Nicaragua: Where are the “Disappeared” Political Prisoners?
Families note: “They have them, but they deny it!”
The forced disappearances are a cruel punishment used by the Nicaraguan dictatorship. Relatives seeking information about their detained family member’s whereabouts encounter only silence or threats.
HAVANA TIMES – Victoria remembers the weight on her chest and the pain in her stomach when she learned that the police had kidnapped her son. “The suffering is terrible,” she says. [Detention] was my greatest fear for him,” The dictatorship is holding the young man under “forced disappearance,” a recurring form of punishment by the Ortega-Murillo regime.
The police abducted Victoria’s son in one of the raids carried out by the dictatorship so far in 2025. Immediately after he was taken, his mother went to inquire at the police station in her city, but they denied he was there. She then stood for hours under the sun at the El Chipote jail in Managua, only to be told he wasn’t there either.
“They won’t give me any proof that he’s alive. I know they [government officials] have him, because the whole neighborhood saw when they arrested him, but they deny it when I ask them why they have him in prison,” she laments.
No one goes near Victoria’s house. When they see her on the street or at the market, some neighbors and friends timidly approach her and ask her about her son. “People avoid contacting me because they’re afraid I’m being watched and because they have seen patrol cars near my house,” she confesses.
“I’ve continued to ask about my son and beg them to let me give him some food or pills for the migraines he suffers from, but they tell me they don’t have him and even threaten me if I don’t leave and stop bothering them,” she explains.
33 detained political prisoners in “forced disappearance”
Victoria’s anguish is echoed by many families. In Nicaragua, at least 73 people are currently detained for political reasons, of whom 33 remain in a state of “forced disappearance,” according to the August 30, 2025 report by the Mechanism for the Recognition of Political Prisoners. This organization notes that disappearance “has become a systematic practice” of the regime.
Although detentions without official notification and even confinement in clandestine prisons began at the start of the 2018 protests, the practice of denying the kidnapping of individuals has intensified since the end of 2023. The uptick in this practice is documented in the report “¿Dónde más busco?”: Vidas suspendidas, desapariciones forzadas en Nicaragua y la resistencia de quienes les buscan,” [“Where Else Do I Look?”: Suspended Lives, Enforced Disappearances in Nicaragua and the Resistance of Those Who Search”] compiled by Raza e Igualdad, the Nicaragua Nunca Más Collective, the Legal Defense Unit, IM-Defensoras, and the Autonomous Movement of Women of Nicaragua.
Now, the periods of disappearance have gone from a maximum of 90 days to indefinite durations, these five organizations warn.
Who are the “disappeared”?
The 33 political prisoners considered a state of forced disappearance are those who were abducted from their homes or other places by police agents yet whose families are “systematically” denied information about their whereabouts, forcing them to visit police stations, prisons, and hospitals without receiving any answers.
“The deliberate silence of the State prolongs the uncertainty and anguish,” states the report from the Mechanism for the Recognition of Political Prisoners.
The following is the most current list of the 33 political prisoners with whereabouts unknown – considered “disappeared”.
- Douglas Gamaliel Álvarez Morales.
- Eddie Moisés González Valdivia.
- Eveling Carolina Matus Hernández.
- Brooklyn Rivera Bryan.
- Lesbia del Socorro Gutiérrez Poveda.
- Carmen María Saénz Martínez.
- Fabiola del Carmen Tercero Castro.
- Steadman Fagot Müller.
- Víctor Boitano Coleman.
- Leo Catalino Cárcamo Herrera.
- Fabio Alberto Cáceres Larios.
- Julio Antonio Quintana Carvajal.
- Angélica Patricia Chavarría Altamirano.
- José Alejandro Hurtado Díaz.
- Álvaro Baltodano Monroy.
- Rudy Antonio Palacios Vargas.
- Armando José Bermúdez Mojica.
- Olga María Lara Rojas.
