Nicaragua: Speak Out about the Missing or Remain Silent?
The example of Rosa Ruiz, our modern-day Mother Courage highlights the fact that a clear, loud denunciation is the first step towards defeating a policy of forced disappearances.
By Silvio Prado (Confidencial)
HAVANA TIMES – The earthquake that destroyed Managua in the early morning of December 23, 1972, surprised a group of young people in the atrium of the Cathedral demanding the freedom of the imprisoned FSLN guerrillas, part of a yearly campaign for “Christmas without political prisoners.” Various accounts of this protest claim that Father Fernando Cardenal and other member of the Christian base communities were among the participants. Years later, many of these same Christians would go on to join the ranks of the urban guerrilla.
The Somoza dictatorship didn’t block that act of protest: they didn’t detain the participants or repress the actions of the imprisoned guerrilla fighters’ family members. Today, however, this type of activity would be unthinkable in Nicaragua. The brutal repression that the families of today’s missing prisoners are suffering is the best proof of this impossibility.
If we glance through the list of the people classed as disappeared – those whose whereabouts remains unknown after their arrest at the hands of the Ortega-Murillo dictatorship – we realize that anyone, at any time, could catch the eye of the repressive forces. One day, without knowing why, uniformed and plainclothes agents of the regime could arrive at your home to take you away to parts unknown. That moment marks the beginning of the suffering of not only the person who’s been taken, but also of their family. It’s the practice of forced disappearance now raised to the category of national policy, a set of State actions designed to [try and] resolve the government’s terrors.
The list of the missing includes all kinds of people: former members of the Sandinista military who fought against Somoza; political leaders and activists; members of the Liberal Party [a longtime political party in Nicaragua]; former deputies; a former FSLN councilwoman; an administrator; a doctor; a cultural promotor; an Evangelical Protestant pastor; an artist; and even a former elementary school teacher from a remote town in Chinandega, among others.
What does this social cross-section of Ortega’s repression mean? Simply that the dictatorship has become the enemy of all the people, and not the other way around – because it’s the dictatorship that sees enemies under every rock, even as most Nicaraguas, in all of their expressions, are simply trying to lead a “normal” life despite the restrictions on their freedoms.
This animosity of the dictatorship towards the population is confirmed by the explicit and inferred motives for the detentions: for proposing a national dialogue (a crime of lesa majestade); for returning to the country despite an illegal order of banishment; for complying with the medical duty to attend to the wounded; for organizing the retired veterans without swearing loyalty to the co-dictators; for resigning from public office, or the position of teacher; or for posting a comment recognizing the spiritual leadership of a Bishop, a crime of lesa imperatrix against the high priestess [Rosario Murillo, Nicaragua’s all powerful co-president and first lady].
In other words, everyone who thinks and acts on their own judgement are guilty of living on the margins of the hacienda that Nicaragua has become. Any suspicion is reason enough to end up with your whereabouts unknown, in a land where the only law is the whim of the hatchet men.
A simple graph that compares the number of people imprisoned for political reasons with those subjected to forced disappearances reveals a pattern that helps explain this perverse conduct. If we consider the detentions that have occurred since 2023, we can observe a growing tendency of increased detentions for political reasons, alongside a growing number of people who have disappeared after their police abduction. According to the statistics compiled by the Mechanism for the Recognition of Political Prisoners, as of August 30, 2025, 45% of those captured for political reasons were in the category of forced disappearance.
That’s brutal. It would be scandalous even if it involved one lone prisoner who was missing. But we’re seeing that the probability of going missing after being detained by the dictatorship’s repressive forces is nearly half, since the missing represent nearly half of the detentions.
And there’s more. The graph indicates that the gap between the prisoners and the disappeared is closing, thus constituting a pattern of behavior. Behind the data is the logic of cruelty, a method of hidden brutality. As can be seen, the dictatorship has been consolidating this modus operandi through a type of trial and error that’s progressed in three phases.
In the first, if we go back to 2018, we note that the disappearances then had two features: they were temporary and were aimed at decapitating the underground protest movements. The second phase was in 2021, with disappearances that lasted longer (around 80 – 90 days). These were to dismantle the political opposition that was preparing for the presidential elections.
The third and last phase, unleashed in 2023, has been arbitrary, apparently without logic but more merciless, because the people have been kept missing over a prolonged period of time, and the tactic has been practiced on nearly every segment of society. There are people like [indigenous political leader] Brooklyn Rivera, who has now been disappeared for over two years, and even now absolutely nothing is known about him. That is, in this third phase the conditions of the forced disappearance have hardened, including the risk of having the authorities merely return the dead bodies, as they did with Mauricio Alonso, Carlos Cardenas, and the Miskito prisoner David Medaviz Castro.
The practices illustrated in the graph have had multiple effects on the families. The regime doesn’t only penalize them by having their father, mother or child among the disappeared – it persecutes the families with equal brutality as the prisoners, using a vicarious inverse violence. They harass the family members, so that they don’t denounce the situation of their loved ones; they threaten them so they don’t organize; they force them to remain in hiding; they pressure them to leave the country.
The best example of this is Mrs. Rosa Ruiz’ first-hand story of her Calvary. Rosa Ruiz is the mother of Yerri Estrada, a Mother Courage of our times, invulnerable to despair, who has raised her voice in opposition to the fear and precautions that other family members have assumed in hopes that their missing family members will be treated better in their captivity.
It must also be said clearly: these practices of the oppressor State have shown special cruelty in the lowest possible way to the women, the searchers of every day, who drag from jail to jail seeking some word of their loved ones. As in Mexico, Columbia and other countries, the women risk being deceived by the guards who, day after day, force them to mount a pilgrimage from one prison center to another, subject them to humiliation and sexual harassment, make them strip, only to later mock them. It’s the law of derision that rules in the lawless land of the prisons run by dictatorships.
These aren’t random behaviors. It all corresponds to a deliberate policy whose overall orientations have been conceived by the most twisted minds of the tyranny and carried out by soulless beings. They seek the silence of the victims, in order to feel immune from punishment, and to enforce it, these same prisoners are only released under threat.
To remain silent or not is a matter that leaves us questioning our place between willingness and reality. Faced with a regime as inhumane as the Ortega-Murillo dictatorship, realism rhymes with omission and omission with consent. History and Rosa Ruiz show that the willingness to fight is the only alternative in the face of the tormentors.
Loud and clear denunciation is the first step towards defeating a policy of forced disappearance that has been conceived on the backs of our silence, to assure that it never, ever, occurs to us to once again take over the atriums of the Cathedrals.
First published in Spanish by Confidencial and translated and posted in English by Havana Times.