Geneva, 26 June 2025. Samcam Ruíz was a powerful and outspoken critic of the Ortega-Murillo dictatorship. He had condemned and accused the Nicaraguan army of participating in acts of repression and extrajudicial executions since 2018. He had also exposed an espionage network targeting political opponents exiled in Costa Rica.
Major Samcam Ruíz was one of the 94 Nicaraguans whose citizenship was revoked by the Ortega-Murillo regime in February 2023. Since 11 July 2018 he had been living in Costa Rica as a political refugee because of the persecution and criminalization carried out by the regime. On 26 July 2023 he obtained Spanish citizenship.
His assassination is not the first attack on political opponents perpetrated on Costa Rican soil. In 2023, opposition member Joao Maldonado and his wife survived an attack with a firearm that was clearly meant to kill them. In 2021, Maldonado had already been the target of an attack in San José, Costa Rica. In 2022, Rodolfo Rojas, an opponent of the Nicaraguan regime was found dead in Honduras. According to relatives, he had been taken from Costa Rica, where he was exiled, to Honduras under false pretenses. Jaime Luis Ortega, also a political refugee, was murdered in 2024 in Upala, a canton on the border with Nicaragua. Samcam Ruiz had pointed out to the press the direct involvement of the Ortega-Murillo regime in these killings and had stated that he knew that his life was in danger.
Investigations into Samcam Ruiz’s murder are ongoing. The circumstances of the murder and the profile of the victim strongly point to a political crime with possible transnational links. Various human rights organizations have been documenting a sustained pattern of surveillance, threats, harassment, and acts of intimidation directed against Nicaraguans in exile in the region, especially in Costa Rica.
We believe that this crime should be seen and investigated as being part of a broader strategy of transnational repression undertaken by the Nicaraguan regime to persecute and silence dissent beyond its borders, in open violation of the human rights of refugees and exiles. This form of transnational repression has been documented by the Group of Experts on Human Rights in Nicaragua (Grupo de Expertos en derechos humanos sobre Nicaragua-GHREN), who have noted that "The Government’s repressive actions transcend the country’s borders and affect people living abroad who are [political] opponents or perceived as such. The Government continues to target family members living in Nicaragua, including children, solely for being related, to punish opponents and/or dissuade them from speaking out wherever they may be."
Given the gravity of the crime and the persistent pattern of transnational repression against exiled Nicaraguans, we urgently call on the international community to demand that the State of Nicaragua immediately cease all forms of persecution, surveillance, and violence against dissidents in exile. We also call on the international community to strengthen political, technical, and financial support for protection mechanisms for human rights defenders in exile and for the urgent establishment of bilateral or multilateral channels of communication with the host countries where Nicaraguans are living, in order to assess the security situation and elaborate prevention responses to potential acts of transnational persecution. Finally, we call on international human rights organizations to urgently examine these cases that are the result of a systematic pattern of cross-border repression and to make sure that justice is rendered and truth provided to the victims.