Nicaragua announced last week it is withdrawing from the United Nations Human Rights Council, following a U.N. report that slammed the government’s human rights violations and warned the country was becoming an authoritarian state. The report by a panel of independent human rights experts adds to international pressure on the Nicaraguan government led by President Daniel Ortega and first lady Rosario Murillo, who was recently named co-president. “Nicaragua has become a country of enforced silence and surveillance for those who stay in the country, while those who dare to speak out face a life of exile and denationalization,” says Reed Brody, a member of the U.N. expert panel, who has spent decades investigating rights abuses in Nicaragua.
He speaks to Democracy Now! 40 years to the day since the release of his landmark 1985 fact-finding report Contra Terror in Nicaragua, which laid out how U.S. policy attempted to destabilize Nicaragua’s Sandinista government by funding the Contras and their campaign of torture, rape, kidnapping and murder.
