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The first institution Nicaragua’s National Assembly called to testify on the constitutional reform ending competitive elections was the army. On July 29, 2026, Gen. Julio César Avilés appeared before the Special Constitutional Commission and pledged the firm support of the Army of Nicaragua for a package that dissolves the electoral basis of the civilian authority he serves. Avilés spoke on behalf of the General Command, the Military Council, and the ground, naval, air, and reserve forces under his command. Five years earlier, at the ceremony launching the distribution of ballots for the 2021 election, the same officer committed 15,000 troops to protect 634 sites and told the country that the army respected the vote of a sovereign people and had no business declaring who had won.
What changed between those two moments should be occupying Washington’s attention, because the answer will determine who governs Nicaragua when Daniel Ortega and Rosario Murillo are gone. The Army of Nicaragua has attached its name to reforms that eliminate the electoral foundation of the authority it is constitutionally sworn to obey. Whoever inherits this state will hold it only with the army’s consent, because no other institution is strong enough to sustain a successor.
Pérez has studied Central American armed forces since the early 1990s and helped build the survey series that tracked Nicaraguan confidence in the military through its rise and its collapse. Pestana served as country director for Western Hemisphere Affairs in the Office of the Secretary of Defense and co-authored the 2017 assessment of Nicaraguan military culture that U.S. defense audiences still use as their baseline.
Ortega set this process in motion on July 19, 2026, at the rally marking the 47th anniversary of the Sandinista revolution. After 61 days out of public view, tying the longest absence of his presidency, he announced that Nicaragua would no longer hold elections. National Assembly President Gustavo Porras narrowed the statement three days later without reversing it: Elections would continue under a constitutional framework that permits the government to exclude opposition figures and parties it considers disloyal or foreign backed. The co-presidency sent a draft of the reforms to the National Assembly and the Supreme Electoral Council within days. The assembly took up the text on Sept. 1, 2026, at a special session in León, and the deputies unanimously approved eight amended articles in the first of the two legislatures the constitution requires. A second vote in 2027 will fully approve them.
Among the provisions Avilés endorsed is one extending every elected and ratified office in Nicaragua to a renewable seven-year term, applied retroactively to current officeholders, including his own command, the police leadership, and the co-presidency itself. Another hands the Supreme Electoral Council authority to strip legal personality from any party that accepts foreign funding or advocates sanctions against the country. A third, added by a show of hands in a special session on Aug. 22, 2026, declares in Article 12 that no foreign law, ruling, or resolution has validity or jurisdiction within Nicaragua. The last provision is insurance against whatever Washington and the Organization of American States decide to do next. The provision passed three days after the Organization of American States Permanent Council voted to convene a meeting of hemispheric foreign ministers on Nicaragua.
These reforms land harder on the army than on Nicaraguan elections. The regime, after all, jailed seven presidential candidates before the 2021 vote, and no one mistook that process as free, fair, or competitive. However, the elections still provided a façade of legality that allowed the armed forces to maintain compliance with the 1994 Military Code, which the National Assembly later wrote into the constitution, and which defines the army as subordinate to a civilian authority derived through elections. The army’s organic code assigns it a standing mission to support the Supreme Electoral Council, and four soldiers of the Bosawás Ecological Battalion died carrying out that mission near the Bambana river in November 2021. An officer corps that once defended an elected government now enforces the authority of a family that has made it plain it intends to stay.
