The news arrives with grim predictability. Another indigenous leader, another cell, another suspicious death. The UK Foreign Office has issued the obligatory condemnation of Daniel Ortega’s regime, tutting at Managua as though a strongly worded press release might resurrect the dead. One wonders if our diplomats realise that Ortega, that old revolutionary turned autocrat, has long since stopped caring about the court of global opinion. He cares about power. And power, in Nicaragua, is maintained through fear, repression, and the systematic silencing of dissent.
Let us not feign surprise. The trajectory of Ortega’s rule has been clear for years: a slow but steady descent into the kind of caudillo dictatorship that Latin America knows too well. The indigenous communities of the Atlantic Coast, the Miskito, the Rama, the Mayangna, have been in the regime’s crosshairs for their opposition to the Grand Canal project and their demands for land rights. To be an indigenous leader in Nicaragua today is to carry a target on your back. The death in custody is not an anomaly. It is a feature.
But what truly rankles, what makes this more than a routine diplomatic spasm, is the broader context of intellectual decadence that allows such regimes to flourish. We in the West have become addicted to the theatre of condemnation. We issue statements, we summon ambassadors, we impose sanctions that are often too little and too late. We do this because it is easy. It costs us nothing. It allows us to feel virtuous without confronting the deeper rot.
Consider the parallel with the late Roman Empire. As the barbarians gnawed at the frontiers, the senatorial class occupied itself with elaborate rituals, public games, and the denunciation of distant malefactors. Sound familiar? Our modern version is the Twitter pile-on, the strongly worded paragraph from the Foreign Office. We have forgotten that regimes like Ortega’s thrive not because they are strong, but because we are weak. Weak in will, weak in strategic imagination, weak in our commitment to the liberal order we claim to champion.
The death of this unnamed leader is a tragedy. But it is also a mirror. It reflects our own failure to understand that autocracies do not reform through gentle persuasion. They reform when they are confronted with consequences that bite. Economic pressure, diplomatic isolation, support for opposition movements. These are unfashionable tools in an era of ‘soft power’ and ‘engagement.’ Yet they are the only ones that have ever worked.
What will we do now? We will express our deep concern. We will note that the Ortega regime must be held accountable. We will move on to the next outrage in a week. The indigenous peoples of Nicaragua know this. They know that the Western gaze is fleeting, that our attention span is measured in news cycles, not years. And so they suffer. They die. And we curse the darkness without ever lighting a match.
This is not a column about hope. It is a column about shame. Shame for a world that has grown too comfortable, too complacent, too enamoured of its own moral posturing to act. The death in a Nicaraguan cell is a small tragedy in the great sweep of history. But it is a tragedy that indicts us all.
