In Nicaragua, everything changed on April 18, 2018.
The national protest that erupted without warning in April 2018, demanding an end to the dictatorship, and the brutal response of state repression and political persecution, marked a turning point in the country’s history.
The turbulent relationship that Daniel Ortega’s regime had maintained with the independent press for a decade also changed forever. With the imposition of a police state, eliminating all freedoms, came the imprisonment of journalists, the confiscation and shuttering of more than 50 media outlets, and the criminalization of freedom of the press and expression, forcing more than 200 journalists into exile to date.
Even working under the authoritarian drift of a dictatorship, never in my more than four decades as a journalist had I contemplated going into exile, but in the last seven years I have been forced into it twice with my wife in Costa Rica. The first time was on January 1, 2019, after a police raid on the offices of Confidencial at the end of 2018. My exile lasted 11 months; I returned to Nicaragua on November 25, 2019. My second exile began on June 15, 2021, during the police raid in which all presidential candidates and political and civic leaders were imprisoned in order to wipe out that year’s November 7 elections.
More than four years have now gone by.
In both cases, what triggered my departure was an extreme situation of threats against my personal safety, pushing me to preserve my freedom so that I could continue working as a journalist. The difference is that the second exile ceased to be an emergency situation and became permanent — not only for me as editor-in-chief of Confidencial, but for all the journalists in my newsroom and other media outlets, who in the last three years have also been forced into exile to avoid prison.
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During the first decade of the Ortega Murillo family dictatorship, between 2007 and 2017, the regime imposed a policy of harassment and intimidation to try to silence the independent press. Long before the emergence of Donald Trump in the United States or Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil, Daniel Ortega described the press as “the enemy” and dismissed journalists as “children of Goebbels.”
In August 2007, following the publication in Esta Semana and Confidencial of “Extortion in Tola,” the first case of public corruption involving the state-party-family regime, I was the target of a public lynching campaign on official television channels, which published daily cartoons with my photograph and the label “Wanted,” accusing me of being a “drug trafficker,” “geophagus,” and perpetrator of “crimes against campesinos.”
A year later, the Ministry of the Interior and the Attorney General’s Office launched an investigation into “money laundering” against the non-governmental organization Centro de Investigaciones de la Comunicación (CINCO), of which I was president, which led to a police raid on CINCO’s offices in October 2008 and the seizure of five years of its accounting information. However, under the precarious rule of law that still existed in Nicaragua at the time, four months later, a judge admitted that there was insufficient evidence to convict us of “money laundering” for having carried out a project, with funds from E.U. taxpayers, to promote women’s rights and oppose the criminalization of therapeutic abortion.
The harassment continued with the “uncontaminated information” strategy of First Lady Rosario Murillo, who imposed a blockade on access to public information for the media, as well as a monopoly on state advertising to punish the independent press and finance the ruling family’s new media empire. These went hand-in-hand with a criminalization of criticism and freedom of opinion and espionage by the Army’s Political Intelligence Service, which attempted to recruit journalists, the webmaster, and administrative workers at Confidencial.
We journalists accepted these flagrant violations of press freedom as gajes del oficio, all in a day’s work under a dictatorship. While Ortega’s caudillismo consolidated its hegemony and enjoyed popular support, we continued to investigate corruption, electoral fraud, unconstitutional re-election, human rights violations, the diverting of millions of petrodollars from Venezuela to the private coffers of the Ortega Murillo family, the “Chinese fairy tale” of the interoceanic canal that mortgaged national sovereignty, environmental destruction in the protected Bosawás reserve, and the alliance between the dictatorship and big business that doled out both legitimacy and opportunities for profit at the expense of democracy and transparency.
During those dark years, when our newsroom was very lonely, Confidencial provided evidence of public corruption and even documented criminal acts, but it could not bring about any change or reform in public policy in a centralized power structure that completely nullified the rule of law, until the “model” collapsed in April 2018.
