Nicaragua’s Ruling Sandinistas Fall Victim to Covid-19, Highlighting the Disease’s Spread

Orlando Noguera was a Nicaraguan mayor best known for a crackdown on anti-government protesters two years ago that left seven people dead in his city.

Now Mr. Noguera, the former mayor of Masaya, a city 15 miles south of Nicaragua’s capital, has a new legacy: He is among the dozens of fiercely loyal members of the ruling Sandinista National Liberation Front party whose deaths in recent weeks are thought to have been caused by the coronavirus.

The string of fatalities — of mayors, judges, police officials, council members and government bureaucrats — over the past two months has highlighted the fact that the disease is much more widespread than the government has publicly acknowledged.

And to critics of the government, the deaths underscore the consequences of President Daniel Ortega’s haphazard and politicized response to the pandemic — with no encouragement of wearing masks or social distancing measures, and little testing and no stay-at-home orders or shutdowns.

Several young epidemiologists, virologists and related specialists said in the medical journal Lancet that Nicaragua’s response “has been perhaps the most erratic of any country in the world to date.”

The government’s response has put its own officials and supporters at particular risk, said Dora María Tellez, a former health minister under the Sandinistas who broke with the party.

“They were the only ones going around without masks,” she said, “as the mask came to be considered a sign of opposition.”

Francisco Aguirre Sacasa, a former Nicaraguan ambassador to Washington, said the deaths of the public officials were strikingly obvious “when you looked at the National Assembly and saw a lot of empty chairs in the Sandinista side of the National Assembly. ”

“You can’t just ignore that,” he said. “You can’t hide it. You can’t cover that up.”

“It is obvious, obvious, that Sandinistas have been dying,” he added.

Still, the deaths of few officials were publicly attributed to Covid-19 — as is the case with most virus fatalities in Nicaragua. Many are officially attributed to “atypical pneumonia.”

Officially, the government reports that just 99 people have died from the virus, although the Citizens Covid-19 Observatory, an anonymous group of doctors and activists in Nicaragua, have registered 2,397 probable deaths.

One of the Sandinista legislators who died of Covid-19 in late May was the former ambassador’s cousin, María Manuela Sacasa de Prego, he said, although she also had cancer.

“Her kids told me she died of Covid,” Mr. Sacasa said.

The government has now created Covid-only hospital units; mass disinfection campaigns are being organized by the military. But many critics say one clear sign that those measures came too late are the high-profile deaths of the party’s own members.

The government is preparing for its annual July 19 anniversary extravaganza celebrating the victory of the Sandinista revolution, which toppled the Somoza family dictatorship in 1979.

The event, held every year at a public square in the capital, Managua, features hundreds of thousands of people bused in from throughout the country. They wear matching T-shirts and carry black-and-red party flags before a dais where all the leading government officials sit.

But this year, for the first time in its 41-year history, the event will be held as a virtual concert.

Dampening the festive mood, on Friday, the United States Treasury Department sanctioned the son of Mr. Ortega and his wife, Rosario Murillo, who is also the vice president of the country.

The son, Juan Carlos Ortega, manages a media company “which he uses to stifle independent voices, spread regime propaganda, and defend the Ortegas’ violence and repression,” Michael R. Pompeo, the secretary of state, said in a statement.

Nicaragua, which spent the past two years battling a popular uprising, was one of a few countries that never shut down schools and businesses and never issued a stay-at-home order. The Pan American Health Organization publicly expressed concern.

Trying to stave off economic collapse, the government continued to organize mass events, even after the pandemic was raging around the world.

A March rally, advertised as being held in solidarity for countries suffering coronavirus deaths, was called “Love in the Time of Covid-19.” Beauty pageants, boxing matches, art fairs, food festivals and other events organized by the government also continued as planned, as Sandinista lawmakers mocked opposition legislators for wearing masks.

Nicaragua’s response to the pandemic has “been lambasted throughout the world as one of the worst,” said Mateo C. Jarquín, a Nicaraguan professor at Chapman University in California who was one of the authors of the Lancet article.

“We should recognize all governments are struggling,” he wrote. “What has no excuse is the lack of transparency and the blatant manipulation of information.”

In May, the government released a report justifying its approach to the pandemic. The report noted that a desperately poor country like Nicaragua could ill afford an economic shutdown. Many people in Nicaragua must work to eat and cannot stay home, the government said.

But it did not explain why it allowed large gatherings to continue even as similarly popular, crowded events were canceled worldwide.

Relatives of Eden Pastora, a government ally and a prominent figure in the nation’s civil war, said he did not have the illness, but his death certificate, which was read to The New York Times by a family member, showed Mr. Pastora died of “atypical pneumonia” — the usual official designation for a coronavirus death.

Orlando J. Castillo, the head of the government telecommunications office who had recently been sanctioned for human-rights violations by the United States Treasury Department, died on June 2. Local media, citing family sources, said the cause was Covid-19.

When a top police official, Olivio Salguera Hernández, died in May, his family insisted he had suffered a fatal heart attack. But the media reported that his body was buried the same day he died, as is customary in Nicaragua when people die of Covid-19 — suggesting that he had the disease.

Ms. Tellez, the former Sandinista health minister, provided The Times with a list of 38 Sandinistas who were believed to have died of the coronavirus and said some 200 names have circulated on social media.

Carlos Fernando Chamorro, editor of Confidencial, a leading news outlet, said his team has counted some 100 deaths of Sandinistas, including about 10 well-known figures.

“The problem is that here, nobody officially dies of Covid-19,” he said.

The Nicaraguan government funnels all media inquiries to Ms. Murillo, the vice president. She did not respond to requests for comment.

In public comments, she has acknowledged the deaths of the prominent government officials, but did not give the cause. They had “transitioned to another plane,” Ms. Murillo said, but their legacies live on.

“We live their legacy with the strength of the revolution,” she said following the deaths of two officials. “Our revolution makes us strong every day.”

Orlando Obando Cabrera, a Sandinista regional councilman in Bluefields, on the Caribbean coast, posted videos on his Facebook page in which he implored Nicaraguans to stop looking for people to blame for the health crisis.

“If I die in this struggle and you want to find someone responsible, don’t look for it in the government,” Mr. Obando said in a video posted May 26, acknowledging that he was being treated for the illness. “If something happens to me, don’t blame Daniel, don’t blame Rosario, don’t blame others.”

Two days later, he vowed to beat Covid-19. On June 13, Mr. Obando died.

Alfonso Flores Bermúdez contributed reporting from Managua, Nicaragua.