Nicaragua Indigenous leader Brooklyn Rivera dies after years in custody

Brooklyn Rivera, one of Nicaragua’s best-known Miskito leaders and a founder of YATAMA, died in state custody after months of warnings that the 73-year-old Indigenous figure had been gravely ill and unreachable to his family and lawyer.

Rivera spent more than four decades defending the political and territorial rights of Indigenous communities on Nicaragua’s Caribbean Coast. He served as a parliamentarian and member of the National Assembly, and he became a central voice for the Miskito people through YATAMA, the Indigenous political organization that represented communities across the Costa Caribe.

His case became a symbol of Nicaragua’s widening crackdown on dissent. Amnesty International said authorities denied Rivera entry into the country in April 2023 after he denounced the situation facing Indigenous peoples at an international forum. He later entered Nicaragua by an alternative route in September 2023, when the National Police detained him and he was then forcibly disappeared, according to Amnesty and United Nations human-rights experts.

From there, Rivera’s disappearance deepened concerns that the government of Daniel Ortega and Rosario Murillo was targeting not only opposition politicians but also Indigenous leaders who had long pressed for autonomy, land rights and political representation. The Inter-American Commission on Human Rights issued precautionary measures for him on October 9, 2023, and Amnesty later designated him a prisoner of conscience in December 2024. By March 2025, Amnesty said his family and lawyer had gone at least 16 months without contact with him.

The alarm sharpened in 2026. On May 1, United Nations experts warned that Rivera may have died in custody. On May 27, Nicaragua’s government released hospital photos showing him emaciated and intubated and said he had multiple respiratory and liver illnesses, a disclosure that drew renewed outrage from rights advocates. The country’s health ministry later confirmed his death in state custody.

Rivera’s death now stands alongside a broader pattern of repression that has reshaped public life in Nicaragua. Human Rights Watch said police also detained another YATAMA leader, Nancy Henríquez, in 2023, while at least 452 Nicaraguans have reportedly been arbitrarily deprived of nationality under the government’s repression campaign. Amnesty has said the Ortega government has relied on imprisonment, exile, disappearance, media closures and restrictions on civil society to silence critics, narrowing the space left for Indigenous political representation in particular.