Violation of the Right to Stay in Nicaragua: Promoting and Weaponizing Emigration

Executive Summary This paper analyzes the right to stay and to migrate in light of state regimes that seek to exercise totalitarian control over their own populations, with a particular focus on the Nicaraguan regime of Daniel Ortega. Such regimes violate the rights to stay and to migrate — which are rooted in human dignity, rights, and agency —by using migration (both of their own citizens and third-country nationals) and repression to ensure their survival and to advance their own political, economic, and geopolitical ends. The author, a former Nicaraguan presidential candidate, finds that such regimes fail to create the conditions that would allow for robust, widely shared, socio-economic development. The Ortega regime instead encourages and seeks to facilitate the emigration of Nicaraguan nationals and depends on spending of remitted monies to keep Nicaragua’s economy afloat. It systematically persecutes, confiscates assets, and strips citizenship from its perceived opponents, including political dissidents, civil society organization, and religious institutions. Finally, it has sought to benefit financially by serving as a hub and way station for third-country nationals in transit to the United States, Costa Rica and other nations, which it (in turn) hopes to destabilize.