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The U.S. Department of the Treasury sanctioned five senior officials who “lead the country’s main financial intelligence, communications, and military agencies,” accusing them of collaborating with the dictatorship to “repress its people.”
Those newly sanctioned are: retired Major General Denis Membreño Rivas, director of the Financial Analysis Unit (UAF), and retired Commissioner General Aldo Sáenz Ulloa, deputy director of the UAF; Major General Leonel Gutiérrez López, former head of the Army’s Military Intelligence and Counterintelligence Directorate (DICIM). According to sources linked to the Army, Gutiérrez is now in charge of the Military Hospital’s “major business operations”; Johana Flores Jiménez, head of the Ministry of Labor, accused of violating the CAFTA trade agreement; and Celia Reyes, deputy director of the Nicaraguan Institute of Telecommunications and Postal Services (Telcor), which promotes internet censorship and troll farms.
Economist Juan Sebastián Chamorro, a former political prisoner exiled in the United States and coordinator of Citizens for Freedom in exile, believes these sanctions — following the recent measures imposed on Commissioner Roberto Guevara, director of La Modelo prison — show that the United States is paying closer attention to the Ortega-Murillo dictatorship, in the context of the pressure it is exerting on the dictatorships of Venezuela and Cuba.
In an interview on the program Esta Semana, broadcast on CONFIDENCIAL’s YouTube channel due to television censorship in Nicaragua, Chamorro analyzed the systemic corruption practiced in Nicaragua for the benefit of the ruling family, the military and police high command, and their associates. He highlighted fiscal and customs extortion against private businesses, as well as the illegal confiscation of the U.S.-Canadian mining company BHMB — an investment of roughly $80 million in Palacagüina — which was transferred by the Attorney General’s Office to a “Chinese businessman.”
“The complaint by the company’s owners triggered a strange statement from the Attorney General’s Office claiming that property rights are respected in Nicaragua, when no one had even asked them about it. That confiscation will have repercussions (in the United States) for the dictatorship,” Chamorro warned.
The Treasury Department sanctioned five senior officials of the Ortega-Murillo regime, including retired General Denis Membreño, director of the Financial Analysis Unit (UAF), and its deputy director, retired Commissioner General Aldo Sáenz. What does this sanction mean, and what does the UAF have to do with corruption?
This sanction is extremely significant because, for several years, there had not been one of this nature, given the number of officials involved and their high rank. It comes in a context where developments in Venezuela have unfolded, Cuba is tense, and the United States is saying: of the “Troika” (of dictatorships), Nicaragua is also here, and we are going to deal with them. The waters are starting to stir with the UAF. The statement maintains that the regime uses what should be a technical body — meant to detect financial flows linked to drug trafficking, terrorism, and weapons of mass destruction — as a political tool of Murillo and Ortega, to freeze the accounts and assets of opponents, NGOs, and other sectors of the Nicaraguan economy they consider “suspicious.”
This sanction has a strong financial intelligence component. Then there is communications intelligence, by sanctioning the deputy director of Telcor, and military intelligence and counterintelligence, by also targeting the head of the Intelligence and Counterintelligence Directorate.
The context is important because it comes one week after sanctioning the prison chief, Director Guevara of La Modelo. Now they are moving against elements of repression through financial intelligence, Telcor and the troll farm, military intelligence, and the labor minister. It is clearly tied to the ongoing Section 301 investigation by the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative, which remains open and is sending a message that the conditions that led to the special tariffs of 10% for next year, 2027, and 15% for the following year, 2028, are still in place.
What concrete impact do these sanctions have on the government’s repressive and corrupt machinery? Usually, they sanction an official, remove them as the legal representative and authorized signatory, and replace them with someone else, which could be anyone. Will the UAF be paralyzed because these two senior officials have been sanctioned? Will the Army’s military intelligence stop operating?
No, they will not stop. These individuals are nothing more than pawns, and in corruption cases this becomes very clear. When they are no longer useful, they are simply discarded or even sent to prison.
