HAVANA TIMES – After almost six years of political crisis in Nicaragua, environmental information that clandestinely comes from this Central American country’s protected and forested areas to news accounts and international reports is almost always negative and murky.
“We were left without eyes in the forest and without witnesses in the indigenous communities,” Rosa Aguilar Jackson, whom everyone knows as “Rosalinda,” tells IPS from Managua.
A former member of the Humboldt Center, a non-governmental organization focused on protecting rainforests, Rosalinda is one of the last environmental activists who still resides in Nicaragua. Now, away from her job, she is hidden in the usual hustle and bustle of the Nicaraguan capital.
She lost her job in December 2021 when the environmental office where she worked for more than 12 years closed. The government of former Sandinista guerrilla Daniel Ortega canceled the institution’s legal status and froze its bank accounts. It was part of Ortega’s crusade to eliminate Nicaraguan civil society organizations.
Since the 1990s, her organization has been dedicated to monitoring information on mining concessions in protected areas, illegal deforestation, logging permits, and other aspects of the environment and development in the departments of Matagalpa and Jinotega in northern Nicaragua.
“With the funds that the board of directors obtained from outside, they paid our salaries and advised us to leave the country. Of my team, which had seven members, only I stayed. Everyone has already left,” she told IPS in a conversation carried out through an electronic messaging network.
“We erased the database of contacts and sources in the territories. We burned files, destroyed hard drives and USBs, encrypted collections of reports, and destroyed chips and even phones to protect our informants in the territories. Now I know nothing about them or the projects,” she says.
Since the outbreak of the sociopolitical crisis in Nicaragua in April 2018, environmental management and the protection of natural resources have suffered a notable decline. This was affected by a series of actions and policies implemented by the regime of Daniel Ortega and Rosario Murillo, his wife, and the country’s vice president.
Ortega, former commander of the Sandinista National Liberation Front, governed the country between 1980 and 1985 and returned to power in 2007, where he remains with a government that has become increasingly authoritarian and self-centered, according to international human rights institutions.
Amaru Ramírez, director of the environmental and now banned Fundación del Río, explains to IPS from exile in Costa Rica that in the last six years, Nicaragua has not only lost more forests but also the capacity for independent oversight of natural resources.
According to the environmentalist, this deterioration has demonstrated itself by banning more than 170 civil society organizations dedicated to the defense, promotion, care, study, protection, and oversight of the environment.
“In general terms, the concessions granted by the Nicaraguan State to private companies without transparency impact territorial communities, indigenous populations, and the environment,” says Ramirez, who was denationalized by the regime in 2023 under the charge of “treason.”
“The role of accompaniment, evaluation, independent reports, promotion and participation in consultation processes, reporting on concessions, auditing projects, and developing independent environmental research processes have effectively been lost,” he tells IPS.
On condition of anonymity, another exiled environmentalist in Costa Rica told IPS that state repression against environmental organizations began in 2013 when the government granted a 100-year concession to a Chinese businessman for the failed interoceanic canal construction project.
The route would affect large indigenous territories, bodies of water, forests, and agricultural production areas, motivating thousands of peasant families to protest against the ambitious infrastructure project.
The environmental community questioned the project’s environmental impact and carried out studies and estimates of its adverse environmental effects, which earned them the government’s animosity.
“The 2018 crisis did not begin with the Social Security claim, but with the huge fire in the Indio Maiz reserve that the government wanted to hide and manipulate. It was an environmental issue that lit the fuse of the crisis we are experiencing today,” he recalled.
Then, starting in 2020, the government began creating laws that cut off funding to environmental organizations, which it categorized as “foreign agents.”
It also penalized under the category of “fake news” the issuance of reports or statements contradicting the government’s version. Finally, it began to annul the legal status of the offices of environmental organizations, persecute their directors, confiscate their assets, and silence the scientific community.
Ramirez’s said state policies led to the exile of specialists and the cessation of funds destined to protect reserves, natural parks, and protected areas.
Thus, the policies and plans for protecting forests and wetlands, environmental education, training in saving water sources, solid waste management, recycling, and good agricultural production practices were annulled.
“There were offices engaged in carrying out independent studies, scientific analysis, climate monitoring, wetland care, protection of the Indio Maíz biological reserve…” he told IPS.
Since then, information on the issue has fallen strictly on the government and its official reports.
These official versions published in the media, akin to the government, indicated that through environmental policies called Reforestation and Restoration campaigns, “Green that I love you green,” the country has managed to recover 321 thousand hectares.
“After the presidential mandate, the changes in Nicaragua have been substantial. For example, from 2007 to 2023, 19,700 nurseries have been established, with a production of 221 million plants. In addition, the restoration of 321 thousand hectares has been achieved at the national level,” states part of the brief press release.
However, the credibility of official data has been affected due to multiple reports of human rights violations, corruption, lack of transparency, and sanctions against public institutions and officials.
In a clear reflection of this problem, the Green Climate Fund (GCF) of the United Nations canceled a disbursement of 64.1 million dollars destined for the environment in Nicaragua this March.
The decision, based on non-compliance with environmental and social safeguards policies and procedures, revealed the worrying lack of adequate consultation with indigenous and Afro-descendant communities and the Nicaraguan administration’s departure from international commitments on the environment.
The Green Fund project represented a crucial initiative for environmental conservation in the regions of the Bosawás Biosphere Reserve and the San Juan River, both of great ecological importance.
The Sandinista administration demanded the disbursement through a press release, claiming to have complied “exemplarily” with the environmental commitment.
However, the cancellation of financing reveals the deep institutional and social gaps that Nicaragua faces in its fight against deforestation and for the sustainable management of land use.
According to a report from the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR), presented in Geneva in September 2023, within the framework of monitoring the sociopolitical crisis in Nicaragua, the country has lost 22% of its primary and secondary forests over the last 20 years.
According to United Nations data, Nicaragua has had its highest deforestation rate in the last twenty years since environmental defense organizations were forced to stop working there.
The Nicaraguan government, through the Attorney General’s Office, refuted these reports and data, describing them as interference in Nicaragua’s internal affairs.
This year, the government approved the Law for the Certification of Environmental Permits and Authorizations, which gives the Attorney General’s Office a central role in issuing environmental certificates previously handled by the Ministry of the Environment and Natural Resources.
“This law means environmental decisions based on commercial interests,” a former environmental delegate who had to leave the country and currently works in a European cooperation agency that withdrew its offices from Managua in 2022 and moved them to another Central American country told IPS.
According to the environmental development specialist, who requested anonymity due to her new functions, the reorganization of environmental functions in Nicaragua shows “an alarming lack of independence and transparency in the country’s environmental management.”
“The persecution, expulsion, denationalization, and imprisonment of environmental activists, peasant leaders, indigenous representatives, and even environmental journalists constitute an unprecedented democratic weakening” in the fight for environmental protection in Nicaragua, she remarked.
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