The Ministry of the Interior (Migob) has already begun the approval of validation or “reapprovals” of Non-Profit Organizations (OSFL), which will now be governed under the new legal regime established with Law 1115, approved in March 2022. However , hidden in this process is a new way to eliminate the operations of some organizations without making it public, warns Amaru Ruiz, who has followed up on the closure of NGOs and is a member of Fundación del Río, eliminated in 2018.
“Many of the organizations are not going to comply with the requirements that the law asks of them or they are simply going to be hindered or stopped because they do not want to give it to them (legal status). that implicitly means a closure of operations without the need to publicly cancel the legal status”, says Ruiz.
With Law 1115 or General Law for the Regulation and Control of Non-Profit Organisms, Law 147, which since 1992 governed the legal framework of NPOs, was repealed. Likewise, Law 522 or General of Sports, Physical Education and Physical Recreation and Law 849 or General of Chambers, Federations and Business Union Confederations were reformed. With this new legislation and reforms, Migob was left with absolute control of the NGOs.
The organizations had to initiate a process of validation or “reapproval” of their legal status to continue operating now with the new legal regime.
In total, Migob has validated 24 associations and foundations, almost all of which are sports. The first reapproval occurred on December 22, 2022 and was the Associated Nicaraguan Baseball Federation (Feniba).
On January 18, there was a group of 23 more NPOs, 22 of these are sports and include the Nicaraguan Olympic Committee, the bodybuilding, weightlifting, and soccer federations, the Managua FC and Juventus FC teams, among others. . That day the Nicaraguan Chamber of Tobacco Producers (Puro Sabor) was also validated.
The OSFL validations are being published in the Official Newspaper La Gaceta. In addition to reapproving their legal status, Migob grants them a new perpetual number, which they must use in all their documentation and legal operations.
Chambers and NGOs with problems to validate
Since the validation process began, there have been no cancellations of legal status as there were in 2022, the worst year for NGOs. In that year alone, Migob eliminated the legal status of 3,108 NPOs and accumulated a total of 3,182 legal statuses and operation records eliminated since November 2018.
These organizations worked, for the most part, on issues of development, human rights, democracy, education, health, social projects, the environment, and also on religious evangelization projects. Whereby, it harmed more than a million Nicaraguans who benefited from programs that the Ortega government cannot replace.
Now with the new regime, Ruiz explains that there are presents from business chambers and NGOs that are having problems to validate.
“This tells us that it will be a new element to stop the operation of the organizations of the legal entities of the NPOs,” he highlights.
“Voluntary closings, they are not voluntary”
Parallel to the cancellations of legal status and operation records —in the case of foreign NPOs— and the validation, the “voluntary dissolutions” of at least three organizations have occurred: Fundación Centro Empresarial Pellas, Fundación Sincotex Cares and Water For People , these last two dissolve in January 2023.
“When we analyzed who these organizations are and if they were really thinking of closing, the evidence and some workers from these institutions said that they had no plans to close,” Ruiz points out.
He adds that these had projects approved that did not close in 2022 or 2023, and that they had not started the closing process either, because it takes at least a year to complete the entire liquidation and closing procedure.
“So the voluntary closure for us is not voluntary. Rather, they have been under pressure and have reached agreements to try to safeguard their assets”, stresses the activist, who adds that “this treatment has been exclusive to organizations that are linked to the private sector of the highest sphere”.
