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Sandinista National Liberation Front party continued to excercise significant control over all branches of government

Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR) ordered Nicaragua to provide protection measures to the Miskito people, after the ongoing conflict between the Indigenous community and colonos (settlers) attempting to take over the community's ancestral land escalated in September

Government officials and supporters sought to repress and stigmatize the work of civil society organizations and media outlets that had been critical of the ruling party

At 2:30 p.m. on June 15, 2000—more than ten years after the U.S.-sponsored Contra war officially ended in Nicaragua—a guerrilla unit of rearmed ex-Sandinistas and ex-Contras surrounded the small campesino home of Guadalupe Montenegro in the rural municipality of Siuna

Without saying a word, the men opened fire indiscriminately, killing Montenegro and all ten members of his family before burning the corpses and torching the house.

Perhaps nowhere else in Central America are the problems of demobilized soldiers, weapons left over from the Cold War and poverty more obvious than in the rural area of north-central Nicaragua—a region where the war that began in the 1980s has still not ended.

On Jan. 10, 1978, my father was assassinated by hit men of the Somoza regime. His death meant the end of whatever remained of Nicaragua’s political arena. But it also unleashed an enormous wave of protests nationwide, because the country now saw rebellion as the only way left to end the dictatorship.Four decades later, we have gone through a tortuous cycle of revolution and counterrevolution, civil war and foreign aggression, democratic transition and, now, a return to authoritarianism. History is repeating itself as farce under the regime of Daniel Ortega, the former guerrilla leader who was the elected president from 1985 to 1990 and who returned to power in 2007.

Ironically, when the Sandinista revolution’s leaders were voted out of power in 1990 (allowing my mother, Violeta Chamorro, to become Nicaragua’s president for seven years), it was Mr. Ortega himself who contributed to the establishment of an electoral democracy by conceding defeat, thereby setting the country on course to transfer power peacefully among political parties. However, Mr. Ortega and the next president, Arnoldo Alemán, who later was accused of corruption, arrived at a political compact in 1999 that weakened the trend toward pluralistic democracy by setting up bipartisan control of the electoral system. In 2007, that, too, collapsed when Mr. Ortega, now back in office, took sole control.

In 2008, well-documented fraud marred municipal elections. And in 2011, Mr. Ortega, defying term limits law, was “re-elected” in balloting that was denounced as unconstitutional. He has used the time since to consolidate an institutional dictatorship that concentrates absolute power and that derives political support from an alliance with private business interests and from citizens who benefit from government policies that aid the poor.