A modern-day gold rush is poisoning ecosystems and terrorizing Indigenous and Afro-descendant communities in Nicaragua, as corporations and settlers invade autonomous territories and nature reserves, stealing land and extracting profits in a lucrative business environment enforced through state and paramilitary violence. Community members who oppose mining and displacement have been threatened, attacked, sexually assaulted, disappeared, imprisoned, exiled, tortured, and killed, according to victim testimonies, eyewitness accounts, and reports from human rights and environmental advocates. Meanwhile, the gangs of settlers responsible —often former soldiers with ties to the ruling regime of Daniel Ortega and Rosario Murillo— are rarely, if ever, held accountable.
The scenes of frontier violence and state-enforced “lawlessness” in Nicaragua’s mining regions are reminiscent of the settler-colonial mayhem of extraction that descended on California following its invasion and annexation by the United States in 1848. If not in scale, then in kind: Just as the California Gold Rush accelerated the genocide of the region’s original inhabitants, Nicaragua’s modern-day mining bonanza —spearheaded by armed groups of Spanish-speaking settlers, known as colonos, together with state-affiliated corporations and transnational mining giants— is dispossessing Indigenous communities of their ancestral lands in the name of profits and progress, and with the complicity of the state.
Since 2020, at least 73 Indigenous people have been killed in Nicaragua in cases related to land grabs and resource extraction, according to a 2024 report by the Oakland Institute, and the country is now the seventh deadliest in the world for human rights defenders (in 2022, Front Line Defenders ranked it 17th).
Meanwhile, in the aftermath of the 2018 civil rebellion against the government —a de facto dictatorship controlled by President Daniel Ortega and his wife, Vice President Rosario Murillo, and administered by an ever-shrinking circle of family relatives and party loyalists— most of the movement leaders and civil society organizations that once held the front line of defense between exploitative industries and the communities suffering their impacts have been outlawed and forced into exile or hiding, together with thousands of journalists, environmentalists, human rights defenders, and opposition activists.
Many of Nicaragua’s Indigenous peoples —namely the Miskitu and Mayangna of the North Caribbean Coast Autonomous Region— have practiced small-scale artisanal gold digging for generations. Since the privatization of mining in 1994, however, transnational corporations have come to dominate the industry. The boom in large-scale strip mining and ore processing has incentivized thousands of colonos —many of them apparently ruling Sandinista party militants— to encroach on areas off-limits to large-scale extraction, supplanting traditional miners and prospecting in nature reserves or autonomous territories in hopes of selling their spoils to the mining companies, who then process and launder the dirty gold for export, with the overwhelming majority destined for the United States. Artisanal mining thus acts as an exploratory and extractive arm of industrial mining, reaching deep into areas otherwise protected from large-scale commercial operations.
In recent years, while human rights abuses against students and journalists in Nicaragua have garnered international attention, widespread violence and dispossession endured by rural Indigenous and Afro-descendant communities —and the impunity granted to invading settlers— have gone largely ignored. According to exiled Nicaraguan biologist Amaru Ruiz, president of the environmental organization Fundación del Río, one of hundreds of NGOs outlawed by the government, Nicaragua has more mining operations in Indigenous and protected territory than any country in Central America (some of which have actually passed moratoriums on new mining concessions).
Settler Violence
The incursion of corporations and colonos into autonomous regions has proliferated violent conflicts over resources and land. Reports of massacres, settler terrorism, and forced evictions of Indigenous and Afro-descendant communities are commonplace, and impunity is the norm.
In 2021, armed colonos dressed in military clothing attacked a group of Miskitu and Mayangna artisanal miners in the area of Cerro Kiwakumbai, located in the Bosawás Biosphere Reserve and Mayangna Sauni As territory in Nicaragua’s northeast. According to surviving witnesses and relatives of the victims who spoke to the Nicaraguan outlet Confidencial, the men raped and assaulted multiple women and killed at least 11 people. Survivors denounced the attack to the National Police, who responded not by investigating the perpetrators, but by raiding the homes of some 40-50 residents, detaining and forcefully disappearing 14 Mayanga community members and guardabosques (Indigenous forest defenders), and eventually sentencing four of them to life in prison, despite eye-witness testimonies provided to the National Police, stating that none of the individuals had been present during the attack. No settlers were ever investigated, much less prosecuted, and since that massacre—neither the first nor the last in recent years—violence and extraction have continued apace.
