ABSTRACT
COVID-19 has ravaged Latin America’s poorest country, Nicaragua, which suffered among the highest excess mortality rates in the world at the pandemic’s height in mid-2020. While it would be easy to blame underdevelopment, weak public health infrastructure, and the lack of healthcare access for the pandemic’s toll, the authoritarian nature of the ruling regime, led by President Daniel Ortega and his wife and Vice President Rosario Murillo, exacerbated the devastation. Having centralized power through brutal repression since 2018, the Ortega-Murillo regime’s strategy was characterized by denial of the pandemic’s severity, the distortion of information, and the criminalization of the medical community and citizen-led responses efforts. Beyond authoritarianism, the regime’s approach demonstrated the key features of populist crisis performance: (1) the invocation of “the people” as a means of repressing opposition and rejecting a stronger pandemic response as economically disastrous and (2) the perpetuation of the crisis to further consolidate regime power. While downplaying the pandemic and resisting preventive measures were largely driven by economic considerations, increased repression amid waning support reflected the regime’s attempts to eliminate any alternative sources of popular legitimacy and preserve the ruling family’s grip on power and wealth.
