David Pratt: Children of the Revolution

Back in 1979, at that time, Managua was still controlled by the dictator Anastasio Somoza Debayle, whose Guardia Nacional violently suppressed revolutionary activity. But Masaya had recently come under the control of the FSLN, and was considered liberated territory.

Following this near legendary march by the Sandinistas, Masaya became the base for the revolution to regroup and three weeks later topple the dictator Somoza. Every year since then Sandinista supporters celebrate the repliegue as a watershed moment in the revolutionary struggle.

Just a few years after the revolution, while working as a young journalist in the country, I once joined Nicaraguans on that march. It was an eye-opening moment, providing a unique insight into the near mythical status the Sandinista revolution held among people there.

Fast forward to June 2018 and the streets of Managua are again filled with Nicaraguans who see themselves as revolutionaries. The difference this time though is that it is Sandinista leader and current president Daniel Ortega they are trying to topple.

More than a month after changes to Nicaragua’s social security system triggered student-led protests, indignation at a brutal crackdown in which at least 100 people have been killed and over 800 wounded has morphed into an all-out challenge to Ortega’s rule.

Protesters demand he step down, regional diplomatic body the Organisation of American States said last week he should hold early elections.

So far, Ortega has shown no signs of heeding that call, and the violence has only worsened. Writing in a blog last week the young Nicaraguan journalist Cinthia Membreno summed up the frustrations of many among a younger generation who believe the time has come for Ortega to stand down.

“Over the past 11 years, I, and many other young Nicaraguans, have come to see Ortega not as a revolutionary hero but as the face of dictatorship,” wrote Membreno.

“But until a month ago, it was hard to believe that anything would ever change. Today, I get the impression that we are about to witness another kind of revolution and another moment of freedom. This time, we hope, it will be different,” she added.

There is a certain irony in that many of today’s protesters, including Membreno, will no doubt have been reared on the oral histories and stories of those revolutionary times back in 1979 when Somoza was overthrown by the Sandinistas of which Ortega was part.

In any understanding of the current mood in Nicaragua it is important to recognise the resonance the Sandinista revolution still has for many. It may be the best part of 40 years ago now, but looking back on those days when as a young journalist on his first foreign assignment I was meant to have a degree of professional detachment, I still recall myself being somewhat in awe of the Sandinistas.

Their fight from the hills and jungles which was brought into Nicaragua’s cities with the support of the civilian population was the stuff of legend. Like so many ordinary Nicaraguans, I too believed the Sandinistas represented the best hope for giving back a disenfranchised people a stake in their own future.

For 43 years the Somoza family had ruthlessly ruled over this Central American country. By 1979, Somoza was a dictator who thought nothing of diverting foreign earthquake aid to his own warehouses. Here was a ruler who once said: “I don’t want an educated population; I want oxen.” He and his cadres quite literally bled their people to death, the president and his son being both part owners of a company called Plasmaferesis.

This was a business that collected blood plasma from up to 1,000 of Nicaragua’s poorest people every day for sale in the United States and Europe. The homeless, the alcoholics, the desperately poor went to sell half a litre for a few Nicaraguan cordobas in order to survive, while Somoza and his family pocketed the vast profits from the exported blood plasma.

“The people united will never be defeated,” was the revolutionary slogan on the streets all those years ago when Somoza was overthrown. Today it’s being chanted again, but by a very different generation with very different expectations.

“This is a civic revolution, unprecedented in my country,” said Violeta Granera, a sociologist who ran as an opposition vice-presidential candidate against Ortega in 2016.

The protests, she said, were nothing less than “a national demand for a total change in the economic, political and social system”.

Last week, after a brief pause for dialogue, violence returned to the streets of Managua as police and pro-Sandinista supporters clashed with opposition protesters. At night those opposition protesters hunker behind barricades of paving stones pulled up from the streets armed with homemade mortars for clashes with pro-Ortega gangs whom witnesses and rights groups blame for many of the casualties.

Watching television footage of the running street battles these last few days, I couldn’t help thinking how like the Sandinistas of the revolutionary days the current young protesters appeared. With their masks and homemade mortars they stood behind barricades that could have come straight out of those days in 1979 and the early 1980s.

According to Reuters news agency, daily road blockades have snarled transportation across the country as students and farmers erect these makeshift barricades to damage the economy and wear down the government. The government, meanwhile, estimates the turmoil has cost the economy some $250 million. On Wednesday, a march through the capital, dubbed “the Mother of All Marches” and led by mothers of those killed during earlier protests, ended when gunmen opened fire on the crowd. Witnesses have accused police and their civilian allies of initiating the violence that left as many as 18 people dead and more than 200 wounded.

