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Nicaragua Protest
A protestor waves a Nicaraguan flag during an anti-government event coined "The March of Balloons" in Managua, Nicaragua, Sunday, Sept. 9, 2018. The march aimed to raise awareness of what protesters call political prisoners and demand their release. (AP Photo/Alfredo Zuniga)
The day after Daniel Ortega was re-elected president of Nicaragua in November 2011, a farmer named Wilmer Álvarez told me, “The one thing is, he needs to pass the power on to someone else.” Though he believed Ortega’s social programs had benefited rural people, he worried that the one-time revolutionary “could become a dictator, like Chávez, like Castro.”
But, he hastened to add, “Nicaragua isn’t like Cuba. It’s not like Venezuela. People here aren’t scared. If he does something the people don’t like, they’ll take him out.” At the time, I brushed this off as harmless bravado, a prideful nod to the 1979 Sandinista revolution that toppled Nicaragua’s Somoza dynasty, the longest family dictatorship in the Americas.
But almost seven years later, Álvarez’s statement rings prophetic. Ortega never passed on power. Instead, he manipulated changes to the constitution to allow himself to be elected to an unprecedented third term. Since mid-April, hundreds of thousands of Nicaraguans have orchestrated a campaign of marches, roadblocks, general strikes, and occupations aimed at ousting Ortega and his wife, Vice President Rosario Murillo.
According to the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, this unrest and the government’s response to it have claimed more than 300 lives, including those of at least one journalist and twenty-one police officers. In addition, an estimated 2,200 people have been injured, many seriously. Ortega’s government blames the violence on “coup supporters.” And undoubtedly, individuals associated with the opposition have committed violent acts.
The unrest, and the government’s response to it, have claimed more than 300 lives, including those of at least one journalist and twenty-one police officers.
Nevertheless, as the Nicaraguan news magazine Revista Envío stated, “The vast majority of those hundreds of thousands of people actively involved in the uprising have expressed their support in myriad peaceful ways.” And human rights organizations agree that the police and government-associated paramilitary groups are responsible for most of the deaths.
Why did this crisis erupt? Since he was elected to a second stint as president in 2006 (after previously leading the nation from 1979 to 1990), Ortega has consolidated nearly absolute power of Nicaragua’s government, courts, electoral system, and media. But during this same period, his regime reduced poverty and established a high level of security that distinguished Nicaragua from its Central American neighbors. Given the country’s relative stability, some Nicaraguans and international observers have been surprised by the extent of unrest.
At least three major forces within Nicaragua have been fomenting discontent in recent years. One is the widespread opposition of rural people to Ortega’s flagship project for economic development—an unbuilt canal linking the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans. The government’s heavy-handed response to the anti-canal protests at times prefigured this year’s repression.
Another destabilizing force is the reduction of the social welfare programs that had broadened Ortega’s popularity. These programs have provided some of Nicaragua’s poorest people with free roofs, micro-financing for businesses, housing, livestock, and other benefits. But they were largely funded by oil-related profits that have since dried up.
A third force is the growing angst among Nicaragua’s young people. About half of the population is under twenty-five years old and, as of late 2016, the estimated youth unemployment rate was 40 percent. Even college graduates have trouble finding work, and landing coveted public sector jobs typically requires government loyalty or connections. Frustrated youth with time on their hands and social media savvy have proven to be potent protest organizers.
Twenty-two-year-old Francis Argüello is one of these unemployed, college-educated youth. Argüello took to the streets of the capital city of Managua in late April after student-led protests were repressed by police and pro-government gangs. The repression galvanized diverse student groups to occupy several universities in Managua, which Argüello supported by bringing in food and medical supplies.
“I want to see an urgent change, live in a democratic country,” Argüello tells me in an email. “I’m motivated to go into the streets for future generations because I don’t want them to live through the persecution in the future that we young people experience.”
On May 30, Mother’s Day in Nicaragua, Argüello participated in a nationwide march in support of the Mothers of April, a group of more than eighty mothers who lost their children in the recent violence. A wave of blue and white—Nicaragua’s national colors—made up of tens of thousands of citizens surged two miles down one of Managua’s main thoroughfares. A black-and-white banner saying, ¡NO TENEMOS MIEDO! (We are not afraid!) bobbed above the crowd. For three hours, the marchers sang and chanted peacefully. But as the march concluded, a barrage of shots rang out from nearby buildings.
