Nicaragua’s communist regime has granted control of the nation’s gold mines to China in dubious and expedited procedures, the Argentine news outlet Infobae reported over the weekend.
Nicaraguan biologist and activist Amaru Ruiz explained to Infobae that the regime of dictator Daniel Ortega has granted at least 13 mining leases over the past six months to three Chinese companies through procedures that are “not normal,” as the leases were approved in an expedited manner and without due process. Some of them were allegedly approved as quickly as two months after being requested.
The 13 lease contracts reportedly grant the Chinese companies Zhong Fu Development, Thomas Metal, and Nicaragua XinXin Linze Minera Group exclusive rights for the exploration and exploitation of mineral deposits spanning nearly 250,000 hectares for a period of 25 years, renewable for an additional 25 years.
The three companies, Infobae stated in its report, would manage 11.66 percent of the entire mining area that communist dictator Daniel Ortega has so far leased, which is estimated at almost 2 million hectares according to official information.
“We don’t even know if there are environmental impact studies with the granting of these concessions,” Ruiz said. “We consider that they do not exist because of the time in which the concession is granted, which is really very short compared to other processes of other companies.”
Gold has become Nicaragua’s top export in recent years, registering over $1.1 billion in gold export revenues during 2023, a 22.4-percent increase when compared to 2022.
In May, the United States imposed sanctions on Comintsa and Capital Mining, two Nicaraguan-based gold companies with ties to the Ortega regime. The Department of the Treasury explained that Comintsa is owned by Salvador Mansell Castrillo, who previously served as Ortega’s energy and mines minister and one of the Ortega regime’s high-ranking offers sanctioned by the United States in 2021.
Similarly, the U.S. Treasury Department explained in its May statement that Capital Mining serves as an intermediary company of the Ortega regime in Nicaragua’s gold sector controlled by Laureano Ortega Murillo, dictator Daniel Ortega’s son.
“The designations of Comintsa and Capital Mining target government-affiliated gold companies generating revenue for the Ortega-Murillo regime,” the Department of the Treasury stated. “Gold is Nicaragua’s top commodity export, and this action aims to degrade the ability of the Ortega-Murillo regime to manipulate the sector and profit from the corrupt operations of Comintsa and Capital Mining.”
America previously imposed sanctions on Nicaragua in October 2022 against the General Directorate of Mines meant to curb the authoritarian Ortega regime’s ability to fund itself from gold mining proceeds.
Ruiz – whose environmentalist non-government organization Fundación del Río was dissolved by the Ortega regime and forced to flee Nicaragua in September 2021 for “spreading false news” – explained to Infobae that China’s incursion in the country’s mining began surreptitiously.
“First they functioned as intermediaries – that is, they started with at least two companies, one of them is Hyts Resources Development, which did not appear as the owner of a concession as such, but we did find it operating in the southeastern area of Nicaragua and in partnership with a company called Topacio S.A. that did have concessions, but in El Rama and not in southeastern Nicaragua,” Ruiz stated.
“The first dive we see is that they are trying to get involved in both the industrial concession market and the artisanal mining market,” he continued. “Once the sanctions return these three companies that do appear in the registry directly enter with concessions granted.”
The environmentalist asserted that the Ortega regime is searching to circumvent the sanctions to its gold mining industry but that the sanctions “have had a very limited impact for my taste.”
“That is, it has been more to generate media impact than the real impact it has had on the mining industry, because the mining industry continues exporting at levels that exceed 1,100 million dollars,” Ruiz said.
“But, in addition to circumventing the sanctions in the short term, the Chinese presence seeks to change Nicaragua’s mining market, with a view to replacing the United States as the country’s main gold buyer and incorporating companies that do not depend on the U.S. market,” he continued.
Ruiz pointed out that China’s presence does not mean that the gold is being exported to China and asserted that there is no change in the country’s export market.
“The U.S. market remains the same, although a market such as Switzerland and the United Arab Emirates has increased,” Ruiz stated.
The Ortega regime has accelerated its business ties with China since January 2022, when Nicaragua formally joined China’s predatory Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) debt trap program.
Nicaragua’s entry into the BRI took place one month after dictator Ortega had Nicaragua break its relations with Taiwan, embracing communist China’s “One-China Principle,” which falsely claims the sovereign nation of Taiwan as a province of China.
China elevated its relations with Nicaragua to that of a “strategic partnership” in December, a decision that acted as a prelude to the official start of a “lifeboat” Free Trade Agreement (FTA) deal between both countries on January 1.
Reports published in early June indicate that Nicaragua received four loans from China totaling $567 million between January and May. The four loans, which prompted concerns that Ortega had compromise the future of Nicaragua, increased the country’s growing public debt, estimated by local media to have surpassed $10 billion as of the third quarter of 2023.
Christian K. Caruzo is a Venezuelan writer and documents life under socialism. You can follow him on Twitter here.