In March of 2023, a group of approximately 60 armed settlers attacked the autonomous Mayangna village of Wilú, also in the Bosowás Reserve, killing at least six people, leaving others mutilated and paraplegic, sacrificing domestic animals, and setting fire to homes and buildings. The Inter-American Court of Human Rights extended precautionary measures to the Wilú and several other Indigenous communities in the area, but the Ortega-Murillo government has refused to comply with these and other similar measures. In November of last year, Nicaragua formalized its withdrawal from the OAS, accusing the institution of being “an instrument of the United States of America’s decadent and hegemonic government.”
Since returning to power in 2007 on a promise to “put the poor first,” the self-described socialist government of Daniel Ortega, a former Marxist-Leninist revolutionary and the leader of the Sandinista National Liberation Front (FSLN), has pursued an increasingly despotic, repressive, and pro-business agenda, incentivizing rampant capitalist extraction —in the form of mines, clearcuts, sweatshops, and slaughterhouses— by foreign and state-controlled corporations. As a result, Nicaragua’s mining sector has boomed while poisoning communities and the environment and proliferating dangerous and exploitative working conditions. Meanwhile, Nicaragua remains the second poorest country in the Western Hemisphere, with one of the highest levels of income inequality in the world, according to figures from the World Bank.
In recent years, gold has become Nicaragua’s top export commodity, surpassing coffee and beef in 2020 thanks to lax government regulations, substantial tax incentives, and what the former CEO of Canada’s Calibre Mining —the largest mining company operating in Nicaragua, with concessions covering nine percent of the country’s total land mass— described as the “rule of law and order.” Nearly 80 percent of all existing Nicaraguan mining concessions were granted since Ortega came to power, and the country is now the largest exporter of gold in Central America.
According to research by Rose J. Spalding, Professor of Political Science at DePaul University, the Ortega-Murillo government’s mining-friendly policies have included “fiscal incentives, infrastructure construction, accelerated application processing, thin regulation, legal guarantees, high-level access to officials, and the active deployment of party and security forces to keep resistance at bay.” In a recent interview, Calibre’s Senior VP of Corporate Development, Ryan King, bragged about the country’s fast-tracked permitting process for new gold mines: “From discovery or resource through to plant is taking us about 18 months, in most cases,” he said, then quickly added a caveat praising Nicaragua’s “strong mining legislation” and “very rigorous process of environmental reviews.” In the United States, by comparison, it takes an average of seven to ten years to secure the permits necessary to open a new mine, according to the National Mining Association.
The “rule of law and order” celebrated by corporations like Calibre has come at a steep cost to the people of Nicaragua, most notably since 2018, when a student-led popular uprising against the government was brutally repressed by soldiers, police, and paramilitary death squads allied with the ruling Sandinista party. In the aftermath of the violence, which left over 350 people dead, at least 2,000 injured, and thousands more arbitrarily imprisoned, disappeared, or exiled, Ortega and Murillo have further entrenched their familial dictatorship, clamping down on voices of opposition, further co-opting the judicial and legislative branches of government, purging the party-state apparatus, and criminalizing civil society and independent journalism.
In the years since the uprising, the government has outlawed public protest; shut down and seized the offices and assets of dozens of news outlets; revoked the legal standing of thousands of nonprofit organizations, including Fundación del Río and other grassroots groups working to protect communities from mining and land grabs; and stripped hundreds of students, journalists, literary figures and human rights defenders of their citizenship, denouncing them as “foreign agents” and “traitors.” Since 2018, more than 300,000 Nicaraguans have sought asylum in neighboring Costa Rica, nearly 440,000 have been apprehended or “encountered” by U.S. Customs and Border Protection (many in hopes of winning an asylum claim), and a staggering 1.5 million —roughly 22 percent of Nicaragua’s total population, according to a 2024 analysis of U.N. data— now live outside the borders of their homeland.
Foreign Benefactors
As Nicaraguans leave the country in droves, billionaire corporate investors from the U.S., Canada, China and elsewhere are rushing to take advantage of the friendly business environment.
