By the Nicaragua Solidarity Coalition

[The Nicaragua Solidarity Coalition is an international coalition of organizations and individuals who support Nicaragua’s sovereignty. Its purpose is to share with the public accurate information about Nicaragua and to counter misinformation and lies about the country that are published in the media. Writings are based on personal experiences in Nicaragua as well as an understanding of its history and current conditions. The Coalition welcomes others to join.]

The major US media have been less than truthful about the 222 released prisoners, formerly Nicaraguan, who traveled to Washington by agreement with the US government, in a plane provided by the US, on February 9.

What the media should focus on is that, as in the 1980s with Reagan’s Contra war, the United States has been trying to overthrow the democratically elected government of Nicaragua. These 222 received US monies directly or indirectly, through nonprofits or businesses, to manage US aggressions against the State of Nicaragua. Many of them conspired with the US embassy in Managua. Most  of them were involved in the 2018 US-directed coup attempt that left 253 people dead, hundreds of Sandinistas tortured and traumatized, and billions of dollars of damage to the economy. They were planning further actions in the run-up to Nicaragua’s 2021 elections when they were arrested.  Details follow, to substantiate these claims.

The media should be telling the US public how their tax dollars are used for lies and violence and the overthrow of democratically elected governments – as happened in numerous countries in Latin America since World War II beginning with Guatemala in 1954.

These persons, who may be accurately regarded as US agents, received money directly or indirectly from the United States to wage acts of extreme violence during the coup attempt, largely ignored by the international media. Nicaragua gave an amnesty in June 2019 to hundreds of those found guilty of crimes, with the caveat that no further crimes be committed. But after the coup attempt, these 222 continued to direct destabilization actions, or they financed and managed actions with money from US taxpayers.

In total, 316 people have been deprived of Nicaraguan citizenship because of their treacherous crimes. International bodies such as the UN refugee agency claim that this is illegal because the action was taken on “arbitrary grounds,” completely ignoring the evidence of what they had done. Deprivation of citizenship exists in most national legal systems including the US and UK. For example, the UK government has deprived 767 people of British citizenship since 2010 and taken away UK passports in 94 other cases. In the US, committing an act of treason can be grounds for losing citizenship.

Where did the US money come from and what was it used for?

Money from agencies funded by the US government was used in three main ways:
To finance media terrorism;
To create so-called NGOs or nonprofits which, for example, trained young people to overthrow their own government;
To create or sustain so-called “human rights” organizations.

Funds were directed through US agencies like the US Agency for International Development (USAID), the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), and others. USAID alone provided US$315,009,297 from 2014 to 2021; the biggest years, of course, were 2017 and 2018 with a total of US$100 million to nonprofits and “human rights” organizations. In May 2018, during the attempted coup, Tom Ricker of the Quixote Center described 55 NED grants awarded between 2014 and 2017, totaling US$4.2 million, “as part of a U.S. government-funded campaign to provide a coordinated strategy and media voice for opposition groups in Nicaragua.”

Media terrorism refers to outright lies, fake news, and news distortion, including millions of fake messages through social media, to incite and maintain the coup attempt and to foment assassinations and hate crimes.  These crimes included torture, murder and actual burning of Sandinistas; arson of Sandinistas’ homes; and destruction of dozens of public buildings like schools, health centers, and city halls. Since 2007, when the Sandinistas returned to the presidency, the US helped create and fund media not just to disinform Nicaraguans but to fool US citizens.

This funding helped create a subversive front of Nicaragua-based newspapers, television stations, radio stations, websites, news agencies, and social media pages, whose sole purpose was and is to attack the Sandinista government, while pretending to be “independent.”

The US corporate media reprinted the false propaganda narrative created by this media front in Nicaragua. Thus, the news that most people in the US get about Nicaragua is effectively created and paid for by Washington.

Setting up NGOs or nonprofits. A complementary use of US funding was to set up NGOs and “think tanks,” which provided incomes for opposition figures, promoted their views and “research,” and enabled creation of training schemes aimed at young Nicaraguans.

Kenneth Wollack, now chairman of the state-funded National Endowment for Democracy (NED), bragged to the US Congress on June 14, 2018, that these US-funded bodies had trained 8,000 young Nicaraguans to take part in the uprising. Yorlis Luna has described in detail the indoctrination process. An article for Global Americans gave details of the NED “laying the groundwork for insurrection” in Nicaragua in 2018.

“Human rights” organizations have been set up or paid for by the US in Nicaragua since the 1980s. A country of just 6.3 million people has four human rights organizations – all funded by the US and one even founded by the US government in the ‘80s to cover up for the Contra. Their function is not to deal in general with human rights, but to create and sustain an image of “human rights violations” by the Sandinista government, feeding false or distorted information to the media and to international bodies such as Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch.

US money continues to fund their propaganda work, even when done from other countries. For example, prior to the 2021 Nicaragua Presidential elections, NED allocated US$1,664,321 for Nicaraguans and their organizations in Costa Rica to continue lying about the government.

The rest of this briefing paper provides short histories of some of the key people among the Nicaraguans deprived of citizenship.

Who is Cristiana Chamorro and what did she do?

Cristiana Chamorro is part of the famous family of oligarchs that count seven members as previous presidents and own various media outlets including La Prensa, funded since the 1980s by the US. Cristiana is the daughter of former president Violeta Barrios de Chamorro who was handpicked by the US as the candidate in the 1990 elections. In that election, the voters yielded to tremendous pressure from the US, which had signaled continuing support for the Contra war against the Sandinista government. Violeta won and the Sandinistas turned over the presidency in a peaceful transition. This led to 17 years under three neoliberal governments, run by and for the oligarchy and also favoring US corporations.

