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Investigation by ProBox, Expediente Público, and La Prensa
The regime’s propaganda outlets proudly announced on June 2 that a delegation of 21 Sandinista communicators had successfully completed a cycle of training and seminars on communication topics in Beijing, China. This training is not an isolated event.
Between December 2021 and July 2025, at least 13 cooperation and training events aimed at Nicaraguan communicators were organized under guidelines promoted by China. These initiatives arose after the reestablishment of diplomatic relations between the two countries and the opening of the China Media Group offices in Managua. Since then, a new space has been opened for the training of Nicaraguan journalists, through meetings in Beijing and visits by Chinese delegations to Nicaragua.
These activities included not only spokespersons linked to pro-government media, but also communication students from state universities such as the National Autonomous University of Nicaragua (UNAN) and the recently created Casimiro Sotelo National University (August 2023), which occupies the campus confiscated from the Central American University (UCA), an institution expropriated by the regime of Daniel Ortega and Rosario Murillo in 2023.
However, Chinese influence in the Nicaraguan media ecosystem is not limited to the training of communicators. It also aims to directly influence young people through Facebook, the most widely used platform in the country. Between January and September 2025, 726 paid advertisements were detected, promoted by 229 different pages, most of them with messages aligned with the interests and narratives of Xi Jinping’s government.
All this is happening in a context in which the independent press faces harsh repression: as of September this year, more than 280 media workers, including 217 journalists, have been forced into exile since the socio-political crisis erupted in 2018, while their media outlets have been shut down and their work criminalized, leaving the domestic news space virtually in the hands of the official discourse.
This joint investigation by ProBox, Expediente Público, and La Prensa reveals China’s active role in the ideological training of Nicaraguan communicators, the dissemination of paid campaigns on social media, and the promotion of discourses aligned with its political model.
Training with a Chinese stamp: Beijing as a propaganda classroom
Since the reestablishment of diplomatic relations with China in December 2021, the Ortega and Murillo regime has developed a systematic policy of media alignment with the authoritarian communication model of the Chinese Communist Party. Following the opening of the China Media Group’s offices in Managua in 2021, shortly after the reestablishment of diplomatic relations between the two countries, at least 13 media cooperation initiatives between the two have been recorded.
On April 13, 2024, a delegation of 25 pro-government journalists traveled to Beijing on a professional exchange program with Chinese state media, where they learned firsthand about the production and propaganda methods used by China’s media apparatus. A year later, on May 14, 2025, another group—this time composed of 21 Nicaraguan journalists—participated in a series of seminars given by the Research and Training Institute of China’s National Radio and Television Administration, focusing on content production, communication strategies, and bilateral cooperation.
Beyond these confirmed figures, a continuous dynamic of training and exchange has been consolidated that transcends the official media and reaches academic spaces controlled by the Nicaraguan regime.
Notable events include: the July 25, 2024 meeting with the China/Latin America Media Group, which brought together young communicators and journalists from Nicaraguan state media (such as Canal 13) for sessions on ideological training, audiovisual production, and strengthening revolutionary discourse. Similarly, on October 28, 2024, a virtual meeting was held between CGTN in Spanish and Sandinista communicators, another training space that consolidated the regime’s discursive dependence on Chinese state media structures.
At this last meeting, Daniel Edmundo Ortega Murillo, media coordinator for Nicaragua’s Communication and Citizenship Council and son of dictators Daniel Ortega and Rosario Murillo, assured that this meeting was “contributing through communication to the defense of the homeland and the defense of the Revolution.”
Since the reestablishment of diplomatic relations in December 2021 and the opening of the China Media Group offices in Managua (on December 15 of that same year), there have been at least six in-person events in China with the official participation of Nicaraguan media delegations, including visits, forums, and training sessions in Beijing and Xi’an.
Likewise, four meetings have been held in Nicaragua, including exchanges with CGTN and the China-Latin America Media Group. In addition, three formal media cooperation agreements have been finalized, including the Framework Agreement of February 2022, signed by Nicaraguan state media on February 21, 2022, and the bilateral audiovisual agreement signed in June 2024.
