By Carola Guerrero De León
April 1 was a day like any other for Nicaraguan journalists. A day of silence, of censorship. And it’s because at the beginning of the month, the president of Nicaragua, Daniel Ortega, celebrated 3,000 days without an open press conference, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ).
It was more than eight years ago that independent media in Nicaragua had anything similar to a press conference with Ortega. According to the newspaper La Prensa, the last contact occurred on January 10, 2007, the day the president took office.
The peculiarity of this case is that when it comes to complaining about the lack of transparency and communication, journalists tend to focus their anger towards First Lady Rosario Murillo, not the president.
Murillo, 63, is the official spokesman of the government. Several sources point to her as the ‘architect’ of the current strategy that denies access to independent press and answers the occasional “soft question addressed by pro-government media,” according to CPJ.
Meanwhile, Ortega is not the only one following the 'communicative strategies' of his wife. According to Lucydalia Baca, editor of La Prensa, government ministers also avoid critical journalists following orders from Murillo.
Opponents of the government have characterized Murillo as an omnipresent figure in Nicaragua.
According to La República, Ortega occasionally appears in public. In contrast, the first lady is on national television every weekday, where she can be seen talking about “the government of her husband in a rhetorical wave which mixes socialism, New Age spirituality and Catholicism,” according to the newspaper.
In his book Why do they hate us so much?, author Omar Rincón talks about the state of freedom of expression in Nicaragua. “Institutions do not respond to allegations of investigative journalism. And when they do respond, they do so with smear campaigns or by instigating violence against journalists” [...] "Access to public information is increasingly precarious.”
Currently, the biggest news story is the construction of the transoceanic canal in Nicaragua, a controversial project valued at US $50 billion which has been criticized for alleged violations of human rights. On March 16, the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR) held a hearing on this topic where these issues were exposed.
These complaints join those from journalists who want to investigate but face a real struggle in getting government responses, according to CPJ.
“The main source of information about HKND, the Chinese company contracted to build the canal, has been their website because neither the company nor the government has provided us with much information,” said a Managua newspaper editor, who requested anonymity from CPJ for security reasons.
Several journalists have said that Ortega is addressing the issue of the Canal in the way he addresses most government issues: in secret.
Note from the editor: This story was originally published by the Knight Center’s blog Journalism in the Americas, the predecessor of LatAm Journalism Review.
