Nicaragua Solidarity Fund

The Nicaragua Solidarity Fund was formed in 2020 when it held its first fundraising appeal. The project’s fundraising appeals raised $2,400 to “purchase personal protective equipment” for a public hospital in Masaya, Nicaragua at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, and $27,500 which was sent to SINAPRED, Nicaragua’s disaster prevention and mitigation agency, in the wake of Hurricane Eta. ³

Background

The Nicaragua Solidarity Fund is an advocacy project of the Alliance for Global Justice (AfGJ), an organizing group that serves as a fiscal sponsor to numerous left-wing initiatives. The group arose from the Nicaragua Network, an organization that supported the communist-aligned Sandinista regime in Nicaragua. ^{1 2}

The Sandinistas (formally the Sandinista National Liberation Front, in Spanish Frente Sandinista de Liberacion Nacional) are a communist paramilitary group-turned-political party with ties to the communist regime in Cuba. The party has controlled the government of Nicaragua since 2006 and has been criticized for increasing authoritarianism. ^{4 5}

Critics of the party have said that Nicaragua “is best characterized as a police state” and has “brutally repressed” journalists, indigenous people, and Nicaraguan members of the clergy. According to the Center for Strategic and International Studies, an American think tank and research institution created to support American foreign policy and national security during the height of the Cold War, the Nicaraguan government was holding approximately 200 political prisoners as of November 2022, most of whom reside at El Chipote, a prison complex “known for its use [of] torture and dungeon-like conditions.” ⁶

Fundraising

The Nicaragua Solidarity Fund was formed in 2020, when it held its first fundraising appeal. The first appeal raised $2,400 to “purchase personal protective equipment” for a public hospital in Masaya, Nicaragua, at the beginning of the Coronavirus pandemic. A second fundraising appeal was launched to raise money for “relief and reconstruction efforts” after areas in Nicaragua were damaged by Hurricane Eta. A total of $27,500 was sent to SINAPRED, Nicaragua’s disaster prevention and mitigation agency. ³

Its third fundraising appeal was in October 2022, when the project launched a campaign to raise funds to “support the Nicaraguan government’s efforts to rebuild damaged infrastructure” and to support people who had been affected by Hurricane Julia. ³

The Nicaragua Solidarity Fund claims that it is an “opportunity for US citizens to support the needs of the Nicaraguan people” and that the United States has violated international law by placing sanctions against Nicaragua. ³