Migrant smuggling disguised as tourism in Nicaragua

The Ortega-Murillo regime took advantage of the migration crisis to defy whom it considers its main enemy. It turned the desire of thousands of migrants to reach the American dream into a political weapon that has pushed the migratory crisis in the United States to the limit on its southern border. As a collateral benefit, after decades of financial crisis, the National and International Airports Administration Company (EAAI) registered millionaire profits.

Between 2022 and the first quarter of 2024, some US$29 million was generated by the increase in passengers at Managua’s Augusto C. Sandino International Airport by charter flights, from all over the world, landing in the capital filled with migrants who then continue their journey towards the United States.

Furthermore, in a clear manipulation of the data, it includes these migrants as tourists and presents them as such to the World Tourism Organization (UNWTO) and other international agencies linked to the activity, to claim an exceptional recovery in tourist arrivals.

As part of this strategy, the Nicaraguan Institute of Tourism (INTUR), delays its statistics for more than a year. A few months ago, it released the 2022 report. Concerning 2017, before the beginning of the socio-political crisis that later worsened with the pandemic, there was an increase of 20 thousand percent in the arrival of Cubans and 2 thousand percent of Ecuadorians.

Although INTUR has yet to publish its 2023 data, the Nicaraguan Central Bank (BCN) said that last year the tourism sector collected $739.2 million in revenue from the arrival of 1,202,300 tourists, up 29 percent from the 932,700 travelers in 2022. However, it did not include more data regarding the origin of the passengers.

In the statistics of visitors to the Managua International Airport published by the BCN, the margin between arrivals and departures began to widen as of 2022. Of the 1,769,700 passengers that entered the country by air between 2022 and April 2024, 649,200 did not leave by plane but continued their journey by land to the United States.

At the same time, a mechanism was established for migrants entering by land from Costa Rica. They are charged between $150 and $250 and are given a few hours to exit through the border to Honduras.

The human smuggling promoted by the Ortega Murillo regime began in November 2021 with the elimination of the visa requirement for Cubans and the establishment of the Caracas-Havana-Managua route operated by the Venezuelan airline Conviasa. Since then, the list of countries to which Nicaragua exempts from visa requirements has multiplied and charter flights with migrants now arrive from all continents.

Nicaragua’s strategy of disguising irregular migration as tourism recovery is weakened when statistics from the National Migration Institute (INM) of Honduras show that in 2022, 188,858 irregular migrants from Nicaragua entered its territory. Last year the figure rose to 545,043 people, and between January and May 2024, 219,675 irregular migrants from Nicaragua were reported to have entered the country.

Tourism operators assure that at the end of last year and the beginning of the current one, have been the best season since the socio-political crisis broke out in 2018. But despite the recovery, they admit that they are still far from the figures of 2017, when they catered to 1,957,822 tourists, including nearly 200 thousand visitors per day during the high season.

Meanwhile, the U.S. State Department recently included Nicaragua along with Cuba and Venezuela as the largest human traffickers in the region. In addition, since last year it began to restrict visas to businesspeople linked to human trafficking through Nicaragua.

Faced with so much evidence of what is happening, the Nicaraguan Democratic Concertation, CDN-Monteverde calls on the UNWTO and other tourism-related bodies not to allow the tragedy from which the Ortega Murillo regime is profiting to be recognized as an upturn in tourism, which is unlikely to recover while the state of repression persists in Nicaragua, where they even closed the organizations that brought together the entrepreneurs of the sector and keep the companies under constant surveillance and harassment.