Confiscation – Economic Vengeance of Nicaragua’s Repressors
HAVANA TIMES – Since 2018, the Nicaraguan government has carried out a series of confiscations of assets, properties, furnishings, pensions, bank accounts and labor rights, all aimed against anyone in the opposition, or perceived as such. Their policy is to leave those who oppose them in ruins.
A case in point is the family of business owners Martha Rosa Jara and Henry Briceño. One November night in 2024, the police arrived at their home in the municipality of San Rafael del Sur, 63 kilometers from Managua. Several patrol vehicles and dozens of armed police from special operations teams surrounded the residence and forced their way in.
They took the four members of the family – including a boy of 11 – to the police station in the capital, where they informed them they’d been accused of “treason,” due to things that Henry Briceño had posted on social media. Briceño, 75, is a retired journalist who managed two family businesses. He often criticized Daneil Ortega and wife Rosario Murillo – Nicaragua’s presidential duo – on Facebook.
That same night, the family was turned over to a military patrol on Nicaragua’s southern border and forced to cross into Costa Rica via a rural path with no border offices, under threat of “spraying them with bullets” if they attempted to return to the country.
Their house, plus a small hotel, a nursery and a commercial locale that had been in the family for decades, were all confiscated, along with vehicles, jewels, bank accounts and all household utensils. “We couldn’t even take our identity documents – they expelled us from the country with nothing but the clothes on our backs,” Briceño told IPS in San Jose, Costa Rica, where he has had to seek residency.
“We lost all our savings, our assets, the results of so many years of efforts and sacrifice. I’m too old to initiate a lawsuit and wait for the dictatorship to fall, in order to reclaim what belongs to us,” he stated. He estimates his total losses at a million US dollars.
Following their banishment, the properties were repainted in different colors, and the regime divided them up among several public institutions. Now, their home is a police barracks; the plant nursery is an educational center; the hotel an ambulance station; and the other commercial site has become a municipal office.
Martha Rosa Jara, Briceño’s wife, is trying to negotiate a waiver with a [private] Nicaraguan bank, to absolve her from the payment of loans taken in her name. The financial institutions don’t receive any formal notification when Nicaraguan citizens are confiscated and banished, so they continue demanding payment for their accumulated debts.
Countless others have fallen victim to similar seizure of their assets: journalists, company owners, priests, businesspeople, farmers, members of civil society, and environmental activists all figure on the long list of those confiscated.
“They’re stripped us of everything: my house, which had also been my parents’ home, was occupied by the police and now functions as a youth center. My children were left without a roof, and my elderly parents without their only shelter,” Angela, a Nicaraguan journalist now exiled in the United States, tells us. IPS agreed not to reveal her identity for security reasons.
“Angela” was notified in 2022 to appear at the closest police station for “an interview.” A politically active acquaintance warned her it was a trap to jail her, because they suspected she was collaborating with exiled media outlets that offered independent news of Nicaragua. Given this, she fled north the night before the appointment and crossed over into Honduras via unmarked paths.
Her home, in an urban area of Jinotega department, 143 kilometers from Managua, was the focus of a police assault in the early morning of July 25, 2022. Her family was evicted, and since that time, the house has been empty, although under surveillance from militant members of the governing FSLN (Sandinista National Liberation Party).
This practice of confiscations has been denounced as a systematic violation of human rights. The UN Group of Human Rights Experts on Nicaragua has termed it a deliberate government policy with devastating impacts on the victims and their families. According to a report this Group presented in April 2025 before the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva, over 5,000 non-profit organizations in Nicaragua have been shuttered since 2018, and their properties transferred to the government through irregular legal proceedings.
The same has occurred with the assets of over 452 people who have been banished, denationalized, and forced into exile, and many others when Nicaraguan authorities blocked them from returning to Nicaragua after they had left the country for temporary reasons such as vacations, medical appointments, or work. It’s a systematic pattern, coordinated by the Office of the Presidency, and involving the participation of different government institutions, the UN Group of Experts indicated.
“This report reveals an architecture of state repression that uses confiscations as economic punishment and an instrument of social control,” declared Jan-Michael Simon, chair of the UN Group of Experts. In his judgement, the mechanism doesn’t only affect individuals, but also entire social networks and organizations that assist vulnerable populations, such as orphanages, soup kitchens, old age homes, clinics, schools, universities, farms, and training centers used by the Catholic Church.
An investigation published in May 2024 by the Pro-transparency and Anticorruption Observatory of the civic organization Hagamos Democracia estimated at that time that the losses from 135 intervened properties were worth over 250 million dollars.
In May of that same year, Ortega, speaking in a public plaza, justified the expropriations as properties that “were legally transferred to the people, for the benefit of the people.”
“Properties derived from criminal cases of drug trafficking, money laundering, or crimes against citizen security and sovereignty have been transferred to the State and legally recovered for the Nicaraguan people,” Ortega declared.
Angela, the journalist, stated that the authorities never notified her of any court proceedings. “They simply came, routed out my parents, my children, and put locks on the door. There was no court case or any judicial order. Nothing,” she assured.
Her two children, a 15-year-old girl and a nine-year-old boy, were left in the care of their 74-and-68-year-old grandparents, stripped of everything.
Gonzalo Carrion, attorney with the Nicaragua Nunca Mas Human Rights Collective, said the pattern of confiscations is part of a strategy of unprecedented social annihilation in the country. “It’s not only a matter of taking away properties, but of erasing all legal traces of these people. They’re stripped of their nationality, their pensions, civic records. It’s a modern form of permanent exile,” he explained to IPS.
In fact, on May 16, the co-presidential duo announced their plan to reform two articles of the Constitution, in order to automatically cancel Nicaraguan nationality for those who become citizens of another country. When the measure is ratified by the docile Sandinista legislators, in the requisite two legislative sessions, it will become a new instrument for broadening the confiscations .
The UN report identified 54 high level Sandinista officials – including judges, prosecutors, property registry officials and the Attorney General’s Office – as those directly responsible for the confiscations and other abuses considered crimes against humanity, The experts documented that the decisions are coordinated in the office of the Presidency, headed by Rosario Murillo, and the confiscated properties have been transferred not only to State institutions, but also to certain individuals tied to the governing party. In many cases, the Nicaraguan Social Security Institute has been the beneficiary of such assets as the pensions and savings of dissenters.
In many cases, the homes or other buildings have been converted into public offices, community centers or branches of the National Police. This reutilization of assets appropriated without either compensation or any legal process, violates fundamental principles of international law, affirmed the Group of Experts’ report.
The UN Group of Experts pointed out that these confiscations not only affect public figures, but also entire families. Older adults have been stripped of their pensions, and many have been left with no means of covering their basic needs.
Carrion added that the people affected currently have no legal avenues for appealing. “In Nicaragua, there aren’t any independent institutions. The property registries, the courtrooms, and the District Attorney’s offices, all respond to a political chain of command. The rule of law has been abducted,” he asserted.
The situation has generated a new wave of poverty in exile. Many victims have had to begin all over again from nothing in the countries that took them in, with no possibility of recovering what they lost in Nicaragua.
Angela, who now works as a waitress in a Miami restaurant, confided: “It doesn’t grieve me to have left, it hurts what they’ve taken away from me. Not because of its economic value, but for what it signifies: they left my children and my parents out in the street.”
First published in Spanish by IPS and translated and posted in English by Havana Times.