Counting deaths for dollars: the rise and fall of Nicaraguas human rights
organizations
In their hunger for US funding, Nicaraguan human rights NGOs inflated the
death toll during last years coup. Today, these groups are in a state of
complete disarray.
By John Perry
When political conflict results in people being killed especially at the
hands of a government the deaths are not just personal tragedies, they
become fodder for that governments foes. This dynamic unfolded during last
years attempted coup in Nicaragua, when the opposition tried and failed to
bring down the elected government of President Daniel Ortega through a
nationwide campaign of protest and violent sabotage.
When the regime change attempt was finally halted in July 2018, the
opposition alleged through a triad of human rights NGOs that the
government had killed anywhere from 325 to 500 protesters.
This death toll was repeated in practically every international media
report, on the floor of the US Congress, and in the halls of the
Organization of American States, all to drum up support for sanctioning the
Nicaraguan government.
The Guardian was among papers that reported now-discredited death counts
without a shred of skepticism.
But a year later, the human rights outfits whose reports generated these
numbers have started to fall apart. And as their US funding dries up, their
former staffers have begun to reveal the truth about their dubious data.
The Grayzone reported last month on the dramatic break-up of the Nicaragua
Association for Human Rights (ANPDH), an opposition NGO whose board of
directors confessed to exaggerating the death toll in order to rake in more
US government money.
In a press conference this July that was totally ignored by corporate media,
ANPDH ex-director Gustavo Bermúdez accused his former boss, Álvaro Leiva, of
having inflated the death toll. Bermúdez said, We personally asked him
where you got that figure; a friend called me saying to please get his
grandmother who died of a heart attack off the list of people who were
supposedly victims of the repression.
But ANPDH group is only one part of a sizable human rights industry in
Nicaragua that has functioned as a weapon of regime-change, putting politics
over professionalism in order to secure their maximalist goals. And now that
the coup they participated in has failed, their network is collapsing and
their directors are positioned in a circular firing squad.
The oppositions propaganda machine
Until recently, three local bodies claimed to monitor human rights, all
doing so with foreign funding. Their work complimented regular reports by
international bodies such as Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch
(HRW), and frequent interventions by the Inter-American Commission on Human
Rights (IACHR) and the UN Commission for Human Rights (UNCHR). Meanwhile,
the Nicaraguan government operated own human rights office. Though the
international bodies have enormous resources, the three small local bodies
have had a disproportionate influence on them.
The oldest local NGO, the Permanent Commission on Human Rights (CPDH for its
initials in Spanish) dates from before Nicaraguas 1979 revolution, and
receives funding from the US regime-change outfit, the National Endowment
for Democracy (NED). For its part, the Nicaragua Association for Human
Rights (ANPDH) was set up in Miami with $3 million from the Reagan
administration in the 1980s, with the aim of whitewashing the violence of
the US-backed Contra forces that were attempting to overthrow the
Sandinista government. The third of these opposition NGOs is CENIDH, or the
Nicaraguan Center for Human Rights. This group was set up with European
funding in 1990, and is headed by an ex-FSLN member, Vilma Nuñez de
Escorcia, who is one of the founders of the opposition MRS party.
None of these three bodies have made any attempt at political neutrality.
Indeed, all were opposed to the Sandinista government well before last
years coup attempt. But when the overthrow attempt began last April, they
became a key part of the oppositions propaganda machine.
CENIDH and ANPDH, in particular, published regular reports whose bias is
made obvious by the language: CENIDH, for example, referred to the
Nicaraguan government, elected in 2016, as the dictatorial regime of
Daniel Ortega and (vice-president) Rosario Murillo. This groups initial
report, issued on May 4, immediately exaggerated the numbers of deaths by
recording six fatalities on the first day of the violence (April 19), all
but one attributed to the government, when in fact there were only three: a
police officer, a Sandinista defending a town hall from attack, and an
uninvolved bystander. By late July, CENIDHs fifth report logged 302 deaths,
all attributed to state terrorism.
By the same date, ANPDH was reporting no less than 448 deaths in civic
protests, a figure repeated by the BBC, MSN, news sources across the West
and the United Nations Human Rights Council. By early September, ANPDHs
death count had reached 481, of which 455 were listed as homicides.
ANPDH director Álvaro Leiva categorized the deaths with remarkable
confidence and specificity: 152 died in random executions, Leiva claimed,
while 116 were killed in planned executions, 86 in disproportionate
clashes between government forces and civilians, 57 in selective
executions, 36 deaths appear to be planned and executed by hooded and
armed paramilitaries, and only eight were unexplained. By the end of the
same month in which there was very little violence, ANPDHs death toll all
blamed on the government had reached 512. According to ANPDH, a further
1,300 people had disappeared.
By early July last year, the accounts published by the human rights bodies
had already started to unravel. Enrique Hendrix, a resident of Managua, went
systematically through the death counts to produce a report he called
Monopolizing death: Or how to frame a government by inflating a list of the
dead.
