It's quicker to fly from Miami to Managua — the capital of Nicaragua — than it is to fly to Washington, D.C. and most other major cities in the United States. Nicaragua also straddles key Caribbean and Pacific approaches near the Panama Canal’s alternative routes. And it's a corridor for drug trafficking and mass migration to our southern border.
So, why this topic hasn't made any MSM headlines this past week is puzzling to me.
Back in September 2025, Russia and the Ortega-Murillo regime in Nicaragua agreed to increase their already strong alliance by signing a major military cooperation agreement. Russia’s Federation Council approved it last week, and Vladimir Putin signed the ratification on May 2.
The pact will "establish the necessary legal foundations to determine the objectives, directions, and forms of bilateral military cooperation (and) will protect the interests of Russian citizens carrying out missions under this agreement within Nicaraguan jurisdiction."
It includes agreements on activities like joint training of troops, military education exchanges, scientific research cooperation, and Intelligence and information-sharing on "extremism and international terrorism." It also includes protections for Russian personnel operating in Nicaragua and a framework for broader defense ties, including radiological, chemical, and biological options.
It seems to be setting the stage for Daniel Ortega and Rosario Murillo's military to become some sort of Russian proxy force and for Nicaragua to become something of a Russian military outpost. I don't know about you, but I find this concerning.
Nicaraguan opposition leader Felix Maradiaga says the regime is turning the entire country into a "military base" and says the pact "breaks the reasonable balance of forces in Central America and directly violates the 1995 Framework Treaty on Democratic Security in Central America." For what it's worth, Maradiaga is also a former political prisoner who was exiled to the United States in 2023 and stripped of his Nicaraguan citizenship.
Of course, the relationship between Nicaragua and Russia is nothing new. When Ortega was president during the 1980s, he received massive Soviet support. When he returned to office in 2007, he built a strong relationship with Putin. As a matter of fact, about 90% of all of Nicaragua's military equipment has Soviet or Russian origins. Russia also operates a GLONASS satellite monitoring station near Managua. And Ortega has admitted that the Russians helped him crush the infamous 2018 protests in Nicaragua — which he called a government coup "financed by the imperialist community" of Latin America, the United States, and Europe — leaving at least 355 people dead. And a Russian training center in Managua, which has been sanctioned by the U.S., has trained and graduated at least 2,353 police officers from at least 13 Latin American countries.
President Ronald Reagan warned of this back during the 1980s. Here's a part of a speech he gave in 1986:
I must speak to you tonight about a mounting danger in Central America that threatens the security of the United States. This danger will not go away; it will grow worse, much worse, if we fail to take action now. I'm speaking of Nicaragua, a Soviet ally on the American mainland only 2 hours' flying time from our own borders. With over a billion dollars in Soviet-bloc aid, the Communist government of Nicaragua has launched a campaign to subvert and topple its democratic neighbors. Using Nicaragua as a base, the Soviets and Cubans can become the dominant power in the crucial corridor between North and South America. Established there, they will be in a position to threaten the Panama Canal, interdict our vital Caribbean sealanes, and, ultimately, move against Mexico. Should that happen, desperate Latin peoples by the millions would begin fleeing north into the cities of the southern United States or to wherever some hope of freedom remained.
It should be noted that Russia isn't the only one of our adversaries with a stronghold in Nicaragua. Russia may be building a military presence, but China is literally buying up the country. Nicaragua cut ties with Taiwan in favor of Beijing and its sketchy Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) in 2021, and the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has been running amok there ever since.
As of October 2025, the Chinese controlled 1,482,632 acres, give or take, in Nicaragua— some sources say it's actually much, much higher — which is roughly the size of the state of Delaware. A lot of it has to do with mining for gold and other minerals. Around 15 Chinese mining companies control about 8.5% of the country. The Ortega-Murillo regime has even revoked concessions for U.S. firms and handed them to the Chinese. The mining being done by these Chinese companies ranges from questionable to downright illegal, whether it's taking place on indigenous lands (displacing locals), creating severe environmental damage and pollution, or seeping over the border into Costa Rica.
Nicaragua also has a trade deal with China that, not so shockingly, favors China heavily. And China is heavily involved with Nicaragua's ports and infrastructure.
Thankfully, Donald Trump and Marco Rubio aren't blind to this like previous administrations. In January of this year, while testifying before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Rubio warned that Russia operates in our region through its allies — Cuba, Venezuela, and Nicaragua — citing this as one reason to go after the Nicolás Maduro regime — a move that is and will continue serving a domino effect in the region. We've seen how cutting off Venezuelan oil to Cuba has hurt the regime there. Losing Maduro also meant losing a strong regional ally for the regime in Nicaragua.
The Trump administration also continues to place sanctions and economic pressure on the Ortega-Murillo regime. In the past few weeks alone, the Treasury's Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) announced that it "sanctioned five individuals and seven companies that operate in Nicaragua’s gold sector, as well as Nicaraguan entities and individuals involved in the forceful seizure of U.S.-owned property in Nicaragua." (That's what was handed over to China.) Those sanctions included two of Ortega and Murillo's sons — Maurice Facundo Ortega Murillo, who serves as the Nicaraguan presidential delegate for sports, and Daniel Edmundo Ortega Murillo, the head of the Communication and Citizenship Council of Nicaragua — as well as Santiago Hernan Bermudez Tapia, the vice minister of energy and mines.
On April 18, the anniversary of the 2018 protests I mentioned, Rubio also slapped sanctions on Vice Minister of the Interior Luis Roberto Cañas Novoa for human rights violations.
So, why do we care? Again, you can get from Miami to Managua quicker than you can, say, Miami to New York City. Nicaragua is that close to the United States. I don't know about you, but I'm not comfortable with the Russians using it as a platform for surveillance and intelligence gathering. Nicaragua is also a major corridor for drug trafficking and mass migration into the United States. The regime creates instability in the U.S. and in the entire Western Hemisphere, and it's only able to do so with our adversaries propping it up militarily, economically, and diplomatically. They're essentially keeping an anti-U.S. dictatorship in power.
It will be interesting to see what, if anything, happens to Nicaragua over the next few years. Trump has successfully removed Maduro, and, with the help of the Venezuelan opposition, I do believe the regime will be dismantled at some point. By now, it's pretty obvious that he's planning to do something in Cuba to take down the regime there. While Nicaragua hasn't been a hot topic of conversation, I have no problem with the administration setting its sights there next. Go big or go home. It may be the hardest one to crack, though, because China and Russia are digging in deeper as we speak.
Editor’s Note: Thanks to President Trump and his administration’s bold leadership, we are respected on the world stage, and our enemies are being put on notice.
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