Nicaragua: 28 Newly Abducted Remain in Forced Disappearance
including entire families
Most were involved in the 2018 protests and are linked to Colegio San José. The regime has not revealed their whereabouts.
HAVANA TIMES – At least 28 people, including five entire families, remain “forcibly disappeared” following the latest repressive raid by the Ortega and Murillo regime, which took place between August 12 and 18, 2025, according to Monitoreo Azul y Blanco.
The arrests were concentrated in Carazo, but also occurred in Masaya, Granada and Managua, through coordinated police operations, explained Claudia Pineda, director of the Asociación Unidad de Defensa Jurídica, Registro y Memoria and spokesperson for Monitoreo Azul y Blanco (Blue and White Monitoring), in an interview with the program Esta Semana which airs on CONFIDENCIAL’s YouTube channel, due to the television censorship imposed by the dictatorship.
Pineda highlighted that this latest raid is particularly concerning because entire families were arrested. “At least five families have been detained—relatives, whether couples, parents and children, or siblings,” she detailed.
She warned that this practice leaves other minors without care and destroys the families’ economic stability by detaining both providers.
Persecuted and imprisoned since 2018
Pineda assured that most of those detained are people who participated in the April 2018 protests and were linked to the activities developed around the San Jose School, in Jinotepe, Carazo (pre-school, primary and secondary education). This was an educational center of the Josephine sisters, closed and confiscated on August 12, 2025 by orders of the dictatorship, and a week later reopened under the name “Colegio Bismarck Martinez”, after the Sandinista sympathizer that the dictatorship claims was murdered in 2018.
“This school served as a medical care center and refuge. It was also near a roadblock known as the San Jose roadblock,” Pineda explained.
“Some of them had even faced previous accusations by the State. In general, they were people who actively participated in the activities and protests of 2018,” she added.
Among those re-arrested is retired Colonel Carlos Brenes, originally from Masaya, who was detained—now along with his wife, Salvadora Martinez—at his property located between the municipalities of Masatepe and Jinotepe. Brenes had already been a political prisoner of the dictatorship from August 2018 to June 2019.
Systematic forced disappearance
The practice of forced disappearance is systematic under the Nicaraguan dictatorship, as it hides the location and conditions of detainees. Regarding this round up, Pineda explained that, although the names of the 28 detainees are known, their families do not know their whereabouts.
“There has been no confirmation of where they were transferred,” he denounced. Families searching for their relatives are sent from one detention center to another in Managua without obtaining accurate information about their location.
“They are really being shuffled from one place to another. That is, they go to District III prison, to La Modelo, to El Chipote, and so far no confirmation has been given of where they actually are,” Pineda detailed.
The National Police and the Prosecutor’s Office maintain complete silence about the arrests, issuing no statements or providing information in the judicial system. Some detainees have already spent more than 15 days in this irregular situation.
The August raids add to the 20 arrests recorded in July—linked to the Evangelical Church—bringing the total political detentions in just two months to 48. Previously, in the last Monitoreo Azul y Blanco report published in July 2025, 54 political prisoners had been confirmed.
She clarified that “this does not mean these are the only political prisoners,” since some families choose not to report the cases. “The regime often releases some of these people. So we do not want to give final figures because we hope—and the families’ hope is also our hope—that they will be freed before being formally charged with any crime.”
Raids, purges, and fear in the dynastic succession
Pineda attributes this repressive escalation to two factors: the apparent deterioration of Ortega’s health and the preparation for any transition scenario.
“We are seeing a very rapid decline in Daniel Ortega’s health and a purge among those closest to him,” she explained, distinguishing between these raids against citizens and opposition members and the internal purges that have affected historic Sandinistas and former political collaborators.
She dismissed, for example, that the arrest of Brenes is related to the purge: “because the colonel had been retired for many years.”
“He was not connected to party structures, unlike Bayardo Arce, Rodolfo Castillo, and others who have been imprisoned, like Nestor Moncada Lau, who were still recently tied to party structures,” she added.
Arce, detained in late July, was one of the nine commanders of the National Directorate of the Sandinista Front in the 1980s and, after Ortega’s return to power in 2007, was appointed presidential adviser on economic affairs. Moncada Lau, meanwhile, is officially “presidential adviser on national security matters,” though his real role has been as the “custodian of El Carmen’s secrets”—the residence and office of Ortega and Murillo—and their key link to institutions such as the National Police and the Ministry of the Interior (formerly the Ministry of Governance).
According to Pineda, the strategy seeks to “ensure that in any type of transition from one co-president to the other, there is zero possibility of protest.”
House arrest: invisible repression
In addition to these detentions in southeastern Nicaragua, dozens of citizens remain under de facto house arrest, some for more than two years. This form of repression, Pineda said, has become so normalized that victims now file fewer complaints out of fear of worsening their situation.
“People in this condition come to normalize this violation of human rights and denounce it less and less,” she warned. Many of them, she added, are required to report regularly to the Police or the Prosecutor’s Office.
The Asociación Unidad de Defensa Jurídica has reported these cases to international organizations, requesting hearings before the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR) and informing the UN Group of Human Rights Experts on Nicaragua (GHREN).
“The condition of arbitrary detention, plus forced disappearance, is an extreme condition,” stressed Pineda, who described the situation as a systematic violation of human rights with repercussions that transcend the direct victims to affect entire families.
She argued that the July and August raids confirm that the Ortega-Murillo regime is maintaining its strategy of state terror, with more forced disappearances designed to render repression invisible to the international community.