- Jessica María Palacios Vargas.
- Pedro José López Calero.
- Marcos Adony Cruz Moncada.
- Yolanda del Carmen González Escobar.
- Mario José Rodríguez Serrano.
- Luis Francisco Ortiz Calero.
- Yerri Gustavo Estrada Ruiz.
- Marvin Antonio Campos Chavarría.
- María José Rojas Arburola.
- Carlos Ramon Brenes Sánchez.
- Salvadora del Socorro Martínez Aburto.
- Undisclosed
- Undisclosed
- Undisclosed
- Undisclosed
“They don’t want us to speak out”
The study “Dónde más busco?” (Where do I look) documents how the dictatorship uses forced disappearance as a “mechanism of punishment and social control” to affect both detainees and their families, who are “condemned to an endless search, amid official silence.”
“Each disappearance leaves lives suspended: those who are erased by the State and those outside, left to sustain life, memory, and resistance,” they emphasize.
What makes Dalilah feel most powerless is “not being able to denounce with all my words the cruelty of this dictatorship,” that has kept her sister missing since 2024.
“Many of us do not speak out publicly because we are afraid that something will happen to our family member in prison, or because we know that we too could be imprisoned,” she confesses in an interview with CONFIDENCIAL.
“It’s clear that they silence us because they don’t want us to speak out, they don’t want anyone to know the conditions in which [the prisoners] are being held (…) it’s a horrendous crime not even allowing us to know how they are,” says Dalilah.
A general pattern
Beyond the timing of the forced disappearances, the five organizations mention in the report that there is a general pattern, characterized by:
- Detentions carried out by police officers or paramilitaries who assist the police.
- Detainees then transferred to police districts and/or eventually to prisons.
- Criminal proceedings take place in the absence of trusted lawyers, with legal files that are not accessible to anyone.
The document explains that in some cases, the police or prison authorities allow the seeking families to leave personal hygiene products, medicines or food to the undisclosed prisoners. Despite this, “they won’t confirm that they’re there, nor are they allowed to see them to conclusively corroborate their whereabouts.”
“The only humanitarian action they have towards us is to allow us to leave the some things, but that doesn’t always happen. We also don’t know for sure that they delivered them [to our loved one]. The only thing left us is to have faith,” Dalilah affirms.
Women confront the government’s silence
The report denounces the impact of the concealment of prisoner whereabouts on “searchers, mostly women, who face harassment, misinformation, unsustainable economic costs, and severe emotional distress.”
“Many are mothers, daughters, or wives who bear the double responsibility of supporting their families and keeping the search alive,” they stress.
These organizations have documented “the agonizing and prolonged journey of searchers in Nicaragua, who face a system marked by impunity and official silence in the face of the forced disappearance of their loved ones.”
Some of the searchers are elderly, which exacerbates their vulnerability. “Many of them must travel more than 200 kilometers from rural or remote communities to Managua, the country’s capital, where detentions are often centralized and the main detention centers are located,” the report details.
The ordeal: from station to station
Searchers often face “cruel, inhumane, and degrading treatment” by police and prison system officials.
The first form of violence they face, notes the Dónde busco? report, is misinformation. “They’re told that their family members may be found in such and such a police station, but when they arrive at that office they receive no answer. Instead they’re referred to another station, and later to yet another.”
“It’s a cycle of endless attrition that offers neither certainty nor results. This dynamic not only constitutes psychological violence, but also has a serious impact on the overall health of relatives and their precarious economic situation, as they must allocate resources they do not have to constant traveling,” the report affirms.
The document argues that “the burden is even more devastating in households where the detained person was the main breadwinner, leading to forced impoverishment and deepening the vulnerability of families.”
Family members forced into exile
The study conducted by Raza e Igualdad [Race and Equality] and four other organizations highlights their documentation of “multiple incidents of direct harassment against those who seek information,” ranging from “threats of reprisals if they report, humiliating searches with dogs inside police stations, and body searches that include sexual touching without any justification whatsoever.”
