“The Police stole my house and vehicles that weren’t even mine”
The Nicaraguan AFP correspondent had to seek exile in the US. “It’s sad that practically no one is left to depict what’s happening in Nicaragua,” he says regretfully.
HAVANA TIMES – In 2018, photojournalist Oswaldo Rivas first began to feel himself under persecution from the regime headed by Daniel Ortega and Rosario Murillo. Every time he covered an event as a journalist, it became “normal” to find himself surrounded by military, police or plain-clothed police identifying themselves as “intelligence officers.” These agents would interrogate him and make him leave the activities. In 2019, he recalls, such repression against independent journalists increased, especially those working for international news agencies.
Despite this, the Nicaraguan photojournalist continued to do his job, most recently working as graphics correspondent for the Agence France-Presse (AFP). On June 4, 2024, he was in the Granada Cathedral together with an independent French journalist who had come to Nicaragua to document the religious persecution in the country. A police patrol arrived and kept them from continuing their work.
“We couldn’t do anything, we had to suspend our work and we left, but from that point on the persecution against me began,” Rivas affirmed in a telephone interview with Confidencial.
The next day, the journalist was covering the Nicaragua vs. Montserrat soccer game, part of the Concacaf – Fifa World Cup 2026 qualifying series. While he was there, some friends alerted him that the police were planning to detain him that same night. “What I did was to stay at the match until the end, then act like I was going to go to the press conference afterwards. Instead, I went into a bathroom, then slipped out of