{"id":5676,"date":"2019-07-19T09:55:52","date_gmt":"2019-07-19T17:55:52","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.entremundos.org\/revista\/?p=5676&lang=en"},"modified":"2019-07-19T10:04:37","modified_gmt":"2019-07-19T18:04:37","slug":"outline-of-the-conflict-in-nicaragua","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.entremundos.org\/revista\/uncategorized\/outline-of-the-conflict-in-nicaragua\/?lang=en","title":{"rendered":"Outline of the Conflict in Nicaragua"},"content":{"rendered":"

By: Jason Klarl<\/strong><\/p>\n

The following are excerpts from a May 2019 interview with Lauren, (her real name has been changed as a precaution) a community development worker who had been living in Nicaragua for nearly three years before the political unrest shook the country in April 2018.<\/em><\/p>\n

Tell me about some of your first interactions with Nicaraguans…<\/strong><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>
Daniel Ortega, in the investiture as president in 1984.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

I landed in Managua and my boss picked me up at the airport, which was great. He\u2019s a Nicaraguan man, the director of the organization. We had a three hour drive. We started talking about the upcoming election where Daniel Ortega was going to run again. I asked him his opinion and he said that Daniel Ortega is becoming a dictator, and had a dictatorship… (the word of dictatorship in Spanish is dictadura, and dura<\/em> means hard, so he was making a word play arguing it wasn\u2019t a dicta-dura but a \u2018dictabuena\u2019, and that he was a good dictator\u201d. At the time what Daniel Ortega
\nhad been doing was repaving roads, increasing healthcare, and having some better improvements in education. And I think that in general Nicaraguans are…they have the war, the very long civil war in their very recent memory. And many people who are in their 50\u2019s and 60\u2019s and 40\u2019s lost their brother, their mom, their dad. And nobody wanted to think that Daniel Ortega, who was the savior, had become what he\u2019d overthrown. So there was a lot of tolerance, like:
\n\u2018Yeah he\u2019s a dictator, but he\u2019s \u2018dictabuena\u2019.<\/p>\n

Was there any time where you felt like there was any sort of tension or any thing like that with how [Nicaraguans] regarded estadounidenses?<\/strong><\/p>\n

I think that there was a very clear understanding that what the CIA did, what Ronald Reagan did isn\u2019t the same as me. I didn\u2019t do that. And I do think that people from the U.S. as a whole have benefited from the actions of the U.S. government. So it\u2019s not to say that I\u2019ve never benefited from the corruption and imperialism that our country has done. But I \u2026 never felt that someone thought I had done any malicious acts towards them. I did have a few conversations with people where they said, \u2018Do you know what your country did to my country\u2019? And because I had
\nread books like Blood of Brothers and The Country Under My Skin, and other books about the revolution and civil war, I was able to say yes. I don\u2019t understand how it felt to live here during the war, but I am not completely ignorant of it.<\/p>\n

(I asked Lauren to respond to a quote from a Bernie Sanders interview from 1985, shortly after his visit to Nicaragua):<\/strong><\/p>\n

One of the things that I think I learned on my trip, you know as a socialist…the word socialism
\ndoes not frighten me. And I think it\u2019s probably fair to say that the Nicaraguan government is primarily a socialist government. But what you learn down there is that socialism, or anti-capitalism, is much less prevalent than nationalism. Basically what they\u2019re saying is, we\u2019ve been under the thumb of the Marines\u2014as you know the Marines installed the Somoza family\u2014we\u2019ve been under the thumb of the United States for our entire modern history and we\u2019re not going to
\nbe under the thumb of anybody anymore. Nicaragua is our country. We will do the right
\nthings or the wrong things. We will make our mistakes, but we will make them independently,
\nas an independent, free nation. That is the theme of their revolution.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I think that in general Nicaraguans love Nicaragua.\u00a0 And Nicaraguans love Sandino and the Sandinista ideals …<\/p>\n[A] taxi driver told me that one of the boys …I think he was 19, who was killed in Esteli, his father had been one of the Sandinista soldiers who had liberated Daniel Ortega from prison.\u00a0 And the taxi driver told me basically, Daniel Ortega repaid this man by killing his son.\u00a0 He was killed with a sniper.\u00a0 And that same driver told me,\u00a0 \u2018I’m a Sandinista.\u00a0 And I believe in freedom and equality, and not having one landowner own the entire country but instead dividing it amongst the laborers.\u00a0 But I am NOT a Danielista<\/em>.\u00a0 And so I think that Nicaraguans do believe in cooperativism, and working together, and always together is better.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>
Photo: Jorge Mej\u00eda Peralta, Wikimmedia Commons.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

I don\u2019t know how much you feel comfortable speaking about the events of last year, the unrest where people were killed.\u00a0 Please share whatever you\u2019d like.<\/strong><\/p>\n

On April 16th or right around April 16th, the Ortega government announced a social security change.\u00a0 So, essentially retired people, grandma and grandpa we’re going to receive less in their Social Security benefit money each month. And people who work and pay into Social Security were going to have to pay more.\u00a0 So people did the math and realized that that wasn’t fair.\u00a0 So grandma and grandpa started protesting on April 17th.\u00a0 \u00a0\u00a0 \u2026\u00a0 At the end of May and beginning of June there was a national day of protest.\u00a0 So basically Le\u00f3n, the city where I was living, on a Tuesday decided to have a paro.<\/em>\u00a0 That basically means to stop all economic activities so that no taxes are going into the government’s pocket.\u00a0 So every store was closed.\u00a0 There was a woman who sold papaya off of a basket on her head every single day.\u00a0 Every single day<\/em> except that day. \u00a0And I heard her yelling \u2018papaya\u2019 every single day, and so even she was protesting.\u00a0 But when the barricades were going up I went to one of my neighbor’s houses.\u00a0 And she’s like 80, so she lived through the war.\u00a0 And she told us, \u2018Do you have barricades on your street?\u00a0 You need to make them to protect yourselves from police.\u2019\u00a0 So there was, and probably still is, a real fear.<\/p>\n

The full interview is available on travelogue.media http:\/\/bit.ly\/2WsOZMQ<\/a><\/p>\n

Cover photo: Flickr de Jorge Mej\u00eda Peralta.<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

By: Jason Klarl The following are excerpts from a May 2019 interview with Lauren, (her real name has been changed as a precaution) a community development worker who had been living in Nicaragua for nearly three years before the political unrest shook the country in April 2018. Tell me about some of your first interactions […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":5603,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_exactmetrics_skip_tracking":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_active":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_note":"","_exactmetrics_sitenote_category":0,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[425,453,424,1],"tags":[1784,1782,1783,1780,1781,1785],"class_list":["post-5676","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-community-action-en-2","category-frontpage-en","category-politics","category-uncategorized","tag-conflict-nicaragua","tag-daniel-ortega","tag-interview-nicaragua","tag-nicaragua-protests","tag-nicaragua-revolution","tag-war-nicaragua"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.entremundos.org\/revista\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/07\/foto-flickr-jorge-mejia-peralta-para-pag-22.jpg?fit=1000%2C667&ssl=1","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p7ljt7-1ty","jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":5761,"url":"https:\/\/www.entremundos.org\/revista\/politics\/community-action-en-2\/the-revolution-that-was-initiated-by-the-grandparents\/?lang=en","url_meta":{"origin":5676,"position":0},"title":"The 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