Daniel Ortega makes Managua a gateway to irregular migration to the United States

Since the Government of Daniel Ortega and Rosario Murillo opened the doors of the Augusto C. Sandino International Airport in 2021 to the massive arrival of charter flights, arrivals to Managua from countries usually not connected to Nicaragua, such as Suriname, Libya, Morocco, Uzbekistan, India and Tajikistan. That, without adding the flights loaded with migrants from Cuba, the Dominican Republic, El Salvador, Curacao and Haiti, who were the first to use this route to the United States to avoid passing through the Darien jungle. According to a calculation of think thank you The Inter-American Dialogue, there were more than a thousand between May 2023 and May 2024

For the most part, the users of this migratory springboard enabled by the Ortega and Murillo regime are Cuban, Haitian, African and Asian migrants. The Sandinista apparatus has not only found a lucrative business in this movement of migrants, as Morning Express has been able to document through taxes and unofficial charges, but the United States has begun to see this flow as a threat to its national security. In November 2023, the State Department launched a new visa restriction policy “against owners, executives and/or senior officials of companies that offer charter flights to Nicaragua, designed to be used primarily by irregular immigrants to the United States.”

Washington’s policy was expanded in February 2024 due to the “growing trend carried out by charter flight companies that offer flights charging extortion prices.” If before the restrictions only applied to air transport, from that date they also apply to sea and land transport. This June 13, the State Department announced that it imposed visa restrictions on an executive of a charter flight company, without detailing the name of the sanctioned person or the company in question.

During the first two weeks of June, however, US authorities captured eight suspected terrorists from Tajikistan in New York, Philadelphia and Los Angeles. Security sources, cited by NBC News, assured that the detainees have possible links with the ISIS organization, but the most striking thing about the case is that they entered North American territory through the southern border during the year 2023.

Human trafficking?

The Sandinista regime has ignored warnings from Washington and continues with migratory trafficking. Manuel Orozco, migration expert and analyst at the Inter-American Dialogue, assures Morning Express that he has managed to track 1,150 charter and “pseudo-commercial” flights between May 2023 and May 2024. He estimates that an average of 200 passengers a day entered through the International Airport. Augusto C. Sandino, that is, almost 200,000 passengers in that period.

For example, in less than a month, between May and June, three charters loaded with migrants arrived in Managua from Tripoli. The flight was operated by a Boeing 777-200, the largest of the Ghadames Air airline. This company does not operate direct flights to the Nicaraguan capital, so they are private flights. Furthermore, their arrivals at the Augusto C. Sandino International Airport are not – nor are they – recorded by the National and International Airport Management Company (EAAI).

Previously, in December 2023, a plane from Dubai with its final destination Managua was detained at the Châlons-Vatry airport, France. On board were 276 passengers of Indian nationality of the 303 total people who planned to land in Managua. The charter was detained by the French due to a complaint of alleged human trafficking. 25 of the passengers requested political asylum from the French, but two were detained because they found thousands of dollars in cash and passports of other migrants. The version is that Indian citizens hired smugglers to reach the United States, using Nicaragua as a shortcut.

Apart from Cubans, Haitians, and Africans, in recent months hundreds of migrants of other nationalities have been seen leaving Managua bound for the southern border of the United States, through Central America. According to data from the National Migration Institute of Honduras (INMH), in 2023 alone at least 373 citizens of Tajikistan entered its territory through the Nicaraguan border. Between January and May 2024, another 73 Tayakistanis entered Honduras through the same route. Before 2022, the Catrachos did not register the entry of citizens of that nationality.

Orozco explains that another way to visualize or measure the irregular migratory flow is by observing the remaining number between foreign tourists and flight arrivals to Nicaragua with flight departures. “The difference is negative,” he says: “in 2023 there were 890,000 passengers landing in Nicaragua, 650,000 foreign tourists landing by air, and 570,000 passengers leaving all in the same year. The average stay of international tourists is seven days. Therefore, there is a deficit of at least 70,000 people who do not return by air, and an excess of 890,000 people who land in Nicaragua that same year, in a country where emigration is at its highest trend.”

Political analysts consulted on condition of anonymity agree that the Ortega-Murillos are part of an international “human trafficking” network. Others, such as the former Nicaraguan ambassador to the Organization of American States (OAS), Arturo McFields, argued in an opinion article that Daniel Ortega “should be circulated internationally as part of an international network of human traffickers.”

“The Nicaraguan dictatorship not only does not stamp passports [de los migrantes]does not provide receipt [de los cobros]only accepts cash from irregular migrants […]The propaganda on social networks in Africa and Haiti to travel to the United States via Nicaragua is massive. Which makes us suspect that Ortega is not acting alone,” McFields denounced.

“Provoke America”

Orozco, for his part, states that one of the objectives of the Ortega-Murillo regime is to “provoke the United States” by increasing the burden of the administrative capacity of migrants arriving from the southern border, a difficult issue for Americans, especially in election year.

“Ortega said that they were going to send migrants to the United States. So, the motivation is fundamentally political and ideological due to the hatred that Ortega has against the United States. Now, the implications are substantial. One of them is the threat to the security of the United States, national security, since the control that Nicaragua has over who is arriving from those nationalities is minimal and you can arrive there with a false passport and they could be a terrorist,” he explains. Orozco.

The Inter-American Dialogue researcher said that the United States is investigating the different options it has to proceed, which includes measuring a response with actions beyond sanctions. “What the United States Government is trying to determine at this moment is the level of complicity that Nicaragua has in the entire process of the transfer business. And if they detect that Nicaragua was not only facilitating the charter flights, but also that there is a national operation network to transfer these people to third countries, then you are really confirming not only State capture, but a very criminal State. functional. Drugs on the one hand [a Rusia]transfer of people, on the other hand,” says Orozco.

The other side of the transfer: the business

When an irregular migrant enters the Augusto C. Sandino International Airport, immigration officials charge each of them an amount of between $150 and $200 in cash to allow them entry. However, there is no paperwork for the collection of the fee; Everything is done de facto, without leaving a record of the payments, according to testimonies collected by Morning Express.

Upon leaving the airport, irregular migrants leave for Honduras. A report by the media DIVERGENTES revealed that dozens of taxi drivers gather daily outside the air terminal offering to transport new arrivals to Honduras. “Fifty and (I’ll) take you to Honduras”, the transporters say in tacky English. The taxi drivers assure that they operate with the permission of the aerodrome authorities, to whom they pay a fee to operate at the site.

In 2023, the Ortega Murillo regime collected 1,664 million córdobas by collecting “fines” from migrants heading to the United States. The de facto fee is hidden under the category of “other service fees”, and represented 64.3% of the income of the General Directorate of Migration and Immigration (DGME), according to an execution report published in April 2024.

The Confidencial media assured that the DGME has reported a sustained increase in the collections of “other service fees”, an item of which they do not detail its origin. “This increase has also coincided with the passage of thousands of migrants to the United States, as well as the opening of Nicaragua to citizens of Cuba, Haiti and African nations, who use the country as a springboard to reach US territory. The amount of 2023 represents a record in the collections of these ‘fines’ and is the first time that the barrier of one billion córdobas was surpassed. In 2022 and 2021, they pocketed 966 million and 608 million córdobas, respectively,” the media reports.

Follow all the information from El PAÍS América inFacebook andxor in ourweekly newsletter.