In the middle of mass shutdown of local media outlets in Nicaragua and the exile of entire newsrooms, the Sandinista government of President Daniel Ortega has chosen to strengthen its ties with the Russian media. This week Managua signed a memorandum of cooperation with the news agency and radio station Sputnik.
According to the official website of the Nicaraguan government, El 19 Digital, Daniel Edmundo Ortega Murillo, son of President Ortega, signed the document in which they state that they seek to “exchange content to bring the peoples of the two countries closer together and for mutual understanding.”
The news from the Russian media would be replicated in at least twenty official Nicaraguan media, within these television and radio channels, which are the ones that predominate in the country, after the raid of communication companies critical of Ortega.
Vasili Pushkov, head of Sputnik’s international cooperation directorate, said signing the memorandum is important because it gets rid of what he called “unnecessary informational garbage.”
IAPA: Alliances consolidate contempt for professional journalism
The signing of the agreement takes place at a time when journalists’ organizations and the international community have denounced Nicaragua’s setback in press freedom.
Carlos Jornet , president of the Committee on Freedom of the Press and Information of the Inter-American Press Association (IAPA) told the voice of america that the agreement between the media conglomerate of the “Nicaraguan regime and the Sputnik agency is not surprising” and assured that “Moscow advances in its ties with the autocrats of the region.”
“These are alliances in which both parties consolidate their contempt for professional journalism and their search to consolidate a story that is far from reality,” the expert emphasized.
Similarly, Jornet stated that just as Nicaragua’s official discourse “denies poverty and repression”, the Russian agency “misinforms with a sweetened version of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. And both Vladimir Putin and Daniel Ortega persecute journalists and media outlets that dare to defy censorship.”
“This agreement goes against what the Nicaraguan people demand: freedom to express themselves, freedom to inform themselves, without speeches manipulated from power, with plural debates, with the possibility of listening to diverse voices,” Jornet said.
For his part, Christopher Mendoza, a journalist for Onda Local and director of PCIN (Independent Journalists and Communicators of Nicaragua) explained that the signing of said agreement “is a cheek,” where what is sought is “to silence the media.” critical communication and say what they want through the media that they have at the service of propaganda for the regime.”
“That is the only meaning that I find in these signatures, agreements, agreements of understanding. That’s what they say,” he adds.
Mendoza recalled that since Ortega came to power in 2007, a repressive escalation began against the media, who tried to impose gags on critical voices, to silence radio media, to take the paper away from print media and then to now shut down the media, seize and storm their buildings.
“These kinds of deals that he makes, on this occasion, with this Russian international agency, Sputnik, and at another time he had also done it with Chinese media, responds to a strategy where I see that the only thing that the regime could get out of gaining there is obviously the years of experience in technology to put at the service of the media that they have created and that they have been organizing to continue lying to the Nicaraguan people and the world,” lamented Mendoza.
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