WASHINGTON _ The Trump administration called for new leadership in Nicaragua, charging that the government of President Daniel Ortega has hollowed out democratic institutions, won't cooperate with international human rights investigators and directed state security forces to violently suppress protests.
U.S. Ambassador Michael Kozak, of the State Department's bureau of democracy, human rights and labor, told a House Foreign Affairs subcommittee on Thursday that demonstrators have even been blocked from getting treatment for their injuries and government-run hospitals have reportedly required families to sign certificates that falsified the cause of deaths as a condition of retrieving relatives' bodies.
Kozak and other administration officials told Congress that the only way to address the ongoing crisis in Nicaragua is with new elections that would allow the Nicaraguan people to pick new leadership.
