The communist Ortega regime in Nicaragua signed its fourth contract with the China Communications Construction Company (CCCC), a major actor in China’s Belt and Road Initiative debt trap program and a state company sanctioned by the United States, the local newspaper La Prensa reported on Thursday.
Husband-and-wife communist dictatorial couple Daniel Ortega and Rosario Murillo, who describe themselves as “co-presidents” of Nicaragua, published a decree on Thursday in the nation’s official gazette authorizing General Treasurer Carlos José Selva to sign a $57.4 million contract with CCCC for the construction of a new “La Mesita” wind farm project in the Estelí Department.
La Prensa detailed that the deal marks the fourth signed by Ortega with the sanctioned Chinese company. The first one, the newspaper detailed, called for the construction of a solar plant in San Isidro Matagalpa in October 2023. In May 2024 the Ortega regime signed a second deal for another solar plant in Ciudad Darío, and in February, it signed a third deal for a wind farm in Estelí.
Daniel Ortega has forced Nicaragua to rapidly embrace and indebt itself to communist China since January 2022 after he broke ties with Taiwan in December 2021. Ortega has adopted the Chinese regime’s “One-China Principle,” which falsely claims the sovereign nation of Taiwan is a province of China. In December 2023, Daniel Ortega held a phone conversation with Chinese genocidal dictator Xi Jinping in which both communist dictators agreed to elevate their relation to “Strategic Association” status.
Since then, and especially since 2024, the communist dictator has signed a growing list of loans and contracts sporting terms extremely beneficial for China and detrimental to Nicaragua that have allowed the Chinese communist regime to expand its influence in the Central American nation. In addition to numerous infrastructure works, some of the contracts address dubious and decades-long gold mining deals — including an open pit mine lease — that effectively hand over Nicaragua’s gold resources to China, and a “lifeboat” Free Trade Agreement with China that went into effect in January 2024.
In May, Nicaragua signed a deal to purchase Chinese military equipment. “Co-president” Rosario Murillo, who announced the deal on state media, reportedly abstained from disclosing further details of the agreement.
Reports published in 2024 indicated that the Ortega regime received four loans from China between January and May 2024 totaling $537 million. The Chinese loans further ballooned Nicaragua’s already spiraling public debt. At the time the reports were published, Nicaragua’s debt was measured at over $10 billion as of Q3 2023. The Central Bank of Nicaragua recently claimed that its foreign debt is now over $15.8 billion as of Q2 2025.
China Communications Construction Company Limited, which will allegedly build the four plants for the Ortega regime, is a Chinese regime-owned company widely accused of corruption and sanctioned by the United States.
In August 2020, during President Donald Trump’s first term, the United States sanctioned 24 Chinese state-owned companies, including several of CCCC’s subsidiaries, for their role in destructive dredging operations in the South China Sea and the construction of internationally condemned artificial islands in the area.
Months later, in November 2020, President Trump signed an Executive Order addressing the threat of China’s exploitation of U.S. capital to fund its military, security, and intelligence apparatus and banning U.S investments in Chinese military-linked companies, including CCCC. In December, the company was added to the Entity List, which lists “entities [that] have been determined by the U.S. Government to be acting contrary to the national security or foreign policy interests of the United States.”
In addition to the U.S. sanctions, CCCC has been targeted by sanctions from other countries and international organizations. In 2018, Bangladesh blacklisted CCCC subsidiary China Harbour Engineering Company for allegedly trying to bribe a local senior official to secure a highway expansion contract. In 2011, the world bank debarred CCCC until 2017 for fraudulent practices allegedly committed in a road project in the Philippines.
La Prensa emphasized that it is not the first time the Ortega regime has seemingly ignored international warnings and inked deals with sanctioned companies tied to its ideological allies. The newspaper noted that, in April, the communist regime signed a digital surveillance and espionage training memorandum with Russian telecom firm Rostelecom, a company sanctioned by the United States and the United Kingdom for its role in Russia’s ongoing invasion of Ukraine. Similarly, the Nicaraguan regime has signed deals with Belarusian companies also sanctioned for their role in the war in Ukraine.
Christian K. Caruzo is a Venezuelan writer and documents life under socialism. You can follow him on Twitter here.
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