Cristiana Chamorro adheres to the same neoliberal ideology. She was the director of the Violeta Barrios de Chamorro Foundation, one of the recipients and main distributors of US money in Nicaragua. On June 2, 2021, journalist William Grigsby revealed US documents which show that the US openly channeled US$16.7 million for the coup attempt through the Chamorro Foundation. This article has a table showing these funds, leading up to the attempted coup and during it. There is also a detailed schedule of known funding from US agencies, which highlights in particular funding that went to the Chamorros.

Briefly: From the USAID alone, the Chamorro Foundation received and channeled US$7.14 million from 2014 to 2021 (the year of Nicaragua’s most recent presidential elections). The foundation also received money from other US institutions such as the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), which spent US$4.2 million in the four years leading up to the 2018 coup attempt on media and other organizations in Nicaragua. European states also gave millions to the foundation: for example, in 2020 alone, it received €831,527 (more than $1 million USD) from the Spanish Agency of Cooperation for International Development. (Note that these funding organizations previously published details of their programs in Nicaragua on their websites, but often now hide them.)

The foundation’s main purpose was to channel funds to some 25 opposition media outlets, several owned by the Chamorro family itself. For example, Confidencial and Esta Semana, both owned by Cristiana Chamorro’s brother Carlos Fernando who is also under investigation, received about US$2 million. The Nicaraguan Prosecutor’s Office asserted that the funds were mostly designated for a program called Media for Nicaragua, but that in practice the money was spent for purposes not within the foundation’s scope.

Cristiana Chamorro and her other brother, Pedro Joaquin Chamorro, a member of the foundation board, were found guilty of money laundering and other crimes in March 2022. From the time she was arrested until she was released on February 9, Cristiana was allowed to serve her time in her mansion.

Cristiana closed the Chamorro Foundation in February of 2021, saying she didn’t want to comply with the Nicaragua “Foreign Agents” law because the US had audited their accounting and said it was all fine. Her statement offended many Nicaraguans, who objected publicly, asking which nation she was governed by.  Under the new Nicaraguan law, organizations receiving foreign funding must now report on the use of the funding – similar to many other nations, including the US and UK. The main reason for any government’s requiring nonprofits to register is to ensure they are not receiving foreign government money for political purposes – exactly what was happening in practice in Nicaragua before its new law took effect.

According to journalist William Grigsby and Liberal Party news analyst Enrique Quiñones, there was still some US$7 million in the Chamorro Foundation account when she closed it, and this money appeared soon afterward in three of her personal bank accounts. More is explained here.

Cristiana Chamorro was presented by US thinktanks such as The Dialogue as the likely next president of Nicaragua in the 2021 elections (here she is jokingly referred to as “President Cristiana”) and was recently described in the New York Times as a “leading contender” for the presidency. These are false representations. She has little political experience and was not a member of a political party; only political parties can nominate presidential candidates. Moreover, she denied wanting to run for election in 2021 and only changed her mind when her arrest for money laundering appeared imminent.

Who is Carlos Fernando Chamorro and what did he do?

Cristiana’s brother Carlos Fernando has his own media empire including the very slick online Confidencial and various expensive television programs. US money through the Chamorro Foundation supported part of these family businesses.  His thinktank CINCO also received funds from the foundation, such as US$153,000 documented and shown here in September 2018:

Confidencial describes itself as an “independent” media outlet, but this is untrue. Confidencial’s framework of taking on Ortega with “uncommon valor” is funded, at least in part, by the National Endowment for Democracy. In 2014, for example, its holding company INVERMEDIA received a $60,000 grant in order to “foster independent digital media in Nicaragua,” and they received an additional $175,000 in subsequent years. Supposedly, this was to “strengthen the organizational capacity” and the “social media presence” of Confidencial. Confidencial would also “establish working relations with leading civil society organizations in order to provide a media platform for coordinated action.” Coordinated action for what purpose?  This description suggests a role beyond mere “independence.”

In fact, Confidencial goes well beyond the role of a right-wing media outlet. It publishes as fact the outputs of other NED and USAID funded bodies, as well as CINCO, whose “research” bears little relationship to the facts. Ever since 2018, it has completely whitewashed the involvement of opposition leaders in violence. For example, the murderer Medardo Mairena (see below), was interviewed recently in Washington by Chamorro without any hint at his crimes. Furthermore, it has encouraged writers from Confidencial and other Chamorro-controlled outlets to work for corporate international media, which then follow Confidencial’s version of events. Examples are Wilfredo Miranda, writing for Spain’s El Pais, Dora Luz Romero, working for the BBC, and Gabriela Selser, writing for the Associated Press.

More information about Chamorro’s media enterprises, CINCO thinktank, and their funding can be found here.

Carlos Fernando Chamorro had already left the country before he was charged for the crimes of laundering money, property and assets; misappropriation and improper retention of funds; and abusive management of funds.  Recently, along with 93 others, he was declared a traitor and lost his citizenship. He has never served time and has been lauded as an “independent” journalist and never discusses the funding he receives from the US and elsewhere.

Who is Manuel Orozco and what did he do?

Manuel Orozco, based in the US, is director of the Center for Migration and Stabilization of Creatíve Associates International (CAI).  CAI is a global agency that is funded by the US to “engineer political transitions” with over $2 billion in US government contracts.  Much of the funding comes from USAID; see their website for more information.  Orozco was the lead in a group of Nicaraguan agents (in this link scroll down to the week’s Briefs) which, according to the public prosecutor, included Juan Sebastián Chamorro, Felix Maradiaga and many others, that proposed and lobbied for economic sanctions against the state of Nicaragua; requested other foreign interference in internal affairs; and promoted destabilization against the democratically elected government of Nicaragua – all with foreign funding.

Orozco is one of the 94 Nicaraguans who have been deprived of citizenship for acts of treason.

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