SAN JOSE, Costa Rica (BN24) — Roberto Samcam, a retired Nicaraguan army major who became one of President Daniel Ortega’s most outspoken opponents, was shot to death at his home Thursday morning in Costa Rica, where he had lived in exile since fleeing political persecution in 2018.
Authorities in Costa Rica said an unidentified man entered Samcam’s gated residential complex northeast of San Jose shortly after 7:30 a.m. and went directly to his home. Without speaking, the assailant opened fire with a 9mm pistol, striking Samcam multiple times before fleeing the scene. The gunman remains at large, according to Costa Rica’s Judicial Investigation Organization.
Samcam, 67, had become a prominent voice among the Nicaraguan exile community following a brutal crackdown on anti-government protests six years ago that forced hundreds of thousands to flee the country. The news of his assassination quickly reverberated across exile networks in Costa Rica, where more than 300,000 Nicaraguans now live after fleeing Ortega’s increasingly authoritarian regime.
In recent years, Samcam had dedicated himself to documenting abuses committed by the Nicaraguan government. In 2020, he served as a military chain-of-command expert for the Court of Conscience, a project led by the Arias Foundation for Peace and Human Progress in Costa Rica. The initiative gathered testimonies from victims of state violence with the aim of pursuing justice through regional and international human rights courts.
“We are documenting each case so that it can move on to a trial, possibly before the Inter-American Court of Human Rights,” Samcam said during his participation in the tribunal. He explicitly named Ortega’s top officials as perpetrators of abuses including torture and extrajudicial detentions.
Samcam further detailed his accusations in a 2022 book, Ortega: El calvario de Nicaragua (“Ortega: Nicaragua’s Torment”), which chronicled the regime’s descent into dictatorship. He followed up in 2023 with another volume analyzing how Ortega systematically dismantled Nicaragua’s democratic institutions.
The assassination has drawn parallels to the January 2024 attempted killing of Joao Maldonado, another exiled Nicaraguan political figure. Maldonado was shot seven times outside San Jose, survived, and later accused a Sandinista paramilitary cell of orchestrating the attack. That case remains unresolved.
The Ortega government, led jointly by President Ortega and his wife and Vice President Rosario Murillo, has yet to comment on Samcam’s death. Murillo, who also serves as the regime’s chief spokesperson, did not respond to a request for comment.
Since violently quelling the 2018 protests, the Ortega administration has waged an unrelenting campaign against dissent. It has shuttered over 3,000 nongovernmental organizations, targeted religious institutions—particularly the Catholic Church—and stripped more than 300 political opponents and journalists of their Nicaraguan citizenship. Exiles and human rights groups have repeatedly warned that the government’s reach extends beyond its borders.
Human rights advocates say Samcam’s assassination is part of a broader pattern of transnational repression. While investigators in Costa Rica have not yet determined a motive, activists fear the killing marks an escalation in the campaign to silence Ortega’s critics—even on foreign soil.