Between 2021 and 2023, according to an analysis by the Oakland Institute based on figures from Nicaragua’s Ministry of Energy and Mines (MEM), mining concessions in the country nearly doubled, from 923,681 hectares to 1.8 million hectares. As of Mar. 1, 2024, a total of 2,778,081 hectares —that’s 10,725 square miles, or more than 20 percent of Nicaragua’s total territory— have been granted mining concessions or are awaiting approval for concession. In its bid to attract foreign development, the Ortega-Murillo regime’s investment and export promotion agency, ProNicaragua, has advertised a staggering 7.1 million hectares of land, or roughly 60 percent of the entire country, as available for potential mining concessions, and another 2.6 million, or 30 percent of the country, for logging concessions. According to figures published by the MEM, export earnings from gold mining have more than doubled in recent years, surging from $509 million in 2019 to $1.13 billion in 2023, and reported earnings for 2024 are already on track to surpass last year’s record.
Canada’s Calibre Mining is the greatest beneficiary by far, with nearly 1,130,000 hectares under concession, record production every year (Calibre’s annual gold output has more than doubled since 2020), and expected exponential growth thanks in part to the recent purchase of the Eastern Borosi open-pit complex, located in the heart of the North Caribbean Autonomous Region, just east of the Bosawás Biosphere Reserve. Over the past five years, Calibre’s share price has soared 312 percent as it continues to expand its operations in Nicaragua. Trailing far behind are Colombia’s Grupo Mineros (with 151,259 hectares) and British companies Condor Gold and Royal Road Minerals (fewer than 90,000 hectares, collectively).
After the Ortega-Murillo government severed ties with Taiwan in 2021, Chinese investment companies have become major players in Nicaragua’s mining economy as well. As of 2023, Zhong Fu Investment Group, through its Nicaraguan subsidiary Zhong Fu Development, S.A., is now the second-largest owner of gold mining concessions in the country, with nearly 232,000 hectares at their disposal, according to the MEM. This year, on April 22, World Earth Day, the Ortega-Murillo regime awarded another Chinese company, Xinxin Linze, a 25-year concession to mine 36,610 hectares of land in the municipalities of Siuna and Mulukukuu, in the North Caribbean Autonomous Region, without conducting any known environmental impact studies, Nicaraguan news outlet Confidencial reported. The Platform for Indigenous and Afro-descendent People denounced the concession, asserting that it would “deepen extractivism and create conditions for greater violence, colonization, and genocide of the peoples who inhabit the territories of the Moskitia.”
In addition, Amaru Ruiz, who spoke with El Faro English in a video call, says that Fundación del Río has identified two other Chinese companies with mining concessions in Nicaragua that do not appear in official government registers. He says that one of these subsidiaries, Santa Rita Mining, shares a concession with Calibre.
Despite the record growth in gold production and the staggering profits of the companies involved, the economic benefits for the Nicaraguan population have been minimal to non-existent, Ruiz says. Like other ostensibly leftist governments in Latin America, the Ortega-Murillo regime has pursued a development policy of “neo-extractivism,” promoting rampant exploitation of natural resources with the alleged goal of improving living conditions, funding social programs, and strengthening economic independence. In Nicaragua, which remains one of the most unequal and impoverished countries in the world, the results have been mixed, at best — especially for communities located within the ever-expanding sacrifice zones of extraction.
Companies like Calibre, echoing the discourse of the dictatorship, promote mining as a panacea for poverty. But according to Ruiz, “not a single municipality with industrial mining development [in Nicaragua] has risen out of poverty or experienced high standards of development. Not one. Not La Libertad, which has a long history of mining, not Bonanza, not Siuna, not Rosita, not Nueva Segovia — not one.”
Unprotected Areas
As part of its efforts to encourage the expansion of industrial mining, the Nicaraguan state has aggressively promoted artisanal and small-scale mining. In an effort to circumvent U.S. sanctions against Empresa Nicaragüense de Minas (ENIMINAS) —a state-owned mining company tasked with granting concessions to private corporations— in 2022, the Ortega-Murillo regime reformed the Special Law on Exploration and Exploitation of Mines (Law 387), transferring the responsibilities of ENIMINAS to the Ministry of Energy and Mines. The reform also made the MEM responsible for coordinating and supervising the purchase of artisanal and small-scale gold by industrial mining companies, effectively legalizing the practice in an effort to increase government revenue and expand the areas informally available to industrial mining companies, who effectively contract the work of exploration and extraction to independent small-scale entrepreneurs and cooperatives. Many of these cooperatives, Ruiz says, are co-opted by the state and corporate mining interests to serve as an intermediary between illegal miners and the companies who purchase and launder their gold.
