Q24N — Last week, the regime of Daniel Ortega and Rosario Murillo once again confirmed, without admitting it, one of the practices most denounced by human rights organizations: the forced disappearance of political prisoners.
First, they showed Angélica Patricia Chavarría Altamirano reading a prepared statement in which she thanked the regime for the supposed “humane treatment” she received in prison.
Days later, they released a medical report on the Miskito indigenous leader Brooklyn Rivera Bryan, who disappeared in September 2023, presented in critical condition, on a ventilator, and suffering from multiple organ failure. Brooklyn Rivera died on Saturday, May 30; however, the regime did not make it public until the next day.
The paradox is that neither Chavarría nor Rivera has an open legal case explaining why the regime has kept them imprisoned and disappeared for more than two years.
The two reappearances came after years of public pressure from family members, international bodies, the U.S. government in the case of Brooklyn Rivera, and human rights organizations. They also came amid growing reports of missing political prisoners within the Nicaraguan prison system and fears that more detainees will die in state custody.
Since 2019, at least six political prisoners have died in prisons or under the regime’s control. Nicaragua’s newspaper, La Prensa, puts the number at 8. And now 9 with Brooklyn Rivera.
Forced disappearance has become one of the most extreme instruments of political repression in Nicaragua. Human rights organizations consider any detained person whose whereabouts are concealed by the State, without access to family, lawyers, or official information about their physical condition or legal status, to be “disappeared.”
A study presented in August 2025 by the Legal Defense Unit and other organizations indicated that 33 of the 73 political prisoners at that time were victims of enforced disappearance. According to the Mechanism for the Recognition of Political Prisoners, as of March 2026, 11 people remained disappeared while in state custody.
Gonzalo Carrión, lawyer and member of the Nicaragua Never Again Human Rights Collective, maintains that the real number is higher. “We’re talking about a dozen missing people. And I’m telling you, there are more, because we’re documenting missing people whose families kept them anonymous out of fear, out of terror, even hoping that one day they would deign to bring them out.”
The Angélica Chavarría Case
Five days before Rivera’s public appearance, the regime had already displayed Angélica Chavarría Altamirano, detained since May 2024 and disappeared for two years. The Ministry of the Interior released a video in which Chavarría appeared reading a statement claiming she was receiving medical attention, food, and humane treatment.
Carrión rejects the authenticity of that statement. “In Angélica Chavarría’s case, they paraded her, forcing her to read what she said. They forced her to say that she was being treated well, that she was receiving care, all of that. But we know firsthand: she wasn’t speaking freely. Her face and the way she spoke weren’t those of a free person.”
Chavarría was arrested during the operation against her partner, Humberto Ortega Saavedra, Daniel Ortega’s brother and former head of the Army, on May 19, 2024, the same day he gave an interview to Infobae criticizing the lack of democratic succession in Nicaragua. Five months later, on September 30, 2024, Humberto Ortega died after spending more than three months under house arrest and in hospital isolation. Daniel Ortega never publicly commented on his brother’s death.
“Angélica was the woman who had been missing the longest,” Carrión recalled. “And her case demonstrates something important: asking about them, speaking publicly, persisting even amidst fear, plays a vital role.”