The distance the army has traveled since 2006 is evident in what it has agreed to do and to tolerate. In April 2025, the United Nations Group of Human Rights Experts on Nicaragua named 54 officials responsible for the repression that followed the April 2018 protests, and 11 of these officials were military: six generals and five colonels of the high command, Avilés among them. The institution’s communiqué of May 12, 2018, three weeks into the killings, backed the government’s search for a solution through dialogue and said nothing about the armed civilians then working alongside the police. A forensic study of the paramilitary arsenal put military weapons in those hands. The further claim that they came out of army stocks rests on pseudonymous officer testimony that no independent investigation has corroborated. At an air force ceremony on April 21, 2028, Avilés called the crisis a grave situation affecting all Nicaraguans and then invoked the apolitical character of his institution as reason to leave the response to others. The 2025 constitutional reforms amended the Military Code to make Rosario Murillo co-supreme chief alongside her husband, Daniel Ortega, and Avilés publicly affirmed the army’s compliance. A separate amendment carried General Avilés’ term to February 2031, which the reform approved on September 1 would stretch by another year, leaving him in command for 22 years.
Alongside command authority runs a financial architecture that binds the institution just as tightly. The army’s pension fund, the Instituto de Previsión Social Militar, has grown into one of the largest military-owned business groups in the country, with holdings in construction, retail, pharmaceuticals, higher education, and real estate. No commander has published an audit since Joaquín Cuadra did so after taking command in 1995. Defense spending fell for two years after 2020 and has since recovered to roughly a quarter above that trough, though it remains below its 2015 level in real terms. Troop strength has held flat throughout. In 2024, 99 percent of the army budget went to current spending, which leaves almost nothing for the equipment and infrastructure a defense budget normally buys. Those holdings raise the cost of any transition that would put the fund and the officers’ retirement income at risk, whatever individual officers might prefer.
For all their effort spent securing the army, Ortega and Murillo behave as if they are not sure of its loyalty. The March 2025 Military Code reforms gave the presidency explicit power to appoint and dismiss the commander in chief. Two months later, agents of the Directorate of Judicial Assistance arrested retired Brig. Gen. Álvaro Baltodano at his farm in Matagalpa, and a court convicted him of treason in a summary proceeding held by videoconference and confiscated his property. Police arrested retired Capt. Aníbal Rivas Reed three days later in the same sweep, and a court sentenced him to 50 years. The government moved Rivas Reed to house arrest in February 2026, where he remains under police supervision. Governments that feel secure do not jail retired generals who helped build the institution they are accused of plotting against.
That unease runs through the promotion system, which stopped working as a career ladder some time ago and now functions as a control mechanism. Avilés is 68 and has run the army since 2010 — longer than any officer in its history — while the chief of the general staff and the inspector general have not moved since roughly 2017. Ortega has promoted 43 brigadier generals since returning to power, and 27 of them remain in uniform, producing what Nicaraguan analysts call a “tapón institucional” (an institutional bottleneck). The Nicaraguan army widened the retirement windows and lengthened the military career itself, presenting both in its five-year report as better use of professional human resources. Yet only nine officers made brigadier general between 2015 and 2020. In 2021, the figure was one, against 262 promotions. The colonels stuck behind that bottleneck joined during the professionalization of the 1990s and trained under a doctrine of subordination to elected civilian authority. They have spent a decade watching the ladder remain fixed. They are also the generation that would lead the army through a regime succession, and there are not many of them. The officer corps numbers about 1,885, and only 35 completed the senior command and staff course for lieutenant colonels between 2015 and 2020. Chavismo, the movement Hugo Chávez built and Nicolás Maduro inherited, solved the same problem the other way: Political promotion inflated the top of the Venezuelan officer corps until the country held more than 2,000 active and retired generals and admirals, a senior tier large enough to contain factions with standing of its own. Nicaragua bought the same loyalty by withholding rank, which left a smaller and far more dependent group of colonels.
What that group believes, nobody outside the institution can say, because the officers who spoke publicly are dead or missing. Roberto Samcam, a retired major who spent years documenting the army’s part in 2018, was shot eight times in his apartment in San José in June 2025, and Costa Rican prosecutors are investigating whether Nicaraguan military intelligence organized the attack. Plainclothes police took Col. Víctor Boitano from his home in Managua in April 2024, and his family has had no word of him since. The army retired him in 2007, and he then published books critical of the Sandinista National Liberation Front. The prospect of reprisals limits Washington’s ability to engage directly with current officers, but continued participation in multilateral gatherings, such as the Conference of Central American Armed Forces, or contact through third-country military channels, does provide avenues for informal military-to-military dialogue.
