Senseless repression gives a meaning to Nicaraguan rebellion

The openMovements series invites leading social scientists to share their research results and perspectives on contemporary social struggles.

Protests in Managua, 2018. Wikimedia Commons.

It could be said that brutal repression was precisely
what brought the citizens out onto the streets. In order to examine the
correlation between repression and the protests (in that order, and not the
other way around), we must understand that the government deployed its coercive
mechanisms in successive stages, both before and during the crisis, and that it
"adjusted" them to the actual "operation theatre" (rural or
urban).

On the other hand, the stigmatization of groups (students,
entrepreneurs, intellectuals, merchants, peasants, ordinary citizens, workers,
feminists, political leaders) and the selective threats against certain
individuals reflect the tilt that the government wishes to give to the
narrative surrounding the events.

The messages intended to elicit support from
allies (within and outside the country) also affected the forms of action of
its opponents.

In a chronicle entitled ‘The vandal grandmother against the invisible men’, sociologist José
Luis Rocha asks: "Why does a government that has more than 20,000 guards,
between police officers and military personnel, and several thousand
paramilitaries at his disposal, need to arrest with a disproportionate show of
force, as if confronting a resurrected Osama Bin Laden, a 78-year-old lady who
did nothing but offer some water to the participants in the protest
demonstrations?".

Doña Coquito, Rocha goes on to say, "went to the
protest marches to give the water bags she usually sells for a living for free.
That's why she was arrested last weekend by a raging, uncoordinated police
squad – no fewer than five agents, perhaps as many as ten.

She was not
proclaiming anything. She was not demanding anything. She did not raise her
hand in protest. She has never in her life uttered a word against the regime in
public.

She was simply giving water to thirsty protesters. Even when she was
later interviewed about her detention, she did not curse the regime. She told
the facts: 'They called me an old cow and threw me onto the truck like a
pig'."

"Doña
Coquito, water purveyor to the protesters, together with dancer Doña Flor and marathon runner Alex
Vanegas, has become a symbol of the rebellion.

lmost dragging her huipil, Doña Flor was shoved and pushed towards a police patrol and then carried to El Chipote for displaying folk dances at the marches. 

lmost dragging her huipil, Doña Flor was shoved and pushed towards a police patrol and then
carried to El Chipote for displaying folk dances at the marches. 62- year-old
marathon runner Alex Vanegas, who was touring the country calling for the
release of political prisoners, had already been arrested twice.

These are
three characters of the rebellion. They are not leaders – God forbid, they
would probably say. They only gave some water, danced, and ran. Three
activities that terrify a millionaire family entrenched in their mammoth
housing complex which includes à la carte
room service."

Doña Coquito, Doña
Flor and Don Alex are a part of the
'ordinary people' who have courageously and gracefully been involved in the
April 19 movement.

They are moved by their values and have been hurled into
action by the events – by the repression, most of all – and have ended up right
in the eye of the hurricane.

30 years ago, they would have been nothing more
than an anecdote which would have gone around by word of mouth. Today, they are
three heroes of the rebellion.

They are ordinary people who do not lead anything
or anybody. They do not seek a ministerial appointment, an embassy, or a cushy
job. They have not written any manifestoes, and until a week ago they had never
set foot in a television studio.

Today, they are champions of the movement.
They and the university students made their debut on the tiny screens of cell
phones before making it to the television. In a way, they were "approved
of" by people through social media and identified by the regime as
dangerous individuals.

"On the other corner, their contenders: the
superheroes of the regime, the paramilitaries. Not only are they diametrically
opposed because of their support of Ortega and his brutal methods.

They are
opponents because they cover their faces. If Doña Coquito, Doña Flor
and Don Alex are effective because
they are now famous, the paramilitaries draw their strength from their
anonymity. They are invisible. The hood over their heads not only renders them
unknown to the rest of the people, it renders them unknown to themselves."

"The two opponents of the April rebellion
are those who go defenceless and show their face, and those who hide under a
hood. Those who show themselves and those who cover themselves.

Some are moved
by compassion, others commit crimes that they do not dare to confess even to
themselves. But the thousands of paramilitaries who hide their identity to ease
their conscience have been unable to intimidate the opposition. And the regime
feels insecure when a defenseless 78-year-old woman is offering water in the
streets. Fear of what?"

This portrait of the resistance goes against the
grain of the discourse that people in power have tried to impose: the tale of a
Machiavellian opposition moved by dark forces and manipulated by foreign
agents.

But it is also confounding if, like Honduran sociologist Tomas Andino –
among the first observers who have tried to analyze "what’s happening in Nicaragua"
– the reasons presented are mainly derived from a "deep social discontent
that has been piling up for more than a decade, in the context of a number of
contradictions between the government and the people, incubated in a Nicaraguan
brand of capitalism, together with unpopular decisions, dictatorial attitudes
and fiscal measures taken by the Daniel Ortega and Rosario Murillo duo."

This explanation has some validity, especially because it questions both the
official discourse and the credulity of those who have accepted without
questioning, the story of the "safest country in the region",
friendly to foreign investment thanks to a broad social consensus promoted by
the government.

If the problem had been confined to the
controversial reform of the Nicaraguan Social Security Institute, which was
presented as the trigger for the protests, then the fact that Daniel Ortega
withdrew it and then surrounded himself with the managers of the Free Zone
companies to make the announcement, should have sufficed to calm the spirits.

