Brooklyn Rivera Bryan, historic leader of the Miskitu people and president of the indigenous party Yatama, died on May 30, 2026, at 8:30 p.m. at the Fernando Vélez Paiz hospital in Managua, after more than 971 days of political imprisonment and forced disappearance under the custody of the regime of Daniel Ortega and Rosario Murillo. He was 73 years old. The regime confirmed his death more than twelve hours later, without mentioning the time of death, and until Sunday morning it refused to hand over the body to his family, who wish to fulfill his will to be buried in Lidaukra, in Sandy Bay, in the Nicaraguan Caribbean, alongside his mother.
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Rivera is the eighth political prisoner to die in custody of the regime since 2018. Four of those deaths occurred in the last nine months. The official statement attributed his death to complications from “a bacteria generated by the COVID-19 virus” and assured that he was accompanied by family members, Reverend Adela Martínez from the Moravian Church, and Commander Lumberto Campbell. But his daughter, Tininiska Rivera, denied that version from exile in Spain. She stated that, to her knowledge, her aunt was not present, and that Nancy Elizabeth Henríquez, mentioned in the statement, is not part of their family and remained under house arrest, without freedom to act independently.
“The MINSA and the Legal Medicine Directorate are carrying out the corresponding procedures to certify his death,” says the official text, while the body remains in custody. However, there is no mention of the 971 days of forced disappearance nor any acknowledgment of state responsibility. In other words, even dead, he remains imprisoned.
The regime broke the silence about Rivera on May 27, after 971 days of forced disappearance due to concealment of whereabouts. What it showed was a man in agony: bedridden in a hospital bed, connected to mechanical ventilation via tracheotomy, with intravenous feeding and severe neurological damage. The images circulated alongside a statement listing his multiple ailments, especially a bacterial lung infection (stenotrophomonas maltophilia), liver cirrhosis, cerebral edema, and multi-organ failure.
One day later, when Tininiska demanded that her father be handed over, the regime responded with another statement: “transferring him would increase the risk to his life with predictable consequences.” Three days later, Brooklyn Rivera was dead.
Medical sources consulted by EL PAÍS agree that, although the clinical condition of the Yatama leader was very serious, the lack of timely care during his forced disappearance was decisive in his outcome.
Rivera was arrested on September 29, 2023, in Bilwi, the main city of the North Caribbean, where he had returned after the regime banned his entry into the country for having voiced criticisms at the United Nations. The regime located him through deception and detained him at his home. For more than a year it denied the arrest. The State only acknowledged it in November 2024, before the UN Universal Periodic Review, pressured by the delegations of Brazil, Norway, Canada, and other States.
Founder of Yatama, whose name in the Miskitu language means Children of Mother Earth, Rivera was born on September 24, 1952, in the community of Lidaukra. He was a central figure of indigenous resistance during the eighties, Minister of Development of the Autonomous Regions in the nineties, and a deputy to the National Assembly on four occasions since 2007. For Professor Miguel González, from York University, his detention “was not an impulsive act: it was a strategic decision to symbolically decapitate a resistance that the central power has not managed to overcome by other means.”
A pattern with responsible parties
Rivera’s death replicates the pattern documented in previous cases: retired General Hugo Torres in February 2022; Humberto Ortega Saavedra in September 2024; Mauricio Alonso Petri and jurist Carlos Cárdenas Zepeda in August 2025; lawyer Santos Flores in November 2021; and the Nicaraguan-American Eddy Montes, killed by a prison officer in May 2019.
OAS Secretary General Albert R. Ramdin recalled that Rivera was protected by precautionary measures from the Inter-American Commission and the Inter-American Court of Human Rights, and demanded an immediate, independent, and transparent investigation. For its part, the UNAMOS party called it a “state murder” and accused the regime of having turned Nicaraguan prisons into centers of physical and psychological extermination.
Tininiska Rivera requested international guarantees this Sunday to be able to enter Nicaragua and participate in the funeral acts. She demands that the body be handed over to bury him according to the traditions of the Miskitu people. “They took away my father’s freedom!” she wrote. “Let us not allow them to also take away his family’s right to say goodbye according to his will, beliefs, and legacy!”
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