Nicaraguan dictatorship shutters opposition universities

The socialist dictatorship of Nicaragua’s Daniel Ortega has closed several opposition universities across the country in what analysts have decried as a sweeping attack on higher education and “an escalation of the repressive tactics that have driven the country toward dictatorship.”

On Wednesday, the regime controlled National Assembly canceled the operating licenses of five private universities and transferred the management of those institutions to the government’s National Council of Universities, the Washington Post reported.

Of the closed universities, the Polytechnic University of Nicaragua – founded in Managua in 1967 with the assistance of American missionaries – perhaps stands out as it was an epicenter of the 2018 anti-government protests, which left more than 350 dead at the hands of security forces.

The regime did not stop with national universities, however, and has pushed out any possible opposition centers of higher learning. On Thursday, for example, Ortega’s dictatorship announced that it was canceling the operating permits for seven foreign academic programs, including those associated with Florida International University and Wake Forest University.

“This is the gravest attack on institutions of higher education in the history of Nicaragua, and probably in the history of Central America,” Ernesto Medina, the former rector of the country’s largest university, the National Autonomous University of Nicaragua, said on Facebook.

When pressed on their decision to shutter the universities, authorities said operating licenses had been canceled because they violated laws that require nonprofit groups to present detailed information on their finances and directors. The universities, however, have all said they previously fulfilled those requirements and that the regime was acting in a punitive manner.

“They are shutting us down because in 2018 we took the side of the students,” said Adrián Meza, rector of the Paulo Freire University.

Human Rights Watch’s Tamara Taraciuk Broner said the Ortega regime’s closure of private universities signaled an effort to extinguish any remaining opposition to the government – adding to the tactics which include the systematic imprisonment of opposition candidates.

“At the heart of these measures is a blatant attempt to undermine the student movement, one of the pillars fighting for democracy in Nicaragua,” she said.

María Asunción Moreno, a professor of constitutional law at three of the shuttered universities, said she fears the regime wants to “impose an educational system aimed at indoctrinating young people.”

“The assault on the universities shows a government strategy aimed at exterminating university autonomy, the goal of a historic battle in the lives of Nicaraguans,” she said.