The Nicaraguan government closed 15 NGOs, including six nuns, according to decrees published this Friday in the official newspaper La Gaceta.
On the one hand, a resolution signed by the Minister of the Interior, María Amelia Coronel, orders “the cancellation of legal personality and registration” of 13 NGOs “for being in breach” of their legal obligations.
Another resolution, also signed by Coronel, formalizes “by voluntary dissolution the cancellation of legal personality and registration” of two other organizations, including Plan International, dedicated to the defense of the rights of minors.
The government of Daniel Ortega and his wife, Vice President Rosario Murillo, toughened the laws against NGOs this year and established that they can only work in Nicaragua in “association alliances” with state entities.
Among the fifteen NGOs closed there are also some educational, health and community ones.
Related news: Ortega closes several Sandinista NGOs, including one named after his brother Camilo Ortega
According to a study published in October by the Nicaragua Never Again Collective, which works from exile in Costa Rica, the Ortega government has canceled almost 5,600 NGOs since 2018. Of them, more than 1,235 were religious.
The government mainly argued that these organizations did not present their financial statements, and expropriated their assets.
Ortega, a 79-year-old former guerrilla who ruled Nicaragua in the 1980s and has been back in power since 2007, maintains that NGOs and especially the Catholic Church supported the anti-government protests in 2018, which he considers an attempted coup d’état sponsored by Washington.
The 2018 protests left more than 300 dead in three months, according to the UN, and thousands of exiles.
This week, the Ortega government expelled Bishop Carlos Herrera, president of the Episcopal Conference of Nicaragua, to Guatemala. He is the third Catholic bishop expelled from the country.
