What Young Nicas Want You to Know About the Ongoing Conflict In Their Country
"No a la Censura." Photo by Jorge Mejía Peralta (Creative Commons 2.0 Attribution Generic License), via Wikimedia Commons
Seven months have passed since Nicaragua plunged into conflict. Earlier this year, President Daniel Ortega enacted pension reforms, which raised taxes by up to 4 percentage points and cut benefits by 5 percent. Infuriated Nicaraguans took to the streets to protest the overreach in power. The government responded by violently suppressing people – which led to the death of many – and eventually, Ortega canceled the planned reforms. But this wasn’t enough. By then, the people of Nicaragua were angry. And as a matter of fact, they were angry for a long time. What started on April 19 is only one piece of a labyrinthine puzzle. To truly understand what’s currently happening (and what has taken shape in the last half year), you have to look further back.
A few months ago, we spoke to two young Nicaraguans to learn when they began to feel disillusioned with the government and why they began to fight. Since then, news coverage on the resistance has dissipated in US media, but the need to tell their stories hasn’t. Here’s what they want you to know about the turmoil in Nicaragua.
The following testimonies have been slightly edited for clarity.
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Photo by Cancillería del Ecuador (Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 Generic), via Flickr
What’s happening in Nicaragua didn’t happen over night. It’s something that’s been coming for many years, but we all supported the abuses for all this time until we became fed up. Here, nobody’s rights were respected. No one could say anything against the government because it’d send shock groups to hurt and silence them. (Which is nothing rare now as it now sends them to kill them directly). There is no institutionality here. All the institutions and absolutely all powers of the state are controlled by the dictatorial Ortega-Murillo family.
Laws don’t exist. There is no one to turn to for justice. There is nothing. EVERYTHING is politicized.
“What’s happening in Nicaragua didn’t happen over night. It’s something that’s been coming for many years.”
I decided to join the resistance from the first moment that it began. I don’t belong to any political party, but I’ve NEVER liked this government, even from the beginning. So when they attacked the elderly for protesting, many young people from the university UCA (Universidad Centroamericana) rose up in protest. They also had shock groups sent after them, which is when everyone awoke and we took to the streets and occupied different universities. -Berlín
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Photo by Jorge Mejía Peralta (Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 Generic), via Flickr
This government has been abusive for years. The FSLN (Frente Sandinista de Liberación Nacional) won the elections in 2006, and everything was fine for a while. But the constitution established that re-election is prohibited. The government abolished the decree and it reintroduced another period in 2011. I think that from that point forward everything worsened, but nobody wanted to talk about it. Every governmental institution demanded that its workers be militants of its party, the FSLN. Without that license, you could not aspire to be a public official. [This went for everyone] from the Ministerio de Salud (MINSA), Consejo Supremo Electoral (CSE), the police, army, judges – all the powers began transforming into a grand political party, even though the constitution doesn’t allow political proselytism in public institutions. Little by little, the party ate away at television channels, public universities, city halls.
“We remained quiet for a long time, even though it was clear what was happening. ”
We remained quiet for a long time, even though it was clear what was happening. In the year 2013, Daniel Ortega sold the country to the Wang Jin company so it could build an interoceanic canal. I think around the same year, there was an INSS (Instituto Nicaragüense de Seguridad Social) reform that affected the elderly, and many young people accompanied them and they were brutally reprimanded by the Sadinista youth. And that’s where everything started, the [government] sowed fear [into its people]. -Grettel
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