The political context has been escalating, from the U.S. embassy’s chargé d’affaires demanding the unconditional and immediate release of political prisoners, to calling the co-dictator a “coward” a week later, then sanctioning Guevara, the warden of La Modelo prison, and now sanctioning five individuals. I see this as part of a process that is not going to soften. Based on the signs we are seeing, I would expect further actions by the Trump Administration against the dictatorship.
When you impose international sanctions on the director and deputy director of the UAF, that is a much bigger matter. The UAF is not just an internal body of the regime; it is part of a global network of financial intelligence units coordinated through the Financial Action Task Force, an international framework against terrorism and drug trafficking. Nicaragua is severely weakened by this message, because it can no longer claim to be a barrier against drug trafficking or money laundering when its own directors have been internationally accused of facilitating the opposite. The international reputational cost will be reflected in risk assessments that are already showing signs of impact. Moody’s said last week in its report on Nicaragua that it feared country risk could rise due to the risk of imminent sanctions. This UAF sanction will affect international risk ratings.
On corruption, the Attorney General’s Office has been granted sweeping powers supposedly to pursue corruption, yet Transparency International continues to rank Nicaragua as the second most corrupt country in Latin America. Will the Attorney General dare to investigate the diversion of five billion dollars in Venezuelan state cooperation funds that ended up in the hands of the Ortega-Murillo family, or the energy deals, or the business of facilitating irregular migration to the United States through Nicaragua? Can the Attorney General investigate and punish corruption?
It will act only insofar as it is politically convenient. But if the Nicaraguan Army or the Ortega-Murillo family are involved in a business, they obviously will not investigate it. The Constitution itself establishes that everything is subject to the dictates of the co-dictatorship, including the Judiciary. Filing any kind of complaint is pointless, because charges are brought by order, not independently, but by mandate. The co-dictators accuse retired General Álvaro Baltodano of corruption; they accuse the airport director of corruption. Why? Because those individuals have become undesirable for their dynastic, political, or economic plans, or simply because they are stains they want to cover up, as in the case of the airport or the Port Authority. In all of these cases, members of the family were involved. Laureano Ortega was practically Baltodano’s second-in-command, and at the airport company there was Mr. Castillo, who owned houses everywhere and was very close to Laureano Ortega and the other children of the dictatorship.
The same applies to the Port Authority. It is worth recalling that a container full of drugs that had departed from Nicaragua was detected in St. Petersburg. This corruption ultimately reaches the family, the Army, and the Police, as in the case of Venezuelan cooperation funds, the worst corruption scandal in Nicaragua’s history, involving more than five billion dollars.
Moreover, the General State Budget is managed in a completely discretionary manner. During the time of Arnoldo Alemán, which was considered the golden age of corruption, the General State Budget did not exceed, in real terms, about 800 million dollars. Today, it stands at 4.2 billion dollars. Many public works projects, highways, and so on are being carried out, and a share is going to officials, front men, figures like Tirso Celedón, and other corrupt actors who lend their names and companies to carry out these public works. The scale of this is enormous. Public funds that used to go through bidding processes, albeit with irregularities, now operate in total opacity.
Private business owners complain about tax assessments from the General Revenue Directorate and about customs valuation disputes on imports. Only a few dare to say openly that there is an organized scheme of fiscal and customs extortion. The growing revenue collected by Customs or the DGI, is it a sign of efficiency in raising funds, or is it corruption?
It is an act of blackmail and extortion. No one knows the details of a company better than the tax authority, aside from the owners themselves. I was vice minister of finance, and the General Revenue Directorate knows in minute detail a company’s assets, liabilities, sales, labor obligations, inventories, everything. With that information, it becomes easier to calculate the level of extortion in a tax assessment that extracts maximum profit from the business without bankrupting it. Sometimes they overreach, and business owners say they cannot pay the assessment and offer to hand over the company; then the assessment is reduced. They have an intelligence system they call “the Chinese,” supposedly modeled on a Chinese system, to analyze a company’s finances. When an audit arrives, they already know the inventory levels and the revenue generated. They can push a company to the brink of collapse and then lower the assessment to the amount they had originally planned to demand, extorting the business.
