MANAGUA — A senior U.S. diplomat has condemned Nicaragua’s seizure of properties owned by American citizens as “illegal” and “unacceptable,” days after the government returned the keys to eight of nine beach homes taken from U.S. retirees, without explaining the seizures or the reversal.
Juan Pablo Segura, who leads the State Department’s Western Hemisphere bureau, said in a post on X that the Murillo-Ortega government’s “illegal seizures of properties owned by American citizens are unacceptable and demonstrate why [the State Department] advises Americans to exercise extreme caution before investing in Nicaragua.”
He urged Americans to review the risks before they “become your reality” and to reconsider travel to the country.
The department’s travel advisory for Nicaragua, which carries a “Reconsider Travel” rating, warns that authorities may seize property, including land, homes, cash and financial assets, without prior notice or legal justification.
The Tola Homes
The case centers on nine luxury vacation homes at Playa Gavilán in Tola, on Nicaragua’s Pacific coast in Rivas department. Owners say the Attorney General’s Office took the properties, furniture included, in late August and transferred them to the national social security institute, INSS, as a “donation.”
Caretakers were told by men identifying as INSS officials that the houses now belonged to the institution, and the owners, who were abroad, learned of it from employees.
The owners are American retirees who first arrived in the 2000s and finished building between 2010 and later. Under Nicaragua’s coastal development law, they own the structures but not the land, and paid the municipality $1,000 a year in lease fees, which Tola canceled for 2026. The homes cost between roughly $500,000 and $800,000 each to build, and one owner put the combined loss, including 15 years of improvements and contents, at about $15 million.
About 15 local employees lost their jobs.
No Nicaraguan authority has publicly explained the seizure. Owners say an INSS official offered to rent their homes back to them for about $2,000 a month.
Reversals
After the case was reported on October 12, the INSS began returning the properties around October 15–16. Eight owners recovered their keys, and the owners say they were told by phone that everything is “as it was before.”
The property owners have received nothing in writing and say they will not reinvest without legal guarantees.
“We are still very worried because this matter has not been fully resolved,” one investor said. Another said they “really need greater guarantees before we can return and reinvest in Nicaragua.”
The ninth owner, identified only as José, has not recovered his property. He says he has lost a beach house, a hotel, a commercial plaza, a farm with about 350 pigs and 108 cows, vehicles and equipment, which he estimates at nearly $50 million. That figure is his own and has not been verified.
He is outside Nicaragua and unsure whether he would be let back in.
The Tola case is the first documented use of the attorney general-to-INSS transfer against U.S. citizens, according to the reporting that first surfaced it. Nicaraguan investigators counted 372 properties donated to the INSS between August 2024 and October 2026, compared with two in the previous 17 years of Daniel Ortega’s current time in power.
Since the 2018 crackdown, the state has also taken property from thousands of canceled nonprofits, churches, exiled opponents and businesses.
A State Department spokesperson called it “deeply regrettable” that the Nicaraguan government “repeatedly disregards property rights,” and the U.S. Embassy in Managua says it knows of numerous confiscations without justification.
Owners say the embassy told them it could not intervene in property matters, and the department recommends that affected citizens hire a local lawyer.
The dispute comes amid wider friction. On October 13, Washington recalled its chargé d’affaires in Managua for consultations after Nicaragua rejected the U.S. ambassador-designate.
Nicaragua’s government has not commented on the Tola seizures, their return or Segura’s statement. No owner has received a written guarantee of title, and the ninth case remains open.
