Counting deaths for dollars: the rise and fall of Nicaragua’s ‘human rights’ organizations

In their hunger for US funding, Nicaraguan “human rights” NGO’s inflated the death toll during last year’s coup. Today, these groups are in a state of complete disarray.

By John Perry

August 26, 2019 "Information Clearing House" -  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 government’s foes. This dynamic unfolded during last year’s 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” NGO’s 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.

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 opposition’s 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.