Daniel Ortega built the loyalty of the armed forces, and it is far from certain that it transfers to his wife or their successors. Rosario Murillo exercised direct and personal control over the National Police of Nicaragua, while the army remained under Avilés, with Ortega serving as its political interlocutor. The 2025 reforms placed Murillo in formal co-command of an institution whose obedience she never had to earn, and whether that obedience survives her husband is the central unanswered question in Nicaraguan civil-military relations.
The reformed constitution provides that if one co-president dies, the other assumes the presidency and holds it for the remainder of the term, making Rosario Murillo the legal heir. Behind her stands their son, Laureano Ortega Murillo, who holds at least 27 grants of plenipotentiary authority and manages the relationships with Moscow and Beijing. What the text cannot settle is the army’s response. At Plaza La Fe on Feb. 21, 2025, Murillo read out the accord appointing the commander in chief and Ortega handed Avilés the baton — she performed the appointment and he supplied the authority behind it.
Would what worked in Caracas travel to Managua? The answer is no. As Pérez argued in these pages last November, removing a ruler is the simplest part of regime change. Venezuela offered conditions Nicaragua lacks: oil that gave Washington a motive and a lever; an officer corps large enough to contain factions with independent standing; a constitutional and opportunistic successor in Delcy Rodríguez, contested among allied governments and still able to hold the state together; and a year of American force buildup behind the operation. These resources notwithstanding, the result so far has been managed authoritarianism rather than democratic transition.
The Army of Nicaragua numbers around 14,500 in a unified command, with no service rivalries to exploit and no successor holding institutional standing outside the family, as the family has spent a decade removing anyone who might have challenged them. Much of the organized opposition is in exile. If Ortega and Murillo leave power tomorrow morning, someone must hold the state that afternoon. That someone would likely be the army, regardless of what Washington thinks of the officers currently in charge.
Security cooperation with Nicaragua ended years ago. The Title 10 authorities that fund exercises, institution-building, and training are closed to Managua and would require a waiver or a restructured strategy to reopen, which is why Washington treats the relationship as finished. Engagement is a different matter, and it never stopped. In March 2026, Nicaraguan officers sat in Lima with 19 other delegations, including the United States, to prepare the Conference of Defense Ministers of the Americas, in a room that also held the Defense Department’s William J. Perry Center for Hemispheric Defense Studies. The United States will run the next cycle, in 2027 and 2028, which keeps Nicaraguan officers inside an American-led process for two more years.
Brig. Gen. Efrén Alejandro Marín Serrano, who heads the air force and air defense, spent five days in Punta Cana in June 2026 at the conference of American air force chiefs, where the United States sat among 18 other air forces and the Inter-American Air Forces Academy at Joint Base San Antonio-Lackland attended as an observer. The chief of staff of the naval force, Capt. Omar Elí Hernández Valverde, was at the Inter-American War Game in Rio de Janeiro in August alongside officers from 14 other navies, including the U.S. Navy. The semiannual presidential decree that authorizes foreign military personnel to enter the country still names the United States, even with no American personnel deploying under it, while Russia holds authorized access to elite units and Nicaraguan waters. Nicaraguan officers keep walking into rooms that American and partner-nation officers also occupy, and those rooms are where a conversation about a post-Ortega Nicaragua could quietly begin.
In 2021, Lt. Col. Roger Carvajal Santamaría told Avilés that the armed forces accounted for much of the country’s growth and stability. The State Department disavowed the remarks within days, and the U.S. government removed Carvajal Santamaría from the post. Conferring legitimacy on the current military leadership serves no U.S. interest and would cost Washington whatever credibility it retains among the Nicaraguan opposition. However, the attaché’s remarks suggest that the critical institution in a future transition would be the armed forces. Therefore, maintaining below-the-surface engagement serves long-term U.S. interests.
