Concrete barricades become symbol of Nicaragua clashes
THEY ALSO POSE QUESTION OF WHO CAN CLAIM TO BE COUNTRY’S TRUE REVOLUTIONARIES
Nicaragua has become a country of barricades as what began as a protest against pension cuts has quickly spiralled into a wideranging civic uprising against what many see as President Daniel Ortega’s autocratic 11year rule.
The improvised roadblocks are a ubiquitous marker of Nicaragua’s current crisis, serving as both bulwark and emblem.
Opposition newspapers publish maps of the protesters’ barricades on major highways around the republic. And in a country that lacks conventional street addresses — which instead are rendered as directions indicating a certain number of blocks from a given landmark — the joke currently doing the rounds on social media is that a typical Nicaraguan address is now: “From the barricade by the park, two barricades south and three barricades up.”
Nicaragua’s streets have for decades been paved with polygonal concrete blocks known as adoquines.
Piquant irony
At the time of the popular, Sandinista-led revolution in 1979 against the dictator Anastasio Somoza, rebels found it was easy to lever these blocks out of the roadway and stack them into effective barricades as the armed revolt spread through Nicaragua’s cities and towns. The fact that the adoquines themselves were manufactured in a cement plant owned by the Somoza family added a piquant irony.
So while on one level the barricades are simply practical — staking out territory and providing a measure of protection from the police and armed supporters of the government who have so far left nearly 130 protesters dead — they also represent a battle for the iconography of Sandinismo and who can claim to be Nicaragua’s true revolutionaries.
Many of today’s protesters draw a direct line from barricades of the 1979 insurrection to their own uprising against what they see as a new dictator. But supporters of the government see themselves as the true heirs of the revolution — and those on the street as the agents of reactionary, possibly foreign-sponsored, forces.
Ortega, 72, still heads the Sandinista National Liberation Front, a party whose name recalls its origins as a Che Guevara-style guerrilla group. These days, its old red and black colours have been replaced by fuchsia, apparently at the suggestion of the president’s wife and now vice-president, Rosario Murillo, who has denounced the protesters as “toxic groups”.
Critics, though, allege that the party has long since become a personal vehicle for the president.