Bilateral events between Nicaragua and China have not only taken place in forums or diplomatic halls: they have also been strategically promoted through social media by the regime’s official channels and aligned media, as part of a narrative of “achievements” in international cooperation.
According to monitoring carried out by ProBox, between July 2024 and August 2025, there were 2,246 mentions of the Nicaragua-China relationship, with social network X (formerly Twitter) being the main platform, accounting for 79% of the total (1,777 mentions).
The analysis reveals that the highest peaks in digital conversation coincide with events carefully promoted by the ruling party’s communications machine: for example, in the week of July 22, 2024, the event held with students from UNAN-Managua and the China-Latin America Media Group generated 170 mentions, of which 154 occurred on X.
Comunicadores de los Medios Sandinistas de Nicaragua sostienen encuentro con comunicadoras del Grupo de Medios de China#4519LaPatriaLaRevolución #noticias #nicaragua https://t.co/KlIHsHJSQ6 pic.twitter.com/wI9Yi9cWFl
— Canal 4 Nicaragua (@Canal4Ni) July 18, 2024
A second significant peak occurred during the week of May 12, 2025, with 118 mentions (105 on X), when a Nicaraguan delegation participated in the global conference on digital education in Wuhan, promoted by pro-government media outlets such as El 19 Digital, Canal 4, and TN8. Shortly thereafter, the signing of diplomatic agreements by Laureano Ortega on May 19 kept the volume of conversation high (81 mentions), showing narrative continuity.
Delegación de Nicaragua participa en Conferencia de Educación Digital en Wuhan. #Noticias #Nicaragua
Más información 🌐👉https://t.co/JtO674lxwW pic.twitter.com/juTdw6nI7Z
— Canal 4 Nicaragua (@Canal4Ni) May 15, 2025
Publications surrounding these events highlight technological cooperation, educational modernization, and the “brotherhood” ties between the two countries. In all cases, the actors promoting this content were accounts linked to the Sandinista ecosystem, including party structures, state media, and profiles aligned with the official narrative that appear to be ordinary citizens. This centralization around pro-government actors shows a controlled communication apparatus that serves as a propaganda arm for the regime and its international allies.
Beyond their descriptive function, the hashtags and slogans used in digital publications operate as symbolic mechanisms of political alignment. Some, such as #China and #Nicaragua, although apparently neutral, become discursive pillars of a binational narrative that seeks to normalize and celebrate the closeness between the two regimes.
This symbiosis is reinforced by complementary expressions such as #StrategicAlliances, #InternationalCooperation, and #BrotherhoodOfPeoples, which projects a relationship based on common interests, but also on ideological affinities.
The language used not only extols the alliance, but also draws a framework of geopolitical antagonism. Hashtags such as #YankeeGoHome, #EEUULesaHumanidad and references to countries such as Russia, Venezuela, or Palestine are recurrent in militant accounts that amplify messages related to China-Nicaragua cooperation. In this way, the digital conversation is not limited to highlighting bilateral achievements, but is part of a narrative of resistance against the “empire,” in line with the official discourse of the Sandinista Front.
#TheEmpireWillFall @CIDH #YankeeGoHome #Word #world #ГероиZ #Rusia #China #CoreaDelNorte #Ucrania #PLOMO #OEA #UE #Nicaragua #Cuba #Venezuela #AmeriLatina #PlanNacionaldeLuchacontralaPobreza20222026 #ResistenciaIndigena #EEUULesaHumanidad #EULesaHumanidad #FreePalenstine https://t.co/CQKEdHTfUH
— PLOMOFL² (@plomoflr) December 23, 2024
The propaganda component is evident in the systematic use of hashtags such as #NicaraguaEnRevolución (Nicaragua in Revolution) or #4619SiempreMásAllá (4619 Always Beyond), slogans with strong symbolic meaning that refer directly to the ideological apparatus of the Sandinista Front. These slogans are frequently inserted into publications celebrating the signing of agreements, diplomatic visits, or training sessions with Chinese actors, suggesting a strategy of discursive cohesion that seeks to connect foreign policy with the party’s revolutionary identity.
