The death of an indigenous leader in a Nicaraguan prison is not merely a tragedy. It is a symptom of a regime so morally bankrupt that it mirrors the darkest days of the Somoza dynasty. The Foreign Office’s condemnation is as predictable as it is hollow.
What did they expect? That Daniel Ortega, a man who has perfected the art of mimicking authoritarianism, would suddenly embrace due process? The man who crushed the 2018 protests with paramilitary death squads is now presumed to mourn a prisoner’s passing?
Spare me the diplomatic outrage. The real scandal is that Western governments continue to treat Nicaragua as a minor aberration rather than a petri dish for what happens when revolutionary rhetoric curdles into tyranny. We have seen this before: the fall of Rome was preceded by a rot in the provinces, and the genocide of indigenous peoples was the hallmark of colonial regimes.
Here, we have a government that wraps itself in Sandinista nostalgia while committing atrocities that would make the Contras blush. The indigenous communities, already marginalised, become the canaries in the coal mine. Their leader’s death is a warning: the junta in Managua will stop at nothing to silence those who remind them that another world is possible.
And what does the Foreign Office do? It issues statements. Empty, performative statements, as if words could resurrect the dead.
But they cannot. The corpse lies in a cell, and the world yawns. This is the intellectual decadence I have warned about: a comfortable belief that moralising from a distance absolves us of complicity.
It does not. Every trade deal, every diplomatic nicety, every ‘critical engagement’ props up Ortega’s machinery of repression. Until we treat Nicaragua’s slide into brutality with the same urgency as a coup in Ukraine or a conflict in Gaza, we are merely cosplaying as a civilised world.
The indigenous leader’s blood is on our hands, too. Let that sink in.
