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LatinNews Daily - 17 April 2026
In brief: US targets Nicaragua’s gold sector with more sanctions
*The US Department of the Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (Ofac) has imposed sanctions on Daniel Edmundo Ortega Murillo and Maurice Facundo Ortega Murillo, two sons of Nicaragua’s co-presidents, Daniel Ortega and his wife, Rosario Murillo, along with five other individuals, and seven companies. A US Department of State press release says that these have “enabled the dictatorship’s corrupt control over Nicaragua’s gold sector, seizure of property owned by U.S. citizens, and proliferation of its dynastic rule”. The mining firms sanctioned include Exportadora de Metales, Sociedad Anónima (Emsa), which sells gold in bulk in the US, and Grupo Minero Xiloa, a Nicaraguan company that became more prominent after Ofac sanctioned gold mining company Compañía Minera Internacional, Sociedad Anónima (Comintsa) in 2024, along with Capital Mining Investment Nicaragua. The other five Nicaraguan firms are: Thomas Metal; Nicaragua Xinxin Linze Minería Group; Brother Metal; Santa Rita Mining Company; and Zhong Fu Development. The five individuals sanctioned are: deputy mining minister Santiago Hernán Bermúdez Tapia; Comintsa’s legal representative Nelson Francisco Sobalvarro; lawyer Lester Matus Tamariz; and two legal representatives of Zhong Fu, Aníbal Vladimir Matus Buitrago, and Feiwu Bian, a Chinese national who is its president. According to Ofac, since 2020, the Ortega-Murillo government has “restructured the mining sector into a complex network of front companies and frontmen designed to generate foreign currency, launder sanctioned assets, and reinforce political control for their own benefit”. It has previously sanctioned other individuals and companies associated with the gold sector. These include Nicaraguan state-owned mining company Empresa Nicaragüense de Minas (Eniminas) and the president of its board of directors, Ruy Delgado López who were sanctioned in June 2022, while Nicaragua’s mining authority (DGM) was blacklisted in October 2022, and Mining Minister Salvador Mansell was sanctioned in November 2021.
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