The following is a transcript of episode 24 of the weekly El Faro English podcast, Central America in Minutes.
GRESSIER, HOST: Seven years since the start of the 2018 mass uprising in Nicaragua, the U.N. Group of Human Rights Experts on Nicaragua has issued its most expansive report to date on the chain of command in sweeping state repression in the last seven years. Days later, the regime announced it will reactivate its international lawsuit against Israel, unironically expressing its concern for human rights and international law.
On April 3 in Geneva, Switzerland, the U.N. Group of Human Rights Experts on Nicaragua issued a scathing report. They named 54 top regime officials, including Daniel Ortega and Rosario Murillo, as playing “key roles in arbitrary detentions, torture, executions, persecution of civil society and the media, denationalization campaigns, and the confiscation of private property.”
Group member Ariela Peralta denounced a “deliberate and well-orchestrated State policy carried out by identifiable actors through defined chains of command.”
This new report compounds the growing body of evidence against the regime on the international scene. Right before the New Year, an Argentinian court issued arrest warrants for Ortega, Murillo, and a dozen top officials implicated in over 300 murders, as well as torture and forced disappearances in their repression of dissidents in 2018.
As digital outlet Confidencial reported in their weekly English-language newsletter, The Dispatch, on the U.N. Group’s new list are six Nicaraguan Army generals and five colonels, the national police chief, and nine other top police officials. They wrote that all are part of the repressive apparatus directly controlled by Daniel Ortega and Rosario Murillo.
One of the names, which you may remember from episode 16, is presidential security advisor Horacio Rocha López, a retired police commissioner and Ortega loyalist who was instrumental in an internal regime purge starting in late 2023, earning him the nickname “Angel of Death”. Co-president Rosario Murillo decreed Rocha’s removal in early February, marking his fall from grace.
Another name is Luis Pérez Olivas, the former overseer of El Chipote Prison named in 2018 as supervising torture by Human Rights Watch and the U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights.
As expected, the U.N. Group of Experts issued their report one day before the end of the current session of the U.N. Human Rights Council. It’s their second major release this year: In late February, as the three person team was preparing the list of implicated regime officials, the Ortega-Murillo regime withdrew altogether from the Human Rights Council.
The Nicaraguan regime’s retreat from international forums even reached the U.N. Food and Agricultural Organization, after a report found this year that one-fifth of Nicaraguans go hungry.
The universal-jurisdiction case in Argentina against the regime grows in salience given Ortega and Murillo’s public posturing as defenders of international law and human rights in Occupied Palestine. On April 1, Nicaragua withdrew its request to join South Africa at the International Court of Justice in accusing Israel of genocide, citing high litigation costs.
But on Thursday the regime backpedaled, announcing that it had “decided to notify the International Court of Justice that it wishes to continue the judicial processes for the violations of the rights of the Palestinian people.”
Meanwhile, in Nicaragua, the mass protests that unleashed months of state brutality will turn seven years old in one week, on April 18. Not one official or paramilitary member has been held accountable. On the contrary: the new constitution created a “Volunteer Police” force. In recent weeks, the regime has forced public-sector employees to march in ruling party gear and masks, harking back to the close cooperation between state security forces and paramilitary forces in 2018 — and yet another monument to the state policy of impunity.
“Exercise normal precautions”
Nayib Bukele is set to visit the White House on Monday. And the Trump administration has rolled out quite the red carpet. On April 2, Secretary of State Marco Rubio certified the Salvadoran government as strengthening the rule of law, fighting corruption, and respecting human rights.
On Tuesday, the State Department reduced travel warnings for U.S. citizens in El Salvador to the bare minimum, level one. “Exercise normal precautions in El Salvador,” reads the travel advisory. “Gang activity has decreased over the last three years. This has caused a drop in violent crimes and murders.” —Close quote.—
The U.S. Embassy noted constitutional rights have been suspended for three years, and that U.S. citizens and other foreign nationals have been arrested under the state of exception.
In 2023, El Faro English documented the unjustified arrest of Nelson Vladimir Hernández Tobar, a North Carolina hip-hop artist who was detained for appearing “nervous” to police, and for lyrics alluding to his birth in an area of El Salvador once controlled by gangs.
Nelson Rauda reported this week in El Faro English that the Trump administration deported Venezuelan-born construction worker Jesús Ríos in mid-March and jailed him in El Salvador despite his pending residency application, and without his U.S. citizen wife’s knowledge. The U.S. press has found that only a handful of the 238 Venezuelans in CECOT have a criminal record.
The highest echelons of the Trump administration are doubling down on the lack of due process in their removals to El Salvador. After a senior DOJ attorney acknowledged in court that Kilmar Armando Ábrego García, a Maryland-based family man born in El Salvador with no criminal record, should not have been sent to CECOT, he was placed on administrative leave for failing to “zealously advocate” for the official deportation policy above all other considerations — including, apparently, the law.
This is Bukele’s first time at the White House, and he will go by Trump’s invitation. It’s the second time they meet in person: they spoke on the sidelines of the U.N. in New York in September 2019, as their administrations signed a safe-third-country migration agreement for El Salvador to receive asylum seekers from other countries. Bukele called Trump “nice and cool.”
Joe Biden, on the other hand, never received Bukele at the White House, even snubbing the Salvadoran president in February 2021. At the time, U.S. officials from the White House and State Department turned down multiple meeting requests from Bukele in an unannounced trip to Washington —just prior to the Salvadoran legislative elections— to send a message that U.S.-El Salvador relations were under review.
After tense relations with El Salvador throughout 2021, especially over the illegal May 2021 removal of the Constitutional Chamber and attorney general, the Biden administration eventually folded. Tensions softened following the arrival of current Ambassador William Duncan in February 2023, and especially given their muting of criticism of Bukele’s unconstitutional reelection in 2024.
Biden human rights reports were critical of the state of exception and mass rights violations in El Salvador. But in 2024, U.S. officials admitted to El Faro English that the State Department softened criticism of corruption in its May human rights report, a touchy subject for Bukele.
The next month, in June, Bukele was sworn-in to his second term in violation of the constitution, leaving the old criticism as water under the bridge.
Roman Gressier wrote this episode of Central America in Minutes, with production and original soundtrack by Omnionn. Subscribe on Apple, Spotify, Amazon, YouTube, and iHeart podcast platforms.
