ROMAN GONZALEZ
Roman Gonzalez returns to boxing this weekend against Moises Fuentes knowing defeat could spell the end. But it’s not just the trajectory of his career that changed when he lost two fights last year, as Thomas Kershaw explains
A revealing feature on the former P4P king who has a spot on the undercard
GOD is with me and the [Nicaraguan] people. He is angry with Roman for his bad decisions”, Moises Fuentes declared, appointing himself Nicaragua’s karmic deliverer. “Roman is doing things wrong and has abandoned the people for personal interests. People change, Roman changed and knew another life.”
On April 18, 2018, hoards of elderly Nicaraguans abandoned their barrios to swamp Managua’s main street. Supported by thousands of protestors who wanted to protect their pensions, they marched peacefully through the country’s capital, their pale blue and white stripe flags melding silently into the skyline. Hours later, the police opened fire. Twenty-six protestors were killed and journalists were mauled by the president’s militant support group, the Sandinista Youth.
Nicaragua descended into bedlam. Police and protesters clashed across nine cities. Fires marked Managua’s streets like a candlelit vigil, plumes merging above the city centre where the masked motorcyclists looted. One hundred days later and 448 Nicaraguans had been killed under the President Ortega’s orders. Almost 600 were still missing, reappearing sporadically in semi-lifeless stacks on the pavement after being tortured by the police.
Daniel Ortega, the leader of the Sandinistas, was a socialist revolutionary who dethroned the dictatorship in Nicaragua and battled the Contras as the country became a Cold War kernel. Eventually losing leadership to the Contras, he returned to power 17 years later in 2007, promising to prop up the poor.
But the political war between the Sandinistas and the Contra rebels still divided Nicaragua. Many of the revolutionaries who’d fought with Ortega in the ‘80s, whose pensions the president now sought to reduce, claimed he had corrupted their ideology only serving to enrich himself while the barrios starved in squalor. They separated from the Sandinistas to create rival factions, but in 2016 Ortega ousted his political opponents and strengthened his authoritarian rule. Faced with his leadership until 2021, contempt began to bubble and bleed from the barrios.
In the midst of this year’s protests, Ortega organised a counter-rally in the capital to bolster his authority. Sandinistas flooded Managua’s arterial road, waving their red and black ➤