By identifying each victim, he was able to spot double-counting and in most
cases, determine the real cause of death. Hendrix found, for example, that
CENIDHs list included a suicide, traffic accidents and various duplications
or unexplained deaths. Of the 167 deaths included in their early reports,
just 31% (51 people) were actually protesters who had died in the conflict.
In the case of ANPDH, which by that stage had logged 285 deaths, only 20%
(58) were confirmed as protesters. A report released weeks later by the
Nicaraguan National Assemblys Truth Commission also found a huge gap
between ANPDHs figures and the real number of deaths arising from the
conflict.
International human rights bodies echo opposition disinformation
Following the publication of Amnesty Internationals unbalanced and poorly
researched investigations of last years violence, a group of local
researchers responded with a report called Dismissing the Truth. This paper
examined in detail the casualty lists produced by the human rights bodies
relating to the central zone of Nicaragua, where considerable violence
occurred in and around the roadblocks set up by the opposition and guarded
by people with weapons.
Through a case-by-case examination, the researchers found that of the 16
reported deaths that were confirmed as conflict-related, 15 were killed as
the result of opposition action (the victims consisted of five police
officers, six government supporters or workers, and five unaffiliated
citizens). For the 16th and final conflict-related death, responsibility was
undetermined, and possibly was the result of crossfire.
In addition to these 16 deaths, ANPDH reported another 18 which, on
investigation, were clearly not a result of the conflict. Causes of death
included fights between armed opposition activists at roadblocks (e.g. over
money), robberies, a road accident and two cases where names were
duplicated. In other words, more than half the deaths recorded by ANPDH were
wrongly attributed to the conflict. Nevertheless, ANPDH gave the impression
that all 34 deaths resulted from government violence, when the evidence
showed that only one possibly did so.
Shockingly, evidence of malpractice and outright mendacity by by local
human rights bodies was largely ignored by the international bodies
monitoring the casualties from last years conflict. The first report by the
Organization of American States Inter American Commission on Human Rights
(IACHR) listed 212 deaths, but Hendrix found only 25% of those (52 deaths)
were actual protesters. Nor did IACHR identify deaths which were opposition
killings, thus giving the same impression as the local bodies that all, or
most, of the deaths it counted were attributable to government repression.
By September, Amnesty International had pushed the death toll to 322,
claiming that most [occurred] at the hands of state agents. It based its
allegation on the counts by IACHR and the local bodies. Amnestys second
report on the conflict absurdly condemned the government for challenging
the information put forward by human rights organizations, as if they were
above criticism and their casualty lists should have been accepted without a
hint of skepticism.
Of course, the whole point of examining and challenging the lists was
precisely because they were part of the propaganda drive against the Ortega
government, referred to in practically every international media report on
the crisis and cited as authoritative by international bodies, including
detailed references to ANPDH by the UN Commission for Human Rights in its
2018 report on Nicaragua.
As late as last December, when the violence was months in the past, the
IACHRs secretary general Paulo Abrão was still denouncing Nicaragua as a
police state. In a session attended by all three local opposition bodies
(CPDH, CENIDH and ANPDH), he said that not a day goes by when the IAHCR
fails to receive a report of a human rights abuse from the country,
presumably via those organizations.
Yet by February 2019, the Truth Commission was able to issue a final report
on the death toll from the attempted coup which, after exhaustive analysis
of the different sources, confirmed the total number of conflict-related
deaths as 253 less than half that claimed by ANPDH six months before.
Those deaths consisted of 31 known supporters of the opposition, 48 probable
or actual Sandinista supporters, 22 police and the remainder (152) of
unknown affiliation.
Things fall apart
But 2019 has turned out to be a bad year for the three human rights
bodies. ANPDH and CENIDH were found by the government to have violated their
own statutes and their registration as NGOs was terminated. Some of their
functionaries fled to Costa Rica. CPDH continues, but its lawyer, María
Oviedo, was arrested recently when, in a visit to a police station in
support of a leading opposition member who had been found to have an
unregistered firearm, she slapped a police officer. The officials of the
other two bodies are fighting among themselves. When CENIDH director Gonzalo
Carrión tried to open a new NGO in Costa Rica, he was denied support by
ex-colleagues who feared he would pocket the foreign donations and use them
for his own purposes.
The fate of the former staff members of ANPDH is most disturbing, however.
The former general secretary, Álvaro Leiva, was given asylum in Costa Rica
last October, a move welcomed by the IAHCRs Paulo Abrão, who awarded him
protective measures this June.
ANPDH board member and anti-Ortega activist Gustavo Bermúdez accused his
groups director, Álvaro Leiva, of embezzlement and fraud on a massive scale
However, as The Grayzone reported, when Leiva attempted to open a new NGO in
Costa Rica, his former colleagues angrily accused him of appropriating funds
supplied by US bodies such as the NED. More importantly, they revealed that
Leiva personally ordered them to inflate ANPDHs casualty counts last year
because he believed padding the death tolls would help secure extra funding
from the US. ANPDH director Gustavo Bermúdez, in a press conference ignored
by corporate media, said:
Álvaro Leiva inflated the death toll. We personally asked him where you got
that figure; a friend called me saying to please get his grandmother who
died of a heart attack off the list of people who were supposedly victims of
the repression.