Finally, other hashtags such as #SomosUnan, linked to the university sphere, reveals how academic institutions have also been integrated into this communication mechanism, after the regime canceled the legal status of at least 40 universities in the last five years, completely eliminating independent university institutions. The constant mention of public universities at events with Chinese delegations, coupled with the appearance of their hashtags in official and militant publications, points to an instrumentalization of the education sector as a narrative vehicle and legitimizer of the China-Nicaragua agenda.
The training and propaganda strategy responds to an architecture of transnational authoritarian cooperation, in which Russia and Venezuela also participate. In August 2025, Daniel Edmundo Ortega Murillo traveled to Moscow to sign agreements with the Russian state media outlets RT, Sputnik, and Izvestia, consolidating an alliance with powers that share an interest in building media apparatuses subordinate to political power.
At the same time, Venezuela has served as a key ideological partner in the training of young Sandinista communicators. The figure of Venezuelan Abraham Istillarte, co-founder of Telesur (a media outlet conceived by Fidel Castro and Hugo Chávez) and consultant for the pro-government media outlet El 19 Digital, has become a recurring presence in workshops and training courses aimed at public university students and members of the Network of Young Communicators, in a discourse that reinforces the “brotherhood” between allied regimes.
China pays to influence
The Chinese regime’s influence on Nicaraguan communications is also evident in paid social media campaigns. According to a review of Meta’s ad library, between January and September 2025, we identified 726 paid ads that reached audiences in Nicaragua, promoted by 229 different pages, which generated between 96.7 and 112.2 million impressions (the number of times a piece of content is displayed on a user’s screen, regardless of whether the same user has seen it multiple times). The total estimated investment reached 2.79 million córdobas (equivalent to $75,700) and included the Nicaraguan public among its targets.
Among the main advertisers, the Chinese Embassy in Nicaragua stands out, publishing 89 ads and becoming the most active foreign actor in the country. It is followed by official Chinese media such as China Xinhua News (65 ads), the video game Conflict of Nations: World War 3 (54 ads), Economic Daily, China (48 ads), and the Global Times newspaper (19 ads).
The type of posts promoted by the embassy are divided into three blocks:
- Historical propaganda: commemorating events such as China’s Victory Day over Japan or the start of the Japanese invasion in 1937.
- Messages of modernization and technological advances: such as intelligent robots or large-scale infrastructure.
- Discourses on international cooperation and China-Nicaragua friendship: presenting Beijing as a reliable and peaceful partner.
In terms of segmentation, the data reveals that the ads are mainly aimed at young people aged 18 to 34, the most active group on social media, with distribution across different departments of the country and messages in Spanish.
Overall, in just nine months, the Chinese Embassy in Nicaragua’s ads generated between 10.6 and 12.5 million impressions and an estimated investment of $5,674.
An ecosystem at the service of the China-Nicaragua narrative
The digital narrative about the alliance between Nicaragua and China does not arise spontaneously, but is the result of an amplified propaganda strategy from a highly controlled ecosystem. This environment is made up of pro-government media, state institutions, public universities, and a political-media elite aligned with the interests of the Ortega-Murillo regime. In a country where freedom of expression is severely restricted, this ecosystem not only reproduces pro-government content, but also trains new communicators within that same logic, consolidating a closed communication machine with no room for dissent or pluralism of information.
This strategy is coordinated by the Communication and Citizenship Council, led by Rosario Murillo, which centralizes control of official discourse. The network not only disseminates information, but also shapes public opinion in line with the regime’s strategic objectives, aligned with the Chinese propaganda model.
At the center of this structure are pro-government media outlets such as Canal 4, TN8, Radio Nicaragua, Viva Nicaragua Canal 13, El 19 Digital (owned by the Presidency), which act as reproducers of Chinese state content, transmitters of news about bilateral cooperation, and promoters of audiovisual materials framed within the narrative of “fraternity” between peoples, confirming the centrality of the media apparatus in the digital conversation.
