Brooklyn Rivera, Nicaraguan Indigenous Leader, Dies in Government Custody

Mr. Rivera’s niece, Dina Carolina Fagoth Rivera, said by telephone that her family and Indigenous communities wanted to bury him in his native region, the northern Caribbean coast of Nicaragua. She also insisted on an independent investigation of his death.

“We do not, for one moment, think that any of what they’re telling us is true,” said Ms. Fagoth Rivera, whose fatherSteadman Fagoth Müller, a fellow Miskito leader, was detained by the Nicaraguan government in 2024.

She added about her uncle, “He was a light for our people. He meant freedom for our people.”

Reed Brody, a member of the United Nations Group of Human Right Experts on Nicaragua, said in an interview that Mr. Rivera, who was first elected to the country’s legislature in 2007, was probably the most important Miskito political leader of the last 40 years and one of the most prominent activists to die in Nicaraguan government detention.

He said that the U.N. group has documented 124 cases of the arbitrary detention of Indigenous leaders and that at least 46 have been killed in violence on the Caribbean coast since 2018. Mr. Rivera’s death “encapsulates the broader dismantling of Indigenous autonomy and it also illustrates the problem of enforced disappearances in Nicaragua,” Mr. Brody said.

An estimated 500,000 Miskito people live in Nicaragua, mostly along the northern Caribbean coast.

Mr. Rivera fought against the first Sandinista government, of which Mr. Ortega was a part, alongside the Contra rebels in the 1980s. His political party, Yatama, eventually became an ally of Mr. Ortega after he returned to power in 2007, but later fell out over what it said was an infringement of Indigenous lands and rights.

In 2023, Mr. Ortega’s government barred Mr. Rivera’s political party from running for elected office. Mr. Rivera was also barred from returning to Nicaragua after criticizing the government while abroad early that year, but he slipped back in and was later arrested.