ANPDH received over $88,000 from the NED, and $348,000 from other US sources
last year. CPDH received $180,000 from the NED in 2018 alone, out of NED
spending of $1.8 million spent that year to promote Nicaraguas opposition
bodies.
The NED and USAID clearly viewed Nicaraguan organizations working in the
human rights field as one of the most crucial elements of Washingtons
regime-change agenda. By incentivizing NGOs to produce anti-government
disinformation, the US set the stage for their public collapse of their
credibility.
Critics of the Contras transform into soft coup supporters
Allen Weinstein, a founding member of the NED told the Washington Post in
1991, A lot of what we do today was done covertly twenty-five years ago by
the CIA. It is therefore hardly surprising that among the biggest
recipients of NED funding in Latin America have been NGOs operating in
nations that John Bolton has labelled the troika of tyranny: Nicaragua,
Cuba and Venezuela.
And while the NED dumped US money into supposedly neutral human rights
bodies that functioned as regime-change weapons, the international media
provided them with an uncritical platform for disseminating their propaganda
without ever mentioning the source of their funding.
It was not always this way, however. Back in 1989, Human Rights Watch
slammed ANPDH as for all intents and purposes a US State Department funded
arm of the Nicaraguan Resistance, referring to the CIA-backed Contra forces
fighting the Sandinista government. The left-leaning political magazine
Envío was also highly critical of both CPDH and ANPDH in the 1980s. It
described Lino Hernández, then director of the CPDH, as coming from a far
right background. Commenting on the $3 million ANPDH received from the US
government, the magazine asked What kind of human rights watchdogging has
the ANPDH done with all this money? Hardly a whimper, much less a bark.
A NGO prominent at the time, the Catholic Institute for International
Relations, pointed out that ANPDH did not even set up a Nicaragua office
until after the Sandinistas left power in 1990. In its report on a Contra
attack in which women and a baby had its throat slit, ANPDH exonerated the
Contra forces involved. Paul Laverty, a Nicaragua-based human rights lawyer,
also strongly criticised CPDH for ignoring atrocities by the Contras.
Skepticism was not only reserved for the local human rights bodies. Envío
was critical of Human Rights Watch and, even more so, of Amnesty
International, accusing both of a lack of thoroughness and criticizing
Amnesty for its extremely sloppy investigation and unquestioning
reliance on reports from biased organizations like CPDH. While working for
Scottish Medical Aid for Nicaragua, Laverty published a damning critique of
Amnestys assessment of human rights under the 1979-1990 Sandinista
government, concluding that their accusations of harsh treatment of
political prisoners were exaggerated or, at worst, entirely unfounded.
Thirty years later, critical thinking about the real role of Nicaraguan
human rights NGOs in stirring up regime-change is practically off limits.
When ANPDH and CENIDH lost their NGO registration last year, HRW complained
that, Public officials repeatedly made stigmatizing statements to undermine
the credibility of [human rights] defenders. As noted earlier, Amnesty does
not even accept the Nicaraguan governments right to analyze the death
counts produced by human rights bodies. Envío magazine, meanwhile, has
become an unflinching critic of the Ortega government and supporter of
CENIDH; Paul Laverty, now a screenwriter famous for his work with Ken Loach,
has lent support to opposition members touring Europe to promote their
anti-Sandinista message.
Raking in millions to advance empire
Meanwhile, human rights has become a lucrative and glitzy business. HRW, for
example, has 450 staff members and a budget of over $90 million, while
Amnestys global budget reaches almost $300 million. While HRW relies
heavily on the fortune of anti-communist billionaire George Soros, Amnesty
gains much of its budget from small donations, and its need to maintain its
profile has brought multiple criticisms of its toxic working culture.
Both organizations have been criticized for their alignment with US
government policy in Latin America, where their attention focuses
particularly on the countries in Boltons troika of tyranny while
downplaying or ignoring the huge damage caused to people in those countries
by US intervention. (AIs most recent, 56-page report on Venezuela, Hunger
for Justice, only has the briefest reference to US sanctions).
In the case of Nicaragua, the local human rights bodies provided HRW and
AI with evidence that fit their own prejudices about the Ortega government.
While these local bodies depended on publicity from HRW and AI to maintain
credibility, they also needed to demonstrate to US government organizations
like the NED that they were useful regime-change weapons.
Thanks to this toxic dynamic, CDPH, ANPDH and CENIDH are in complete
disarray, and their former staffers are spilling the beans about the bogus
death tolls they spun out to justify US funding. A year after they helped
stoke a coup, the only regime that is changing is their own.
John Perry
John Perry
John Perry is a writer based in Masaya, Nicaragua whose work has appeared in
the Nation, the London Review of Books, and many other publications.
