The policies enacted by President Joe Biden to respond to Nicaragua’s communist regime using its main airport as a hub for U.S.-bound migrants have had little to no effect in curbing migration, the Nicaraguan newspaper La Prensa reported on Thursday.
Nicaragua’s communist dictator Daniel Ortega has been accused of “weaponizing” Managua’s international airport against the United States by allowing migrants to arrive to the airport and freely pass through the country en route to the United States.
Thousands of migrants from Latin America and other continents seeking to cross the U.S. southern border have opted to first land in Managua because the Sandinista government has very limited visa requirements. Nicaragua’s location in Central America also allows migrants to avoid having to cross through the deadly Darién Gap jungle trail located between Colombia and Panama.
The Ortega regime has been able to profit from allowing migrants to transit through its airport by reportedly charging them a fee of upwards $200 per person to use the facilities. Experts have suggested that Ortega sees migrants as a “golden opportunity” bargaining tool to negotiate potential sanctions relief with the United States.
In recent months, the administration of U.S. President Joe Biden has attempted to “crack down” on the use of charter flights that land in Nicaragua, a growing trend among migrants seeking to reach the United States, and imposed sanctions on Nicaraguan-based charter flight airlines and its executives. The Biden administration issued a warning to relevant airlines suggesting they undergo vetting processes and take measures to “avoid complicity.”
Experts estimate that roughly 1,150 charter flights landed in Managua between May 2024 and May 2024.
The measures adopted by the Biden administration, according to La Prensa’s report, have had an “insufficient” effect in the reduction of U.S.-bound migrants using Nicaragua. The migrant flow remains “constant and almost unchanged” compared to 2023, which reportedly saw more than 300,000 migrants use the airport in their journey towards the United States, the report claimed.
According to statistics from the Central Bank of Nicaragua quoted by the newspaper, a total of 198,500 travelers landed in Managua’s airport between January and March 2024, of which only 179,600 left the country on an outbound flight, leaving 18,900 individuals who potentially left the country by land towards the United States.
During the same time period in 2023, 147,600 travelers were registered to have disembarked at the airport, of which only 130,800 departed through an outbound flight, leaving a differential of 16,800 people.
“Data from the first quarter of this year indicate that despite Washington’s efforts to counter the dictatorship’s strategy, they are proving insufficient,” La Prensa said.
La Prensa noted that it will take two years to be able to know the nationalities of the U.S-bound migrants, as the Nicaraguan Institute of Tourism (Intur), which handles the relevant statistics, has a two-year delay in the publication of said data. La Prensa noted, however, that in the recently released 2022 migrant nationality data, there was a noticeable increase in the arrival of Cuban and Ecuadorian nationals described by the newspaper to be “in line with Ortega’s strategy of placing migrants at the U.S. border.”
The Nicaraguan newspaper stated that if the trend registered during the first three months of 2024 continues, then the Ortega regime will have facilitated the passage of a similar number of migrants this year when compared to 2023, when 878,900 travelers entered through the airport, but only 572,600 left, leaving 306,300 individuals unaccounted for.
In 2022, when the Ortega regime began its weaponization of migrants to force Washington to negotiate potential sanctions reliefs, the differential of migrants that entered by air but did not leave on a flight was estimated at roughly 322,400.
“In other words, in two years and three months, the dictatorship has managed to put 647,600 migrants at the U.S. border, not including Nicaraguans who have also been forced to leave the country,” the report read.
“In this way, Ortega will have easily put almost one million migrants at the borders of Nicaragua’s main trading partner, which has refused to sanction one of the most important trade agreements for the economy and which sustains the finances of the regime: Cafta-DR,” the report continued.
La Prensa stated that the flow of migrants from Nicaragua may skyrocket throughout the remainder of 2024, as the Ortega regime opened 11 new embassies in the first half of this year. Some of new embassies have been opened in countries where there is not even a local Nicaraguan community to offer consular services.
“The dictatorship is not sending in diplomats, but migratory operators. The regime needs to have people on the ground to help it streamline and coordinate all these things,” former Nicaraguan Ambassador to the Organization of American States (OAS) Arturo McFields told La Prensa this week. “I think illegal migration … Ortega needs to have people on the ground who are his operators.”
The Ortega regime has also begun allowing direct charter flights from countries that previously did not have a flight connection to Nicaragua, such as Libya, Morocco, Germany, and France. La Prensa stated that between May and early June, the Libyan airline Ghadames Airlines, reportedly conducted three such charter flights that transported mostly Indian nationals.
Christian K. Caruzo is a Venezuelan writer and documents life under socialism. You can follow him on Twitter here.
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