In the dim corridors of a Nicaraguan prison, a story reached its grim finale. Mokoro Goring, an indigenous leader of the Mayangna people, died this week after three years of detention. His crime? Defending his community’s land against a hydroelectric dam. His sentence? A slow, quiet death, far from the international spotlight that occasionally flickers onto Managua. But now, with the UK announcing sanctions against the Ortega regime for human rights abuses, the question is not whether the world noticed, but why it took so long.
Goring’s death is a microcosm of a broader tragedy: the systematic erasure of indigenous voices in Nicaragua under Daniel Ortega’s rule. Since 2018, over 300 activists have been arrested, many have died in custody, and thousands have fled. The Ortega government, once a darling of the Latin American left, now operates with the paranoid ruthlessness of a dictatorship. Yet for years, Western powers hesitated, prioritising trade deals and migration agreements over human lives.
The UK’s sanctions, though welcomed, feel like a bandage on a haemorrhage. They target four officials, including the police chief and a supreme court justice, freezing their assets and banning travel. But symbolic gestures do not bring back the dead. They do not dismantle the network of paramilitaries that terrorises the Atlantic Coast. They do not restore the communal lands that have been sold to Chinese and Russian mining companies.
On the ground, the impact is visceral. In Bilwi, the capital of the North Caribbean Coast Autonomous Region, families gather in hushed gatherings. They speak of Goring as a guardian, a man who refused to bow. “He knew this would happen,” a local teacher told me. “But he said someone had to stand.” His widow now faces eviction from their home, a small shack that the government claims is on “state land”.
The cultural shift here is palpable. Nicaragua’s indigenous communities have long been the country’s conscience, their resistance a quiet flame against the wind. But with each death, the flame flickers. The young are leaving, crossing through jungles and rivers to reach Costa Rica or the US. They carry stories of violence, but also of a homeland that is no longer theirs.
There is a cruel irony in Goring’s death coinciding with the UK’s sanctions. It suggests a pattern: the West acts only when the body is cold. For three years, human rights organisations pleaded for intervention. The UN documented torture, arbitrary detentions, and forced disappearances. Yet the Ortega regime remained a partner in regional security, helping to stem migration flows north. Pragmatism over principle, as always.
The sanctions matter, but they are a starting point, not an ending. They must be coupled with asset freezes that target Ortega’s family, with an arms embargo, with visa bans for all regime cronies. More importantly, they must be paired with support for civil society: for the lawyers who defend prisoners, for the journalists who risk their lives to file reports, for the indigenous councils that try to preserve a culture under siege.
Goring’s final days were spent in a cell without windows, his asthma untreated. He died of a heart attack, the officials said. But his heart was broken long before. Broken by a system that sees indigenous lives as obstacles to progress, that equates dissent with treason, that silences the very people who hold the keys to the country’s ecological future.
The UK’s sanctions are a step towards accountability. But they also demand a deeper reckoning from the international community. How many more leaders must die in obscurity before the world acts with the urgency that justice requires? Nicaragua is not a lost cause, but its people need more than gestures. They need to know that the world does not only see them when they are gone.
