficker,” a “geophage,” and responsible for “crimes against peasants.” A year later, the Ministry of the Interior and the Prosecutor’s Office launched a money laundering investigation against the Center for Communication Research (CINCO), the NGO I chaired, which culminated in a police raid on CINCO’s offices in October 2008. However, under the still-functioning, though fragile, rule of law that then existed in Nicaragua, a judge admitted four months later that there was no evidence to convict us of money laundering—because we had used European Union taxpayer funds to carry out a project promoting women’s rights and opposing the criminalization of therapeutic abortion.
The harassment continued through First Lady Rosario Murillo’s so-called “uncontaminated information” strategy, which included blocking independent media from accessing public information, monopolizing government advertising to punish critical outlets and finance the ruling family’s growing private media empire, criminalizing dissent and freedom of expression, and using the military’s political intelligence unit to spy on CONFIDENCIAL—even attempting to recruit our journalists, webmaster, and administrative staff.
As journalists, we faced these blatant violations of press freedom as “occupational hazards” under a dictatorship that controlled every branch of government. At the time, Ortega’s authoritarian rule enjoyed popular support thanks to his clientelist social programs, and his power was further cemented through an alliance with big business—an arrangement that granted both sides legitimacy and business opportunities at the cost of democracy and transparency. In those gray years, of much solitude in our editorial office, we investigated and exposed corruption, election fraud, Ortega’s unconstitutional reelection, human rights abuses, the diversion of millions in Venezuelan oil funds into the private accounts of the Ortega-Murillo family, the “Chinese fairytale” of the interoceanic canal that mortgaged national sovereignty, and the environmental destruction of the protected Bosawas reserve. CONFIDENCIAL presented solid evidence of public corruption and even documented criminal acts at the highest levels of power. But in a centralized system that had dismantled the rule of law, these investigations could not bring about change or influence public policy—until the entire “model” collapsed with the April 2018 uprising.
The April 2018 Uprising and the Attack on the Press
With the outbreak of the civic insurrection on April 18, 2018, the regime lost control of the streets and public spaces, and for the first time faced the challenge of a formidable opposition that shook its grip on political power. For 100 days, through massive marches in the streets; barricades and roadblocks in neighborhoods, highways, and universities; business strikes, and a National Dialogue, the self-organized movement pushed for a civic solution to the national crisis, demanding early elections. The dictatorship, in turn, responded with police and paramilitary repression and the mass imprisonment of protest participants—placing journalists and media outlets on the front lines of its attacks.
When the regime saw its power threatened by the civic uprising, what had once been a tenuous tolerance for critical media turned into an all-out war to annihilate independent journalism. In April 2018, journalist Ángel Gahona was assassinated in Bluefields while livestreaming a protest; paramilitary forces attacked Radio Darío in León; independent TV channels were censored; a wave of physical assaults and threats targeted reporters; and customs authorities began blocking the import of newsprint and other supplies needed by newspapers.
In July 2018, when the civic protest had already been crushed by repression, the regime passed the Terrorism Financing Law, criminalizing everything from foreign donations to local church collections. The law allowed authorities to shut down businesses and associations arbitrarily, labeling them as “enemies of national security.” With the advice of a multidisciplinary team of the best lawyers in the country, we designed a legal defense strategy, preparing ourselves to face an eventual accusation against CONFIDENCIAL. But the blow came by force in the early morning of December 14, 2018, when the Police raided the editorial office of CONFIDENCIAL, without a warrant. They ransacked all our equipment, computers and TV cameras, and stole our institutional and personal documentation. The next day, we went to file a complaint at Plaza del Sol, the central offices of the National Police, where riot police physically expelled us. At the Public Prosecutor’s Office, our robbery complaint against the police was met with indifference and never processed—just like the appeals for protection we later submitted to the Supreme Court.
With our newsroom occupied by armed police and no legal recourse available, we never stopped publishing. Not for a single day. We moved online and continued reporting, driven by the conviction that CONFIDENCIAL’s journalism was never defined by a physical newsroom, but by the commitment of its journalists to report the truth at any cost, without submitting to censorship. A week later came the final blow in the regime’s wave of repression: the police raid on the cable news channel 100% Noticias, where journalists Miguel Mora and Lucía Pineda Ubau were arrested while broadcasting live. The next day, they were brought before regime-controlled courts and charged with “incitement to hatred” and “conspiracy to commit terrorism.” On that strange Christmas of 2018, when I was torn between fear and uncertainty, a source I deeply trusted—who had gained fortuitous access to information from the police leadership—alerted me that the order to imprison me had already been given. “It could be carried out tomorrow, or next week,” they told me, “and then they’ll invent the charges during the judicial process.”