The Managua-based opposition newspaper La Prensa accused Ortega of transforming the peaceful demonstration into “a bloodbath”. “Due to the situation of insecurity that reined throughout the night it was difficult to arrive at the exact number of fatal victims,” it said. “Every day they’re killing more people,” Gonzalo Carrion, a lawyer with the Nicaraguan Centre for Human Rights, said of government forces. “They are causing a wave of terror.”

His views are echoed by other rights groups. Last week, Amnesty International reported that the Nicaraguan authorities have adopted a strategy of repression, characterised by the excessive use of force, extrajudicial executions, control of the media, and the use of pro-government paramilitary groups. On the face of it not unlike what the Somocista did all those years ago.

“The Nicaraguan authorities have turned on their own people in a vicious, sustained and frequently lethal assault on their rights to life, freedom of expression and peaceful assembly,” said Erika Guevara-Rosas, Americas director at Amnesty International.

For the loose alliance of students, farmers, politicians and academics who have come together on the streets, it will not be easy to dislodge Ortega. That now seems to be their express aim rather than just looking for concessions from the government.

Ortega has rejected calls for his exit while reportedly stepping up security around his mansion in Managua.

“We want peace for all Nicaraguan families, security for all Nicaraguan families,” Ortega told a counter-rally on Wednesday, according to the government-controlled newspaper, El 19.

Given his revolutionary background Ortega is no stranger to political pressures and street confrontations, but nevertheless he looks more isolated and vulnerable now than at any time in his current 11-year tenure as president.

Support from the Catholic Church and the private sector is wavering. The latest sign of fracturing came on Wednesday, when after just four days of talks, Nicaragua’s Episcopal Conference of Catholic bishops suspended a “national dialogue” that had widely been seen as a chance for Ortega to take the wind out of the protests by making small concessions.

Many in the private sector, too, are openly backing protesters and demanding change, turning against Ortega after an uneasy alliance in recent years that has underpinned strong economic growth.

In its most explicit move yet, Reuters reported that the Superior Council for Private Enterprise in Nicaragua, which represents the private sector, called on businesses to “join the clamour of mothers, grandmothers and wives who demand justice for the murder of their loved ones”.

Elsewhere and perhaps more significantly, there is visible discomfort in the military. A solidly Sandinista organisation constructed by Ortega’s brother from the original revolutionary army that overthrew Somoza, in recent days it has signalled its refusal to appear in the streets.

Last month, rather symbolically, former Sandinista officers held a meeting in the town of Masaya, destination of the repliegue marchers in 1979. Some of the most brutal clashes of the last few weeks have taken place in the town and one of the former officers at the meeting made clear the position he and his former Sandinista comrades have taken.

“All of us fought the overthrow of the dictatorship of Somoza. Then we participated in the defence of the revolution against the Contras,” said Carlo Breles, a former Sandinista commander. “Now we are initiating a third struggle, against the dictatorship of Ortega-Murillo,” he added, referring to the president’s wife Rosario Murillo, vice-president and widely seen as a power behind the Ortega throne.

But despite some shifts in political position away form Ortega by some former Sandinistas, many remain loyal to the president and insist the current protests are the work of right-wing provocateurs.

Some even go a far as to suggest that the CIA and other external forces are stoking up the violence and instability, keen to see regime change in Nicaragua, one of the longest-standing leftist governments in Latin America. While some sceptics call such claims nothing more than a conspiracy diversionary tactic aimed at taking pressure off Ortega, the US and CIA have a long history of interfering with elected governments in Latin America, from Chile to El Salvador, and Argentina to Haiti.

In a recent report online for the Latin American TV Channel Telesur, entitled Rebellion or Counter-Revolution: Made In US In Nicaragua?, writer Achim Rodner highlighted how three Nicaraguan students are currently touring Europe and Sweden in search of support for their protest campaign at home. At least one of the students represents an organisation Rodner alleges is funded and created by the National Democratic Institute (NDI) a US organisation whose president is Madeleine Albright, former US secretary of state.

The writer goes on to suggest that the NDI and other similar organisations have extensive activities in Nicaragua, with thousands of activists trained to “change society”.

In what Rodner describes as “subversive tasks”, the NDI, he says, also works in Venezuela, another country under a leftist government the US has sought regime change in for some time.

Against such claims it is worth noting though that Telesur, the channel where Rodner’s report appeared, is itself headquartered in Caracas, Venezuela, and among its multi-state funders are Cuba and Nicaragua. For now, conspiracies aside, what is clear is that Nicaraguans are once again being trampled underfoot at the hands of an authoritarian regime.

All those years ago the Sandinistas created history through their revolution, overthrow of Somoza and events like the tactical retreat from Managua to Masaya. Now though it looks increasingly like president Daniel Ortega himself will be the once forced to retreat in the not to distant future.