Latin America As Coronavirus Spreads in Nicaragua, Official Denials Amplify Risk President Ortega rejects containment measures, while reports from doctors and hospitals dwarf official toll
https://www.wsj.com/articles/as-coronavirus-spreads-in-nicaragua-official-denials-amplify-risk-11590246000
Nicaragua has become a coronavirus hot spot in Latin America but its authoritarian leader is endangering public health by ignoring the threat and hiding infection data, according to doctors and relatives of victims.
President Daniel Ortega and his wife, Vice President Rosario Murillo, have refused to introduce quarantines or limits on commerce. “Staying at home is the way to the country’s destruction,” Mr. Ortega said at a rare appearance to deliver a May Day speech.
As of Monday, Nicaragua, with a population of more than six million, had recognized only 25 coronavirus cases and 8 fatalities—and Mr. Ortega declared: “We have been able to counter the pandemic.”
The following day, under pressure from doctors and activists, and facing an overwhelmed health system, the Health Ministry updated its numbers to 254 cases and 17 deaths, without explanation.
That was well short of the count by the Citizen’s Observatory, a watchdog group of doctors and experts, which said on Tuesday it had verified 1,594 cases of Covid-19 in Nicaragua and 351 deaths. Videos posted on social media, local news reports and accounts from relatives of victims suggest the country’s health system is overwhelmed, with hospitals crammed with victims.
“The government’s figures are not real,” said a doctor at the Roberto Calderón Hospital, one of the largest in the capital, Managua. “They are deceiving the population.”
The Nicaraguan government hasn’t given any data to the United Nations-affiliated Pan American Health Organization and has barred the agency’s officials from checking conditions at hospitals, said Dr. Ciro Ugarte, the country emergencies director for the agency.
“Nicaragua has not been reporting vital information,” he said. “We have tried many times, calling them and writing two or three times a day without success.”
Ms. Murillo, who serves as the government’s spokesman, didn’t reply to requests for comment. She has said criticism by doctors of conditions in the country was unpatriotic, the work of “small brains who are like computers who are activated when they receive messages from others in another galaxy.”
Many victims who die in hospitals are buried at night in cemeteries in what have been dubbed “express funerals,” with few family members in attendance, relatives said. Ms. Murillo has dismissed eerie videos of night burials as fake and fabricated abroad.
“They don’t want to accept that the virus is all over Nicaragua,” said Rosalina Dávila, whose husband, Mario Antonio Lara, 57, died of “acute pneumonia possibly coronavirus,” according to his death certificate. He was buried on Wednesday night in a sealed coffin, a handful of family members in attendance.
Two years ago, Mr. Ortega’s government was shaken by civil unrest that led to the deaths of more than 300 people, most of them protesters killed by security forces. Since then, his government has suffered international sanctions. The economy in Nicaragua—the second-poorest country in the Western Hemisphere after Haiti—shrank by 3.8% in 2018 and by 5.7% the following year, according to the International Monetary Fund.
SHARE YOUR THOUGHTS
What should Nicaragua do about its coronavirus outbreak? Join the conversation below.
On Friday the U.S. Treasury Department introduced new economic sanctions against Mr. Ortega’s government, this time targeting Nicaragua’s army commander-in-chief, Julio Aviles, and the finance minister. The sanctions mean that any U.S. property, interest and asset held by the officials will be blocked.
Acknowledging a wider spread of the virus would put Mr. Ortega under pressure to lock down the country—a move he has said would be fatal for the country’s faltering economy. It would also increase political and social pressure on his government.
“The regime of Ortega and Rosario believes this health crisis is a conspiracy of the opposition to topple the government,” said Luis Alberto Martínez, a doctor at a private hospital in Chinandega, a northern city that has been severely hit by the coronavirus. “That’s why they don’t want to let people know about the real magnitude of this crisis.”
Since the beginning of the pandemic, Mr. Ortega, who is 74 and believed to suffer from lupus, has been mostly out of sight, at one time prompting speculation that he was either dead or ill with Covid-19.
Nicaragua’s refusal to deal with the pandemic has heightened tensions with neighboring Costa Rica, which boasts one of Central America’s best public-health systems. Costa Rica shut schools and tourism, pushed working from home and implemented testing and tracing of the contacts of coronavirus victims.
On May 15, Costa Rica’s congress sent a letter to the Pan American Health Organization asking for an independent evaluation of the pandemic in Nicaragua. It isn’t just, the letter said, that Costa Rica “is being exposed to all the risks of contagion due to the irresponsible attitude of Nicaragua’s rulers.”
Since then, relations have worsened. After Costa Rica began testing truckers arriving from Nicaragua for the new coronavirus—and said 50 Nicaraguans had tested positive—Nicaragua on Monday closed the border in retaliation.
As Costa Rica’s testing left long lines of trailer trucks stalled at the border, Mr. Ortega took to the airwaves. “It’s not Nicaragua which has closed the border, it’s Costa Rica with the measures it has begun to take,” he said.
La Nación, Costa Rica’s most influential newspaper, said in an editorial that the country had saved itself from a major tragedy as the infected truckers were “traveling agents of infection.”
Comments are closed.