Still clinging to the hope of continuing to report from within Nicaragua, it took me over 72 hours to come to terms with the impossible choice before me: either go to prison and become a silenced journalist, or go into exile and remain a free journalist able to give voice to the victims of political persecution. It was an agonizing decision—one I was only able to make thanks to the courage and support of my wife and children. Overnight, we packed a backpack and, with the help of an anonymous network of collaborators, my wife and I managed to leave Managua, slipping past police checkpoints and crossing the border into Costa Rica through unmarked paths. In those final days of December 2018, five other CONFIDENCIAL journalists decided to leave the country by their own means, based on the individual risk analysis carried out in each case, but most of our reporters and editors remained in Nicaragua, working from a makeshift location, defying the permanent threat of the police state.
The first exile in Costa Rica: Journalism in Emergency
During the emergency of my first exile, I was welcomed in San José by the Nicaraguan community, the people and government of Costa Rica, and above all, by the extraordinary solidarity of Telenoticias, Channel 7, which allowed me to continue directing CONFIDENCIAL remotely and to produce Es Esta Semana andEsta Noche from Teletica’s studios. When censorship was imposed against Canal 12 in Nicaragua, we called on our television audience to migrate to CONFIDENCIAL’S YouTube channel, which today, six years later, has more than 524,000 subscribers.
From exile in Costa Rica, I founded a new association to relaunch a media outlet that had been outlawed and criminalized by the dictatorship. I continued reporting with my eyes and ears fixed on Nicaragua 24/7, with the sole priority of returning to the country as soon as the minimum freedoms were restored that would allow me to do journalism without being imprisoned.
As a result of the second National Dialogue, held between the government and the Civic Alliance for Justice and Democracy from February to April 2019, the regime committed to releasing all political prisoners and restoring constitutional rights. It only partially fulfilled the first promise and passed a self-amnesty law to shield its supporters responsible for the repression’s crimes. Under that law, more than 300 political prisoners were released, including several journalist colleagues, but the police state remained intact, and the regime refused to discuss or negotiate electoral reforms that would make free elections possible in 2021.
A few months after the prisoners were freed, a small group of journalists, human rights defenders, and political activists decided to take the risk of returning to Nicaragua. On November 25, 2019, I resumed the demand in Managua for the return of CONFIDENCIAL’s newsroom, which remained occupied by the police. In the meantime, we set up a new office and makeshift television studio in a commercial building, where the CONFIDENCIAL team came back together—until March 2020, when the COVID-19 pandemic forced us to retreat and work from home.
Reporting on Nicaragua Under Pandemic and Police State
The COVID-19 pandemic taught us how to work remotely and put the best practices of journalism to the test, in order to overcome the triple blockade of the police state, censorship, and the government’s denial of the public health crisis. According to the Ministry of Health, only 179 people died from COVID-19 in Nicaragua—an outcome that would have been a global feat. But based on the observation of “express burials,” testimonies from victims’ relatives and independent doctors in hospitals, and public health experts’ projections based on underreported official data, CONFIDENCIAL estimated that Nicaragua had one of the highest excess mortality rates in the world. While tens of thousands of people were dying—among them hundreds of top regime officials who had blindly believed the official lie, set to the rhythm of cumbia, that COVID-19 was an “imported virus”—the dictatorship was preparing to shut down the last chance for political change through the November 7, 2021 elections.
Between October 2020 and February 2021, the National Assembly controlled by the Sandinista Front approved the trident of repressive laws: the Special Law on Cybercrimes, the Law on Foreign Agents, and the Law on Sovereignty (which which defines “treason” as a criminal offense). These laws would later be applied a posteriori and used to justify the imprisonment of political prisoners. But the spearhead of the repression remained the police state: the ban on the right to assemble and protest, and an ever-tightening police blockade. Between September 2020 and June 2021, the only entrance to my house, located in Intermezzo del Bosque, was guarded by a police checkpoint 24 hours a day, while the main leaders of the civic uprising and aspiring presidential candidates were immobilized under a de facto house arrest.
