The United States has imposed sanctions on Nicaragua’s Attorney General Wendy Carolina Morales Urbina. In a statement, the Treasury Department called her a “key actor in the Nicaraguan regime’s unjust persecution of political prisoners and civil society within the country.”
Treasury Under Secretary for Terrorism and Financial Intelligence Brian Nelson said, “The Attorney General, in concert with the Ortega-Murillo regime, has exploited her office to facilitate a coordinated campaign to suppress dissent by seizing property from government political opponents without a legal basis.” The seizures include the properties of the 222 political prisoners who were released and flown to the United States in February 2023. The exiled Nicaraguans were also stripped of their citizenship. Morales Urbina helped formulate the strategy designating Nicaraguan opposition members as terrorists and blocking their financial resources under an anti-terrorism law. She was instrumental, the Treasury Department noted, for enabling the Ortega-Murillo regime not only to steal real property owned by political prisoners, but also by independent media outlets and international organizations.
In a separate statement, State Department Spokesperson Matthew Miller observed that Morales Urbina is responsible for the closing of over 3500 civil society organizations, including over 250 evangelical groups. She also took part, he said, “in the Ortega-Murillo regime’s baseless attacks on religious institutions, which included false charges and unjust detention of religious leaders.”
The designation means that any property of Morales Urbino in the United States is blocked, and U.S. persons are banned from business transactions with her.
Morales Urbina has been Attorney General in Nicaragua since 2019. In 2018 there were mass protests against the Ortega-Murillo government that were brutally repressed by the authorities. Since then, as a February 2024 report by UN human rights experts attests, repression by the government has grown to include large swaths of society with a focus “on incapacitating any kind of opposition in the long term.”
The United States is determined to hold accountable those in the Nicaraguan regime who are trampling on the rights of the Nicaraguan people. Daniel Ortega, Rosario Murillo, and more than one hundred Nicaraguan officials in Nicaragua’s political and judicial systems have already been sanctioned by the United States. With the designation of the Attorney General, the United States demonstrates that it remains firmly committed to act against Nicaragua’s anti-democratic actors and human rights abusers.
