Nicaragua’s Interior Ministry said Saturday that the country will release dozens of prisoners who were held in its National Penitentiary System, following pressure from the United States.
The statement came after the U.S. Embassy in Nicaragua said on Friday that Venezuela had taken an important step toward peace by releasing people it described as “political prisoners.” In its remarks, the embassy lamented that in Nicaragua, more than 60 people remain “unjustly detained or disappeared,” including pastors, religious workers, the sick, and the elderly.
On Saturday, Nicaragua’s Interior Ministry said in a statement that “dozens of people who were in the National Penitentiary System are returning to their homes and families.”
It was not immediately clear who would be freed or under what conditions. Nicaragua’s government did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The AP report said the government has been carrying out an ongoing crackdown since mass social protests in 2018 that were violently repressed. It said Nicaragua’s government has imprisoned adversaries, religious leaders and journalists, then exiled them, stripping hundreds of their Nicaraguan citizenship and possessions.
The report said that since 2018 Nicaragua has shuttered more than 5,000 organizations, largely religious, and forced thousands to flee. It said the government has often accused critics and opponents of plotting against the government.
In recent years, the report said, Nicaragua has released hundreds of imprisoned political opponents, critics and activists, then stripped them of Nicaraguan citizenship and sent them to other countries like the U.S. and Guatemala. Observers cited by the report have called the releases an effort to offset international human rights criticism, and the report said many were forced into a situation of “statelessness.”
Saturday on X, the U.S. State Department’s Bureau of Western Hemisphere Affairs again slammed Nicaragua’s government. The bureau said: “Nicaraguans voted for a president in 2006, not for an illegitimate lifelong dynasty,” and it added, “Rewriting the Constitution and crushing dissent will not erase the Nicaraguans’ aspirations to live free from tyranny.”
Danny Ramírez-Ayérdiz, executive-secretary of the Nicaraguan human rights organization CADILH, said he had mixed feelings about the releases announced Saturday. “On the one hand, I’m glad. All political prisoners suffer some form of torture,” he said, while also saying he knows the released people will continue to be harassed, surveilled and monitored by the police, and that their families will be monitored as well.
Ramírez-Ayérdiz said the liberation of the prisoners is a response to pressure exerted by the United States, and he said: “There is surely a great deal of fear within the regime that the U.S. might completely dismantle it.”