In December 2020, the dictatorship made the illegal confiscation of CONFIDENCIAL official, declaring the newsroom property of the Ministry of Health (MINSA). In a crude attempt to whitewash its crime against press freedom, the Health Minister held a high-profile event to inaugurate a “Maternity Home” for pregnant women in our newsroom, an initiative that was eventually abandoned. On May 20, 2021, the police raided CONFIDENCIAL’s new newsroom for the second time. Once again, they stole all of our equipment, work documents, and legal and financial records, and detained our audiovisual producer, Leonel Gutiérrez (RIP), for ten hours in El Chipote prison.
With our second newsroom confiscated and under the threat of new repressive escalation, we persisted in doing journalism and prepared to cover the “primaries,” with which—despite the lack of electoral guarantees—the opposition intended to select a single candidate to run against dictator Daniel Ortega in the November 2021 elections. In the following three weeks, a sweeping police crackdown was unleashed, ending with the arrest of all seven opposition presidential aspirants—Cristiana Chamorro, Arturo Cruz, Juan Sebastián Chamorro, Félix Maradiaga, Medardo Mairena, Miguel Mora, and Noel Vidaurre—as well as more than 40 other political and civic leaders, including university students, farmers, businesspeople, political activists, journalists, and human rights defenders. The goal was to criminalize the opposition and eliminate any political competition in the November 7 elections—in which all polls showed Daniel Ortega would lose to any of the opposition candidates—in order for Ortega to forcibly impose his reelection.
On June 13, 2021, the regime’s Foreign Ministry circulated a statement to the international community, written in Orwellian language, titled “In Defense of the Rule of Law.” It attempted to justify the police crackdown by claiming the government was the target of a “seditious conspiracy” financed by tens of millions of dollars from USAID, IRI, and NED, channeled through the Violeta Barrios de Chamorro Foundation, led by my sister Cristiana Chamorro—who by then was already under house arrest. The official statement alleged that the funds used to commit this “act of treason” had been transferred to me and to CONFIDENCIAL, La Prensa, and other independent media outlets, all “under investigation” by the Public Prosecutor’s Office. And, although CONFIDENCIAL had never received a single donation from that foundation—and even though its financial support to other outlets was not in any way illegal—it was clear that, without ever being summoned by the Prosecutor’s Office, I had already been condemned in advance for an alleged crime, and that I would have no right to a defense in El Chipote prison, where political prisoners were being prosecuted.
Again, faced with an imminent illegal detention, I went into exile for the second time on June 15, 2021, leaving with my wife for Costa Rica through a new route of blind spots along the border. Six days later, when I was starting to work with the support of Teletica, still incognito from San José, a unit from the Police Special Operations Directorate raided my house in Managua to imprison me. That same night, they captured sportswriter and blogger Miguel Mendoza. Two months later, the Prosecutor’s Office issued a warrant for my arrest and formally charged me with “money laundering” in the same case being used to prosecute six other political prisoners.
By August 2021, as the regime’s prisons filled with political prisoners and the prospect of change was definitively shut down with the annulment of the November 7 elections, I finally understood that my second exile had ceased to be a temporary emergency and had become a permanent situation. As other colleagues from my newsroom were also forced into exile to escape harassment from the Prosecutor’s Office and the threat of arrest, my priority was no longer an immediate return to Nicaragua, where I would be jailed upon arrival. Instead, my focus became protecting my newsroom—now dispersed between Nicaragua, Costa Rica, the United States, and other countries—and to work tirelessly to achieve the long-term sustainability of the medium, to continue doing journalism from exile and to defeat the censorship of the dictatorship.
The Second Exile: Defeating Censorship in Nicaragua
On November 7, 2021, dictator Daniel Ortega declared himself the winner of a third consecutive reelection, without political competition, and for the second time with his wife, Rosario Murillo, as vice president—consolidating a dynastic family dictatorship. Contrary to the political opening some international analysts predicted, the regime deepened its totalitarian radicalization: launching religious persecution against the Catholic Church; eliminating all spaces for civil society canceling more than 5500 associations and non-governmental organizationsincluding private universities and business associations; and initiating a campaign of transnational repression against exiles. This campaign included the revocation of Nicaraguan nationality for more than 450 citizens, including about 20 journalists, and the confiscation of their property; the de facto exile of thousands of citizens, either expelled arbitrarily or barred from reentering the country; and state-sponsored terrorism operations targeting Nicaraguan refugees in Costa Rica.
