Daniel Ortega’s government has closed eight universities, ended university autonomy, and erected barriers to foreign collaborations

_SCIENCE

Repression of academia in Nicaragua has escalated over the past 3 months. President Daniel Ortega’s government has closed eight private universities and confiscated their assets, effectively ended university autonomy, and erected barriers to foreign research collaborations. “They are killing the universities,” says chemist Ernesto Medina, former dean of American University, a private institution in Managua that remains open. “All these measures serve to silence the critical voices in academia and suffocate critical thinking.”

Ortega has been president for 15 years, having won reelections condemned internationally as farcical. In April 2018, students took to the streets in anti-government protests. The government responded with unprecedented repression. Police and paramilitary groups killed more than 300 people and arrested more than 1000, according to Amnesty International. After writing two open letters asking Ortega to stop the “irrational violence,” Medina was forced out of his university position. He fled to Germany in July 2020, becoming one of more than 200,000 Nicaraguans in exile. “It is not safe to be there,” he says.

Since then, conditions for Nicaragua’s small scientific community have worsened. After the 2018 protests, international research conferences were canceled and funding for scientific institutions, such as the Nicaraguan Academy of Sciences, was cut.

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A version of this story appeared in Science, Vol 376, Issue 6592.