Brooklyn Rivera, one of the best-known leaders of Nicaragua’s Indigenous Miskito people, has died at the age of 73 after nearly three years in state detention, the government confirmed. His death, which advocates said occurred on 30 May, removes a veteran campaigner for Indigenous land rights and a longtime critic of President Daniel Ortega’s government.
Rivera spent decades advocating for the protection of ancestral lands along Nicaragua’s northeastern Caribbean coast, the homeland of the Miskito, the country’s largest Indigenous group. He was among the figures who spoke out against the policies of Ortega’s Sandinista government, a stance that made him a target as the authorities tightened their grip.
He was arrested in September 2023 after slipping back into the country, and was charged with terrorism. Critics dismissed the case as a pretext to silence him, and he spent nearly three years in detention largely cut off from the outside world, leaving relatives and supporters increasingly fearful for his health.
The government attributed his death to a bacterial infection that took hold after a bout of Covid-19. Rights monitors rejected that explanation. "If he is dead, it cannot be said that the cause was illness," said Reed Brody, a member of a United Nations group of human-rights experts on Nicaragua, pointing to the conditions of his confinement.
Rights organisations said Rivera was at least the seventh political prisoner to die in Nicaraguan custody since 2019, a toll they cite as evidence of the deadly conditions facing those detained for opposing the government. The authorities have consistently denied mistreating prisoners.
His death drew condemnation abroad and renewed attention to the plight of Nicaragua’s detained dissidents, as well as to the particular vulnerability of Indigenous leaders caught between the defence of their communities’ lands and a state intolerant of opposition.