SerpApi.Org
Secretary of State Marco Rubio called on the international community to join forces to prevent Nicaragua from canceling elections as President Daniel Ortega cements his family’s decadeslong grip on power.
The U.S. condemnation came after Ortega, 80 years old, said at a mass rally that elections won’t be allowed in the Central American nation any longer.
“There will never be elections here again,” Ortega said Sunday night in a doddering voice, addressing state workers who were required to attend the commemoration of the 1979 Sandinista revolution. That victory ousted dictator Anastasio Somoza and brought Ortega to power at the head of what was then a popular leftist movement.
Ortega said that Nicaragua’s opposition, most of which is in exile, wouldn’t be allowed to take power again. “They would love to win elections in order to make money,” he said. “But they can forget about it.”
Ortega, who made his wife Rosario Murillo co-president through a constitutional reform in 2025, appears to be in ill health, and has disappeared from view for months at a time. In recent years, Murillo has been running the country’s day-to-day affairs. Presidential elections are scheduled for next year amid speculation that Ortega is preparing a dynastic succession.
Rubio said on Monday that the Trump administration and the international community won’t stand by as Ortega and Murillo deepen repression and manufacture instability that he said threatens U.S. national security.
“Ortega’s pledge to abolish elections in Nicaragua proves his cowardice and fear of the Nicaraguan people’s will,” Rubio said on X. He didn’t specify how Ortega threatened U.S. national security.
Murillo, who is also the government spokeswoman, didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.
Since taking office, President Trump has deposed Venezuelan strongman Nicolás Maduro and exerted pressure on Cuba’s communist government. Although the U.S. has imposed some sanctions on the Ortega government, Nicaragua has largely avoided the Trump administration’s attention.
The country has been a low priority because it isn’t seen as an important conduit of narcotics to the U.S., and its police and armed forces have cooperated with U.S. anti-drug efforts, said Orlando Pérez, a Latin American analyst at the University of North Texas at Dallas. In addition, he said, Nicaraguans in the U.S. aren’t as powerful and well-connected as Cuban and Venezuelan communities.
The country is a member of CAFTA-DR, the free trade deal between the U.S., Central American nations and the Dominican Republic. Ortega’s opponents have lobbied for Nicaragua’s suspension from the pact, but the U.S. is reluctant to inflict economic damage that risks sparking mass migration, analysts say.
“It’s the one major tool that could have an impact,” said Eric Farnsworth a Latin American expert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington.
Ortega said Sunday that his government would work with the country’s congress to erect a “wall of legislation” to prevent opponents from reaching the presidency.
Ortega, who was president from 1985 to 1990, has been in power since 2007. He last won re-election in 2021 after arresting and imprisoning his opponents ahead of a vote condemned as a farce by the U.S. and the international community. Since then, most of the opposition has been exiled, and nearly a million Nicaraguans have fled the country as repression deepened, most of them to neighboring Costa Rica and the U.S.
He has closed independent media and shut down or expelled more than 5,000 civic groups and organizations that provided education, running water and medical services to the poorest segments of society. He imprisoned and expelled almost 400 political prisoners, and canceled the citizenship of nearly 500 civic, political, and religious leaders. Ortega has taken over more than 25 universities, and expelled Catholic nuns belonging to Mother Teresa’s Missionaries of Charity.
“He has turned Nicaragua into a tropical version of North Korea,” said Félix Madariaga, a former Nicaraguan presidential candidate who was imprisoned for nearly two years before going into exile in the U.S. in 2023.
Write to José de Córdoba at [email protected]