But there was already more than a dozen dead. In addition, in the way it was
staged, the message of the president sounded rather like a threat, a blackmail
to the workers employed in the Free Trade Zones (numbering more than 100,000).
In fact, as an organized sector, workers have been notably absent from the
protests.

On the other hand, with few exceptions, the union leaders' chorus
proclaimed, as an insurmountable horizon, the right of workers to continue
being exploited by foreign investors.

Over the last two centuries, the political life of the country has been marked by several attempts at rebellion which have been brutally repressed, while a great mass of the population, bent on day-to-day survival, remained relatively "calm".

It is interesting that some in the
European Left who have expressed their support for the Ortega government are
not denouncing what they would never accept in their own countries. In the
context of the recent railroad workers' strike in France for example, those who
claim that the population is "hostage" to the demonstrators and
strikers would almost certainly be labelled as a mange.

A
"historiographical geography" of the rebellion

Another observer of Nicaragua’s rebellion has
examined what happened in places which used to be strongholds of the struggle
against the Somoza dictatorship in the 1970s, such as the indigenous district
of Monimbó (in the city of Masaya), or the popular neighborhoods bordering the
Northern Highway in Managua, and which now stood out again not only for their
participation in the protests but also for their self-organizing capacity.

Extending his analysis from the particular cases to a more general overview, he
highlights "the existence of a great mass of the population which has been
historically excluded not only in economic and social terms, but in terms of
political participation and representation. It is characterized by the presence
of extended families, strong family ties and, in the neighborhoods and
settlements where they live, strong community ties".

"The most relevant characteristic of
political power in Nicaragua has been vertical and authoritarian governments
controlling discretionally all the levers of the State, and particularly the
armed forces.

Over the last two centuries, the political life of the country
has been marked by several attempts at rebellion which have been brutally
repressed, while a great mass of the population, bent on day-to-day survival,
remained relatively "calm".

Massive uprisings only occurred when
large sectors of the population perceived that the abuse of discretional power
by the ruling sectors had crossed a certain line, and/or dislocated daily life
in an unacceptable way. In other words, when power intervened in their lives in
a way which was perceived as unjust, arbitrary and abusive."

"An outstanding feature of the popular
sectors in Nicaragua has been their high religiosity expressed in dozens of
religious festivals, a syncretic religiosity that combines religious ceremonies
with dances, music, liquor and celebration.

This religiosity also explains why
the powers that be have tried to use a religious language and exploit conservative
religious prejudices, such as qualifying feminist groups advocating the
restoration of therapeutic abortion as "criminal", and resorted to
allying with the more retrograde sectors of the Church.

However, it is also
very interesting that the population, when it rebels, entrusts itself to God and
summons the "Lord of all the armies". A remnant also, perhaps, of the
syncretic religiosity of the indigenous people, who entrusted themselves to
their gods before going to battle."

Both the above accounts put a face to the
indignation: the many faces of a popular, mainly urban citizenry. But what they
say is also true for a broad swath of the rural population which, by joining in
the protests, have found an opportunity not only for advancing their own
struggles, but also for making visible the repression they have been enduring
for many years.

The Anti-Channel Peasant Movement, which had
already organized hundreds of protest marches (despite the militarization of
the area and the recurrent barring of the protesters' access to the capital)
has been the most visible face of discontent in the countryside.

In other
regions, resistance has been the result of the unbridled continuation of mining
undertaken by the government since 2007, and of infrastructure projects which
have involved dispossession of land and the displacement of the population. In
recent years, the renewed presence of armed groups in the countryside has been
evoked.

On several occasions, extrajudicial executions (at the hands of the
army) have been reported which the military authorities have described as
deaths occurred in clashes with criminal groups. In a way, as of April, the
expansion of the repression to the cities has contributed to make visible the
silent (and silenced) anger in the countryside.

Is fear of a similar outcome the reason why Carlos Fonseca Terán, the self-proclaimed "ideologue" of the Sandinista Front, labelled as "nefarious" the so-called Arab revolutions?

This phenomenon recalls what
happened in 2011 in Tunisia. The riots which, in previous months and years, had
been brutally repressed in remote provinces of the country went unknown until
the revolt reached the capital and ended the despotic government of the ruling
family.

Is fear of a similar outcome the reason why Carlos Fonseca Terán, the
self-proclaimed "ideologue" of the Sandinista Front, labelled as
"nefarious" the so-called Arab revolutions?

It seems that he and other regime advisers did
not see the dangerous boomerang effect that they had identified in the distant
Arab countries coming their way.

The discourse consisting in justifying the
elimination of some subversive elements in the countryside in order to
guarantee peace lost all legitimacy when the term "terrorist" was
extended first to the students, and then to the population at large.

From the
logic of power, this "qualitative leap" from selective elimination to
mass repression invalidates also the endlessly repeated claim that a small
group of agitators, financed and directed from abroad by forces of the right,
are actively engaged in destabilizing the government.

Paradoxically, the lack of effective leadership
on the part of the traditional opposition parties in the protests, although
there were quite a few members of these parties who sought to position
themselves for the future, was highlighted when the regime recruited
paramilitaries to take on weapons of war against the students.

Suddenly, young
people without any particular political preparation were propelled to the front
of the crowds motivated by an indignation whose magnitude they quite probably
had not foreseen, nor had the capacity to lead, and much less to channel. In
the end, what the repressive strategy of the government achieved was bringing
together sectors (feminists, rural people, merchants, students) the interests
of which might not have met otherwise.