Analysts believe that restoring the extinct Interior Ministry of the eighties is another step towards the return of the problems of that decade.
HAVANA TIMES – To Nicaraguan critics, the return of the Interior Ministry that Daniel Ortega announced last week implies the consolidation of the police state. These opposition members believe the Ministry will exercise a role of social control, spying and repression against any manifestation of government opposition, as took place during the eighties when the Ministry of the Interior originally functioned under the FSLN.
Following the fall of the Somoza dictatorship in 1979, Nicaragua passed into the hands of the Sandinista guerrilla who had conquered power through an armed, popular insurrection. The new government entered with a plan for economic and social transformation, but also with a new militarized State. Within a few years the government found itself under increasing pressure from the US under Ronald Reagan, including the organization and financing of a counterrevolutionary army based in Honduras. The Sandinista government reacted with ever increasing control, including a State Security apparatus coordinated by the Ministry of the Interior, or MINT.
In 1990, the Sandinista government held open elections and were shocked by their loss to Violeta Barrios de Chamorro, who concluded the ongoing peace process. Her new government changed some functions of the Ministry of the Interior and renamed it the Ministry of Governance.
On December 27th, thirty-four years later, Daniel Ortega – who doesn’t disguise his nostalgia for the revolutionary Sandinista years – announced that the Ministry of Governance will once more be called the Ministry of the Interior. According to him, the aim is to “return to the Sandinista roots,” and free the police from Ministry of Governance control. Immediately upon his announcement, Ortega ordered the National Assembly to approve a law establishing the functions and structure of the born again Ministry. His docile congress complied in an “urgent” session on December 29.
Exiled political analyst Felix Maradiaga recalls former MINT persecution
Felix Maradiaga is a former secretary in Nicaragua’s Defense Ministry (2004.2006), and a 2021 presidential hopeful who was imprisoned by Ortega and eventually released and banished along with 221 other political prisoners. He fears that the regime intends more than just a symbolic name change by suppressing the name “Ministry of Governance” established during Violeta Barrios’ term in office. To Maradiaga this “revives dangerous concepts used during the eighties to justify grave violations to human rights and the police state that prevailed during those years.”
“During the eighties, the Sandinista government defined internal security from an ideological and party perspective, where any person or organization opposed to the Sandinista Front was view
