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On May 24, 2025, co-dictator Daniel Ortega reappeared at a party event broadcast nationally on radio and television, after being absent from public life for 25 days. Just five days earlier, without offering any explanation, Ortega also canceled the annual ceremony commemorating the birth of General Sandino—an event he had presided over without fail for 45 years.
His absence triggered a torrent of speculation about the deterioration of his health, and heightened fears over the consummation of the dynastic succession of co-dictator Rosario Murillo—something that, in reality, has already been underway since 2021. A succession tied to the tightening of the police state and the irrational persecution of citizens, and to the rise of selective purges within the FSLN party, the Government, the Police, and the Army, aimed at installing her loyalists throughout the chain of command and control.
The caudillo’s absence generated a wave of uncertainty among his own supporters, but at the same time, what Ortega said upon his return reminded the country of one thing with profound clarity: the demand for justice remains the cornerstone of the change Nicaragua needs for a democratic transition.
Of course, Ortega did not speak of justice, but rather delivered a delirious defense of impunity, making it clear to Nicaraguans and the international community that without justice in a democratic transition in Nicaragua, the structures of his dictatorship cannot be eradicated at the root and there can never be democracy, development and prosperity.
For more than an hour, Ortega railed against the civic protest that erupted in April 2018, repeating the same hateful rhetoric that he and Murillo have made official over the past seven years. He launched a virulent attack on the hundreds of thousands of citizens who took to the streets to demand justice, freedom, and free elections. He insulted and mocked all his victims: the university students, the farmers, the bishops of the Catholic Church, the mothers of the murdered and persecuted, and the private-sector businessmen who were his allies until the 2018 uprising.
As a seasoned disciple of Goebbels and his contemporaries, Ortega once again repeated the lie that the self-organized protests of 2018 were the result of an international conspiracy aimed at delivering an alleged coup d’état to his government. But in the reinvention of that lie, he was forced to admit authorship of his crimes, revealing that in June 2018, he ordered his irregular army of police and paramilitaries to carry out the so-called “Operation Clean-Up.” Just as, in April 2018, it was Rosario Murillo, through Fidel Moreno, who gave the fatal order: “Vamos con todo” (“We’re going all in”)—to unleash the massacre.
What Ortega did not mention is that in 2018, his government invited and allowed three international human rights organizations to enter the country: the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights of the OAS (IACHR), the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR), and the Interdisciplinary Group of Independent Experts (GIEI). However, none of these independent bodies—neither the IACHR, nor the OHCHR, nor the GIEI—found any indication in their investigations that there had been an attempted coup d’état against the government in Nicaragua. On the contrary, their reports documented state repression and the excessive use of force by police and paramilitaries against the population, more than 350 murders that were concealed by the regime, thousands of arbitrary detentions, and hundreds of cases of torture. They warned that the perpetrators of these crimes should be investigated by the justice system, as they may constitute crimes against humanity.
As the official narrative of an alleged coup d’état collapsed, the three international human rights organizations were expelled from Nicaragua by the government in December 2018 and were never allowed to return. But in March 2022, the United Nations Human Rights Council took a momentous step by establishing a Group of Experts on Human Rights on Nicaragua (GHREN) to continue investigating human rights violations and abuses committed in the country since April 2018.
Between March 2023 and April 2025, GHREN has released ten reports detailing the regime’s systematic violation of human rights. The UN experts have documented how, in 2021, Ortega and Murillo imprisoned all of the country’s political and civic leaders, including the seven opposition presidential aspiring candidates, and eliminated political competition in the elections. They also outlined how, over the following three years, the regime exterminated democratic civil society, independent media, associations, universities, religious leaders of the Catholic Church, and business associations, imposing in Nicaragua a police state more akin to that of North Korea than to the dictatorships of Cuba and Venezuela.
In its latest report from April 2025, GHREN singled out Daniel Ortega, Rosario Murillo, and more than 50 high-ranking civilian and military officials— members of the chain of command of the repression— as responsible for crimes against humanity, who must be brought to justice. The report also outlined a path to justice that includes Universal Jurisdiction, the International Court of Justice in The Hague, and eventually, the International Criminal Court.
In each of his rare public appearances, Daniel Ortega always returns to July 19, 2018, the day he first invented the story of the alleged coup attempt, and remains anchored in the past in a desperate effort to justify his crimes. Meanwhile, despite the repression and police state, Nicaraguan society continues to move forward in its pursuit of a democratic transition with justice.
After having turned the country into a large prison, where not even his closest followers are safe from the persecution unleashed by Murillo, Ortega claims that he has managed to constitute a new national alliance after the 2018 crisis. But in reality, neither he nor Murillo can offer the country a future because, like the regime’s political-military leadership, they are tied to widely documented crimes against humanity. Meanwhile, Nicaragua’s future, one of democracy and freedom from dictatorship, can only be built on justice without impunity.
The roadmap for change toward a democratic transition imposes a formidable challenge, which can be summarized in three inseparable conditions: a) More public information to overcome censorship and denounce the public corruption of the family dictatorship; b) Unity in the action of all citizens and organizations that want democratic change, including public servants, civil and military, to carry out small and large actions; and c) A minimum program of democratic transition with the commitment to placing the demand for justice front and center to support deep, meaningful change.
Daniel Ortega is and will continue to be an absent dictator, stepping away from governing for periods of up to 50 days as has been his custom, until he makes his next reappearance. But the national solution must begin now, without waiting for the uncertainty of the dynastic succession and the new internal purges that Rosario Murillo already has planned.
