By Diego Oré
SAN JOSE/MEXICO CITY, (Reuters) -One night last November, four carloads of armed Nicaraguan police pulled opposition figure Henry Briceno and his family out of their home and deposited them at a checkpoint on the border with Costa Rica.
Seven months after the Bricenos were expelled to Costa Rica, the family was packing its bags again.
Unknown men, travelling by motorcycle or in unmarked cars, had been following Briceno. And Briceno started to fear that he could be the latest Nicaraguan
political exile to be killed in Costa Rica, he said in an interview with Reuters.
The Nicaraguan opposition figure, Roberto Samcam, had told fellow Nicaraguan exiles and Costa Rican police the same thing was happening to him in the days before he was shot dead inside his house in San Jose on June 19.
It was the third killing of a Nicaraguan political exile in Costa Rica since 2023.
Eleven days later, Briceno, 75, his wife and two children flew to Europe - despite being granted political asylum in Costa Rica - to escape what dissidents say is the increasingly long arm of President Daniel Ortega's crackdown on political opposition.
'ONLY A MATTER OF TIME'
"Having to start all over again after only seven months (in Costa Rica) was difficult," Briceno said. "But it was necessary … We thought it was only a matter of time before we got killed." Briceno did not identify the country, saying he feared for his safety.
At least 50 Nicaraguan families have fled Costa Rica for Europe and North America since August last year - and two dozen more Nicaraguan exiles and their families are planning to leave, according to Reuters interviews with 19 Nicaraguan exiles who have sought refuge in the country.
The scale of the flight of Nicaraguan exiles from Costa Rica has not been previously reported.
The country was once renowned for its low crime rates and political stability. More than 200,000 Nicaraguans sought asylum in Costa Rica between 2018 and 2024, with another 15,000 granted refugee status.
The exiles Reuters spoke to described an expanding crackdown by the Ortega government that has left them fearful of reprisal even after they fled the region. A dozen exiles told Reuters they had received identical threats by text and cell phone saying: "get off social media, stop attacking (the government) ... or face the consequences."
Nicaraguan Co-President Rosario Murillo, who is Ortega's wife and serves as the spokeswoman for the Nicaraguan presidency, did not respond to questions about the killings. The Nicaraguan Embassy in San Jose also did not respond to requests for comment.
Costa Rican Public Security Minister Mario Zamora told Reuters that Nicaraguan exiles "facing risks to their life" could ask the courts for additional security.
None of the Nicaraguan exiles Reuters spoke to had requested protection.
Zamora did not respond to questions about specific killings. Costa Rica's Public Prosecutor Office said it could not provide details on whether any Nicaraguan exiles had requested government protection, as it was "confidential information."
Four suspects, all Costa Ricans, are in custody charged with Samcam's killing, but the head of Costa Rica's judicial investigation body, Randall Zuniga, said last month that the crime's "mastermind" remained at large. He said the authorities were investigating whether the killings were "a case of political incursion by another government."
The U.N. Group of Human Rights Experts on Nicaragua said in a report last month that the possibility that Managua orchestrated the killings of Samcam and other Nicaraguan exiles "cannot be excluded until comprehensive and independent inquiries are completed."
The report said Managua surveils exiled opposition figures to "silence dissenting voices wherever they are found."
DEEPENING REPRESSION
Human rights groups say Ortega has grown increasingly authoritarian since massive anti-government protests in 2018, consolidating presidential control and silencing his critics through violence, imprisonment and exile.
Over the last few years, activists have accused Ortega's government of ratcheting up the repression by tracking down and killing opponents in exile.
At least four exiled Nicaraguan opposition figures - including Samcam, a Sandinista major turned dissident - have been killed in Central America since 2022, according to human rights groups.
Three more Nicaraguans living in Costa Rica told Reuters that they had been shot at by men riding motorcycles. Another exiled Nicaraguan interviewed by Reuters said he was severely beaten.
The attacks come as Costa Rica wrestles with a surge in homicides as drug cartels fight for new trafficking routes.
Many of the Nicaraguan exiles fleeing Costa Rica described having limited options.
The United States, under President Donald Trump, has tightened asylum pathways and stripped thousands of Nicaraguans living in the U.S. of protection from deportation. Other Central American nations are wracked by insecurity.
For many, Spain has emerged as the preferred destination, due to the shared language, the relative ease of the asylum process, and the distance from Nicaragua. But even those who have fled to Europe said they were afraid of revealing their location.
"ABSOLUTE LACK OF SAFETY"
In 2018, human rights activist Alvaro Leiva fled Ortega's crackdown on anti-government protesters, settling in Costa Rica.
A year later, he said, he began receiving death threats on his cellphone from men with Nicaraguan accents. Strange cars and motorcycles stalked him at home and at work. Fellow Nicaraguan exiles told him that they saw some of these motorcycles depart from the Nicaraguan Embassy in San Jose.
Leiva began to suspect that Nicaragua had sent assassins to Costa Rica with the aim of tracking down and killing off its opponents, and that these operatives were based at the embassy, posing as diplomatic staff.
Leiva said he sent nearly a dozen letters to Costa Rica's political leaders and security officials over the next five years, detailing the threats.
Costa Rica security chief Zamora said he was unfamiliar with the situation, when asked by Reuters.
In his final letter in Nov. 2024, addressed to Costa Rican President Rodrigo Chaves, Leiva renounced his political asylum because of the "absolute lack of safety for myself and my life."
Then he fled the country.
"The tyrants have unrestricted capacity for repression, both within Nicaragua and abroad," he said in a WhatsApp message.
He did not disclose his location, saying he feared he was still within Managua's reach.
(Reporting by Alvaro Murillo in San Jose and Diego Oré and Gabriela Selser in Mexico City; Editing by Laura Gottesdiener and Suzanne Goldenberg)
