The U.S. Department of the Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control sanctioned five individuals and seven companies tied to Nicaragua’s gold sector on April 16.
Among those sanctioned are the sons of the country’s co-presidents, who are alleged to be helping the ruling regime generate revenue and maintain political control.
Also targeted were Santiago Hernan Bermudez Tapia, who is Nicaragua’s vice minister of the Ministry of Energy and Mines, Nicaraguan entities involved in the forceful seizure of U.S.-owned property, and gold companies that assumed concessions previously held by already-sanctioned parties.
“The Murillo-Ortega dictatorship has sought to fill its own coffers through the use of these gold companies and co-conspirators by confiscating American investments in Nicaragua and using it to generate funds to maintain its political power,” U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said in a statement.
“The United States will not allow the illicit confiscation of American-owned assets and will continue to target revenue streams that empower the corrupt Murillo-Ortega regime,” he said.
The Treasury Department said the other companies and officials sanctioned used corruption within the gold industry to fill the regime’s coffers, and that several of those designated were involved in the seizure of a mining company that included U.S. investments.
According to the Treasury Department, the Murillo-Ortega regime has confiscated American investments and used them to generate funds to maintain political power. The U.S. action was taken under Executive Order 13851, as amended by Executive Order 14088, which authorizes sanctions in response to the national emergency with respect to the situation in Nicaragua.
This is not the first time gold has been at the center of U.S. sanctions against the Nicaraguan regime.
In June 2022, Washington sanctioned Nicaragua’s state-owned gold mining company, known by its Spanish acronym ENIMINAS, citing the country’s deepening ties with Russia and the use of gold revenue to oppress the Nicaraguan people.
At that time, the Treasury stated that “high-ranking members of the Ortega-Murillo regime have benefited greatly from Nicaragua’s increase in gold exports in recent years, due in large part to the outsized role ENIMINAS has played in funneling profits to private sector partners and kickbacks to regime insiders.”
Dictatorial Couple
Thursday’s move is the latest effort by Washington to squeeze a regime that has turned Nicaragua into what U.S. officials call a family dictatorship.
Longtime leader Ortega officially named Murillo—his wife and a former vice president—as co-president a year ago. Observers said the move appeared aimed at consolidating the family’s grip on Nicaragua and ensuring that power is handed down to their children.
The constitutional change moved Murillo from vice president to co-president, institutionalizing what the U.S. Treasury describes as a totalitarian state and making the Nicaraguan people subordinate to the dictatorial couple.
Nicaragua’s regime has been carrying out a clampdown on dissent since mass social protests in 2018 that the state violently repressed. Since then, it has shuttered more than 5,000 organizations, largely religious, and forced thousands to flee the country, according to Amnesty International. The U.S. State Department’s “2018 Country Reports on Human Rights Practices: Nicaragua” stated that the conflict left at least 325 people dead, more than 2,000 injured, and hundreds illegally detained and tortured.
Last month, the United Nations said the regime used corruption as a tool to finance systemic political repression and stay in power.
In March 2024, the United States sanctioned Nicaraguan Attorney General Wendy Carolina Morales Urbina, describing her as “a key actor in the Nicaraguan regime’s unjust persecution of political prisoners and civil society within the country.”
Thursday’s sweeping action—targeting members of the ruling family itself—signals a sharper escalation under the current U.S. administration.
