Human smuggling: the unscrupulous business of the dictatorship

The United Nations (UN) Protocol against the Smuggling of Migrants by Land, Sea, and Air defines human smuggling as «the enablement, for financial or another material gain, of the illegal entry of a person into a State.» The activity implies the existence of highly organized criminal groups that operate transnationally with large profits that violate the human rights of migrants. It is, therefore, considered a transnational organized crime.

Daniel Ortega and Rosario Murillo’s dictatorship has facilitated the transit of thousands of irregular migrants headed for the United States and profits from this through two different methods. The first consists of enabling and allowing the passage of thousands of migrants upon payment of between $150 and $200 per person to receive a tourist card. This allows them to transit by land from the southern border Nicaragua shares with Costa Rica to the north. In April 2024, Honduras reported that more than half a million irregular migrants, mainly Venezuelans, Cubans, Haitians, Ecuadorians, and other Latin American countries and even from Europe, Asia, and Africa, entered its territory from Nicaragua.

The second method is even more insidious, as it involves the direct complicity of the Ortega Murillo dictatorship. They allow the arrival of charter flights from different countries in the Americas, Europe, Asia and Africa, which land at Managua’s Augusto C. Sandino International Airport, loaded with migrants who use the country to shorten their journey to the southern border of the United States.

It is clear that these flights have the regime’s blessing, and that there is a transnational logistical ‘infrastructure’ to operate them, as well as a network of internal collaborators who are in charge of receiving the migrants, taking them to lodgings to rest, and then transferring them to the northern border to continue their journey to the United States. In this case, migrants also pay between $150 and $200 for a tourist card that allows them to stay in the country for up to four days.

According to official data, 198,500 passengers arrived in Nicaragua in the first three months of 2024 alone. By the end of 2023, newspaper reports stated that 36 commercial flights from Haiti landed in three days. Additionally, the regime has eliminated visa requirements for citizens of many countries, including Cuba, Haiti, Qatar, and Angola.

The Ortega-Murillo regime decided to continue openly defying US warnings and, in May, began to receive direct flights from Libya with migrants of different nationalities.

And while migrant smuggling continues to exacerbate the migration crisis facing the United States on its southern border, in Nicaragua, it is causing an exponential growth in income for the State through immigration fees. Human smuggling has become one of the most lucrative and unscrupulous businesses of the Daniel Ortega and Rosario Murillo dictatorship, which takes advantage of the yearning of thousands of migrants who leave their countries with the goal of reaching the United States.

In recent years, Central America has become a transit region for large flows of migrants of different nationalities, who cross almost the entire region to reach the United States. But in Nicaragua, it is different. Offering the Managua International Airport as an air bridge to shorten the crossing promotes the increase in the flow of migrants from various continents to use it as a political tool to provoke confrontations with the United States. At the same time, it takes advantage of it as a means of illicit enrichment for the Ortega-Murillo family clan.