Whatever Managua’s other partners supply, they are supplying more of it each year. Avilés spent September 2025 in Beijing and Moscow, where he met the Russian defense minister and made public his admiration for the forces that, in his words, have guaranteed Russia’s security since the invasion of Ukraine. That trip produced a framework military cooperation agreement, ratified by the Federation Council in April 2026, which provides for joint training, intelligence exchange, cooperation in electronic warfare, and special protection for Russian personnel from Nicaraguan jurisdiction. Russian advisers work in Nicaragua under the same semiannual decree that still names the United States, and the demining school outside Managua that trains specialists from four other Central American armies bears the name Nicaragua-Russia Friendship. China has had a free trade agreement in force since 2024, as well as mining concessions negotiated by Laurentino Ortega Murillo, the president’s son, and an equipment relationship with Chinese defense firm Poly Technologies.
Washington’s remaining asset is a relationship an officer could expect to outlast the Ortega-Murillo government. The United States should say publicly what the Army of Nicaragua would have to do to restore a normal military partnership with the United States, and the conditions should center on its professional role: accountability for the officers the United Nations has named, a promotion and retirement system that works, and an institution separated from the regime’s commercial holdings. A public statement along those lines encourages no coup and promises no immunity. It tells an officer corps of roughly 1,900 that its relationship with the United States after the Ortega-Murillo government depends on choices yet to be made.
Whether any of that reaches the colonels depends on the channel, and the most usable one is the Conference of Central American Armed Forces. Nicaragua remains an active member, and its officers spend weeks each year in classrooms in Honduras and the Dominican Republic studying subjects as apolitical as mountain operations and humanitarian demining. A position declared publicly by the United States and repeated to the region’s defense establishments privately will travel farther than any approach made directly to Managua.
Sanctions reach this officer corps only when they distinguish between individual officers and the army as an institution. Blurring the two costs Washington leverage. A colonel below the current senior leadership should recognize that his own decisions determine whether sanctions reach him. A government confident that sanctions were irrelevant would not grant its electoral council the power to dissolve any party that advocates them, nor would it void foreign rulings by constitutional amendment. Both provisions entered the text in the weeks after Avilés pledged the army’s support. The hemispheric track will not carry that pressure. Nicaragua left the Organization of American States in 2023, and the Article 12 amendment voids whatever the foreign ministers decide, so multilateral pressure raises the government’s costs without touching the officer corps.
Neither the public statement of conditions nor the distinction that sanctions draw depends on knowing when Ortega and Murillo will leave power. Ortega is 80. The reform writes a seven-year clock for whoever holds the office after him, binds the army and police leadership to it, and closes the legal routes an opponent might use to contest it. That is what a succession plan looks like when its authors have stopped bothering to disguise one. The United States cannot dictate the timing or the shape of that succession. It can, however, set conditions for a post-Ortega-Murillo government that would enable a renewed U.S.-Nicaragua defense relationship and the benefits derived from it. Ultimately, the officers will decide whether to maintain a Russian-dependent posture outside the hemispheric order or rejoin a system built on democratic norms. At the moment, they have nothing to go on other than the former.
Orlando J. Pérez is professor of Political Science at the University of North Texas at Dallas. He has published eight books on civil-military relations and democratization in Central America, including Civil-Military Relations in Post-Conflict Societies (Routledge, 2015), and has written for War on the Rocks on Venezuela’s transition.
Randy Pestana is deputy director of Florida International University’s Jack D. Gordon Institute for Public Policy, where he leads research on Western Hemisphere security. He previously served as country director for Western Hemisphere Affairs in the Office of the Secretary of Defense for Policy, and he co-authored Nicaraguan Military Culture (2017), a study of the army’s institutional development prepared for U.S. defense audiences.
Image: State Duma of the Russian Federation via Wikimedia Commons
