More than 100,000 people have fled persecution in Nicaragua, with numbers set to rise, two years after the country was plunged into social and economic crisis, the UN’s refugee agency warned.

Even after a violent crackdown against nationwide anti-government protests in April 2018 had subsided, Nicaraguan students, human rights defenders, journalists and farmers have continued to seek asylum abroad at the rate of 4,000 a month.

“With no resolution to the internal crisis in sight, UNHCR, the UN refugee agency, expects these numbers to grow,” said Shabia Mantoo, UNHCR spokesperson, in Geneva on Tuesday.

Brutal repression by the national police and armed pro-government groups in 2018, left 300 people dead, 2,000 injured and hundreds of people arbitrarily detained and prosecuted.

The Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IAHCR) documented 777 arrests. Many of those detained were subjected to torture, electric shocks, asphyxiation and rape in prison.

Costa Rica, Nicaragua’s neighbour, has received the majority of refugees and asylum-seekers, taking in two-thirds, or 77,000 people. A further 8,000 have fled to Panama and 9,000 have gone to Europe while Mexico is sheltering 3,600 Nicaraguans. In all, 103,600 are seeking refuge globally.

The UN has helped Costa Rica to streamline its protocols to speed up refugee status and protection for Nicaraguans, Mantoo said, as well as to allow 6,000 of the most vulnerable people to access health services.

Last week, the Committee to Protect Journalists called for an investigation into attacks on reporters covering the funeral of Ernesto Cardenal, a poet and priest, in Managua, Nicaragua’s capital. Local news outlets reported that the attackers wore red and black bandanas, the colours of president Daniel Ortega’s Sandinista ruling party.

Cardenal had once supported the Sandinista revolution before distancing himself from it and becoming one of Ortega’s most public critics.

Ivan Briscoe, the Latin American director of the International Crisis Group, an NGO aimed at resolving conflict, said levels of violence from the state and paramilitary police in Nicaragua has declined since the uprising in April 2018. However, the level of exodus from Nicaragua to Costa Rica “has not been seen at that speed or level” since the war, he said.

“What we are seeing is a quiet stifling of opposition,” said Briscoe. “We have seen a steady decline in the number of political prisoners, there are something like 60 political prisoners left, compared to hundreds last year. But most of them are under house arrest, which means their cases are still active and if the government wanted to crack down on them, they could.”

Nicaraguan citizens living in Costa Rica shout slogans during a protest against the Nicaraguan government inJanuary 2019. Photograph: Ezequiel Becerra/AFP via Getty Images

The UN human rights council has condemned abuses and has urged Ortega’s administration to resume co-operation with human rights bodies and negotiations with the opposition.

In November last year, police arrested 16 anti-government protesters, accusing them of carrying out terrorists attacks, amid a protest by mothers on hunger strike in a church in the city of Masaya.

Thirteen of those arrested were reported to be social leaders, trying to bring water to the mothers. The hunger strikers, demanding freedom for their children who they believe to be political prisoners, had locked themselves inside the church, in a protest seen as emblematic of similar demonstrations across the country.

The Sandinista party gained a 79% majority in Congress in 2016, enabling Ortega to fast track institutional changes that gave the president control over the army and police, allowed him to legislate by decree and to run for re-election indefinitely.











