“The dictatorship has 90% of the media in Nicaragua and 10% credibility. Contrary to that, we are 10% of the media abroad but we have 90% of the credibility and appreciation of our audience”. This is how the journalist Sergio Marín Cornavaca (61 years old), director of the La Mesa Redonda portal, describes the situation of the Nicaraguan press, referring to data from the Foundation for Freedom of Expression and Democracy.
Marín is one more of the Nicaraguan informants who today carry out their work from a forced exile. In his case, from neighboring Costa Rica, where he decided to flee two years ago in the face of growing accusations from the government of Daniel Ortega.. “My conviction was: I'm not going to be in jail, I'm more useful out of jail, reporting,” explains the journalist when he looks back and remembers how he managed the march in his native country.
Marín consulted his immigration sources to find out if he had any unknown legal impediment to leaving, made the pertinent steps to go to Costa Rica and waited for the right moment to cross.. It was June 20, 2021. It was Sunday and they held him longer than usual. “I had to play it,” he says in a telephone conversation. “It was not an easy decision, I was leaving my family, with my son exiled due to direct threats in Panama and I was forced to cross the border,” says Marín, who took everything he needed to continue reporting from his platform.. “There are colleagues who work with me, practically clandestinely in Nicaragua, they use pseudonyms because they cannot openly practice journalism, however they pass the information on to us, which we process and publish.. The same as the Cubans do, the same as the Venezuelans did at some point.”
Since the marches against the Ortega government in April 2018, the flight of journalists from Nicaragua has increased. Marín belongs to what he defines as “the second wave” of informers who left for fear of threats -in which Carlos Fernández Chamorro also escaped- and who still continue to arrive today, mainly in Costa Rica.. “There are communities, entire towns that no longer have journalists. I can cite the case of the South Caribbean Coast, where there is no independent journalism, practically everyone has gone into exile, what remained are the official media,” he stresses.
April 2018 was a great challenge for the Nicaraguan population towards Sandinismo, which quickly launched the repressive machinery. From that moment on, journalists were singled out, highlights the director of La Mesa Redonda. “All of us without exception were marked and suffered attacks in the marches,” he continues.. Marín himself was attacked while performing live through his networks. “I was next to my vehicle and it was practically a mob of several armed motorists, they arrived, they beat me, they broke the main window of my truck, they took my cell phone (mobile phone), but the people intervened.”
Although the chapter that “marked my life” was the coverage on July 13, 2018 of the events that took place inside the Church of the Divine Mercy in Managua, where he spent hours of “terror” while a group of approximately 200 young people sought refuge from armed attacks.
The citizen outburst experienced five years ago was a turning point in the Central American country. In Marín's opinion, it marked a before and after because “the mask of the revolutionary leader, conciliator, seeker of peace for the people of Nicaragua fell apart because the true dictator that Ortega was and has always been was discovered.”
In fact, Marín was already very critical of Ortega before 2018.. He did it from his radio program and the managers of the station decided to do without him in 2017.
“Since Ortega returned to power in 2007, there have been several milestones that reflect the authoritarian will of the regime and the desire to make enemies with the independent press,” explains Marín.. “A whole desire to silence journalism,” he adds. And so, in his opinion, two types of journalism began to emerge in Nicaragua: the “official collaborationist” and the “independent.”
However, journalists are not the only ones persecuted in Nicaragua. Marín mentions the religious, among whom Monsignor Rolando Álvarez stands out, who recently again refused the expatriation that President Ortega already offered him when he exiled 222 political prisoners to the United States. Also to the doctors, who had to go into exile for caring for young people who came to hospitals with gunshot wounds during the protests. Or the students who were “criminalized” and saw their academic records erased. For this reason, this informant defines himself as “a number more than almost 8% of the Nicaraguan population that has been forced into exile due to political conditions.”
“There is an open hate speech against figures who in one way or another have a relevant speech against the dictatorship and that does not discriminate,” adds Marín, since there are those who “have been imprisoned for expressing their opinion.”. An evil that affects the entire Latin American region, according to the director of La Mesa Redonda: “The legal frameworks of authoritarian governments are adjusting to go against journalism.”
Despite the little or no hopeful panorama that hangs over Nicaragua, the aforementioned exile of the 222 political prisoners left Ortega “isolated”, in the words of Marín. A qualifier that he uses based on the zero support he received from the leftist leaders who govern Latin America today.
That June 20, 2021, Marín managed to cross the border successfully. Even though he is safe in Costa Rica, he reflects that exile is not easy and that he feels in a “legal limbo” since he cannot make his status official.. Nor is it easy to continue doing journalism without income – “here the main risk we have is that for economic reasons we do not continue practicing” -, although he does not give up and seeks new horizons. With all this, he concludes: “We are going to return to Nicaragua to practice journalism in democracy.”