The crime against Indigenous leader Brooklyn Rivera in Nicaragua marks the seventh political prisoner to die in state custody since 2019.

By Carlos F. Chamorro (Confidencial)

HAVANA TIMES — The release of photographs showing Miskito Indigenous leader Brooklyn Rivera emaciated and in critical condition, intubated in a hospital bed after having been disappeared for 971 days as a political prisoner of Nicaragua’s dictatorship, foreshadowed a fatal outcome. Yet his family never imagined that, after his death three days later, the torture would continue.

At 8:30 p.m. on May 30, Rivera was declared dead by the Ministry of Health, although the government did not officially announce the news until 24 hours later. Authorities attributed his “physical and neurological deterioration to a bacterium generated by the Covid-19 virus,” without acknowledging that he had been imprisoned by the state for two years and eight months, during which he was never allowed contact with his family or visits from international human rights organizations — the UN Group of Human Rights Experts on Nicaragua (GHREN), the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR), and Amnesty International — all of which had expressed deep concern over his disappearance and demanded his release.

The official version was refuted by his daughter, Tininiska Rivera, who lives in exile in Costa Rica. She recalled that although “he had Covid in 2020, he recovered and lived a normal life. A few days before his arrest (in 2023), we had a very long conversation about everything he was dealing with, and he was fine. He walked well, ate well… They cannot claim, after three years, when we don’t know where they kept him or under what conditions, that this was the cause. What they did to my father was murder him over the course of three years. We do not know what kind of torture he endured to reach that condition and die.”

Brooklyn Rivera’s body was never subjected to an independent autopsy to determine the cause of death. Even after his death, he remained a prisoner under the dictatorship’s control. The web of power directed down to the smallest detail by “co-president” Rosario Murillo refused to hand over his remains to his family so they could bury him in the community of Sandy Bay on Nicaragua’s Northern Caribbean Coast.

Instead, while relatives were trying to make funeral arrangements, six family members were themselves disappeared. Meanwhile, the “co-presidency” orchestrated a rushed burial in Managua, led by National Assembly President Gustavo Porras and electoral magistrate and Sandinista Front “commissar” on the Caribbean Coast, Lumberto Campbell — the same officials who had stripped Rivera of his seat in the National Assembly and revoked the legal status of his political party, Yatama.

Thus, was fulfilled the Latin American saying born of political cynicism: “They kill and then attend the wake.” To this, Daniel Ortega and Rosario Murillo have now shamelessly added: “And we also steal the body and kidnap the relatives.”

Amid fear and silence, Rivera’s death and the disappearance of his family members have inflicted a deep wound on Nicaragua’s Caribbean Coast.

“There is pain, mourning, sadness, but people cannot express it freely,” says Caribbean Coast anthropologist and political scientist Miguel Gonzalez, a professor at York University. “But the dictatorship will not be able to erase the legacy of the most important Indigenous leader in the country since the triumph of the 1979 revolution.”

Brooklyn Rivera was one of the organizers of Misurasata, which championed Indigenous rights during the revolution. In 1981, he was imprisoned and accused of promoting “separatism.” After securing his release, he joined the armed movement on the Caribbean Coast opposing the Sandinista government.

In 1985, he negotiated the first peace and disarmament agreements, eventually helping achieve the Autonomy Statute for the Caribbean Regions, later incorporated into the 1987 Constitution. Rivera went on to found the Indigenous political party Yatama (“Sons of Mother Earth”).

Since Nicaragua’s political transition in 1990, he participated through state institutions, social movements, and regional and national elections, witnessing both advances and setbacks in the autonomy process. For three decades, Rivera was therefore both an ally and an uncomfortable adversary of the Sandinista Front, always serving as an advocate for Indigenous peoples. That changed in 2023, when Ortega and Murillo’s increasingly totalitarian government expelled him from the National Assembly and outlawed his political party.

In April 2023, Rivera denounced the dictatorship before the United Nations Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues in New York. When he attempted to return to Nicaragua by air, authorities denied him entry, effectively imposing exile.

Nevertheless, the Indigenous leader reentered the country through Honduras’ Mosquitia region and was arrested by police at his home in Bilwi on September 29, 2023. From that moment, he was erased from official history.

Only in November 2024 did the regime acknowledge his detention during Nicaragua’s Universal Periodic Review at the United Nations, accusing him of “treason,” “conspiracy,” and “undermining national integrity.”

Yet when the dictatorship was forced to release photographs of Rivera dying in a hospital bed, the Orwellian language of Ortega and Murillo no longer referred to the disappeared political prisoner and alleged “traitor.” Instead, they portrayed him as something akin to a guest in a five-star medical tourism program, referring to him as “Brother Brooklyn.”

Psychiatrists and experts in criminal sociopathy may have various theories to explain Ortega and Murillo’s political calculations in handling the state crime against Brooklyn Rivera. The reality, however, is that his death is not an isolated case. It reflects a broader pattern of isolation and torture inflicted upon political prisoners with complete impunity.

Since 2019, six other political prisoners have died in state custody:

• Eddy Montes, shot and killed by a prison guard at La Modelo prison (2019);
• Santos Flores, who endured eight years and five months in La Modelo under inhumane conditions (2021);
• Former Sandinista guerrilla and retired Colonel Hugo Torres, imprisoned in El Chipote jail (2022);
• Retired Army General Humberto Ortega, Daniel Ortega’s brother, who was placed under house arrest and died in isolation at a military hospital (2024);
• Opposition activists Mauricio Alonso and Carlos Cardenas, who died in prison after less than two months in custody (2025).

None of these deaths has been independently investigated, and all remain unpunished.

Following Rivera’s death at the hands of the state, US Secretary of State Marco Rubio described the “Murillo-Ortega” dictatorship as an “enemy of humanity,” holding it responsible for Rivera’s death. The United States also imposed visa sanctions on 100 Nicaraguan officials and their family members for complicity with the regime.

Meanwhile, Canada, the United Nations, the Organization of American States, the European Union, and 30 former Ibero-American presidents have called for an independent investigation into the state crime against Brooklyn Rivera and for accountability from Nicaragua’s co-dictators.

However, unlike the crisis surrounding the Somoza dictatorship in 1979 — when Mexico and Venezuela severed diplomatic relations, the Organization of American States rejected the Somoza regime, and an international coalition involving Costa Rica, Cuba, Panama, and the United States actively worked to isolate the dictatorship — today’s warnings directed at Ortega and Murillo, while politically significant, do not constitute genuine continental pressure capable of ending Nicaragua’s police state.

Nine other political prisoners remain victims of enforced disappearance. Their families ask: “Whose photographs will be next — shown in a hospital, dying?” and “When will they call us to tell us our loved one has died?”

All are demanding the immediate release of these prisoners, along with 40 other political detainees, before it is too late.

First published in Spanish by Confidencial and translated and posted in English by Havana Times.

Read more from Nicaragua here on Havana Times.