San José, Costa Rica — A prominent Nicaraguan dissident and retired army officer, Roberto Samcam, was shot dead Thursday in Costa Rica, where he had lived in exile after denouncing President Daniel Ortega’s government.
Costa Rica’s Judicial Investigation Organisation (OIJ) confirmed that the 67-year-old was killed at his condominium in San José when a gunman disguised as a delivery driver entered the building around 7:30 a.m. local time (13:30 GMT). The assailant shot Samcam at least eight times with a 9mm pistol before fleeing on a motorcycle. He remains at large.
Samcam’s wife, Claudia Vargas, told Reuters that the attacker posed as a delivery worker to gain access. “He did not say a word. He just fired and left,” she said.
The killing has heightened fears among Nicaragua’s exiled opposition, many of whom fled after Ortega’s violent crackdown on mass protests in 2018 that left at least 355 people dead, according to the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights.
Samcam, a former major in the Nicaraguan military, emerged as a sharp critic of Ortega, accusing him of deploying military-grade weapons and paramilitary forces against demonstrators. In exile, he continued to document alleged abuses by Ortega’s government.
He served as chain-of-command expert for the Court of Conscience, a project of Costa Rica’s Arias Foundation for Peace and Human Progress, which collected testimony of torture and repression in hopes of building legal cases against Nicaraguan officials.
In 2022, he published Ortega: El Calvario de Nicaragua (“Ortega: Nicaragua’s Torment”), comparing Ortega to former dictator Anastasio Somoza.
Ortega’s government has faced growing accusations of authoritarianism, including stripping hundreds of dissidents of citizenship in 2023, jailing opponents, and concentrating power in the presidency alongside his wife, Vice President Rosario Murillo.
Samcam’s assassination follows other violent incidents targeting exiled Nicaraguan opposition figures in Costa Rica. Student leader Joao Maldonado, a key figure in the 2018 protests, has survived two assassination attempts in San José, the most recent in January 2024 that left him and his partner seriously wounded. Maldonado has blamed Ortega’s Sandinista National Liberation Front for the attacks.
Costa Rican authorities have not identified a motive in Samcam’s killing. Human rights groups are calling for an urgent investigation amid fears of transnational repression by Nicaragua.
Source: Al Jazeera
