Ana María Méndez Dardón

Ana María Méndez Dardón

Director for Central America

The Ortega-Murillo government has not held genuinely free or competitive elections in Nicaragua for years. It systematically dismantled the conditions for electoral competition ahead of the 2016 elections and completed that authoritarian trajectory with the sham presidential elections of 2021, in which opposition leaders were jailed, political parties were eliminated, and independent voices were silenced.

The regime’s recent announcement that Nicaragua will no longer hold competitive presidential elections does not fundamentally change the country’s political reality. Rather, it seeks to transform a de facto dictatorship into a de jure one by formally abandoning even the pretense of democratic competition.

This decision is also an........

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