That is part of the technique they use. Worse still, even if the assessments were justified, which they are not, the money does not even go to the public treasury or the Single Treasury Account. There has been a mafia in place since the time of Walter Porras. A new class of pseudo-businessmen has emerged in this industry, acting as intermediaries so that the extortion, like in any mafia, is carried out in exchange for bribes paid to these operators, who work out of private homes in Managua. All of this is well known, and only a fraction reaches the treasury. We are talking about a massive operation.
The fact that it is not publicly denounced is due to fear. In private circles, in conversations with people who run large, medium, and small businesses, they say they can no longer endure it, that it is widespread, that there is constantly someone from the DGI sitting in company offices. This is not made public because they could be jailed or have their company taken away. But it exists in an institutionalized way within a corrupt system of bribes and extortion.
There is a case recently reported by La Prensa involving a U.S. investor. The company is called BHMB Mining, a mining firm that claims it was stripped of an $80 million investment in Palacagüina, and that the company was subsequently transferred to a Chinese firm. The seizure was carried out by the Attorney General’s Office itself. In other words, the very institution that is supposedly responsible for investigating corruption is carrying out acts of confiscation and corruption.
The BHMB case is going to cost the dictatorship, because several elements of corruption converge here. First, the gold sector. After extracting everything they could from the nearly depleted Albanisa funds and continuing to draw resources from the energy sector, gold has become the new source of income for the ruling family.
The United States sanctioned Nicaragua’s gold sector in 2022, and immediately companies began appearing with Nicaraguan and Chinese partners. Some of these individuals even work in El Carmen. They attempted to evade those sanctions and have built a profitable business. This takeover occurred because BHMB had possession of the facility. Government officials from the Attorney General’s Office, along with other state officials and Chinese representatives, arrived and occupied the plant. All of this has been documented: who received the concession through Eniminas, videos, evidence, property titles, even communications. The third element is that a U.S. company, together with Canadian capital, properly registered and recognized in Nicaragua, was subjected to confiscation, leaving it with no option but to protest. That protest prompted a strange statement from the Attorney General’s Office on Saturday, February 21, claiming that property rights and concession rights are respected in Nicaragua, even though no one had asked about it. Why would the Attorney General issue such an unusual explanatory letter? When it was published by La Prensa, it became clear that there was a serious international accusation, and the pieces began to fit together.
This will have repercussions. The sanctions mention the confiscation of U.S. companies, without naming them, but it does not take much to understand they are referring to this company. This comes at a time when a bill is moving through the U.S. Congress to regulate illegal mining across Latin America, primarily aimed at what is happening in Venezuela with China. However, one section of the bill notes that Nicaragua exported approximately $1.2 billion worth of gold to the United States, Canada, and Switzerland in 2025. The bill is currently heading to the House of Representatives for debate. So it would not surprise me to see some movement on that front from the Administration as well. We are already seeing activity in Congress; we will see what the Trump Administration decides.
How does the documentation of these corruption cases affect Nicaragua’s business and investment climate, especially when Transparency International repeatedly says that there are no institutions in the country capable of overseeing corruption and that the authorities merely carry out their own internal purges?
These global rankings are important because they give a general idea of where we stand in relation to the rest of the world. But the Administration is now focusing on a specific, concrete corruption case, with a name and surname: BHMB, which is also American and Canadian. That puts flesh and bones on the Transparency International report, which already paints a truly shameful picture of where the country stands. When business leaders see these accusations being made internationally, through independent media, they understand the gravity of it, even though thousands of Nicaraguans cannot speak out because they risk losing their companies, being jailed, or being forced into exile.
I should also mention the case of Puerta de la Montaña, which is referenced in last week’s sanctions. It explicitly mentions the persecution of U.S. religious groups. In this case, the regime overreached. In its drive to repress, it did not even consider that it was confiscating property from an American citizen. Added to that are U.S. citizens who have been imprisoned and tortured in Nicaraguan jails. All of this gives the Trump Administration sufficient grounds to pay attention to what is happening in Nicaragua, and clearly, they already are.
