Independent journalists in exile have managed to support at least 26 media outlets from Costa Rica, the United States and Spain, according to a report by “Las Exiliadas”, a network of feminist journalists and communicators.
The report, prepared in coordination with Reporters Without Borders-Spain and published on April 13, 2026, shows that the “attack on the press was not collateral damagebut a strategic objective to eliminate public scrutiny and historical memory.”
The document points out that it took the dictatorship two decades to dismantle press freedom in the country, but it could not “silence” those who continued to report from exile.
The journalist and director of CONFIDENTIALCarlos Fernando Chamorro, highlighted during the presentation of the report that the Nicaraguan press in exile “is defeating censorship” and the proof of this is that although reporting is done from exile, its audiences are still in Nicaragua.
“It is true that there are departments where there are no independent media, but it is not a zone of silence and it is not because there is information. There is information production to defeat censorship,” he emphasized.
Approximately 65% of the national territory has become an “information desert,” the report highlights, where “there is no independent journalism that reports on local reality.”
“Nicaragua is today the only country in Latin America where a printed newspaper does not circulate in the morning. Nor are radio stations heard or critical television channels operating, much less is it possible to identify independent journalists reporting from the territory,” says Maryórit Guevara, director and founder of La Lupa Feminista.
Transnational newsrooms operate
At least 61 media outlets have been closed or confiscated by March 2025 and more than 309 journalists were forced into exile since 2018.
“These attacks seek to neutralize the oversight function of the media. However, each verified data, each documented story and each protected evidence constitute concrete advances towards accountability, the recovery of public space, memory and justice,” the report states.
The economic losses derived from confiscations and property dispossession against media and journalists exceed 57 million dollars.
Despite the dismantling of media outlets and repression against journalists in Nicaragua, communicators in exile have built “transnational newsrooms” and located its editorial teams in Costa Rica, the United States, Spain and Mexico.
Although not all “have managed to sustain themselves over time.” Between 2023 and 2025, several initiatives closed due to lack of financing.
The vice president of Reporters Without Borders, Edith Rodríguez Cachera, questioned the low visibility that repression has in Nicaragua despite being a country that is below countries recognized as repressive such as China, North Korea, Russia, Myanmar, Vietnam or Afghanistan.
For this reason, Guevara suggests, greater international support is needed.
“We call to promote sustained and non-symbolic international solidarity, to strengthen protection systems in host countries like Spain, to implement comprehensive strategies for the transnational repression that we are experiencing in the different territories. To recognize and sanction the instrumentalization of the repressive legal framework that the dictatorship in Nicaragua has created and to incorporate my gender, intersectional approach,” said the author of the report.
journalistic resistance
Despite “state surveillance,” journalists inside the country, according to the report, “often in absolute anonymity, collaborate with teams abroad through encrypted channels, information compartmentalization protocols, and remote editorial flows.” That is, they combine “reporting in the territory with editing and publication from abroad.”
“It is a model that breaks with the traditional notion of centralized editorial and that prioritizes security over immediacy,” says the Las Exiliadas report.
Faced with the systematic blocking of official data, independent media have developed creative and methodological strategies to reconstruct reality through the “intensive use of human sources” such as “community networks, whistleblowers, filtering officials and organized civil society.”
During the collection of information, they usually do “cross-checking and collaborative verification”, that is, triangulating testimonies, leaked documents and digital evidence.
Social network monitoring, indirect administrative records and international databases contribute to the work of the independent press.
“Nicaraguan journalism in exile operates as a living network, which combines memory, denunciation and public service, with an ethic focused on victims, accountability and documentation of human rights violations,” the report details.
Violence against female journalists
The report dedicates a specific chapter to the situation of female journalists, who face forms of violence that do not affect their male colleagues in the same way.
Starting in 2018, female journalists suffered “differentiated violence.” The document identifies “sexualized attacks, smear campaigns based on personal life, threats of sexual violence, harassment directed at daughters and sons, and the use of motherhood as a mechanism of intimidation.”
“These practices not only seek to silence journalistic practice, but also to discipline women who occupy public space,” the document summarizes.
Between 2018 and March 2025 —according to the Foundation for Freedom of Expression and Democracy (FLED)—, 730 violations of the rights of women journalists were documented, of which 59.3% were attributed directly to the State.
Eight out of ten female journalists assisted in psychosocial support programs reported having “suffered sexual violence in the context of repression.”
Exile also has “differentiated impacts.” As of June 2025, there were 106 women journalists in exile, 34.3% of the total displaced. Of them, 76% “cannot cover their basic expenses” with journalistic practice and 60% “have considered leaving the profession.”
The study Voices of women journalists from exile —prepared by Las Comadres in 2025—, based on 43 testimonies, reports that 12 women journalists continue to work in their media of origin, while at least 10 have had to move to other jobs, mainly in the field of care, telemarketing and the sale of food, as a “survival strategy.”
The report concludes that the regime built a “legal and constitutional scaffolding designed to eliminate dissent” and that it affected independent journalism.
