World News

Raising Pressure on Nicaragua, U.S. Imposes Sanctions on Vice President

MEXICO CITY — The Trump administration imposed financial sanctions on Nicaragua’s vice president, Rosario Murillo, and a top aide on Tuesday, ratcheting up pressure on the Sandinista government to end its brutal crackdown on a popular uprising.

Posted Updated

By
Elisabeth Malkin
, New York Times

MEXICO CITY — The Trump administration imposed financial sanctions on Nicaragua’s vice president, Rosario Murillo, and a top aide on Tuesday, ratcheting up pressure on the Sandinista government to end its brutal crackdown on a popular uprising.

Nicaragua has been convulsed since April, when peaceful student protests developed into a broad-based movement demanding the resignation of President Daniel Ortega and Murillo, who is his wife.

Washington has called on the Nicaraguan government to move up elections as a way out of the crisis, but Ortega has said that he will serve out his term, which ends in 2021. Early attempts at talks between the government and a coalition of opposition leaders foundered.

During the summer, masked paramilitaries, often accompanied by the police, attacked protesters at barricades and regained control of the streets. Since then the government has rounded up and jailed opponents, charging many of them with terrorism. The Nicaraguan Center for Human Rights says that more than 320 people have been killed and more than 600 imprisoned since the unrest began.

The Trump administration had already imposed sanctions on four high-ranking Nicaraguan officials when National Security Adviser John Bolton announced on Nov. 1 that Washington would harden its policy toward Nicaragua, which he described as part of Latin America’s “troika of tyranny” along with Cuba and Venezuela.

Until “free, fair, and early elections” are held in Nicaragua, he said, the government “will feel the full weight of America’s robust sanctions regime.”

The sanctions, which are imposed by the Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control, block access to any property that Murillo and the aide, Néstor Moncada Lau, might hold in the United States and prevent U.S. financial institutions from doing any business with the two.

The Treasury’s announcement was backed by an executive order signed by President Donald Trump, who declared that the Ortega government’s actions constituted “an unusual and extraordinary threat to the national security and foreign policy of the United States.”

The political unrest has stalled the country’s economy, which depends on tourism, agriculture and export-assembly plants. Fitch Ratings said Tuesday that it expected the economy to contract by 4 percent this year.

Murillo, 67, has exerted outsize influence on the country since 2007, when Ortega, the 1980s revolutionary leader, won the presidential election and returned to power. Ortega established an increasingly autocratic rule, taking control over all branches of government. By naming Murillo as his vice president in the 2016 election, Ortega indicated that she would be his heir.

Moncada Lau, 64, has long been part of the Ortegas’ inner circle and acts as their national security adviser, the Treasury Department said.

“Nobody debates his rise to power as the guardian of the private affairs of the presidential family,” the Nicaraguan newspaper Confidencial wrote of Moncada Lau on Tuesday.

Copyright 2024 New York Times News Service. All rights reserved.