The police arrived at José Alejandro Hurtado’s house in Nicaragua’s capital one night in January, telling him he had to come to their station house because someone had rented a car using his ID, and the vehicle had been stolen.
That’s the last anyone saw of him.
Mr. Hurtado, 57, a computer systems engineer and a longtime political activist, is one of nearly three dozen people who human rights groups say have been disappeared by Nicaraguan authorities — taken away with officials refusing to acknowledge their detention or disclose their whereabouts.
Such disappearances are a violation of international law and are especially resonant in Latin America, where the practice has been a hallmark of brutal dictatorships. In Nicaragua, they have been happening within the past two years, the majority of them more recently.
Nearly half of the 73 political prisoners that human rights groups have officially documented in Nicaragua appear in no public court database. They have had no contact with their families, and the crimes they were charged with are unknown. Families have gone from prison to prison, police station to police station, seeking their loved ones, without success, human rights groups say.
The flurry of arbitrary detentions with no transparent judicial process marks a new tactic, human rights groups say, in a yearslong wave of political oppression in Nicaragua. There, Daniel Ortega and Rosario Murillo, who rule as co-presidents, have since 2018 eliminated nearly any vestige of opposition that could threaten their grip on power.
It shows how even after arresting and killing hundreds of protesters and sending hundreds more into exile, Nicaragua’s authoritarian government finds novel ways to stifle dissent and sow dread among the populace.
Relatives of the missing prisoners now fear the worst, after two of the disappeared were recently returned to their families — dead.
On Aug. 25, the body of Mauricio A. Petri, who had been arrested 38 days earlier along with his wife and son as part of a sweep of members of a church targeted by the government, was turned over to his family.
The authorities summoned relatives to a coroner’s office and escorted them to a cemetery to bury Mr. Petri without the opportunity for an autopsy, human rights groups said.
Four days later, the body of Carlos Cárdenas Cepeda, a lawyer for the Catholic church, which has also been targeted by the government, was given back to his family. He had been detained for 15 days. No cause of death was given in either case, and the government has made no public pronouncements about them.
These deaths have alarmed the families of the others detained about whom the authorities have revealed nothing. Of those 33 missing prisoners, least a dozen are over 60, and several, like Mr. Hurtado, suffer from diabetes and high blood pressure. One of the missing detainees is 81.
The police officers who showed up without warrants to arrest Mr. Hurtado and search his home in Managua suggested five police stations where the family might later find him, said Mr. Hurtado’s brother Adolfo.
Mr. Hurtado’s wife and his two brothers spent weeks visiting police stations and prisons, where they said they faced bureaucratic runarounds and hourslong waits.
“At first, two brothers and she went once a week, so three times a week, for more or less a month and a half,” Adolfo Hurtado said, referring to José Alejandro Hurtado’s wife. “That rhythm was unsustainable for the family.”
Adolfo Hurtado said he believes his brother was targeted because he had publicly released a proposal for national dialogue and elections to address the country’s political crisis.
Nicaragua’s co-presidents, but particularly Ms. Murillo, seem fixated on clearing the political landscape of any independent voices who could threaten her ability to govern if Mr. Ortega, who will turn 80 next month, dies.
Ms. Murillo, 74, who also acts as a government spokeswoman, did not respond to requests for comment.
Forced disappearances have a long and painful history in Latin America. The term “desaparecido” became synonymous with political repression between 1976 and 1983 in Argentina, when a military dictatorship abducted as many as 30,000 accused dissidents, tortured them and, in hundreds of cases, threw them from airplanes into the sea.
And throughout Latin America hundreds of thousands of people who have disappeared since the 1970s were taken to secret detention centers, tortured and executed. Many of their bodies were never found.
While hundreds of people eventually faced trial in Argentina, many cases of the disappeared went unpunished, said María Adela Antokoletz, who heads the Latin American Federation of Associations for Relatives of the Detained-Disappeared.
“We realize that the abhorrent practice of enforced disappearance continues as a means to silence complaints,” she said.
Mexico, El Salvador and Colombia are three countries in the region where the practice still occurs, though more often perpetrated by gangs or cartels with the acquiescence of local police or mayors, Ms. Antokoletz said.
Authorities are obligated under international law to inform family members if they are holding someone, said Barbara Frey, a retired University of Minnesota professor who coedited a book about disappearances in contemporary Latin America.
“If the state has taken them and won’t tell the families where they are, that’s a disappearance,” Ms. Frey said. “That’s exactly what the definition says.”
The term had historically applied to people missing for prolonged stretches of time, said Reed Brody, a member of the United Nations Group of Human Rights Experts on Nicaragua. But international authorities have increasingly recognized that it also applies even to short-term secret detentions, like those in Nicaragua, he said.
Mr. Brody said the 33 documented cases in Nicaragua were believed to be an undercount because many families are too afraid to file a complaint with human rights organizations. The families have reported being harassed and threatened with arrest or having their property confiscated if they persist in trying to track down their loved ones, human rights experts said.
The missing include community leaders, teachers, Indigenous leaders, journalists and pastors. In at least five cases, multiple people in the same family were arrested. Many were detained over the summer, when more than 50 people were arrested in simultaneous roundups.
“It’s hard to know why some people are arrested and some people are disappeared,” Mr. Brody said.
Angelica Chavarríahas was last seen in May 2024, the same day her partner, Daniel Ortega’s brother Humberto, was placed under house arrest, according to human rights organizations.
Thelma Brenes says she has a theory behind the disappearances. Her father, Carlos Brenes Sánchez, 70, and his partner, Salvadora Martínez, 67, Ms. Brenes said, were taken on Aug. 14 from their home in Jinotepe, about 90 miles north of Managua, Ms. Brenes said.
“If they are disappearing people who they are not registering in jail, how can you prove that there are political prisoners in Nicaragua?” she said. “There are no pictures. He’s not in the system. Can we prove it?”
Mr. Brenes is a retired military colonel and a longtime opponent of Mr. Ortega. He was arrested in 2018 when he spoke out against government abuses after mass street protests but was released a year later under an amnesty law.
He had been abiding by the terms of his release, checking in regularly with the police and not leaving the country, when he was arrested without explanation, his daughter said.
“We want proof of life,” Ms. Brenes said.
Claudia Pineda, a spokeswoman for Blue and White Monitoring Group, a human rights organization that tracks politically motivated arrests, said the Sandinista-controlled legislature changed the penal code in 2021 to allow a person to be held without charges for as long as 90 days.
One potential avenue of relief for the missing detainees and their families would be to file a habeas corpus motion demanding their release. But the government has disbarred any lawyer who might be willing to take on such risky cases, said Salvador Marenco, a Nicaraguan human rights lawyer who fled to Costa Rica two years ago.
All of Nicaragua’s human rights organizations, including his, have been shuttered by the government, and some moved to Costa Rica.
“Was there an opportunity to appeal? Was there opportunity to present evidence? Opportunity for someone to say, ‘this person is innocent?’” Mr. Marenco said. “The answer is no.”
It’s hard, he said, to defend someone against a “ghost case” that, officially, does not exist.