Despite the legalization of artisanal mining, however, the Nicaraguan government has only granted two small-scale gold mining concessions to date, Ruiz says. The vast majority of artisanal operations remain illegal and continue to rely on exploitative and unregulated labor practices, including the use of child labor, as well as highly toxic and environmentally destructive extraction techniques. Small-scale artisanal mining and gold laundered from unknown sources, he adds, now account for an estimated 30 percent of all Nicaraguan gold exports.
Industrial open-pit gold mining, which uses cyanide to separate gold from ore, is extremely harmful to the environment and people, causing deforestation and polluting rivers and streams. But small-scale artisanal mining, despite its quaint-sounding name, can be even more poisonous to ecosystems, workers, and downstream communities. In Nicaragua, as in much of the world, artisanal mining is almost entirely illegal and unregulated and relies on mercury to extract and amalgamate gold from the surrounding mud and minerals. The process is essentially identical to the “quicksilver” methods used by miners in California in the mid-1800s, which left a legacy of toxicity that continues to poison the land, wildlife, and residents to this day.
To mine with mercury, workers drip the toxic element onto bare earth, where it attracts particles of gold to form an amalgam of ore, which is then heated to burn off the mercury, vaporizing it into the surrounding air and into the lungs of miners. Mercury thus enters the atmosphere, water, and soil, bioaccumulating in fish and other food sources and causing serious health effects in animals and people, including brain damage in unborn children. Globally, artisanal and small-scale gold mining surpasses coal combustion and other industrial activities as the largest single source of mercury pollution on the planet, accounting for more than 35 percent of all emissions, according to a study published by the UN in 2018.
Mining companies like Calibre admit that they buy gold from artisanal miners, but deny that any of it comes from illegal operations, ecologically protected areas, or Indigenous land. “Calibre does not purchase ore from, or have any dealings with, artisanal miners located on Indigenous or Afro-descendant communal lands or in Nicaragua’s nature reserves, nor does Calibre promote or encourage, in any way, artisanal mining activities on, or incursions into Indigenous or Afro-descendant communal lands or Nicaragua’s nature reserves,” wrote Ryan King, responding to the finding in the Oakland Institute’s latest report.
But Ruiz and other experts say this is a lie. “Artisanal mining and industrial mining are both taking place in protected areas,” he says. “Companies claim that they don’t operate in protected areas, but their maps lie, in the sense that they’re operating, for example, within the Bosowás Biosphere Reserve.” Ruiz says that Calibre and other companies also purchase gold from small-scale miners operating illegally in protected and autonomous areas, not just in the North Caribbean Coast Autonomous Region, but also in the Indio Maíz Biological Reserve and the Río San Juan Wildlife Refuge, in the country’s southeast. “So one way or another, whether it’s direct or indirect, industrial extraction is happening in protected areas and, obviously, in Indigenous and Afro-descendant territories as well.”
A report published by Fundación del Río in 2022 found that 66 percent of the Bosawás Biosphere Reserve is currently under metallic mining concession and that “the companies benefiting the most from these concessions are Calibre Mining, through its subsidiary Calibre Mining Nicaragua S.A.”
El Faro English emailed Calibre to request their response to these and other allegations, but did not receive an answer.
Ducking Sanctions
In 2022, following the sham reelection of the presidential couple and citing the Ortega-Murillo government’s “repression of the Nicaraguan people and its ability to manipulate the gold sector and profit from corrupt operations,” the Biden administration imposed sanctions on the Nicaraguan gold industry in an effort to tighten pressure on the regime as it continues to strengthen energy ties with Russia, Iran, and China.
Despite the administration’s pro-democracy talking points and hardline public stance toward the dictatorship, the sanctions remain largely unenforced, and have done little to nothing to stop the regime and its corporate partners from expanding operations and reaping record profits. U.S. companies continue to invest in Nicaraguan mining ventures without consequence; Calibre’s second- and third-largest shareholders, for example, are the U.S.-based firms Invesco and VanEck. BlackRock, a U.S. company notorious for financing war, environmental devastation, and human rights abuses around the world —and the “biggest driver of climate destruction on the planet,” according to the Sierra Club— is also a top investor in several mining projects in Nicaragua, with assets invested in Invesco as well. Meanwhile, nearly 80 percent of the country’s gold exports, including unknown quantities laundered through Nicaragua from unknown sources, most likely Venezuela, are imported by buyers in the United States, with much of the rest going to Canada.
