Deepening the Grip

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Nicaraguan lawmakers over the weekend approved a constitutional amendment weekend that would enhance the power of President Daniel Ortega and his wife, Vice President Rosario Murillo, a move that critics and human rights groups describe as “dangerously resembling the North Korean model,” Al Jazeera reported.

On Friday, the country’s national assembly – dominated by Ortega’s ruling Sandinista National Liberation Front (FSLN) – approved the measures “unanimously.”

The amendments would elevate Ortega and his wife to the posts of “co-presidents,” and give them authority over all “legislative, judicial, electoral, control and supervisory bodies, regional and municipal.”

Presidential terms will be increased from five to six years and the executive will have more control over the media and the church, so they are not subject to “foreign interests,” according to Agence France-Presse.

The changes also include stripping the citizenship of “traitors to the homeland,” which the Ortega administration has already done to hundreds of critics, including journalists, politicians, and activists.

The reform will be voted on again in early 2025 but is expected to pass and take effect shortly thereafter.

Human rights groups and international observers swiftly criticized Friday’s vote as a “sham,” with the regional Organization of American States calling the amendments “a definitive attack on the democratic rule of law.”

Political and legal analysts said the reform “guarantees the presidential succession” of Murillo and the couple’s son, Laureano Ortega. Others warned that it would end political pluralism and the doctrine of the separation of powers in the Central American nation.

Ortega first served as president from 1985 to 1990 and returned to power in 2007.

In 2018, he came under national and international scrutiny during mass protests that resulted in a brutal crackdown on demonstrations which left 300 people dead.

Since then, Ortega has targeted church leaders, non-governmental organizations, and journalists, whom he accuses of supporting a coup against him.

Thousands of Nicaraguans have fled into exile.

Even so, Ortega secured a fourth consecutive term as president in 2021 following an election campaign marked by a months-long crackdown on dissent and the detention of dozens of opposition figures, including presidential candidates.