Outspoken Nicaraguan opposition figure shot to death at his home in Costa Rica

SAN JOSE, Costa Rica — A retired Nicaraguan military officer turned outspoken critic of President Daniel Ortega was shot to death Thursday at his home in Costa Rica, authorities said.

Roberto Samcam, 67, had been living in exile since July 2018 when paramilitaries assaulted his home in Nicaragua.

Police say a man entered the condominium complex where Samcam lived northeast of the Costa Rican capital of San Jose and went directly to the retired major's home around 7:30 a.m.

Without saying a word, the man shot Samcam multiple times with a 9mm pistol, according to Costa Rica's Judicial Investigation Organization. The shooter escaped.

Word of Samcam's killing spread rapidly among the hundreds of thousands of Nicaraguans who have sought refuge in Costa Rica since Ortega cracked down on widespread protests in 2018.

In 2020, Samcam served as chain-of-command expert for the Court of Conscience, organized by Costa Rica's Arias Foundation for Peace and Human Progress, to collect testimony of those who suffered torture and other abuses at the hands of the government.

The exercise was in part to build cases to eventually take to regional and international human rights bodies.

''We are documenting each case so that it can move on to a trial, possibly before the Inter-American Court of Human Rights,'' Samcam said at the time. He said government officials were involved in the abuses.

In 2022, Samcam published a book titled ‘Ortega: El calvario de Nicaragua' roughly ‘Ortega: Nicaragua's torment.' Last year, he published another text describing in detail how he watched Ortega build a dictatorship.

In January 2024, another Nicaraguan exile, Joao Maldonado, was shot seven times in the street outside Costa Rica's capital. He survived and accused a cell of Nicaragua's Sandinista National Liberation Front of responsibility for the attack.

Ortega and his wife and Co-president Rosario Murillo have driven hundreds of thousands of Nicaraguans into exile and imprisoned then stripped hundreds more of their citizenship.

Murillo who is also the Nicaraguan government's spokesperson did not immediately respond to an emailed request for comment about Samcam's killing.

Since crushing the 2018 protests, the government has systematically pursued any voice of opposition. The government has shuttered hundreds of nongovernmental organizations and persecuted religious groups, including the Catholic church.

Yader Valdivia of the human rights organization Nicaragua Nunca Más said that Samcam had been one of the exiled Nicaraguans stripped of his citizenship by the government.

Valdivia said there was fear of the government's ''long arm'' among the Nicaraguan exile community in Costa Rica that makes it capable of reaching critics outside its borders.