Nicaragua

Secrecy and a lack of access to public information continue presenting great difficulties. The government only reports through what it has called citizen-powered communication media, a conglomerate of government and family-owned media. During the “appearances” before official media, no questions are asked; rather, there are monologues among public officials and partisan journalists about government advancements in economic or social areas. There is a duopoly that controls eight of the nine over-the-air television stations in the country. On one side is Ángel González, who controls the stations with the largest audiences, channels 10, 2, 9, and 11—dedicated essentially to entertainment and sensationalism, without offering any space for public debate or oversight of public power; and on the other hand, the business group belonging to the president’s family and favored by official advertising, and which controls channels 4, 8, and 13, and uses channel 6, supposedly a national (public) channel, through which it disseminates official propaganda, entertainment, and also sensationalism. This duopoly began when the Telecommunications Institute (TELCOR) handed out licenses to the emporium of Mexican entrepreneur Ángel González. Article 68 of the Political Constitution of Nicaragua permitted a foreigner to hold up to 49% of a media company, but prohibited that foreigner from being its director. A constitutional reform through an ordinary law put the communications media under the Trade Law, where these types of limits do not exist. There is also abuse on the part of TELCOR to impose the presidential radio and television networks, removing from the air the international channels that are transmitted by cable. It is urgent to create a new telecommunications law to end discretionality and the lack of judicial security that rules in the assignment of broadcast frequencies. Presently all channel licenses are in legal limbo, since the law that should govern the matter has languished in the Legislative Assembly since 2005, such that penal or administratie enforcement is in the hands of the regulating agency TELCOR. The government party also holds other media, radio stations Ya, Sandino, Primerísima, and Nicaragua; and digital portals El 19 Digital and Nicaragua Triunfa. It has also acquired radio outlets in the northern departments of Jinotega and Matagalpa, areas of recognized anti-Ortega affiliation and where a good part of the civil war of the eighties developed. It also has radio stations in the southern department of Rivas on the Costa Rican border. Discrimination continues, begun since the first term of President Daniel Orgega(2007-2011), to deny state advertising to the independent media, affecting primarily the smaller radio stations. Due to this policy, the few independent media that subsist, as well as their journalists, practice self-censorship to avoid economic reprisals from the government. The Sandinista mayor of the municipality of Somoto, Wilson Pablo Montoya Rodríguez, called the leaders of Colulmbia Canal 13 of Somoto (north of the country) liars because they had denounced threats of a possible shut-down of that local TV station. A few days later the threats became a reality as channel 13 went off the air. The partners of the cable company known as Concas put on a new Mexican channel. Juan Carlos Pineda Menjíbar, director of the local TV station, stated that the leaders of the Sandinista Front (FSLN), headed by the political secretary of that party in Madriz (a department in the north of Nicaragua), Nery Rodezno, supposedly pressured the partners in the cable company in Somoto, through TELCOR, to remove the signal from that station. The shut-down of the channel, said Menjíbar, who is a militant in the FSLN, was made known at a meeting of the Concas partners, because Rodezno had sent a letter to TELCOR complaining that that television station had greatly criticized the corruption of some government officials, and that if measures were not taken then permission would be withdrawn for operation of the local cable company. Roberto Petray, national coordinator of the Nicaraguan Association of Human Rights (ANPDH) and Alberto Rosales Mondragón, legal advisor in the region for the Nicaraguan Center for Human Rights (Cenidh), demanded the opening of local station Columbia Canal 13.