The Canal 4 Nicaragua account (@Canal4Ni) was the most active on X, amplifying pro-China content with 198 mentions. It was followed by TN8 Nicaragua (@canaltn8) with 106 mentions, El 19 Digital (@el19digital) with 48 mentions, and Viva Nicaragua (@VivaNicaragua13) with 28 mentions. Radio 580 Nicaragua (@radio580nic) and JP+ (@jpmasespanol) also stand out, with between 35 and 37 mentions each.
Delegación del MIFIC visita Sichuan, China, para promover el puro nicaragüense y establecer lazos de cooperación en agricultura y comercio. #Nicaragua #Chinahttps://t.co/226dKs8SJd
— TN8 Nicaragua (@canaltn8) May 26, 2025
Beyond the institutional apparatus and official media, the Ortega-Murillo regime’s strategy for disseminating information about its alliance with China also relies on a core group of highly active personal accounts that act as digital amplifiers of the official discourse. Although these accounts are not always directly linked to government entities, they repeat, redistribute, and sustain a narrative aligned with the ruling party’s objectives.
Among the most active individual actors are @db_nicaragua (78 mentions) and @collvermat (61 mentions), users who show a pattern of constant and coordinated activity, acting as informal spokespersons for pro-China discourse in Nicaragua. They are followed by @Atego16 (50 mentions) and @RDRFSLN_ (48 mentions), both profiles marked by strong online militancy, with posts focused on extolling bilateral cooperation and ideologically defending the regime.
Other profiles such as @Plomo19792 (33 mentions) and @plomoflr (26 mentions) play a repetitive amplification role, acting as reinforcement nodes within the pro-government digital ecosystem. Their activity does not seek to generate genuine conversation or debate, but rather to saturate the digital public sphere with content aligned with the state, systematically replicating posts already issued by state media. This strategy aims to artificially increase the visibility of issues related to China-Nicaragua relations, without adding any new informational value.
A particularly illustrative case is that of @plomoflr, who between July 2024 and August 2025 made at least 14 posts with the same message, each associated with different events related to China. These posts contain no opinions or descriptions of the shared content; they are limited to a block of hashtags ideologically aligned with the China-Russia-Iran geopolitical axis, as seen in this example:
#TheEmpireWillFall @CIDH #YankeeGoHome #Word #world #ГероиZ #Russia #China #NorthKorea #Ukraine #LEAD #OAS #EU #Nicaragua #Cuba #Venezuela #LatinAmerica #NationalPlantoCombatPoverty20222026 #IndigenousResistance #USATortureHumanity #EUATortureHumanity #FreePalestine
#TheEmpireWillFall @CIDH #YankeeGoHome #Word #AquíAlláelYankeeMorira #ГероиZ #Rusia #China #CoreaDelNorte #Ucrania #OEA #UE #Nicaragua #Cuba #Venezuela #AmeriLatina #FreePalentine #PlanNacionaldeLuchacontralaPobreza20222026 #ResistenciaIndigena #EEUULesaHumanidad #EULesaHumanidad https://t.co/WIlYg5fe5J
— PLOMOFL² (@plomoflr) September 7, 2025
This pattern reveals a political spam strategy, in which the objective is not to inform but to position specific ideological labels to garner support for these narratives and generate noise. Rather than real, spontaneous users, these accounts function as automatic content replicators, coordinated with the regime’s communication apparatus.
The Chinese government’s support and training of the Ortega-Murillo regime’s communications apparatus comes amid a severe crackdown on the independent press in Nicaragua: since 2018, more than 280 media workers (including 217 journalists) have been forced into exile, according to FLED data, while their media outlets have been shut down, their offices confiscated, and their work criminalized. Although at least 26 media outlets continue to operate from abroad, the country lives under strict information control.
This phenomenon is part of a regional trend of exporting authoritarian models of communication, driven by alliances with China, Russia, and Venezuela, which seek to shape narratives and silence dissent. The Nicaraguan case thus stands as a warning about how censorship and propaganda can become pillars of power to the detriment of press freedom and democracy in Latin America.
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