The Nicaraguan government announced this Monday the closure of 12 NGOs, bringing the total to around 5,600 canceled since the 2018 protests against President Daniel Ortega.
According to the resolution published in the official newspaper La Gaceta, among the closed NGOs are the Swiss Foundation for Cooperation for Technical Development, two religious organizations, two other medical organizations and one sports organization.
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 support the protests, which he considers an attempted coup d’état sponsored by Washington.
According to a study published at the end of October by the Nicaragua Never Again Collective, which works from exile in Costa Rica, the Ortega government had canceled 5,571 NGOs, 1,235 of them religious.
The government argued that these organizations did not present their financial statements, and expropriated their assets.
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In the case of the groups closed this Monday, official information indicated that the closures occurred due to “voluntary dissolution of members”, “lack of financing” or “due to having completed a portfolio of projects.”
The Ortega government recently tightened laws against NGOs and promoted that they can only work in Nicaragua in “association alliances” with state entities.
The measure was described as “extremely alarming” by the UN Office for Human Rights.
The 2018 protests left more than 300 dead in three months, according to the UN, and thousands of exiles.
