Orlando Noguera was a Nicaraguan mayor best known for the crackdown on anti-government protesters two years ago that left seven people dead in his city.
Now Noguera, the former mayor of Masaya, a city 15 miles south of the Nicaraguan capital, has a new legacy: He is among dozens of fiercely loyal members of the ruling Sandinista National Liberation Front party whose deaths in recent years weeks are believed to have been caused by the coronavirus.
The series of deaths – of mayors, judges, police officers, council members, and government bureaucrats – in the past two months has highlighted the fact that the disease is much more widespread than the government has publicly acknowledged.
And for government critics, the deaths highlight the consequences of President Daniel Ortega’s fortuitous and politicized response to the pandemic, without the encouragement of wearing masks or social distancing measures, and little evidence and no orders to remain in the home or closings.
Several young epidemiologists, virologists, and related specialists said in the Lancet medical journal that Nicaragua’s response “has been perhaps the most erratic of any country in the world to date.”
The government’s response has put its own officials and supporters at particular risk, said Dora María Tellez, a former Sandinista health minister who broke with the party.
“They were the only ones who walked without masks,” he said, “when the mask was considered a sign of opposition.”
Francisco Aguirre Sacasa, a former Nicaraguan ambassador to Washington, said the deaths of public officials were surprisingly obvious “when you looked at the National Assembly and saw many empty chairs on the Sandinista side of the National Assembly.”
“You can’t ignore that,” he said. “You can’t hide it. You can’t hide that. “
“It is obvious, obvious, that the Sandinistas have been dying,” he added.
Still, the deaths of few officials were publicly attributed to Covid-19, as is the case with most virus deaths in Nicaragua. Many are officially attributed to “atypical pneumonia”.
Officially, the government reports that only 99 people have died from the virus, although the Observatorio Ciudadanos Covid-19, an anonymous group of doctors and activists in Nicaragua, has registered 2,397 probable deaths.
One of the Sandinista legislators who died of Covid-19 in late May was the cousin of the former ambassador, María Manuela Sacasa de Prego, she said, although she also had cancer.
“His sons told me he died from Covid,” said Sacasa.
The government has now created exclusive Covid hospital units; The army is organizing massive disinfection campaigns. But many critics say a clear sign that those measures came too late are the high-profile deaths of the party members themselves.
The government is gearing up for its big annual show on July 19 that celebrates the victory of the Sandinista revolution, which toppled the Somoza family dictatorship in 1979.
Held every year in a public square in the capital, Managua, the event has hundreds of thousands of people transported across the country. They wear matching shirts and carry black and red party flags before a podium where all the top government officials sit.
But this year, for the first time in its 41-year history, the event will take place as a virtual concert.
To dampen the festive mood, on Friday, the United States Treasury Department sanctioned Mr. Ortega’s son and his wife, Rosario Murillo, who is also the country’s vice president.
The son, Juan Carlos Ortega, runs a media company “that he uses to stifle independent voices, spread propaganda from the regime, and defend Ortegas violence and repression,” said Michael R. Pompeo, secretary of state, in a statement.
Nicaragua, which spent the past two years fighting against a popular uprising, was one of the few countries that never closed schools and businesses and never issued an order to stay home. The Pan American Health Organization publicly expressed its concern.
Seeking to avoid economic collapse, the government continued to organize massive events, even after the pandemic broke out worldwide.
A March demonstration, heralded as solidarity for countries suffering deaths from coronavirus, was called “Love in the time of Covid-19”. Beauty pageants, boxing matches, art fairs, food festivals, and other events organized by the government also continued as planned, as Sandinista lawmakers teased opposition lawmakers for wearing masks.
Nicaragua’s response to the pandemic “has been criticized worldwide as one of the worst,” said Mateo C. Jarquín, a Nicaraguan professor at Chapman University in California, one of the authors of Lancet’s article.
“We should recognize that all governments are fighting,” he wrote. “What has no excuse is the lack of transparency and the flagrant manipulation of information.”
In May, the government released a report justifying its approach to the pandemic. The report noted that a desperately poor country like Nicaragua could not afford an economic shutdown. Many people in Nicaragua must work to eat and cannot stay at home, the government said.
But it did not explain why he allowed large gatherings to continue, even when equally popular and crowded events were canceled around the world.
Relatives of Eden Pastora, a government ally and a prominent figure in the nation’s civil war, said she did not have the disease, but her death certificate, which a family member read to the New York Times, showed that the Mr. Pastora died of “Atypical pneumonia”: the usual official designation for a coronavirus death.
Orlando J. Castillo, the head of the government’s telecommunications office who had recently been sanctioned for human rights violations by the United States Treasury Department, died on June 2. Local media, citing family sources, said the cause was Covid-19.
When a senior police official, Olivio Salguera Hernández, died in May, his family insisted that he had suffered a fatal heart attack. But the media reported that his body was buried the same day he died, as is the custom in Nicaragua when people die of Covid-19, suggesting he had the disease.
Ms. Tellez, a former Sandinista health minister, provided the Times with a list of 38 Sandinistas who are believed to have died from the coronavirus, and said that about 200 names have circulated on social media.
Carlos Fernando Chamorro, editor of Confidencial, one of the mainstream media, said his team has counted some 100 Sandinista deaths, including about 10 known figures.
“The problem is that here, nobody officially dies from Covid-19,” he said.
The Nicaraguan government channels all media inquiries to Ms. Murillo, the vice president. She did not respond to requests for comment.
In public comments, she has acknowledged the deaths of prominent government officials, but did not give cause. They had “made the transition to another plane,” Murillo said, but her legacies are still alive.
“We live his legacy with the strength of the revolution,” he said after the death of two officials. “Our revolution makes us strong every day.”
Orlando Obando Cabrera, a Sandinista regional councilor in Bluefields, on the Caribbean coast, posted videos on his Facebook page in which he implored Nicaraguans to stop looking for people to blame for the health crisis.
“If I die in this fight and you want to find someone responsible, don’t look it up in the government,” Obando said in a video released May 26, acknowledging that he was being treated for the disease. “If something happens to me, don’t blame Daniel, don’t blame Rosario, don’t blame the others.”
Two days later, he promised to beat Covid-19. On June 13, Mr. Obando died.
Alfonso Flores Bermúdez contributed reporting from Managua, Nicaragua.