Argüello saw a teenage boy get shot in the head. She dove under a pickup truck. She heard wailing children and saw dazed elderly people as police and masked paramilitaries fired on the crowd. After about half an hour, Argüello rushed for shelter into the nearby Metrocentro mall. By the end of the day, eleven people had been killed and at least forty-five injured in Managua’s march. The Nicaraguan Center for Human Rights attributed the deaths to the police and pro-government paramilitaries. The deputy director of the Nicaraguan National Police, Francisco Díaz, blamed “criminal gangs.”
The Mother’s Day Massacre, as it became known, made restarting a failed “national dialogue” between the Ortega government and its opponents, called the Civic Alliance for Justice and Democracy, even more difficult.
Four days of initial talks deadlocked over the Alliance’s demand for an early election and electoral reforms and the government’s insistence on the opposition removing roadblocks that were stalling traffic on roughly 70 percent of the country’s highways.
After weeks of paralyzed movement and commerce, the government removed the roadblocks by force, bringing another wave of deadly violence in June and July. Ortega dubbed this crackdown Operación Limpieza (Operation Clean-Up) and accused the United States of fueling a coup d’état in Nicaragua. There is no evidence that the United States is arming the opposition, although there is ample evidence that the U.S. has supported independent Nicaraguan media. There is, however, every reason to believe that thousands of Nicaraguans have taken to the streets of their own volition.
U.S. imperialism, warmongering, and meddling in Nicaraguan elections have greatly determined the country’s destiny over the past two centuries. Given this history, Ortega simply has to invoke the greedy, aggressive gringos to stir up his base.
Recently, the U.S. government has furthered this narrative. In July, the Trump Administration sanctioned three officials in Ortega’s government and threatened further sanctions. This followed the passage of the House of Representatives’ Nicaraguan Investment Conditionality Act of 2017, which aims to restrict Nicaraguan borrowing from international lending institutions until electoral and human rights reforms are made.
In September, U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley initiated a discussion of the Nicaraguan crisis in the Security Council. All of this builds on years of support for anti-Ortega Nicaraguan groups by the Congressionally funded National Endowment for Democracy and the U.S. Agency for International Development. This clear anti-Ortega agenda only promises to worsen the country’s divisions by helping Ortega scapegoat the United States for any unrest and grievances.
Nicaragua’s polarized crisis is best resolved by Nicaraguans, who did the hard work of reconciliation after the catastrophic Contra War of the 1980s. Many Nicaraguans speak boldly of wanting to complete the Sandinista revolution’s unfinished work of creating a more just society. Lifelong Sandinista Julio López Campos writes of a Nicaragua “recovering the best of our inheritance” that is free of autocratic strongmen and “perks, patronage, and patrimonialism.”
In the meantime in Managua, few people go out after sunset. Marches, though fewer, continue. As many as 215,000 Nicaraguans have lost their jobs due to the economy tanking during the crisis, and firings continue as tourism and consumption haven’t recovered.
“The ones who pay the consequences are us, the poor,” says Miguel Rodríguez, a twenty-five-year-old university English student. Many echo this sentiment in a country where about a third of the population lives in poverty.
Fleeing insecurity, more than 23,000 Nicaraguans have made asylum claim appointments in Costa Rica since April. Hundreds of other claims have been received in Panama, Mexico, and the United States.
Some worry that the country is becoming a police state. “Things are being normalized by force,” says Rodríguez. “If you go anywhere, you’ll see police with [assault rifles].” Dozens of paramilitaries have been sent to guard his former university; most of his classmates have left the country, fearing arrest.
“Things are being normalized by force, if you go anywhere, you’ll see police with assault rifles.”
In fact, Rodríguez says, the jail in the provincial capital of Jinotepe is full of young people, many of them students. Politically motivated arbitrary detentions appear to be increasing, especially of student leaders and doctors who have treated wounded protesters.
Paulo Abrão, executive secretary of the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, says Ortega is now, “criminalizing the demonstrators by using the institutions and justice system to detain them and promote judicial actions and processes against them.”
Meanwhile, Nicaraguan state media—which comprises virtually all television in the country—portray a president “battling for peace” against insurgents who “want to see Nicaragua destroyed.” This alternate reality mirrors the emotionally charged stories of atrocities and faked atrocities that have been pervading Nicaraguan social media.
Though the truth of every event in the unfolding drama of Nicaragua’s 2018 uprising isn’t always easy to discern, this much is: No one wants to see the country destroyed, and the resistance against Ortega that he has called “a diabolical, satanic force” requires acts of ever-greater courage. Nicaraguans, once again, are rising to the occasion.