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With the outbreak of the 2018 civic uprising, the regime lost control of the streets and public spaces and, for the first time, faced the challenge of a formidable opposition that threatened its control of political power. For 100 days, through massive street marches; barricades and roadblocks in neighborhoods, highways, and universities; business strikes; and a National Dialogue, the self-organized movement pressed for a civic solution to the national crisis, demanding new elections. The dictatorship, however, responded with police and paramilitary repression and the mass imprisonment of protest leaders, placing the media and journalists on the front line of its attacks.
When the regime saw its power threatened by the civic rebellion, what had been a relationship of minimal tolerance toward the existence of a critical press turned into an all-out war to annihilate the independent press. In April 2018, journalist Angel Gahona was murdered in Bluefields while covering a protest live; there was a paramilitary assault on Radio Darío in León; independent television channels were censored; a wave of physical attacks and threats against reporters began; and customs blockades of paper and supplies for newspapers were imposed.
In July 2018, when the civic protest had already been crushed, the regime passed the Terrorism Financing Law, which criminalized everything from foreign donations to local fundraising, in order to intervene and shut down companies and associations that could be arbitrarily classified as “enemies of national security.” With the advice of a multidisciplinary team of the country’s best lawyers, we designed a legal defense strategy, preparing to face charges against Confidencial. However, the blow was delivered in the early hours of December 14, 2018, when the police raided the offices of Confidencial without a warrant, ransacked all our equipment, computers, and television cameras, and stole our institutional and personal documentation. A day later, we went to file a complaint at Plaza del Sol, the police headquarters, where we were beaten and expelled by riot police. At the prosecutor’s office, a complaint against the police was received with indifference and would never be processed, just like the appeals for protection we filed with the Supreme Court of Justice.
With our newsroom occupied by the police and without any possibility of legal defense, we never stopped reporting for a single day, pressing forward with the conviction that Confidencial’s journalism did not depend on the physical space of an office, but on the commitment of journalists to report the truth at any cost, without submitting to censorship. A week later, the final blow in the escalation of repression came with the police raid on the cable channel 100% Noticias, where journalists Miguel Mora and Lucía Pineda Ubau were arrested while broadcasting the news. The next day, they were charged in the regime’s courts with the alleged crimes of “incitement to hatred and conspiracy to commit terrorism.”
On that strange Christmas Day in 2018, as I was torn between fear and uncertainty, a trusted source who had fortuitously gained access to information held by the police leadership alerted me that the order had already been given to imprison me at any moment. “It could be carried out tomorrow or next week,” he told me, “and then they would invent the charges.”
Having never prepared an exit plan and still committed to continuing to report from Nicaragua, it took me more than 72 hours to understand that I was faced with the choice of going to prison and becoming a silenced journalist or going into exile and remaining a journalist in freedom. It was an agonizing decision, which I managed to make with the support and courage of my wife and children. Thanks to a network of support and solidarity, we were able to leave Managua, evading police highway checkpoints and crossing the border into Costa Rica through blind spots.
In those final days of December 2018, five other journalists from Confidencial decided to leave the country on their own, based on individual risk assessments, but most of our reporters and editors remained in Nicaragua, reporting from a makeshift office and defying the constant threat of the police state.
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During the emergency of my first exile in San José, I received extraordinary solidarity from Teletica, Canal 7, which allowed me to continue directing Confidencial remotely and produce Esta Semana and Esta Noche from its studios. When censorship was imposed on Channel 12 in Nicaragua, we called for a mass migration of television audiences to Confidencial’s YouTube channel, which today, six years later, has more than 520,000 subscribers. From exile in Costa Rica, I founded a new institution to relaunch a media outlet that had been outlawed and criminalized by the dictatorship. I was a journalist with my eyes and ears trained on Nicaragua, with the sole priority of returning to the country as soon as the minimum freedoms allowing me to practice journalism without being imprisoned were restored.
As a result of the second National Dialogue, held between the government and the Civic Alliance for Justice and Democracy between February and April 2019, the regime committed to releasing all political prisoners and restoring constitutional rights. The dictatorship only partially fulfilled the first commitment and passed a self-amnesty law to protect its partisans who were responsible for the crimes of repression. Under the protection of this law, it also released more than 300 political prisoners, including my fellow journalists, but maintained the police state and refused to discuss or negotiate electoral reform to allow free elections to be held in 2021.
