Nicaragua is officially a dictatorship and US money paved the way

At a rally last week marking the anniversary of the Sandinista revolution’s victory over the Somoza dictatorship, Daniel Ortega — who first came to power as leader of the 1979 Sandinista revolution and governed until he lost an election in 1990 — announced that Nicaragua will never hold elections again.Nicaragua’s elections have been meaningless since 2021, when the regime jailed every viable opposition candidate ahead of that year’s presidential elections.But the announcement deserves attention, because over the last 20 years, Ortega and his wife and co-president Rosario Murillo have extinguished political freedom in Nicaragua more thoroughly than any country in the Western Hemisphere.Cuba and Venezuela are brutal regimes in their own right.But in some respects, the Ortega-Murillo regime has gone further than either of them.Since 2018, it has shuttered thousands of NGOs, universities and charities — roughly 80% of all civil-society organizations in the country.It has gutted the Catholic Church, exiling over 200 clergy and nuns and banning ordinations in four dioceses.Nicaragua has aggressively deployed a tool no other regime in the hemisphere has used: manufactured statelessness.At least 452 Nicaraguans have been arbitrarily stripped of their nationality by court order, their assets seized, their legal identities erased.Exiled critics face surveillance and harassment abroad, and at least one — a former Sandinista military officer turned regime critic — was killed at his home in Costa Rica last year.Ortega didn’t seize this power in one dramatic coup.

He built it the boring way — patiently and systematically taking over state institutions and changing the rules.It started in 1999, when Ortega — then out of power — cut a deal with his right-wing rival to divide control of the Supreme Court and other key institutions between their two parties, freezing out other political parties.After Ortega returned to power in 2006, winning an election than...