Braden: What are the specifics of how autocrats use financial and asset-based repression? How do they do it?

Maradiaga: They have so many methods. The most important and widespread is financial surveillance and the violation of banking privacy.

So regimes get access to banking data, including credit-card transactions, banking records, savings accounts, and any financial flows that can be monitored by financial-intelligence units—the organizations that countries set up to monitor money laundering.

But they also enable regimes to track dissidents’ transactions and financial activity in real time, both domestically and internationally. So you see, they can block international money transfers. The Sandinista regime in Nicaragua targeted my think tank in 2018, for example, in exactly this way. The regime’s been able to shut down around 5,700 nonprofits by manipulating the country’s financial- intelligence unit.

Another method uses the judicial system. By accusing dissidents of money laundering or illicit financing for terrorism, or for some other illegal thing, dictators can get court orders to freeze and close accounts. Then your name gets circulated into an international system that makes it impossible to open a bank account in Europe or the U.S.

A third method—probably the oldest—is confiscating financial and physical assets. Autocratic regimes can take your land, your house, your businesses, and any other tangible resources. Here, too, they justify these appropriations in reference to anti–money-laundering laws or national-security regulations.