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A few months after the prisoners were released, a small group of journalists, human rights defenders, and political activists decided to take the risk of returning to Nicaragua. On November 25, 2019, I resumed in Managua the demand for the return of the Confidencial newsroom, which was still occupied by the police, and in the meantime, we set up a new newsroom and a makeshift television studio in a commercial building, where the entire team regrouped until the Covid-19 pandemic forced us to retreat to our homes in March 2020.
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The pandemic taught us to work remotely and to put the best practices of journalism to the test in order to overcome the triple siege of the police state, censorship, and the official denial of the health crisis. According to the Ministry of Health, only 179 people died from COVID-19 in Nicaragua, which would have been a global feat, but based on observations of ‘express burials’, testimonies from victims’ relatives and independent doctors in hospitals, and projections by health workers based on underreporting of official information, Confidencial estimated that Nicaragua had one of the highest excess mortality rates in the world.
While tens of thousands of people were dying, including hundreds of senior regime officials, civilians, and military personnel who believed wholeheartedly the official lie, repeated to the beat of cumbia music, that Covid-19 was an “imported virus,” the dictatorship was preparing to destroy the last chance for civic change through the November 2021 elections. Between October 2020 and February 2021, the Sandinista-controlled National Assembly passed a trident of repressive laws: the Special Law on Cybercrimes, the Foreign Agents Law, and the Sovereignty Law (which defines the crime of treason), to be applied retroactively to justify the conviction of political prisoners.
But the spearhead of repression continued to be the police state, the prohibition of the rights of assembly and mobilization, imposing a police cordon against the leaders of the civic rebellion and potential presidential candidates, who were immobilized under a de-facto house arrest regime.
In December 2020, the dictatorship formalized the illegal confiscation of Confidencial, assigning the property to the Ministry of Health. In a crude attempt to whitewash the crime against press freedom, the Minister of Health inaugurated with great fanfare a “Maternity Home” for pregnant women in our newsroom, which would eventually be abandoned. On May 20, 2021, the police raided our new newsroom for the second time, stole all equipment and documentation, and held our audiovisual producer Leonel Gutiérrez in El Chipote Prison for 10 hours.
With our second newsroom confiscated and under pressure from escalating repression, we persisted in continuing to report remotely, drawing on lessons learned from the pandemic. But in the following three weeks, a massive police raid was launched to capture the seven opposition presidential candidates and more than 40 political and civic leaders, including journalists, university students, farmers, businesspeople, political activists, and human rights defenders. The aim was to outlaw the opposition and eliminate political competition in the November 7 elections —which polls showed Daniel Ortega would have lost to any of the opposition candidates— and to impose his re-election by force.
On June 13, 2021, the Foreign Ministry distributed an official document to the international community entitled, in Orwellian language, “In Defense of the Rule of Law,” in which it attempted to justify the electoral raid, alleging that the government was the target of “an act of treason” and a “seditious conspiracy” financed with tens of millions of dollars from USAID, IRI and NED, channeled through the Violeta Barrios de Chamorro Foundation —which was headed by my sister Cristiana Chamorro, one of the presidential candidates, under house arrest— and that these funds had been transferred to me and to Confidencial, La Prensa, and other independent media outlets that were “under investigation” by the Attorney General. And although Confidencial had never received a donation from that foundation, whose relationship with the other media outlets did not constitute an illegal act, it was clear that I had been convicted in advance for an alleged crime in a trial in which I would have no right to defend myself.
Once again, facing imminent illegal arrest, on June 15, 2021, I left with my wife for the second time into exile, taking a new route through the countryside to Costa Rica. Six days later, as I was beginning to work incognito from San José, a contingent from the Police Special Operations Directorate raided my home in Managua to imprison me, on the same night that sports reporter and blogger Miguel Mendoza was captured. Two months later, they issued an arrest warrant against me and formally charged me with “money laundering” in the same case in which my siblings Cristiana and Pedro Joaquín and four other political prisoners were being prosecuted.
