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Chapter 74: Nicaragua: The Ortega Family Business and a Port for Bombers

The old revolutionary stares out from the flickering television screen, a ghost haunting his own country. It is Daniel Ortega, his face a jowly mask of permanent fury, his rheumy eyes burning with a paranoid fire. He is delivering one of his interminable, rambling speeches from behind a podium crowded with the garish symbols of his wife’s quasi-mystical ideology. The words are a tired, discordant echo from a long-dead past: a torrent of nostalgic, anti-Yankee rhetoric, hollow incantations of revolution and sovereignty that sound absurd in the suffocating silence of the country he has conquered.

In a darkened, sweltering room in a quiet suburb of Managua, a safe house that changes every three weeks, a young journalist the world will know only as "Isabel" watches the broadcast. Her laptop is the only source of light, its screen reflecting in her tired eyes. She is one of the last of her kind, a reporter for a clandestine news outlet who has not yet been imprisoned in the infamous El Chipote prison or forced into the crushing anonymity of exile in neighboring Costa Rica. She sees through the revolutionary facade with the bitter clarity of a betrayed child. The Ortega she watches is not a socialist; he is a kleptocrat of Shakespearean proportions. His regime is not an ideology; it is a sprawling family business, co-ruled with his powerful, dangerously eccentric wife and Vice President, Rosario Murillo. Their children, a new dynasty, have been installed as heads of state media empires, lucrative state-run import-export companies, and the national oil distribution network.

Isabel’s memory flashes back, unbidden and sharp, to the terror of April 2018. She was a university student then, caught up in the brief, beautiful spring of protest demanding an end to the family’s boundless corruption. She can still feel the sun on her face as she marched with tens of thousands, a sea of blue and white national flags reclaiming the streets, a chorus of voices demanding a future. Then came the crackdown. Not with tear gas and riot police, but with bullets. The masked paramilitaries of the Sandinista Youth, the turbas, unleashed on motorcycles like packs of hyenas, hunting down student leaders in the streets. The snipers on the rooftops of government buildings, methodically picking off protestors. The late-night raids, the disappearances. Her friend, Carlos, a brilliant law student, dragged from his family home and never seen again. She survived, but more than three hundred did not, the dreams of her generation drowned in blood on the asphalt of the capital.

It was after this massacre, when the regime was transformed into an international pariah, condemned by every democracy in the hemisphere and hit with crippling sanctions, that the new patron arrived. First came the quiet security agreements, then the "donations" of Russian wheat and buses. Crates of new, Russian-made equipment began arriving at the ports, destined for the police force that had carried out the killings.

Last month, Isabel’s greatest fear was made real. A source in the military, a disillusioned officer from the old Sandinista army who still believed in the ideals he had once fought for in the mountains, had risked everything to get a message to her. He had smuggled her a photograph taken on his phone from the military side of Managua's international airport. The photo sits on her encrypted laptop now, a single, chilling testament to the final price of her country's subjugation. On the tarmac, stark and alien white against the lush tropical green beyond the runway, is a Tupolev Tu-160 "White Swan"—a massive, nuclear-capable Russian strategic bomber.

Isabel looks from the photograph of the bomber back to the ranting old man on the television. In that instant, she sees the full, tragic arc of her country's history. A revolution born in a brutal jungle war for national liberation, a war fought and won under the banner of sovereignty, has ended here. Her home, a nation purchased in blood by patriots, has become a quiet, convenient, tropical landing strip for a new empire's bombers. Its sovereignty has been sold off, piece by piece, in a grubby transaction for the guns, the money, and the diplomatic cover required to keep one family in power, forever.

The Discourse 74: A Sovereignty for Sale

74.1 From Revolution to Kleptocracy
Russia's modern relationship with Nicaragua is a textbook case of "elite capture," where Moscow props up a corrupt, family-run dictatorship in exchange for a compliant military and diplomatic outpost in the heart of Central America. The modern regime of Daniel Ortega, a celebrated hero of the 1979 Sandinista revolution, has mutated into a dynastic kleptocracy co-managed with his wife, Vice President Rosario Murillo. The pivotal moment in this transformation was the brutal and deadly crackdown on nationwide pro-democracy protests in 2018. Over several months, state-aligned paramilitary forces and the National Police killed over 300 people and imprisoned hundreds more, drawing widespread international condemnation. As a result, the regime was made a pariah, hit with heavy, targeted sanctions from the United States and the European Union and suspended from the Organization of American States (OAS) for its human rights violations. This profound diplomatic and economic isolation made the Ortega-Murillo regime desperate for a powerful, non-Western patron, creating the perfect opportunity for aggressive Russian intervention.

74.2 The Price of Survival: Basing Rights for Firepower
Since 2018, Russia has become the indispensable security guarantor for the Ortega-Murillo family dynasty. This has involved the steady sale and delivery of modern military hardware, including T-72B1 main battle tanks, ZU-23-2 anti-aircraft guns, and multiple naval patrol boats, making Nicaragua's military disproportionately powerful compared to its unarmed Central American neighbors. The relationship was codified in a far more significant way in June 2022 when the Ortega-controlled National Assembly passed Presidential Decree 10-2022. This law, renewed every six months since, officially authorizes the stationing of foreign military troops and equipment—specifically Russian—on its territory for what it vaguely calls "humanitarian aid," "training," and "exchange of experience." The decree explicitly permits Russian ships to use Nicaraguan ports and allows for the entry of Russian long-range strategic aircraft into its airspace. This law is widely seen by Western intelligence agencies as a legal fig leaf, providing a permanent, renewable basing agreement for Russian military assets within a two-hour flight of the United States.

74.3 A Base for Disinformation and Espionage
In parallel with overt military cooperation, Russia has established a significant intelligence and information warfare presence in Managua. In 2017, Russia opened a new counternarcotics training center named after Soviet Marshal Georgy Zhukov on the outskirts of the capital. U.S. intelligence officials have publicly identified this facility as a dual-use intelligence base, providing cover for the GRU to conduct signals and electronic intelligence operations targeting the region. More overtly, Russia has established state-sponsored Spanish-language "media" centers in Managua that serve as regional hubs for its RT and Sputnik propaganda outlets. As documented by the U.S. State Department’s Global Engagement Center, these centers function as troll farms, creating and disseminating pro-Kremlin, anti-U.S. disinformation across social media in Central and South America. This allows Russia to wage information warfare from a secure platform deep within the Western Hemisphere, working to undermine democratic institutions in neighboring countries.

74.4 A Low-Cost, High-Impact Strategic Threat
For a relatively low investment of military hardware, diplomatic support, and economic aid, Russia has secured a significant strategic asset in the heart of what the U.S. has historically considered its "backyard." Moscow now possesses a compliant partner that provides a reliable "yes" vote at the UN, a secure platform for its intelligence and information operations, and, most importantly, a sovereign airfield where it can land and service nuclear-capable bombers. The ability to deploy a Tu-160 to Managua is not about starting a war; it is a form of coercive strategic messaging. It demonstrates a credible capability to hold U.S. territory at risk, forces the U.S. to expend significant resources on hemispheric defense, and shatters the perception of the Americas as a U.S.-dominated zone of stability. As stated by General Laura Richardson, Commander of U.S. Southern Command, the Russian presence in Nicaragua represents a direct and persistent threat, providing Moscow "access to air and sea ports in the Western Hemisphere allowing them to conduct a broad range of malign activities."