For families of missing Nicaraguans, the hardest part of a suspected political detention is often the silence that follows. There may be no public arrest record, no court date and no official confirmation that a relative is being held anywhere.

Reuters reported on Wednesday that retired Army Colonel Carlos Brenes and his wife, Salvadora Martinez, disappeared in August 2025 after neighbours said they saw police escort the couple away from their rural home south of Managua. Their daughter, Thelma Brenes, has been seeking information about their whereabouts, health and legal status ever since.

Brenes was a former Sandinista who later became a critic of President Daniel Ortega. Martinez had no known political role, according to the report. The Nicaraguan Interior Ministry, Attorney General’s Office and Army did not respond to Reuters’ detailed requests for comment about the case.

The couple’s disappearance is part of a wider pattern described by families and human-rights monitors. Reuters reported that Memoria y Justicia, a rights group led by Nicaraguans in exile, and relatives of political prisoners said at least 68 people were being held for political reasons at the end of September. They identified 31 as victims of enforced disappearance.

The United Nations defines enforced disappearance as deprivation of liberty by state agents followed by concealment of a person’s fate or whereabouts. UN experts said they had documented imprisonment, torture and political persecution as part of a widespread and systematic attack on civilians. They reported that at least eight people held for political reasons had died in custody since the crackdown began in 2018, and that 161 disappearance cases had been verified since April of that year.

Those figures are attributed findings, not a final judicial accounting. Nicaragua’s government has dismissed critics as enemies and has not accepted the accusations described by the UN experts. The UN said Managua had not answered requests for comment sent since 2018.

The absence of information is itself part of the harm. Relatives cannot reliably establish whether a person is detained, whether charges have been filed, whether a hearing has taken place or whether medical care is available. In the case of Carlos Brenes, Reuters also reported that an Inter-American Court of Human Rights account said the family had been unofficially told he and Martinez were tried for treason and sentenced to 15 years in prison; relatives said they were not informed of the proceedings.

A functioning justice system can test allegations, protect evidence and give families a route to challenge detention. When arrests are neither acknowledged nor explained, each of those safeguards weakens. The stories of the missing are therefore not only about individual cases but about whether the state can be held accountable for people it controls.