With this, the dictatorship “also deliberately seeks to break the will of families and discourage their exercise of the right to truth.”
In many cases, faced with “threats and a climate of terror,” the relatives of disappeared persons are forced to leave Nicaragua.
Rosa Ruiz has been searching for her son, Yerri Estrada, for over 20 days. Estrada, a young doctor from Leon, was arrested on August 13, 2025, as he was returning from a medical brigade to the Japan-Nicaragua Friendship Hospital in Granada.
“They admitted they have him, but they won’t tell us where he is, much less allow us to see him or give him food or his essential belongings,” says Rosa.
On that same day, August 13, Luis Francisco Ortiz was arrested in Masaya, while having lunch at his home. His whereabouts have also not been disclosed.
“It’s been tough. They’re killing us psychologically, but they won’t defeat us, because there’s a God who knows that what they’re doing is unjust,” his father, Francisco Ortiz, denounced to Confidencial.
Both of these detainees’ parents went into exile. From there, they’re raising their voices demanding to know if their children are still alive and what condition they’re in.
The report also speaks of the difficulties faced by the families in exile: “in addition to the economic hardship resulting from their exile, they experience deep anxiety and frustration due to the lack of knowledge about the physical condition and health of their relatives.”
“They have recurring thoughts that their loved one might be ill, hospitalized, or even dead. In most cases, they must rely on relatives who still reside in Nicaragua to try to obtain information, even though those who remain live with the constant fear that their search efforts could provoke reprisals from the authorities,” the report reiterates.
The traumas of searching
The study cites an analysis of the forensic area of the Unidad de Defensa Juridica [Legal Defense Unit]. This study determined that the lack of access to information about their loved ones – their whereabouts and legal situation – provokes different mental health disturbances for the family members, including:
- Anxiety
- Depression
- Insomnia
- Hypervigilance
- Post-traumatic stress
- Pathological or prolonged grief with persistent sadness
- Inability to resume daily life activities
- Feelings of survivor’s guilt or guilt for having moments of happiness
- Isolation and social stigmatization
On the other side: censorship within the jail
While the families are denied information, the prisoners are also punished to enforce internal censorship. The five organizations have documented the regime’s “practice of threatening to deny family visits” so that prisoners don’t disclose anything that happens inside the detention centers.
Prisoners also “face death threats against their relatives” or are repeatedly told phrases designed to induce depression: “your family has already abandoned you;” “your wife is surely already with someone else;” “you’re never going to get out of here;” “you’re going to die here;” or “your children are going to forget you.”
In some cases, they also withhold the supplies family members send them “as a method of punishment and torture.”
The death of two “disappeared” persons
The study mentions that the Working Group on Enforced or Involuntary Disappearances (WGEID) and the Committee on Enforced Disappearances have warned that “there is no acceptable time limit, for an enforced disappearance, no matter how short. Every minute counts when a person is placed outside the protection of the law.”
They note with alarm the death of Mauricio Alonso, thirty-eight days after he was abducted from his home in Jinotepe. His family, who were never informed of the reasons for his detention, were called to receive his body on August 25, 2025. They were then obligated to bury him quickly and without ceremony, under police watch.
Four days later, on August 29, the regime also released the body of attorney Carlos Cardenas Zepeda, who had been abducted fifteen days before during a raid of those considered dissidents.
The dictatorship has remained silent about both cases. The five organizations collaborating in the report had already warned: “when the disappearance is prolonged over days or weeks, ever moment in which the person remains outside the shelter of the law exponentially increases their risk of torture and cruel treatment,” or, as in these cases, the loss of life.
The collaborative study concludes that “every forced disappearance represents an affront to human dignity, an imprescriptible crime against humanity, and a grave and continued violation of fundamental rights.”
First published in Spanish by Confidencial and translated and posted in English by Havana Times.