The Nicaraguan government closed a dozen NGOs this Wednesday, five of them religious, and now has around 5,600 closed since the protests in 2018 against President Daniel Ortega, according to decrees published in the official newspaper La Gaceta.
Eight of the ten NGOs were canceled “for being in breach of their obligations” and “not promoting transparency policies in the administration of funds” and the other two for “voluntary dissolution.”
Among the dozen closed NGOs there are five of a religious nature.
Ortega, a 79-year-old former guerrilla who already governed Nicaragua in the 1980s and has been in power since 2007, this year toughened the laws against NGOs and established that they can only work in Nicaragua in “association alliances” with state entities.
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The government maintains that NGOs and the Catholic Church supported the protests in 2018, which left more than 300 dead according to the UN and that Ortega considered an attempted coup d’état sponsored by Washington.
According to a study published in October by the Nicaragua Never Again Collective, which works from exile in Costa Rica, the Ortega government had canceled 5,571 NGOs since 2018 and until then.
With these ten and others closed since October, the sum is close to 5,600. Of them, about 1,250 are religious.