It was in that month of August 2021, when the prisons were filling up with political prisoners and the civic space for the November 7 elections was definitively closed, that I understood and accepted that my second exile was no longer an emergency but a permanent condition, while other colleagues from my newsroom were also forced into exile to avoid harassment by the Attorney General’s Office and threats of arrest. My priority this time would no longer be to return immediately to Nicaragua, where I would go straight to prison, but to protect my editorial team, scattered between Nicaragua, Costa Rica, and other countries. From exile, so that they could continue to report and defend the last vestige of freedom in a country subjected to the censorship of a totalitarian dictatorship.
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On November 7, 2021, dictator Daniel Ortega declared himself the winner of his third consecutive re-election, without political competition, for the second time with his wife Rosario Murillo as vice president, consolidating a dynastic family dictatorship. Contrary to the openness expected by some international analysts, the regime deepened a process of totalitarian radicalization with religious persecution against the Catholic Church; the elimination of all spaces for civil society, canceling more than 5,500 associations and non-governmental organizations, including private universities and business associations; and launching a transnational campaign of repression against the opposition in exile. The latter included the denationalization of more than 450 citizens, including some 20 journalists; the de-facto exile of thousands of citizens, arbitrarily expelled or prevented from entering the country; and the execution of state terrorism operations against Nicaraguan refugees in Costa Rica.
Between 2022 and 2024, arbitrary arrests and harassment of independent journalists in Nicaragua increased, subjecting them to a regime of de-facto house arrest, to the point that virtually all reporters remaining in the country had to go into exile to avoid imprisonment or silence.
My Return to Journalism in Nicaragua
Reporting from outside the country, and with independent sources in Nicaragua also criminalized, we set out to avoid the “exile bubble,” in order to continue telling the story of repression, resistance, and also daily life in Nicaragua. To this end, journalism in exile prioritizes the safety of journalists and news sources; promotes innovation in our relationship with our audiences, whose trust in our work is our only defense; and strives to achieve economic sustainability for the media, when traditional advertisers have also been criminalized and cooperation agencies cancel their programs or reduce their donations.
Journalism in exile, with an audience mainly concentrated in Nicaragua, is defeating the dictatorship’s censorship. Investigations into crimes against humanity, murders, extrajudicial executions, torture, political persecution, confiscations, and denationalizations are sowing the seeds of truth for international justice processes. Investigations into bribery and extortion, and the network of 22 private companies owned by the Ortega Murillo family; Russian espionage with the complicity of the Nicaraguan Army; and the “blockade” of 24 generals who are blocking military ascension, highlight widespread public corruption. Above all, revelations of internal purges of senior regime officials, both civilian and military, and the ongoing dynastic succession of co-dictator Rosario Murillo, are the order of the day for a growing audience that includes the very public servants who are hostages to a corrupt regime in the process of decay.
Exile, however, comes at an enormous human cost for journalists who have suffered reprisals against their families in Nicaragua, while in Costa Rica a climate of fear and uncertainty prevails due to criminal attacks orchestrated by the regime, such as that of retired Major Roberto Samcam, the most powerful voice denouncing the Army’s involvement in the repression, who was shot eight times in his home in San José on June 19, 2025.
The exile of journalists also involves the pain of family separation caused by the punishment of banishment. On June 14, 2025, my mother, former Nicaraguan President Violeta Barrios de Chamorro, succumbed in Costa Rica to a longstanding illness. For now, she rests temporarily in San José and will only be able to rest in peace in her homeland when Nicaragua is free and once again a Republic.
Sooner rather than later, after this prolonged exile, independent journalism will have to tell the story of the fall of a dictatorship — and how the monumental task of rebuilding Nicaragua begins.
Carlos Fernardo Chamorro, a Nicaraguan journalist exiled in Costa Rica since June 2021 and stripped of his nationality by the Ortega Murillo dictatorship in February 2023, is the director of confidencial.digital.