journalistic investigations «Piñata and front man: The Ortega Murillos take over paradisiacal lands in the Pacific of Nicaragua» and “The private security business in Nicaragua: a mafia cartel of ex-military and ex-police officers” stood out among 296 of the best journalistic works from Ibero-America, reached the finalist stage and received Honorable Mention at the Latin American Conference of Investigative Journalism (Colpin 2024), which this year is held in Madrid, Spain.
The international jury that analyzed the investigations highlighted, during the ceremony to recognize the finalists, that these are “high-level investigations” and stressed that these works are carried out “in complex contexts in which there has been a deterioration in press freedom.” , including cases of authoritarian regimes in which investigative journalists are in exile or face major challenges in reporting and publishing their investigations.
The journalistic work titled «Piñata and front man: The Ortega Murillos take over paradisiacal lands in the Pacific of Nicaragua» exposes how a couple of figureheads at the service of the Sandinista dictatorship were benefited by the Attorney General’s Office (PGR) with three million-dollar properties in the Nicaraguan Pacific
This investigation of Article 66, Nicaragua Investigates and Radio Darío was made by the journalist Ismael Lopez. This work is the result of more than three years of journalistic work, collecting documents and speaking with government sources that helped us uncover this front man structure directly linked to the ruling family.
The series of three reports demonstrates how Ortega’s assistant, Javier Ernesto Morales Cuadraand his partner, Sonia Martínez Téllez – who also has a son with Rafael Ortega Murillo, were benefited from three properties on the coast of Tola, Rivas, one of the areas with the greatest added value in the Pacific due to its tourism potential.
The properties were sold months after the donation in lots, worth up to $3.2 million, for a dark businessman who confessed in a telephone interview that he had bought the land from the front man.
The second investigation that also obtained Honorable Mention and reached the finals at Colpin 2024 is titled “The private security business in Nicaragua: a mafia cartel of ex-military and ex-police officers,” a journalistic work of the medium Nicaragua Investigatesin alliance with Article 66.
This work discovered a network of front men who have nine companies, all linked to ex-military and ex-police officers, which operate as a cartel that wins million-dollar contracts for the provision of security and surveillance services to the State of Nicaragua.
The team of investigative journalists accessed 55 contracts obtained from the Electronic Administrative Contracting System (Siscae) – website where public procurement processes are carried out – in which 25 State institutions are involved that request – because they continue to do so – security services. security and private surveillance.
All these contracts were analyzed from 2018 to July 2023, without taking into account the following months for the closing of that year. In that period, the nine companies received 19,627,346.09 million dollars.
The investigation reveals that the company Serprosa, linked to the family of Daniel Ortega and Rosario Murillo, is the one that received the most million-dollar contracts. In the five-year period, 17 tenders were awarded that totaled 8,715,077.60 million dollars.
