A retired officer of the Nicaraguan armed forces, a critic of the government of Daniel Ortega and Rosario Murillo, was murdered yesterday (Thursday) in Costa Rica, where he had been living in exile.

Major (ret..). Roberto Samcam, 66, was killed by unidentified gunfire yesterday morning in the apartment building where he lived in a San Jose suburb.

“We don’t know much, but the killing has been confirmed. There were eight shots fired. It’s something we didn’t expect, we didn’t imagine,” Samantha Hiron, Roberto Samcam’s stepdaughter, who lives in Madrid, told the French news agency.

“Roberto was a strong voice” who “directly denounced the dictatorship” of Ortega, Claudia Vargas, wife of the slain retired officer, told the press in San Jose.

According to her, he was fighting to “expose human rights violations” in his home country.

“We strongly condemn the cold-blooded murder of Roberto Samcam. This is an act of cowardice and criminal revenge for political reasons on the part of the Nicaraguan dictatorship,” said Nicaraguan former ambassador Arturo McPhilds, exiled in the US, via X.

Maj Gen. Samcam often expressed himself in the media, denouncing the authoritarianism of the government in Nicaragua. He and his wife had been living in Costa Rica since 2018, the year widespread protests and riots broke out against President Ortega, which were violently put down – according to the UN, more than 300 people died.

Former Costa Rican president Luis Guillermo Solis (2014-2018) called the assassination of Roberto Samcam, “because of his frontal resistance to the dictatorship of Ortega and Murillo”, an “outrageous and extremely serious” action.

The State Department’s Western Hemisphere Affairs office expressed via X “shock” at the killing and offered Washington’s assistance to San Jose to “hold the perpetrators and perpetrators accountable.”

On January 10, 2024, another Nicaraguan exile in Costa Rica, Joao Maldonado, was seriously wounded by bullets.

They proceeded “to execute a retired officer whose voice, they believed, had resonance in the ranks of the armed forces” because of “the weakening of the regime”, told the media outlet 100% Noticias former commander of a guerrilla unit during the Sandinista revolution – Daniel Ortega was among its leaders – Dora Maria Teyes, exiled in Spain after being imprisoned and expelled from the country by order of the authorities.

President Ortega, once a guerrilla leader, 79, has been in power since 2007. He is heavily criticised by many, who accuse him of imposing a “family dictatorship” with his wife and now co-president Murillo.

Following a revision of the constitution that came into force in February, the couple now effectively control all the powers of the state.

Thousands of opponents of the government have been stripped of their Nicaraguan nationality and either driven from their homeland or forced into exile.