Nicaragua: The Abuse of Indigenous Political Prisoners
Twelve indigenous leaders detained in Nicaragua’s “La Modelo” men’s prison and the “La Esperanza” women’s prison are suffering discriminatory and racist mistreatment, according to a recent report.
HAVANA TIMES – Indigenous political prisoners in Nicaragua suffer constant discrimination in Nicaragua’s La Modelo and La Esperanza prisons —both in the municipality of Tipitapa. Prisoners complain that authorities and guards call them ‘witches,’ and label their drinks and natural medicines “potions,” They are also prohibited from speaking their native languages, according to a study presented on August 8, 2025. These actions, the report warns, constitute a situation that “can be described as symbolic ethnocide or extermination.”
The criminalization of Nicaraguan indigenous leaders “cannot be understood as a sum of individual cases, but rather as part of an unacknowledged policy that combines structural racism, territorial dispossession, and the imposition of a model of assimilation,” concluded researchers from the Association for Legal Defense, Registration, and Memory for Nicaragua (Aududrnic) and the Center for Legal Assistance to Indigenous Peoples (CALPI).
The study identified 12 Mayangna and Miskitu indigenous people who were captured in “excessively violent” police operations. In addition, they have been victims of forced disappearances, racist mistreatment, bogus trials, and transfers to prisons located hundreds of kilometers from their territories. In addition, the prison authorities prohibit them from using their native languages and traditional cultural expressions.
The twelve indigenous political prisoners include:
- Brooklyn Rivera, former National Assembly deputy, detained September 29, 2023
- Nancy Elizabeth Henriquez, former alternate deputy, arrested October 1, 2023
- Ignacio Celso Lino, community leader and land defender, detained August 28, 2021
- Arguello Celso Lino, communal judge, detained August 28, 2021
- Donald Andres Bruno Arcangel, forest ranger, arrested September 4, 2021
- Dionisio Robins Zacarias, forest ranger arrested September 4, 2021
The mistreatment and discriminatory actions directed at the indigenous leaders being held as political prisoners deliver “a symbolic message of subordination and colonial domination,” the investigation emphasized.
These actions not only affect the Indigenous people who are prisoners, but also “erode community cohesion, fracture cultural ties, and threaten the spiritual continuity of their peoples, constructing a scenario that can be classified as symbolic ethnocide or extermination.”
What do the indigenous political prisoners represent?
The indigenous people who have been imprisoned “are people who represent the struggle to defend their ancestral way of life,” warned Claudia Pineda, director of the Legal Defense Unit. “In criminalizing the land defenders, criminalizing the defenders of the culture, the aim is to destroy their (communal) way of life and their culture. That is why it is considered ethnocide.”
Imprisoning these people prevents “the defense of that ancestral way of life; prevents indigenous peoples from enjoying their rights, using their traditional medicine, speaking their language, preserving their relationship with the land,” explained Pineda. It’s not only a matter of 12 indigenous people imprisoned for political reasons, but everything their imprisonment implies for the communities.
“Among those detained are forest rangers, whose job is precisely to defend the communities’ relationship with the land. What does their imprisonment mean for the other forest rangers? It means that other indigenous leaders will stop doing that job, for fear of being imprisoned. That’s what the Ortega-Murillo regime intends,” she declared.
The Legal Defense Unit director added that the regime “seeks to destroy the cultural identity of indigenous communities through imprisonment, torture, and forced assimilation, which consists of denying their own language, their own forms of health care, and their own education in order to assume a non-indigenous identity.”
Accused of “witchcraft”
The investigation accused the National Penitentiary System of operating under “a punitive Western, hegemonic logic that systematically obscures and dismantles ancestral values, knowledge, and practices.”
This prison model, which is alien to the indigenous worldview, imposes “a regime of forced assimilation that is incompatible with the principle of equality and non-discrimination and, in general, with international human rights law.”
The report highlight that, in La Modelo prison, prison authorities have disparagingly labeled indigenous inmates as “sorcerers” for attempting to preserve cultural practices through the consumption of traditional foods such as banana wabul and buñia drink, as well as the use of natural medicines such as basil, flor de san diego, or culantro, sometimes stigmatized as “potions.” These items, essential for cultural and spiritual survival, are frequently confiscated.
Another form of discrimination against indigenous political prisoners is the restriction on communicating in their native language, even during family visits, on the grounds of “security” or “disciplinary control.” This practice, they say, has a devastating impact, because it violates not only the right to communicate freely and maintain emotional ties with their families, but also the right to linguistic and cultural identity, which is especially protected in contexts of confinement.
