Five vehicles carrying some 20 police officers swerved violently through the streets of Nicaragua’s capital in October 2024 as police raced toward the home of journalist Elsbeth D’Anda.
When they arrived, officers overpowered D’Anda, handcuffed him and took him away. Other officers searched his Managua home and confiscated his computers, cellphone and his television show’s recording equipment, according to Lawyers Defending the People, a Nicaraguan human rights organization.
The officers did not have an arrest warrant for D’Anda or his property, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists, a journalism advocacy organization. They did not disclose the reason for his arrest, and over a year later, he has not been charged with a crime. But he remains behind bars in El Chipote, a detention center in Managua.
For nearly 30 years, D’Anda had been a local broadcast journalist, director and producer of the news show “La Cobertura,” which translates to “The Coverage.” The show covered local Managua, including construction projects, food supplies and energy problems. During the show, D’Anda allowed Nicaraguan citizens to call in to discuss local and national issues.
Days before his arrest, D’Anda had criticized price increases in the local market, calling on government authorities to monitor the “prices of perishables” so they “don’t skyrocket.”
The shutdown of “La Cobertura” and D’Anda’s arrest is one instance in a long series of the government’s dismantling of independent journalism in Nicaragua. During his four consecutive terms, President Daniel Ortega, once a revolutionary, has forced more than 60 news outlets, including newspapers, broadcast shows and radio stations to close.
The government “has established as its main line, the extermination of independent journalism to impose its unique narrative, a narrative of a country that advances and grows,” Espinoza Yelsin, an exiled Nicaraguan journalist, told Capital News Service in a Zoom call from Costa Rica. “The population does not believe that. The population needs to know what the country’s reality is.”
The Nicaraguan Embassy did not respond to requests for comment.
Nicaragua and Daniel Ortega
Nicaragua was ruled by the corrupt, U.S.-supported Somoza family for 44 years until the Sandinista National Liberation Front led a revolution in 1979. Ortega was one of its leaders. He was first elected president in 1984 and served until 1990. Since their unusual co-election in 2007, Ortega and his wife have since forsaken their socialist, pro-worker roots and ruled as a dictatorship ever since.
The Nicaraguan government has forcibly exiled or imprisoned hundreds of Ortega’s political opponents and journalists over the past six years, according to the 2024 Department of State’s human rights report. “The human rights situation in Nicaragua worsened during the year [of 2024],” the report said. “Significant human rights issues included credible reports of: arbitrary or unlawful killings; disappearances; torture or cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment or punishment; arbitrary arrest and detention.”
In 2018, during deadly anti-government protests, the government closed more than 10 media outlets. As a result, over 250 media workers, mostly reporters, left the country or were expelled to countries such as Costa Rica, Spain and the United States. From outside their country, many continue to report on Nicaragua, said exiled journalist Lucia Galeano, who lives in Costa Rica.
“The cost has been high,” Galeano told CNS via email. “The regime stripped me of my identity: I am an exiled journalist and stateless, with my national ID card, birth certificate, and passport confiscated and invalidated.”
Galeano is an investigative reporter and director of Expediente Público, an independent digital news organization operating from Central America, Cuba, Venezuela and other parts of the Western Hemisphere.
From abroad, she is still trying to hold the government accountable, but it is not easy, she said. “Sources demand extreme caution. The regime’s surveillance is omnipresent,” Galeano said, “and any slip could endanger those who trust me to share information from within [Nicaragua]. Journalists reporting on Nicaragua frequently find themselves reconfirming through multiple secure channels, slowing the reporting process.”
“This is the price I have paid as a woman, daughter, wife, and professional,” Galeano said. “Exile is a harsh and cruel terrain.”
Carl David Goette-Luciak, a freelance reporter in Nicaragua with dual citizenship in the United States and Austria, was granted a press pass to cover events but harassed and threatened after social media posts accused him of working with the CIA – assertions he said were false.
Soon after some posts shared his address, Goette-Luciak was abducted from his home and deported to El Salvador. The regime would not let him bring any of his belongings, only the trash-filled backpack they provided him, he told CNS.
Ortega’s accusation that Goette-Luciak was a CIA operative is “the number one attack that Ortega placed on all of his opponents,” Goette-Luciak told CNS.
After the Sandinistas took over in 1979, the U.S. government viewed Ortega’s land reforms and other efforts as steps toward communism. In response, President Ronald Reagan empowered the CIA to secretly support a group of Nicaraguan rebels known as Contras to overthrow the government. U.S operations failed and the Contra War cost tens of thousands of lives.
Goette-Luciak says memories of the deadly CIA operations in the mid-1980s still haunt Nicaraguans, who believe they are protecting their country from foreign attackers, giving many citizens a reason to become violent toward those Ortega accuses.
“Nicaraguans are pretty unified about how awful American meddling in their country in the 1980s was,” said Goette-Luciak, who now lives in New York. “The U.S directed and funded a terrorist army which killed countless people and attempted to rip down the infrastructure of the revolution.”
Ortega’s purge of journalists from the country, whether through exiling, as with Galeano, or jailing, as with D’Anda, often fails to silence journalists. “I won’t let them take away who I am: a journalist,” Galeano said. “My journalism is not just a profession; it’s an unwavering commitment to truth and justice. In a country where the voice of the people has been systematically silenced, independent journalism is the last line of defense for memory and dignity.”