ANPDH’s board members are accusing their director of stealing huge sums from US soft power organizations and inflating death tolls during last year’s coup attempt in Nicaragua. The OAS, which relied heavily on ANPDH’s flawed data, has kept silent so far.

August 01, 2019 "Information Clearing House" - A year after a US-backed coup attempt rocked Nicaragua, a major scandal is unfolding over the alleged theft of half a million dollars in US taxpayer money by an organization at the center of the destabilization effort.

Three board members of the Nicaraguan Association for Human Rights (ANPDH) have denounced their former director, Álvaro Leiva, accusing him of stealing almost half a million dollars in funding provided by the US government’s National Endowment for Democracy and other US soft power outfits.  

The board members have also accused Leiva of “altering the number of deaths and injuries in the ANPDH reports in order to ask for more resources from North American donors, which totally invalidates the credibility of those reports,” according to Nicaraguan journalist Adolfo Pastran.

During the regime change attempt, which lasted from April 18 through July of last year, ANPDH claimed there were more than 400 dead, inflating the death toll by at least 150 and falsely blaming the government for each death. ANDPH also exaggerated the numbers of detained, wounded and disappeared – of which there was only one: Bismarck Martinez, a Sandinista member who was kidnapped on June 29, 2018 and found murdered in May of this year. Videos of the horrendous torture of Martinez were found on the cell phones of his torturers following their arrest.

As The Grayzone reported, the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR) of the Organization of American States (OAS) relied heavily on the flawed data of ANDPH in its own lopsided report on the 2018 crisis in Nicaragua.