Preventing prisoners from speaking their language with their loved ones, “transmits a symbolic message that denies their humanity or identity, which can constitute a form of cultural and psychological torture,” the document explains.
In the case of older people or those with limited command of Spanish, denying them the use of their own language amounts to “forced isolation and the loss of their only meaningful form of expression.” Furthermore, in collective terms these practices “seek to erode the intergenerational transmission of the language, weakening one of the fundamental pillars of the cultural resistance of indigenous peoples.”
Such discriminatory acts in the Nicaraguan penitentiary system impact indigenous people in a “particularly serious and disproportionate” manner, because they represent “not only physical aggression, but also a structural attack on their identity, spirituality, and traditional way of life. It’s not just the lack of basic services—which are serious violations in themselves—but a form of ongoing cultural violence that disregards their worldview and breaks their essential links with the community and the territory,” the study emphasizes.
Essentially racist torture
The investigation confirms that indigenous political prisoners have suffered tortures such as beatings with fists, AK-47s, or batons; simulated drowning by submerging their heads in a bucket of water or a river; electrocution; prolonged chaining of hands and feet; prolonged isolation; threats on their lives; as well as lack of drinking water, adequate food, adequate medical care, and sexual assault.
These forms of torture, the investigation warns, have not only an individual facet, but also a cultural and spiritual dimension. For example, the report points out, by beating someone for speaking an indigenous language, the message is that the culture, identity and history of the indigenous people is something forbidden or inferior. “It’s an attempt at symbolic annihilation, where the intent is to eradicate the native language as the core of resistance and world vision. It’s an act of racism,” the final document maintains.
Similarly, the use of a river in their own territory for a simulated drowning has “a brutal symbolic dimension,” the investigation states. With that act, the regime’s authorities have transformed a sacred ancestral place into an instrument of torture, in an inversion of its cultural significance. “It’s an act of violent territorial colonization, which seeks to fracture the community’s spiritual relationship to nature,” the authors of the report emphasize.
Along these same lines, the document notes, prolonged periods in chains during public presentations not only causes physical and psychological suffering, but also reinforces the image of the indigenous leaders as dangerous criminals, thus stripping them of dignity and social worth. It all becomes a message directed at the community: “This is what can happen to you if you resist.”
The political imprisonment has been devastating for the indigenous people as a whole, since it has disarticulated their leadership, silenced their land and environmental defenders, and instilled terror in the communities. This in turn has led to the weakened defense of their territories, and the advance of the cultural destruction through internal colonization.
A form of “cultural violence”
The study emphasizes that the arrests of the indigenous leaders were carried out with disproportionate violence. In some cases, the detentions involved around 60 state agents. This type of act, the study leaders affirm, generates terror, paralyzes the community organization, and transmits a message criminalizing the indigenous identity.
Further, confining the indigenous leaders in prisons nearly 200 miles from their communities implies a direct violation of their individual rights, especially their right to psychological integrity, due to the suffering, stress, and loss of identity this additional punishment generates.
“Seclusion hundreds of miles from their ancestral territories isn’t a simple penal measure, but a contemporary form of forced banishment, a practice historically utilized in order to subject and uproot the members of the original peoples,” the report underlines.
“This policy,” it continues, “is inserted within a colonial logic, since it breaks the vital relationship that unites indigenous peoples to their land and communities, as the basis of their collective identity. In other words, it’s also a form of cultural violence.”
In other matters, the report indicates that the political trials of the imprisoned indigenous leaders took place without penal guarantees, a situation that, in addition to harming them, delegitimized the indigenous struggle, eroded their leadership, and perpetuated the historic exclusion of the original peoples, impeding their full exercise of self-determination, access to intercultural justice and comprehensive reparation.
The Nicaraguan judicial system, “has become one more mechanism for internal legal colonization,” the document reads. “None of the indigenous people charged were given interpreters, despite the Constitutional guarantees, thus affecting their capacity for an adequate defense,” the report states.
Also, all of the indigenous prisoners were removed from their normal court and judge, to be processed and imprisoned nearly 200 miles from their homes and their territory, a situation that not only impacted their ability to defend themselves, but also “constituted in itself an additional punishment due to the suffering entailed in being kept distant from their family, community and culture,” the document concludes.
First published in Spanish by Confidencial and translated and posted in English by Havana Times.