29 de agosto 2024
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Under orders from the Executive, The Ministry of the Interior continued its campaign to shut down NGOs in Nicaragua on August 29th by stripping the legal status of 169 Non-Profit Organizations, mostly evangelical churches and business associations.
To justify eliminating them the State accuses any and all NGOs of having “expired” boards of directors and “failing to report” their financial statements for periods ranging from one to 30 years. They don’t mention that since 2018 when the organizations have tried to deliver their reports they are summarily rejected.
The list of organizations losing their legal status today includes religious groups —among them the Moravian Church of Nicaragua— as well as livestock associations, small producers, equestrian, retiree, and other social groups.
The order signed by the Minister of the Interior, María Amelia Coronel Kinloch, states that “with regard to the disposition of movable and immovable property” of the eliminated NGOs, “it will be the responsibility of the Office of the Attorney General to transfer these properties and assets to the name of the State of Nicaragua.”
This is the third mass sweep of NGOs carried out by the dictatorship in two weeks. On Monday, August 19, it canceled 1,500 non-profits, and three days later, it nullified another 151 associations, federations, and business chambers.
With the closure of these 169 organizations, the Ortega-Murillo regime has reached a total of 5,552 NGOs eliminated since late 2018, according to data compiled by Confidencial. The figure is over 70% of the 7,227 NGOs that existed in Nicaragua as of 2017, according to independent organizations.
Environmentalist, community, feminist, health and education, and human and legal rights NGOs were mainly the first eliminated.
This article was published in Spanish in Confidencial and translated by Havana Times. To get the most relevant news from our English coverage delivered straight to your inbox, subscribe to The Dispatch.
