Ortega government’s deadly crackdown enrages students
MASAYA, Nicaragua — Alvaro Gomez was 17 when he volunteered to take up arms to defend President Daniel Ortega’s Sandinista revolution against U.S.-backed Contra rebels in the 1980s. He lost a leg in an accident while on a mission.
Now 48, Gomez recently lost his 23-year-old son, also named Alvaro, who was fatally shot as police clashed with youths after confronting a student-led protest against Ortega’s government in the Nicaraguan city of Masaya. Gomez believes riot police pulled the trigger.
“It makes you ashamed to say you defended the revolution,” said the high school math teacher who supported Ortega when he lost re-election in 1990 and when he won the presidency again in 2006. “For what? ... So that they could come and kill our children?”
Ortega has long been able to count on students, organized by Sandinista Front leaders in campus governments, as some of the most reliable backers of his leftist administration. But now many students are turning on him, organizing independently to oppose his government, enraged by a deadly crackdown on street protests last month by police and Sandinista Youth gangs. Students form the backbone of a protest movement that has left his administration shaken.
How Nicaragua emerges from its political crisis will likely depend on the willingness of students like the younger Gomez to continue confronting Ortega’s government. The new generation does not know war, though their parents and grandparents struggle to reconcile their memories and loyalty to the revolution with anger over what has been harsh repression against their children.
The nongovernmental Permanent Commission on Human Rights on Monday put the death toll in the protests at 65, while other groups and the government have documented lower totals.
Gomez said his son, like other students, was angered by seeing Sandinista Youth taunt and attack a small group of pensioners who tried to march in opposition to social security cuts April 19 in Masaya. Police quickly blocked the march and support grew for the students.
But pushed into Masaya’s Monimbo neighborhood by riot police and Sandinista Youth, the young protesters pried up paving stones to build waist-high barricades.
They hurled rocks and Molotov cocktails and fired homemade mortars fashioned from welded pipe segments. Police fired tear gas, rubber bullets and, in some cases, live rounds.
Meanwhile, the students have not organized sufficiently to express a list of demands for upcoming negotiations with the government, which the Roman Catholic Church has agreed to mediate. Talks are expected to begin Wednesday.