Nicaragua: The human rights organisation Amnesty International has warned that the Nicaraguan government is deepening repression in the Central American state.

In a recently released report, the organisation stated that the government of President Daniel Ortega and Vice President Rosario Murillo has engaged in abuses such as arbitrary detention, torture, and stripping dissidents of citizenship.

“We’ve shown the continuum of repression to which Nicaraguan society has been subjected and the different patterns of human rights violations inflicted on people who dare to raise their voices,” Mr. Erika Guevara-Rosas, Americas director at Amnesty International, stated in a news release.

The Ortega government has been accused of consolidating power and cracking down on voices of opposition since April 2018, when anti-austerity protests against cuts to social security benefits were met with a heavy-handed government response in which hundreds of people were killed and detained.

According to the report, the Ortega government has continued to “expand and reinvent” patterns of repression through a variety of methods, including excessive force, attacks on civil society groups, and using the judiciary to target opponents.

Amnesty further noted that the government has “co-opted” the judicial system, pursuing “unfair trials of people merely because they were considered critical of the government.”

While responding to the report, the Ortega administration has also lashed out at other governments for making statements critical of its human rights record. Nicaragua’s government announced that it would reverse its approval of the European Union’s ambassador to the country and criticised the EU as “interventionist, daring, and insolent.”

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