A retired Nicaraguan military officer who later became a critic of President Daniel Ortega has been killed in a shooting at his condominium in Costa Rica, where he lives in exile.
The death of Roberto Samcam, 67, on Thursday has heightened concern about the safety of Nicaraguan dissidents, even when they live abroad.
Police in Costa Rica have confirmed that a suspect entered Samcam’s condominium building in the capital of San Jose at approximately 7:30am local time (13:30 GMT) and shot the retired major at least eight times.
Costa Rica’s Judicial Investigation Organisation identified the murder weapon as a 9mm pistol. Samcam’s wife, Claudia Vargas, told the Reuters news agency that the suspect pretended to be a delivery driver to gain access to her husband.
The suspect allegedly fired on Samcam and then left without saying a word, escaping on a motorcycle. He remains at large.
Samcam went into exile after participating in the 2018 protests, which began as demonstrations against social security reforms and escalated into one of the largest antigovernment movements in Nicaragua’s history.
Thousands of people flooded Nicaragua’s streets. Some even called for President Ortega’s resignation.
But while Ortega did ultimately cancel the social security reforms, he also answered the protests with a police crackdown, and the clashes killed an estimated 355 people, according to the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR).
More than 2,000 people were injured, and another 2,000 held in what the IACHR described as “arbitrary detention”.
In the months and years after the protests, Ortega has continued to seek punishment for the protesters and institutions involved in the demonstrations, which he likened to a “coup”.
Samcam was among the critics denouncing Ortega’s use of military weapons and paramilitary forces to tamp down on the protests. Ortega has denied using either for repression.
In a 2019 interview with the publication Confidencial, for instance, he compared Ortega to Anastasio Somoza Debayle, the last member of what is commonly known as the Somoza family dictatorship, which ruled Nicaragua for nearly 43 years.
And in 2022, Samcam published a book that roughly called Ortega: El Calvario de Nicaragua, which roughly translates to: Ortega: Nicaragua’s torment.
Ortega has long been accused of human rights abuses and authoritarian tendencies. In 2023, for instance, he stripped hundreds of dissidents of their citizenship, leaving them effectively stateless, and seized their property.
He has also pushed for constitutional reforms to increase his power and that of his wife, former Vice President Rosario Murillo. She now leads with Ortega as his co-president.
The changes also increase Ortega’s term in office and grant him the power to coordinate all “legislative, judicial, electoral, control and supervisory bodies” — putting virtually all government agencies under his authority.
From abroad, Samcam was helping to lead an effort to document some of Ortega’s alleged abuses.
In 2020, he became the chain-of-command expert for the Court of Conscience, a group created by the Arias Foundation for Peace and Human Progress, a nonprofit founded by a Nobel Prize-winning Costa Rican president, Oscar Arias.
As part of the group, Samcam solicited testimony of torture and abuses committed under Ortega, with the aim of building a legal case against the Nicaraguan president and his officials.
“We are documenting each case so that it can move on to a trial, possibly before the Inter-American Court of Human Rights,” Samcam said at the time.
Samcam is not the only Nicaraguan dissident to face an apparent assassination attempt while in exile.
Joao Maldonado, a student leader in the 2018 protests, has survived two such attempts while living in the Costa Rican capital. The most recent one, in January 2024, left him and his partner seriously injured.
Maldonado has blame Nicaragua’s Sandinista National Liberation Front — which Ortega leads — for the attack.
