On Father’s Day last year, Octavio Enriquez shared pizza and soda with his two children. Then he told them he was leaving.
A Nicaraguan journalist known for his rigorous investigations, his most recent reporting had brought him dangerously close to President Daniel Ortega, a former left-wing revolutionary who treated his country, one of the poorest and most corrupt in the Western Hemisphere, with little mercy.
Enriquez, 42, was preparing a series of articles exposing Ortega’s ties to nearly two dozen corporations that had won millions of dollars in government contracts. But the journalist feared imprisonment before he could publish.
“Never be ashamed of your father,” Enriquez said as she hugged her children and walked under a cloak of darkness toward a border crossing. “I’m on the right side of history. “
After violently suppressing democratic protests in 2018, Ortega and his wife, Vice President Rosario Murillo, tightened their grip on power, jailing political opponents, leaders and members of civil society and attacking freedom of expression from all fronts.
They raided newsrooms, imprisoned hounds and ordered the closure of dozens of media outlets. They pushed through a series of laws that criminalized the spread of “fake” news and the publication of legal data through the government, and even banned newspapers from uploading paper and ink. .
The offices of Confidencial, the news magazine where Enriquez worked, had been occupied by police forces and its editor faced money laundering charges that human rights defenders called “absurd. “
Enriquez then called police wondering about his connection to a nonprofit that trained hounds, which the government called a CIA front.
He and his wife, who is also a journalist, that the only way for him to continue reporting on Ortega’s finances was to flee the country. No one was told where he was going, neither the young men nor his twin brother, with whom he shared a hobby for social justice and writing.
As Enriquez walked for hours in the dark, achieving protection in Honduras as the sun rose, he joined the estimated 200,000 Nicaraguans who have fled the country since 2018, a mass exodus of at least 140 journalists.
With virtually more independent media within the country and the entry of banned foreign journalists, Nicaragua has “a black hole of information,” said Natalie Southwick of the Committee to Protect Journalists. Government propaganda is all that remains. Ortega’s circle of relatives and allies own several radio and television stations that paint the United States as the “Yankee empire” and pro-democracy protesters as “coup plotters,” “terrorists” and “termites. “
“Not even Orwell could have imagined a country like this,” said Gioconda Belli, a guerrilla veteran who was president of PEN Nicaragua until the lax discourse organization was expelled from the country last year. “It’s a dystopia. Reality is absolutely distorted.
For Enriquez and other new members of the Nicaraguan diaspora, the message is clear: it’s up to them to divulge the fact of what’s at home.
This mandate is shared through more and more news hounds these days, as many media professionals around the world have fled their countries. From Russia to Afghanistan to Hungary, freedoms are under attack as those in place subvert national narratives for their own benefit.
The challenge is acute in Central America, where the leaders of Guatemala and El Salvador have copied many of Nicaragua’s new legal methods to neutralize the media and civil society, as part of a broader shift toward authoritarianism in the region.
Even from exile, the dangers to a journalist in an authoritarian state are considerable.
When Enriquez escaped, traveling from Honduras to Bogota, Colombia, and yet to San Jose, Costa Rica, he continued to investigate, analyzing official documents that exposed Ortega’s secret ties to various companies. Last August, Enriquez sent an email to Murillo, the government spokeswoman, asking him to comment on the evidence.
She didn’t answer. Instead, police arrived at Enriquez’s home in Nicaragua and knocked on the door. Officers told his surprised wife and children that Enriquez was looking for the back to question them.
He knew at the time that he had to do two things: complete his research and take out his circle of relatives.
Ortega, 76, has been one of the main protagonists of Nicaragua’s history since the 1970s, when he and his motley army of Sandinista revolutionaries helped topple Anastasio Somoza, a right-wing dictator whose circle of relatives controlled the country for decades, enriching himself as Nicaraguans languished in poverty.
Ortega served as president in the 1980s in a bloody civil war that pitted Sandinista fighters against U. S. -backed Contra rebels. He was impeached in the 1990 presidential election, but returned to office in 2007. By rigging the election, he has remained president ever since. fitting into the leader with the most years of service in Latin America.
Many of Ortega’s friends in the revolution opposed him, claiming that he had betrayed their dreams of a socialist utopia and that he had come to resemble the dictator they had helped overthrow.
This is not the story Ortega needs to tell. He has long been hostile to the independent press, once shutting down a newspaper about the Civil War that he accused of “supporting American aggression. “
But in recent years, reporters have been functioning more or less freely and a multitude of new online media has emerged, encouraged by a generation of idealistic young journalists. They were tolerated by a government that sought at least the façade of civil liberties.
That replaced on April 18, 2018, when national protests erupted, driven, in part, by media reports about a sweeping Social Security reform that would raise taxes and reduce benefits. As outraged citizens gathered in the streets, police and pro-Ortega paramilitary teams opened fire, killing dozens.
Nestor Arce, 31, live-streaming protests in the capital, Managua, still wearing pants after training a university journalism elegance that morning. He knew himself as a journalist but assaulted himself 3 times, one of dozens of reporters and photographers injured that day. .
As Arce reported during months of protests and fatal repression, his colleagues were beaten and one of them was shot. When the police occupied two media outlets and began dragging the hounds into the prison, they made the decision that it was time to leave.
Arce returned to Nicaragua the following year to open a news site, Divergentes, with several friends. But in the run-up to the country’s 2021 presidential election, Ortega began jailing the warring parties and renewed his attacks on journalists.
Two of Arce’s colleagues at Divergents were summoned for asking through the police. Arce learned he was under surveillance and didn’t wait for his summons: he ran away for a moment.
