Nicaraguan Public Employees Forced to Be Paramilitary
to instill fear in the population
Government employees reveal how they were trained to form part of the Ortega-Murillo paramilitary. “They made us wear hoods to intimidate,” they denounced.
HAVANA TIMES – “I only know how to hold a marker and write on a whiteboard. As a teacher, I don’t know if learning to shoot an AK-47 rifle will be useful to me,” Rigoberto* recalls telling his wife days after he held a weapon for the first time. “But if they want to teach us, I can’t complain and I have to obey,” he concluded, ending the conversation.
Rigoberto can still feel the nerves ricocheting through his whole body when he shot a rifle. He was nervous, he had never imagined doing anything like that. But this teacher from the southeastern region of Nicaragua was obligated to spend a week receiving police training in a camp far from the city, in order to become part of the so-called “volunteer police,” an armed body established by the dictatorship of Daniel Ortega and Rosario Murillo.
Rigoberto confesses that he participated in those trainings without knowing exactly what they were for. Later, given the type of exercises, what they were told, and after spending a week in that training camp with police, it didn’t take him long to figure out what they were.
“During all those days, what they told us is that we should be prepared to go out onto the streets and defend the government from the “Coup plotters” as they constantly call anyone opposed to them,” Rigoberto commented. “They obligated us to train as voluntary police to intimidate the population and, at the same time, make sure we would remain submissive to them,” he lamented.
Hit the ground, now!!
At 1:00 a.m. on the first night in the training camp, Rigoberto heard an alarm that scared him. Everyone poured out, and the officials in charge began to instruct them about “being alert all the time.”
Together with other teachers, he was sent to “do guard duty” in the open field where there was little shelter from the chill.
The next morning, he had to wake up early, bathe, and do morning exercises. One of those exercises was to crawl through the mud. “Hit the ground nowww!!” the plump police official who led them screamed.
“Just looking at his paunch, I knew that if that man had actually exercised at some time, it was many years ago,” Rigoberto remembers thinking, while the mud splashed in his face.
Even though the exercises weren’t that hard, and the food was the worst part for him, he says that many of his colleagues suffered during the training.
A brigade for repression
Between January 15 and February 26, 2025, the Ortega-Murillo regime quintupled the size of its main repressive arm in Nicaragua, by adding over 76,000 “volunteers” to the ranks of the National Police. “Volunteer police” is the name the regime has given to the repressive forces known as paramilitaries, first employed in mid-2018 to repress the population during the protests. During that period, the combined actions of the police and paramilitary left at least 355 killed.
According to an analysis of official data carried out by CONFIDENCIAL, this increase – which all-powerful First Lady and Vice President Rosario Murillo described as a new “army” – has created the largest body of police in the history of the country. In total, 76 887 “volunteer police officers” and 7,924 new police officers were incorporated through swearing-in ceremonies carried out in 20 municipalities of the country.
During several occasions in 2018, Ortega justified the actions of the paramilitaries, who fired mercilessly against civilians in different municipalities of the country, by arguing that they were “volunteer police officers.” Originally, the concept of Volunteer Police had been created within the National Police, to involve the civilian population in the fight against crime.
Although the existence of the paramilitaries has been at the margins of the law for several years, the group was supposedly given legal status in January 2025, thanks to the unilateral and authoritarian constitutional changes imposed by the dictatorship. The public swearing-in ceremonies of these supposed “volunteer police” is a way to intimidate the people, according to public security experts, who spoke to CONFIDENCIAL on condition of anonymity.
“They want to instill terror”
Between November and December of 2024, some 50 public functionaries from a city in the south of Nicaragua abandoned their desks to spend over a week in an unusual training exercise, held on a vacant patch of land far away from the city.
The tasks they had to perform during those days included physical exercises, learning to assemble and disassemble an AK-47 rifle, drag across the ground, and do night guard duty.
Sebastian* who works at the Nicaraguan Social Security Institute was one of those who spent the week in that improvised camp. He states that many of the office workers refused to go, alleging that “they had pending work.” These employees were forced to participate on weekends.
“It’s a harsh training. Some fainted, because there were some pretty elderly people, women. Only some, a very few, who claimed to have chronic diseases were spared,” he recalled.
In addition to participating in the swearing-in ceremony in his department, Sebastian was forced to participate in the Managua swearing-in activity. “It’s all a circus to instill terror,” he asserted.
“The Managua activity had to be supplemented with people from several departments because behind that enormous number of supposed volunteer police are people forced to participate, and not even that way could they generate the numbers they wanted. Those statistics are all inflated,” Sebastian believes.
“We don’t know what we’ll be used for”
A few days ago, Sebastian and other workers at the Social Security office were advised they’d have 15 more days of training. “By now, many are giving excuses not to go. In my case, I don’t have any problem going, because I have to safeguard my job and I don’t want to be viewed badly,” he said.
“It’s a reality that no one wants to be a paramilitary. They obligated us to buy the clothes. The hoods have been reused at all the oath-taking ceremonies, but no one wants the population to view them badly like they do those hooded tormenters,” Sebastian affirmed.
Sebastian has been a public employee for over ten years and knows first-hand “the humiliation and surveillance” the government workers are subjected to. He’s convinced that “almost no one is willing to grab a weapon to defend the dictatorship.”
“The decision to subject us to this training is rooted first in the dictatorial couple’s paranoid urge to be ready to face an armed attack from the opposition, something I really believe is impossible. Second, they want us to demonstrate our loyalty to them in the face of any eventuality,” he explained.
Nonetheless, Sebastion admits that at no time have they been told what their functions would be. “We don’t know anything; we don’t know what we’ll be doing, because no tasks have been assigned to us for now, except serving as a force for intimidation when they need us,” he indicated.
“Being hooded is contemptible”
“People in a lot of towns knew the paramilitary members, because they were their neighbors,” affirmed Diego* a worker in the Nicaraguan Court System. “And the people despise them, but they also fear them. For that reason, I believe, they decided to keep them hooded, so they could continue making people afraid and being associated with the repression.”
Diego compares this new hooded body with the hooded agents within the police, who are charged with highly dangerous missions such as the fight against drug traffickers. “They [the regime] call us warriors of peace, but really the only thing they want is for us to give that image of terror,” he insisted.
“To me, it’s contemptible to be hooded, because they make us feel like it’s a job done while hiding, when the only thing they want is to sell the idea that they have an armed body willing to kill for them,” he pointed out.
This public employee stated that even though not everyone dares to openly criticize the trainings and swearing-in as ‘volunteer police’, “It’s clear that we all feel ashamed to be one.”
“You see that there were people who avoided being photographed or recorded, for fear of being recognized. Many of them never removed their hoods, and only a few stick out their chests to brag about being part of the paramilitary,” he recognized.
Within the ranks of those who were officially sworn in as “volunteer police” there are people who served as paramilitary during the 2018 protests. However, the majority are “people like me, who didn’t even know how to load a weapon,” stated this public employee.
In contrast with those who participated in the Nicaraguan regime’s so-called “Operation Clean-up,” armed with war-caliber weapons, Diego sees the newly invested “volunteer police as “an unarmed body of intimidation.”
“We’re not people who are going to arrest a criminal during a street robbery; we’re not people who will back up police operations. Not even we ourselves,” he affirmed, “know what we are, or what we’ll be doing.”
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Note: All names have been changed for security reasons.
First published in Spanish by Confidencial and translated and posted in English by Havana Times.