"For the past five months, Alvaro Navarro has been sitting before his computer keyboard with extra care. Never, not even when he started out as a keen reporter and then as news director for the news site Artículo 66, did he have to 'fret over' each word he types. Since last June, the situation for him and his Nicaraguan colleagues is 'high risk,' he said. 'We're under threat by laws about cyber crimes, about foreign agents and about betrayal to country. Any of those can be used against us,' said the journalist, who steers one of the farthest-reaching publications in the Central American country.
The three laws he mentioned were approved by Daniel Ortega's government at the end of 2020. For five months, among the total shutdown of democratic spaces in Nicaragua, the cancellation of general elections after the jailing of the opposition leaders, these rules are used to silence critical voices. Especially those of reporters and their sources. 'We are under a news blackout,' said Navarro."
