Washington, D.C., August 18, 2025. – The Institute on Race, Equality, and Human Rights (Race and Equality) strongly condemns the recent police raids carried out by the Ortega-Murillo regime in the departments of Carazo, Granada, Masaya, and Rivas, which left at least 27 people detained between August 14 and 16.  as denounced and documented by the Blue and White Monitoring (MAB). Four of those people have reportedly been released and 23 remain arbitrarily detained for political reasons.

Most of those arrested are political releases, returned exiles, artists and opposition businessmen. The operations were marked by violent raids, looting, use of canine technique and night detentions, in a context marked by the recent confiscation of the San José School in Jinotepe, Carazo.

According to the MAB report, among those arrested in Carazo in this new offensive are the former political prisoner and returned exile Óscar Velásquez Sánchez, the painter Marvin Campos Chavarría, María José Rojas Arburola, daughter of the assassinated opponent Rodolfo Rojas; Chester Cortés, from the Cementerio neighborhood; tattoo artist Darwin Ayerdis – missing since his capture in July – as well as Mario Rodríguez Serrano and Halder López Luna, the latter arrested after voluntarily presenting himself to the police.

The arrests occurred days after co-dictator Rosario Murillo announced on August 12 the confiscation of the San José school, in Jinotepe, under the alleged argument that torture was carried out in that center during April 2018. The confiscated school was administered by the nuns of the Josephine congregation, which represents another step in the regime’s onslaught against the Catholic Church.

It is with deep concern that the regime does not abandon the pattern of arbitrary detentions for political reasons in order to keep the population afraid to express themselves.

“It is unacceptable that in Nicaragua the practice of detaining people and subjecting them to forced disappearance persists, leaving their families in absolute uncertainty and pain. No one should live in fear of never seeing their loved ones again. This is a very serious violation of human rights that must cease immediately,” said Carlos Quesada, Executive Director of Race and Equality.

We demand that the families of the affected people be informed of their whereabouts and that they be released immediately. We also demand that the repression against the Nicaraguan Church cease and that religious freedom and the properties and educational centers owned or administered by the Church be respected.