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General Commissioner Zhukov Serrano Pérez, deputy director general and head of Police Investigation and Intelligence, has been removed from his post in recent weeks and will soon be sent to a diplomatic position as a “police attaché” in a country allied with the dictatorship. Both decisions were ordered by “co-president” Rosario Murillo, sources linked to the National Police confirmed to CONFIDENCIAL.
According to the sources, Zhukov Serrano’s removal stems from “a decision by co-president Rosario Murillo due to complaints against him.”
The former police deputy chief “is not imprisoned,” the sources said, and it is still unknown which country Murillo has chosen to send him to as a police attaché. “All that is known is that it is an allied country, possibly Russia,” they added.
Serrano’s exit has not been abrupt, as in recent months he has been excluded from the main table at official regime events, which he previously shared with Murillo and Ortega.
Although Serrano’s fall has not been officially announced, “co-presidents” Murillo and Daniel Ortega have already made moves and promoted General Commissioner Fernando Javier Ocón to deputy director of the Police, according to a Presidential Decree published in the Official Gazette La Gaceta on Thursday, January 22, 2026.
Fernando Ocón previously served as “co-head” of the Police Directorate of Economic Investigations. In September 2025, he was promoted to the rank of general commissioner.
The rapid rise of Zhukov Serrano
Zhukov Serrano was promoted to deputy director general of the Police on November 23, 2022, replacing General Commissioner Adolfo Joel Marenco Corea, who had been one of Murillo and Ortega’s most loyal officials.
The intelligence chief was one of the three most powerful commissioners within the National Police. The other two are First Commissioner Francisco Díaz, head of the National Police and a relative by marriage of the presidential couple; and Police co-director Victoriano Ruiz, appointed in 2025.
Serrano’s rise within the police leadership was swift. In 2014 he held the rank of senior commissioner, and by 2019 he had already become a general commissioner, by the will of Murillo and Ortega.
Zhukov Serrano has known experience in the field of intelligence and counterintelligence, with an emphasis on “vetting and surveillance.” Public records indicate that he was already directing the police intelligence area in 2018, when the Police’s loyalty to the dictatorship was sealed with blood, as they repressed — shoulder to shoulder with paramilitary groups — the citizen protests of the April Rebellion, which left more than 350 Nicaraguans killed and thousands wounded.
The police deputy chief is one of the 54 senior Nicaraguan officials identified as responsible for serious human rights violations and crimes against humanity in Nicaragua, in a report by the United Nations Group of Experts on Human Rights on Nicaragua (GHREN), published on April 3, 2025, in Geneva, Switzerland.
Experts point to Zhukov Serrano as one of those responsible for “identifying persons to be expelled” through political surveillance.