An executive order signed by Biden in 2022 gave the U.S. Department of the Treasury authority to freeze the assets of individuals and firms involved in Nicaragua’s gold industry, but it has so far refused to do so. “The Biden administration talks a big game about using targeted sanctions to hold human rights violators accountable in Nicaragua, but the Treasury Department lets the worst of these actors off the hook,” said Josh Mayer, a researcher at the Oakland Institute and the coauthor of the group’s latest report on gold mining in Nicaragua, in a recent press release. The Treasury Department did not return a request for comment.
Rather than enforce existing sanctions against big players like Calibre or BlackRock, in March of this year, the Biden administration issued a new round of sanctions targeting the relatively small, regime-aligned mining companies Cominsta and Capital Mining (according to the U.S. State Department, Cominsta is controlled by Ortega and Murillo’s son, Laureano Ortega Murillo, and Capital Mining by Salvador Mansell Castrillo, Nicaragua’s Minister of Energy and Mines). Ruiz says he doesn’t expect these new sanctions to have an effect on business as usual, either. “The impact is next to nothing. When you tell me, ‘We’ve imposed sanctions, they’re in full force, etc. Fine, great... but it doesn’t have any impact. Tomorrow they’ll just create a different company, change the name, change its registration, call it United States Forever S.A., and continue exporting material.”
Anuradha Mittal, the Executive Director of the Oakland Institute and coauthor of the report, says that if the Biden administration really wanted to throw a wrench in the gears of Nicaragua’s gold industry, they would go after Calibre. Such corporations, she says, are the backbone of the regime. “If you want to really impact the situation of human rights and how it’s being driven by gold mining, you would go after the people that are really providing the resources for this regime to be in place,” she said. “But I guess the U.S. and Canadian governments are very happy to see their corporations prosper.”
In its annual “Sustainability Report” for 2023, Calibre boasts that its company has “zero substantiated cases of human rights violations and zero significant instances of non-compliance with laws and regulations.” It’s an easy claim to make, given that the dictatorship has outlawed and exiled the organizations and individuals that might otherwise be positioned to contest it, and that once denounced such violations.
Mittal says that a lack of government transparency and an atmosphere of terror and repression have made conducting research on the industry’s operations in the country extremely difficult. “For our report, I was able to do field research in the North Caribbean Coast. I traveled the Río Coco, visiting the Indigenous communities who are supposed to be under the protective measures of the Inter-American Court of Human Rights. It was very hard to get to, there was a lot of fear, but I could still go,” she told El Faro English in a recent video call. “But now, it’s impossible, because people who are seen as voicing opposition, or civil society activists, are all in exile. And if they still have their families in Nicaragua, they’re terrified to speak about what’s happening.”
In splashy publications, promotional videos, and regular social media posts, Calibre greenwashes its projects in Nicaragua, echoing the less sophisticated and equally dubious messaging of the Ortega-Murillo government: that mining is good for people and gentle on the land, that it brings prosperity and sustainable development. The gaping abyss separating these claims from reality is one of many ever-widening chasms growing between the socialist and anti-imperialist theatrics of the Sandinista regime and its policies of unbridled capitalist extraction and colonial dispossession. The contradictions are stark, but are often clouded by the lingering haze of outmoded Cold War antagonisms, perpetuated by everyone from Nicaragua’s party-state apparatus, to the White House, to a dwindling minority of international leftists who refuse to accept that the dream of the Sandinista Revolution was betrayed by its self-proclaimed leader a long time ago.
“People get caught in geopolitics,” Mittal says. “It’s either good Nicaragua challenging the imperialist United States, or it’s the United States, which is fighting the dictatorial Ortega. There’s no denying that the United States is an imperialist power. We have seen the horrors it has unleashed in Latin America and the Middle East for decades, and you can easily understand the fault line that exists between the North and South. At the same time, we know that dictator Ortega is no socialist. He has close ties with Western corporations, like the gold mining companies that bankroll his regime. So it is really the geopolitics of capitalism. Some people are so caught up with the lens of old anti-imperialism struggles, that they cannot see that human rights are universal and cannot be applied selectively. Our work shows that the Indigenous and Afro-descendants in Nicaragua are facing exploitation, land grabbing, and incessant violence. This should be a concern for all.”
Max Granger is a writer and translator based in the U.S. Southwest. His work has appeared in The Intercept, El País, High Country News, Foreign Policy, and elsewhere.