Between 2022 and 2024, arbitrary arrests and harassment of independent journalists in Nicaragua intensified. Reporters were subjected to de facto house arrest, to the point where nearly every journalist remaining in the country was forced into exile to avoid prison or censorship.
Under a totalitarian dictatorship, journalism in exile represents the last reserve of all freedoms in a country where all rights, including freedom of opinion, has been stripped away, and independent sources of information have been criminalized. The first challenge for journalists forced to report from abroad is to avoid the “bubble of exile” in order to keep telling the story of repression and resistance, while also documenting the everyday lives of people living under dictatorship that the regime intends to portray as “normal.” Consequently, our priority is the safety of our journalists, and the physical and digital security of our sources and collaborators, through secure channels of communication.
In March 2025, the dictatorship arbitrarily revoked CONFIDENCIAL’s access —along with that of other independent outlets to the .com.ni domain, managed by the National University of Engineering, launching a new phase of attacks against our website and audience. Journalism in exile, therefore, must embrace innovation in the relationship with our audiences, whose trust and credibility in our work is the only defense we have.
With a majority of our audience concentrated in Nicaragua (50%), followed by the United States (18%), Costa Rica and Central America (12%), and dozens of other countries, CONFIDENCIAL’s exiled journalism is defeating the dictatorship’s censorship. Our investigations into crimes against humanity—extrajudicial killings, torture in prisons, political persecution, denationalizations, forced exiles, and confiscations—are planting seeds of truth in international justice processes where 54 top regime officials and the Nicaraguan state are being held accountable.
CONFIDENCIAL has uncovered bribery and extortion schemes targeting citizens and the private sector; the enrichment of the Ortega-Murillo family’s private business network and its front men at the expense of the state; the human trafficking operation promoting illegal migration to the U.S. via Nicaragua; Russian espionage carried out with the complicity of the Nicaraguan military; and the “bottleneck” of 24 generals blocking career advancement within the armed forces—laying bare the pervasive public corruption propping up the regime’s repressive apparatus.
- The Ortega Murillo family’s private business network: 22 companies at the expense of the State – Confidencial
- Ortega pockets $66 million for “fining” migrants traveling to the U.S.
- Russian espionage center operates at Mokoron military base in Managua
And last but not least, the revelations about internal purges of high-ranking civilian and military officials—driven by co-dictator Rosario Murillo’s ongoing dynastic succession campaign—have become “the daily special” for an audience hungry for reliable information, including public employees who remain hostages of a decaying family dictatorship.
CONFIDENCIAL also faces the ongoing challenge of achieving financial sustainability for journalism in conditions of permanent exile. Our traditional advertisers have been criminalized, tech giants impose their rules with overwhelming advantages, and international cooperation agencies are either shutting down their programs or reducing funding based on shifting priorities. As in Russia, Iran, Afghanistan, and Myanmar—as well as in Nicaragua, Cuba, Venezuela, and El Salvador—it is imperative that international aid agencies rethink their approach and support the viability of journalism in exile.
The determination to continue doing journalism from exile comes with enormous human costs. Journalists at CONFIDENCIAL have seen their family members in Nicaragua targeted in retaliation, while in Costa Rica a climate of fear and insecurity prevails due to criminal attacks orchestrated by the regime, such as the murder of retired Major Roberto Samcam, one of the regime’s most outspoken critics, who was shot eight times in his San José home on June 19, 2025.
The exile of journalists also brings with it the pain of family separation caused by the punishment of forced banishment. Last June 14, 2025, my mother, the former president of Nicaragua Violeta Barrios de Chamorro, passed away in Costa Rica with our family exiled in several countries. For now, she rests temporarily in San José and will only be able to rest in peace in her homeland when Nicaragua is free and becomes a Republic again.
Sooner rather than later, after this prolonged exile, it will also be the role of independent journalism to tell the story of the fall of a dictatorship and the monumental task of rebuilding Nicaragua.
*Nicaraguan journalist, exiled in Costa Rica since June 2021. Stripped of his nationality by the Ortega Murillo dictatorship in February 2023. Director of www.confidencial.digital. A version of this text was originally published in the July issue of El Faro.
