Brooklyn Rivera, a 73-year-old Miskito Indigenous leader, politician and long-time advocate for Indigenous rights in Nicaragua, has died after spending nearly three years in government custody with no contact with the outside world. Nicaragua's Ministry of Health confirmed his death on Sunday, attributing it to a bacterial infection that developed following a COVID-19 infection, which caused physical and neurological deterioration, multiple organ failure and a cirrhotic liver. The government took 15 hours to announce his death and has refused to release his body to his family, according to opposition media reports.

Rivera had been held in enforced disappearance since his arrest in September 2023, when he was charged with alleged terrorism after secretly re-entering Nicaragua following a ban imposed by the government of co-presidents Daniel Ortega and Rosario Murillo. Earlier that year, Rivera had travelled to Geneva to address a United Nations forum on Indigenous peoples, where he delivered remarks critical of the Nicaraguan government. His detention went officially unacknowledged for more than a year, and his family was barred from seeing him. The first public indication of his condition came only last week, when the government released photographs showing an emaciated Rivera intubated in a Managua hospital — images that sparked immediate international outcry and calls for his release.

Reed Brody, an American human rights lawyer and member of the UN Group of Human Rights Experts on Nicaragua, rejected the government's account of Rivera's death.