Rosario Murillo: “They Will Never Return to Nicaragua”
“They will never be able to return to this land that does not belong to them,” warned Murillo, referring to those denationalized and exiled.
HAVANA TIMES – The only spokesperson for the Sandinista regime, Rosario Murillo, said on Tuesday, April 29, 2025, that critics and opponents of the dictatorship she leads alongside her husband, Daniel Ortega will never be allowed to return to Nicaragua.
“The condemnable, the unforgivable, will never be able to return to this land (Nicaragua) that does not belong to them,” Murillo declared through pro-government media in Managua.
Murillo, now called a “co-president” through a constitutional reform promoted by the family regime, stated that the Nicaraguans who oppose her rule are consumed by “bitterness and rage,” while “their hearts burn with frustration.”
She made her dictatorship’s policy clear in her regular monologue that she has been broadcasting daily for the last 17+ years. The prohibition on returning home applies to those officially banished and many others in forced or self-imposed exile. Many Nicaraguans abroad find it impossible to obtain or renew their passports leaving them de facto stateless.
“Those who continue to spread slander and lies, because lies are all they have left—that slander and those lies lead nowhere and serve no purpose, because our people want peace,” said Murillo.
Addressing the opposition—whose leaders are mostly in exile—Daniel Ortega’s wife added: “They couldn’t, and they won’t!”
“We are about to end April—dark and grim for them, but victorious for the brave, noble, loving, Christian, fraternal, and supportive people of this blessed Nicaragua,” Murillo went on, referring to the nationwide anti-government demonstrations that erupted in April 2018 and were violently suppressed with repression and bullets.
“Grim for them, they embarked on an adventure. They couldn’t, and they won’t! Disaster, failure, defeat—a disastrous adventure, an adventure that has earned them the contempt, hatred, and rejection of the vast majority of Nicaraguans,” she added.
Murillo noted that there will be “neither forgiveness nor forgetting” and that “they will never be forgiven, because attacking the holy blood of a people who have given so much, shamelessly slandering a people who have so strongly defended real truths—there is no forgiveness for that. No forgiveness, no forgetting.”
In April 2018, thousands of Nicaraguans took to the streets to protest controversial Social Security reforms, which—after the regime responded with force—turned into a demand for President Ortega’s resignation. Ortega, 79, has been in power since 2007. He also governed in the 1980s.
The protests left at least 355 people dead, according to the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR), although Nicaraguan organizations raise the toll to 684, while Ortega acknowledges “more than 300 deaths” and insists it was an attempted coup.
Since then, Nicaragua has been mired in political and social crisis, a police state worsened after the controversial November 2021 elections in which Ortega re-elected himself to a fifth term—his fourth consecutive—while his main rivals were imprisoned, later expelled from the country, and stripped of their nationality and political rights after being accused of being “coup plotters” and “traitors to the homeland.”
First published in Spanish by Confidencial and translated and posted in English by Havana Times.