HUMAN   RIGHTS

Adapted from “The Human Rights Industry and Nicaragua” by John Perry, originally published by Covert Action Magazine, and drawing from the book The Human Rights Industry by Alfred de Zayas.

Nicaragua’s “human rights” bodies

In 2018, Nicaragua had three main “human rights” NGOs, known for their initials in Spanish as the CPDH, ANPDH and CENIDH, all receiving foreign funding. Both CPDH and ANPDH were financed by the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), which is effectively the US government’s regime-change agency. The NED’s website shows that, between 2016 and 2020, it spent almost $1.2 million in funding “human rights” bodies in Nicaragua, in addition to funding many other activities. CPDH also received more than $7 million from an offshoot of the Organization of American States (OAS).

The ANPDH was originally set up by the Reagan administration at the time of the Contra war in Nicaragua, to whitewash Contra atrocities (the funding of these bodies by the NED in the 1980s was reported at the time by The Washington Post). CENIDH is not known to have received NED funding but in the build-up to the coup attempt was awarded a staggering $23 million by various European institutions, some with government connections. Over $10 million of this was allocated for staff salaries alone, an astonishing amount in a low-income country.

As The Grayzone reported, when the ANPDH broke up in 2018 and its employees left for Costa Rica, the employees accused the former director, Álvaro Leiva, of appropriating funds from U.S. bodies such as the NED. Worse, they revealed that Leiva ordered them to inflate ANPDH’s casualty counts during the coup attempt, because he believed padding the death tolls would help secure extra U.S. funding.

One of the enduring myths of the coup attempt was that hundreds of people were killed by the police. A lawyer and analyst, Enrique Hendrix, showed in detail how the “human rights” NGOs inflated their figures. De Zayas concludes in his book that “foreign-funded NGOs built up a completely distorted picture…in which all violence was blamed on the government.”

Not surprisingly, all three “human rights” bodies were closed down by the government after 2018. Similar bodies now operate from Costa Rica: For example, ANPDH reopened in Costa Rica and received over $700,000 from USAID in 2020-2021. US agencies such as the NED and USAID are still actively working with many organizations linked to Nicaragua, and the Open Society Foundation contracted a prominent opponent of the Sandinista government to administer a $25 million fund to promote women’s political leadership.

The corrupt role of the OAS and IACHR 

“At international levels,” Alfred de Zayas writes, referring specifically to Nicaragua, “numerous institutions relied on unverified reports to advance a caricature of a despotic regime that kills its citizens, white-washing opposition violence.” He goes on to name the Organization of American States (OAS), the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR) and even the United Nations as echoing “the same biased narratives.” All of these bodies fed on the information provided by local NGOs and still do so now that many are based abroad. Yet soon after the start of the violence, these bodies were all invited by the Nicaraguan government to visit and conduct their own appraisal of events.

Here is an example of IACHR bias. A group of “experts” visited Nicaragua in 2018 with the government’s approval. The GIEI-Nicaragua (Grupo Interdisciplinario de Expertos Independientes) provided a 468-page report to the IACHR, focused particularly on deaths that occurred on May 30, 2018 when two large marches were held in Managua, one by the opposition and one by Sandinista supporters. The report examined deaths among government opponents, and only briefly referred to Sandinista deaths and injuries to police officers. Crucially, it was shown to have ignored and manipulated evidence from its own experts. It ignored evidence of use of firearms by the opposition, manipulated the analysis of its own weapons expert, and omitted any evidence that contradicted its findings. As a result of the report’s gross distortion of the May 30 events, a large number of organizations and individuals wrote to the IACHR and separately to the OAS, but received only a peremptory reply.

Alfred de Zayas specifically notes the tendency for the IACHR to make “politically-sensitive petitions disappear.” At the IACHR, he remarks, “politically incorrect” victims have “little or no chance of being heard.”

The bias shown by United Nations human rights institutions

De Zayas points out that UN bodies often “capriciously decide to target one country but not another”, especially picking on countries which “oppose the Western unipolar vision.” This can lead to “demonizing a particular country in furtherance of other countries’ foreign policies.”

In 2023, a “Group of Human Rights Experts on Nicaragua” (GHREN) appointed by the UN Human Rights Council published a highly biased report, claiming that Nicaragua’s government had committed “crimes against humanity.” The “experts” even recommended further economic sanctions, against the UN’s own policies. Opposition NGOs had open access to the GHREN and had a strong influence on its work. The Nicaragua Solidarity Coalition quickly prepared a detailed critique of the report. For example, it showed how the GHREN’s chronology of events in the city of Masaya during the coup attempt omitted almost all opposition violence, including murders, torture and destruction of municipal buildings and Sandinista homes.

Alfred de Zayas joined other human rights specialists in condemning the report as being unprofessional, biased, incomplete and concocted to justify further coercive sanctions to damage Nicaragua’s economy. In February 2024 a second report by the GHREN was similarly biased, and the Coalition again protested via a sign-on letter that was organized jointly with Alfred de Zayas and submitted by him.

De Zayas makes the points that the real purpose behind such expert groups or commissions is “to denigrate and destabilize the targeted government to facilitate undemocratic ‘regime change’ as desired by one or more powerful countries.” They are part of the “hybrid war arsenal” which such countries employ.

The role of Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International

Both Human Rights Watch (HRW) and Amnesty International (AI) “follow[ed] the State Department line” on Nicaragua, says de Zayas, endorsing the imposition of sanctions (or “unilateral coercive measures”).

Responding to the bias in AI’s work, in 2018 activists working with the Alliance for Global Justice prepared a detailed response to AI’s second report, Instilling Terror. AFGJ’s Dismissing the Truth showed in detail the bias, omissions and errors in AI’s report. For example, it unraveled the story of a police officer who, according to AI, was killed by his fellow officers. This unlikely explanation had been offered by his estranged mother, an opposition supporter, via a local NGO. In reality there was convincing evidence, including from his partner (also a police officer) that he was killed by an opposition sniper.

Several attempts were made to engage with AI about their report, including a formal complaint via their published procedures and the offer to discuss it at their London headquarters. There was never anything more than a peremptory response.

The government tightens up on foreign-funded NGOs

Having tolerated dozens of NGOs that received US money to promote “human rights” and “democracy” in the period before 2018, only to see them play key roles in the attempted coup, it was inevitable that the government would clamp down on their activities. It did so by passing legislation comparable to the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA), which the US has had in place since the 1930s. De Zayas points out the irony: “When Nicaragua passed legislation comparable to FARA, when they started enforcing the law and some US allies and funding recipients… were punished, the US media sent out howls of outrage.”