A retired Nicaraguan military officer turned outspoken critic of Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega was shot to death on Thursday at his home in Costa Rica, authorities said.
Roberto Samcam, 67, had been living in exile since July 2018, when paramilitaries assaulted his home in Nicaragua.
Police said a man entered the condominium complex where Samcam lived northeast of the Costa Rican capital, San Jose, and went directly to the retired major’s home at about 7:30am.
Photo: AFP
Without saying a word, the man shot Samcam multiple times with a 9mm pistol, Costa Rica’s Judicial Investigation Organization said, adding that the shooter escaped.
Word of Samcam’s killing spread rapidly among the hundreds of thousands of Nicaraguans who have sought refuge in Costa Rica since Ortega cracked down on widespread protests in 2018.
In 2020, Samcam served as chain-of-command expert for the Court of Conscience, organized by Costa Rica’s Arias Foundation for Peace and Human Progress, to collect testimony of those who were tortured or abused at the hands of the government.
The exercise was in part to build cases to eventually take to regional and international human rights bodies.
“We are documenting each case so that it can move on to a trial, possibly before the Inter-American Court of Human Rights,” Samcam said at the time,
Government officials were involved in the abuses, he said.
In 2022, Samcam published a book titled Ortega: El calvario de Nicaragua, (“Ortega: Nicaragua’s torment” in English). He published another text last year describing in detail how he watched Ortega build a dictatorship.
In January last year, another Nicaraguan exile, Joao Maldonado, was shot seven times in the street outside Costa Rica’s capital. He survived and said a cell of Nicaragua’s Sandinista National Liberation Front was responsible for the attack.
Ortega and his wife and copresident, Rosario Murillo, have driven hundreds of thousands of Nicaraguans into exile, and imprisoned and stripped hundreds more of their citizenship.
Murillo, who is also the Nicaraguan government’s spokesperson, did not immediately respond to an e-mailed request for comment.
Since crushing the 2018 protests, the government has systematically pursued any voice of opposition. The government has shuttered hundreds of nongovernmental organizations and persecuted religious groups, including the Catholic Church.
Yader Valdivia of the human rights organization Nicaragua Nunca Mas said that Samcam had been one of the exiled Nicaraguans stripped of his citizenship by the government.
Valdivia said there was fear of the government’s “long arm” among the Nicaraguan exile community in Costa Rica, which makes it capable of reaching critics outside its borders.
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