“Information Blackout” Cloaks Nicaragua in Silence
HAVANA TIMES – Of the 15 departments and two autonomous regions that make up Nicaragua, only Managua, the capital, still has a few independent media outlets functioning. Even these offer limited programming, marked by self-censorship and fear of government surveillance.
This situation was recently highlighted by Gerall Chavez, president of Periodistas y Comunicadores Independientes de Nicaragua (PCIN), an organization that defends freedom of the press and expression. The group is based in San Jose, Costa Rica, where most Nicaraguan journalists in exile reside.
The group describes the phenomenon as an “information blackout,” because the few private media outlets remaining only cover local news, crime, sports, culture, and “curious” international news.
“There’s no one to report on the systematic violation of human rights, the dictatorship’s abuses of power, corruption, and allegations of disappearances, torture, and deaths of political prisoners,” Chavez told IPS from the Costa Rican capital.
The PCIN’s 2024 annual report, presented in January 2025, spoke of an “information blackout” in 12 of the country’s 15 departments, but the latest update, issued at the start of the last quarter of 2025, suggests that only Managua still has some journalists working in local media, with a limited agenda.
How did this happen? A report by the non-governmental Foundation for Freedom of Expression and Democracy (Fled), issued from Costa Rica earlier this month, calls it “the result of systematic dismantling.”
According to the Fled report, the Nicaraguan regime combines multiple repressive strategies to silence journalists: harassment, intimidation, confiscations, imprisonment, forced exile, and other forms of persecution.
“In this context, information deserts emerge as one of the most visible and alarming faces of the structural censorship that prevails in Nicaragua,” Guillermo Medrano, Fled’s communications consultant, tells IPS.
The latest tactic used by agents of the Sandinista regime, according to Fled’s report for the July-September quarter, is to visit retired, pensioned or unemployed journalists, and try to force them to act as “spies” on exiled journalists, threatening them with jail if they refuse.
The damage to the media since the beginning of the political crisis in 2018 has been devastating, the Foundation asserts. A total of 56 media outlets have been shut down and confiscated, and 289 journalists have been exiled or banished, some of them condemned to statelessness by having their civil, academic, and professional records erased from Nicaragua’s registry systems.
At least 24 journalists have been detained and tried since 2018, according to reports from human rights organizations such as the Nicaragua Nunca Más Human Rights Collective. Four of them remain in detention and are considered forcibly disappeared, including Fabiola Tercero, who was arrested in July 2024 and whose fate and whereabouts has been unknown since then.
The massive silencing began in 2018, when thousands of Nicaraguans rebelled against the government of Daniel Ortega, in power since 2007. The protests began over Social Security reforms that reduced workers’ benefits, but quickly mushroomed into large anti-government demonstrations. The authorities quelled the protests with security and paramilitary groups and abundant use of lethal force. There were 355 deaths, more than 2,000 injured, and thousands of people detained, tortured and exiled according to data from the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR).
Laws were subsequently established to legalize the arbitrary detentions and to criminalize protest and dissent as “treason”. At least 300 other journalists who worked in different local and national media abandoned the profession, given the closure of the media outlets and the threat of persecution and reprisals.
According to Medrano, the few independent journalists who still remain in the country – either collaborating discreetly with a media outlet, unemployed, or retired from the profession – have been forced as a survival measure to share the regime’s messages of “normality” on their social media accounts or adopt phrases typical of official discourse.
Those who continue reporting from exile don’t sign their news articles but use bylines such as “Editor,” “Contributor,” and “Journalist.”
The issue of the information blackout and the harassment of journalists has been the object of international concern. On September 23, the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) published an overview of the situation in Nicaragua between June 15, 2024, and June 15, 2025.
The document concludes that this Central American country of 6.7 million inhabitants is undergoing an alarming erosion of the rule of law, characterized by the weakening of fundamental guarantees, the closure of democratic spaces, and the use of the state apparatus to repress dissent.
The report notes that the Special Law on Cybercrimes arbitrarily criminalizes content that may cause “alarm” or “distress,” terms that, according to OHCHR, are incompatible with international standards and facilitate the persecution of critical voices. During the period analyzed, at least 17 people were prosecuted for social media posts critical of the government.
The report further observes that Nicaragua fell to 172nd place out of 180 in the World Press Freedom Index, reflecting a rapid deterioration in conditions for the practice of journalism.
It also denounces that repression has extended to independent media in exile, citing as an example that in March 2025, Nicaragua’s National University of Engineering arbitrarily blocked five media outlets from using the “com.ni” domain, thus restricting their online visibility.
According to the Foundation for Freedom of Expression and Democracy, the number of journalists who have left the profession continues to rise as a result of an increasingly hostile environment for the independent press. “Repression, stigmatization, and constant risk have made journalism a highly dangerous profession, forcing many professionals to prioritize their own safety and that of their families and completely disassociate themselves from their work,” the organization reports.
Many of the former journalists who remain in the country have opted for silence, anonymity, or total retirement, even before reaching retirement age. Some continue to be harassed, even though they’re now elderly and have been away from active journalism for years.
The intolerance of free journalism in Nicaragua was spotlighted in May, when UNESCO awarded its Guillermo Cano World Press Freedom Prize to the Nicaraguan newspaper La Prensa. Founded in 1926, the newspaper maintains a critical stance toward Daniel Ortega and his wife and co-president Rosario Murillo. The co-dictators ordered its closure and confiscation in 2021. Its staff left the country a year later and have since continued to report via the internet from exile in Costa Rica, the United States, Mexico, Spain, and Germany.
Following the announcement of the award, the dictatorship issued a curt statement announcing its withdrawal from UNESCO, which it accused of serving imperialism. The Nicaraguan government called the award given to the country’s oldest newspaper “shameful,” calling the paper the “diabolical spawn of Nicaraguan anti-patriotism.”
A journalist from that media outlet, based in San José, told IPS that this episode was the best example of the untenable situation of the media in Nicaragua.
“Nicaragua had a portfolio of projects worth more than $30 million with UNESCO, but it prefers to lose money and aid rather than tolerate recognition being given to a newspaper. That gives you an idea of the level of contempt for journalism,” he said.
Another journalist from the Nicaraguan Caribbean, who fled to Costa Rica in May, said she resisted as long as she could, collaborating from Nicaragua with media outlets in exile, but the cost of that effort was damaging her mental health.
“Living every day in fear of being discovered is exhausting. Every police officer, every patrol car that passes by, you think they’re coming for you. That’s no life,” she told IPS, asking not to reveal her identity because she is struggling to get her children out of the country.
First published in Spanish by IPS and translated and posted in English by Havana Times.