“Journalism has a crime,” Arce said. We had to close before they took our offices, took our computers and sent us to jail. “
Arce and his family settled in Costa Rica, joining the more than 150,000 Nicaraguans who fled to the country, long a beacon of peace and democracy in a conflict-torn Central America.
He and his team report on a coworking domain in a domain in the country’s capital on a popular café.
Arce, who on a recent rainy afternoon took a sip of latte while typing on his laptop, said he enjoyed Costa Rica but spent so much time thinking about Nicaragua that he forgot it was no longer there. He wonders about all the stories that are not told at home, and the lies invented by an unresponsible government.
Its online page features the news of the day, such as the accumulation of remittances from Nicaraguans abroad or the ongoing case against a Catholic bishop whom Murillo accused of committing crimes “contrary to spirituality,” but also addresses larger projects. Multimedia piece examined, in unprecedented scope, what precisely happened in the 2018 protests.
He named the government officials who led the crackdown and detailed many of the prosecutions of protesters for terrorism. Video testimonies from eyewitnesses were published along with stories about the legions of parents of student activists who were killed and forced to flee the country. This year, the assignment won the Ortega y Gasset Prize, one of the distinctions of Spanish-language journalism.
“We all cover the protests as breaking news,” Arce said. “We seek to have everything in one place and give a contribution to the structure of ancient memory. “
He hopes the series will be a bulwark against collective amnesia and that one day it can be used to help prosecute those who have committed crimes. However, he often wonders about the effect it has, wondering who can suffer. the longest: authoritarian leaders or loose press.
“Of course there are times when you feel frustrated,” Arce said as he strolled the streets of San Jose with a navigation app. “We all think and dream of a long career without Ortega. “
Lucía Pineda is also in exile in Costa Rica. The other day, without any emotion, I was interviewing the wife of a political prisoner detained in Nicaragua for more than a year.
“What impression do those photos give you?” Pineda asked, referring to two photographs of the prisoner, a worker from the NGO Walter Gómez. One showed Gomez before he was imprisoned, strong and smiling. bony shoulders.
“It’s scary,” said Consuelo Cespedes, Gomez’s wife. “I’m afraid he’ll die. “
Pineda, 48, has made known the plight of nearly two hundred political prisoners languishing in Nicaragua’s prisons. She is one of them.
The news channel Pineda works for, 100% Noticias, extensively covered the 2018 protests, broadcasting images of the government committing human rights violations.
It wasn’t long before the police showed up at their headquarters. Authorities cut off the station’s sign and took away its owner, Miguel Mora. While Pineda reported what was going on via Facebook Live, police returned to the station and arrested her. They sought to silence the truth,” he said.
He spent six months in prison, some of them in the country’s infamous El Chipote prison, where the Somoza government had tortured Sandinista fighters. He was in solitary confinement and questioned continuously, adding 30 times in a week of singleness.
“You incited violence,” his jailers insisted, the channel had encouraged protests. “Where does the money come from?”
Pineda and Mora were released in 2019. She quickly fled to Costa Rica, where her mother suggested she change her profession. But Pineda quickly returned to work, reactivating the online channel Only Computers Borrowed by Costa Rican Journalist Friends.
Pineda succeeded Mora after he broke away from the channel and announced he would run for president. He spent time in jail last year and remains in prison.
Sometimes it turns out Ortega is tougher than ever, Pineda said. But she’s proud that she “didn’t give Ortega the thrill of destroying the canal,” now one of the top data resources on Nicaragua. The country has a population of 6 million, of which about 600,000 live abroad. Its online page receives 23 million visitors a year.
Enriquez would never have imagined that he would have to organize shelters for his circle of relatives in Nicaragua. But after police showed up at his home last year, he had them move in every few weeks.
This at the time his twin brother died after contracting COVID-19. Enriquez doesn’t blame Ortega for his brother’s death, but says the government’s reaction to the pandemic has demonstrated the risks of a dictator who is on the loose to tell whatever he wants. .
While nations around the world have locked themselves in to face the coronavirus in 2020, Ortega has confided to his country that there is nothing to worry about.
Schools and businesses remained open as Ortega encouraged citizens to attend concerts, parades and events. “If the country stops working, it dies,” he said.
Journalists showed how the government intentionally underestimated infections and deaths. But no one knows precisely how many Nicaraguans have died in the pandemic.
As Enriquez mourned his brother’s death and kept money to help his family get out, he found solace in his work. “Journalism kept me,” he said.
He nevertheless took out his circle of relatives before the winter break. They walked through Costa Rica and spent the next few days celebrating their reunion and decorating a Christmas tree.
Enriquez published his survey in February. The stories caused a stir in Latin America, but in Nicaragua the president and his circle of relatives remained silent.
Enriquez if the stories had any impact.
“I make a difference,” he said. I just don’t know how fast. “
But then he remembers 2018, when a protest song seemed like a rallying cry to those marching through the streets. The song was referring to an investigation Enriquez had published a year earlier into social security fraud.
Enriquez knows that in Nicaragua it is too harmful for other people to blatantly communicate government transgressions. But he is convinced that they are following the news that is produced through independent sources, and that that is fomenting unrest beneath the surface, like a volcano that can erupt at any time.
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Kate Linthicum is the Los Angeles Times’ foreign correspondent in Mexico City.
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Gary Coronado has been a photographer for the Los Angeles Times since 2016. He is a finalist for the 2007 Pulitzer Prize in reportage photography for photographs of Central America who risk their lives and physical integrity while jumping on trains from southern Mexico to the United States, and a 2005 Pulitzer Finalist for the award in news photography for hurricane team policy. He began running as a freelancer for the Orange County Registry and moved to South Florida in 2001, when he won a Freedom Forum scholarship. Coronado grew up in Southern California and graduated from USC.
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