2023-04-26 18:05:44
They say that when History happens with a capital letter, it enters everyone’s house. That was what happened in Nicaragua five years ago. After that April everything has changed so drastically that today it can be said that April 19 is another watershed in our history; a before and after, as it was on February 25, 1990 and July 19, 1979. There is no Nicaraguan who does not know where he was on that date. In the macro and in the micro, for the general and the personal, everything changed because History entered our homes and it is no longer possible to go back. As a friend says: that country will not return.
nothing has ever been the same
Nothing has been the same in Nicaragua since then. Five years and 355 murders later, almost 300,000 exiles and exiles, a little more than 5% of the national population, with counties, hamlets and depopulated neighborhoods, the country is another. Five years ago the biggest human rights crisis began in times of peace and it does not seem that it has hit bottom: the persecution of the Catholic religion, the expulsion of priests, the imprisonment of Monsignor Álvarez, the dispossession of convents, the absurd prohibition of the processions during Holy Week and the arbitrary imprisonments show that the repressive appetite of the dictatorship has not been satisfied. There is no more daily bread; instead he prescribes the prison of each day.
changed the state
As the GHREN Report points out, the Nicaraguan State did not begin to commit serious human rights violations in 2018; but as of that date it became a set of apparatuses articulated to carry out “a discriminatory policy to systematically persecute and silence everyone and dismantle any civic or political organization that maintains positions different from that of the Government, or that is perceived as critical or adversary of it. With this, he took the definitive step towards an organization that, instead of complying with the obligation to protect its people from violations and abuses, was (and continues to be) the main perpetrator by action and omission of such horrendous crimes.
society changed
The social explosion shook to the last foundation of society that found the channel to release anger in 2018 after more than eleven years of abuse and grievances. The fear contained for so long broke the ties that kept her in a lethargy similar to apathy. But everything was blown up: the stadiums full, the “bacchanal” every weekend and the “I don’t get involved in anything because politics doesn’t feed me”. That same population took to the streets in human floods, unaware that months later they would have to emigrate by force. If the profound change in society can be seen in one trait, it is in exile, particularly in Costa Rica. It is the clearest photo that we are a broken society, due to separation, pain and the destruction of thousands of life projects.
And changed the economy
Despite the recovery in 2021 and 2022 reported by official sources without independent verification, after two years of negative growth rates, the economy also changed due to the withdrawal of external cooperation as a sign of the rejection by donor countries of the repression, and for the implementation of an isolationist foreign policy that led the dictatorship to break relations with some of them. A sector in which this change has been most evident was tourism, where before 2018 promising prospects were opening up, encouraged by the marketing of being the safest country in Central America, but in a little less than a year it was included among the the most insecure and the least legally reliable for foreign investment.
political parties have changed
How could it be otherwise, the rebellion passed over all political parties. He found them out of place. That is why they were unable to capitalize on the protests nor did they appear at the dialogue tables. Rather, they were forced to join the platforms (Civic Alliance and UNAB) formed by the dozens of groups that emerged in the heat of the protests. The painful internal disputes in 2021 and the subsequent waves of repression finished doing the demolition work. Today the parties are rubble, boats adrift, drafts that meet in collective sessions to lick their wounds, but nothing more. Five years later, each says the other is worse, and they are all right.
changed the political culture
Derived from the crisis of the parties, the self-convocation arose, the greatest revulsion that Nicaraguan political culture has had in recent times. Participation in the first person and direct action, five years ago became values that were imposed on the traditional calls to mobilize from political and social organizations, and with this the factor of representativeness as a source of political legitimacy was pulverized. Paradoxically, the questioning of representativeness continues to be one of the stones in the wheels of the car of unity. Likewise, throughout these five years human rights have been established as a cardinal value of political culture that no one dares to marginalize through political agreements.
changed civil society
Of course, civil society also changed. The generalized mobilization of the population also occurred outside the civil society organizations known up to then. This opened the doors to a new type of civil society, following the format of other protests that had occurred before in Latin America, where the autonomous structure was not so much at the level of its internal organization as its degree of mobilization around the axis of government. political change. Seen in this way, the birth of this new civil society occurred directly and in the public space with all the social energy released, but also with all the weaknesses derived from the other face of civil society as a space for conflict between its different currents and agendas. . Finally, it is impossible to ignore the impact of the disappearance of the associative fabric of the more than 3,000 non-governmental organizations of different natures.
changed the dictatorship
But the project of the dictatorship also changed. The protests caused the dialogue and consensus format on which the dictatorship intended to build its hegemonic project to collapse, and this forced it to opt for pure and simple domination. The result was to turn all its mobilization apparatus into instruments of repression. This implied transforming State corporatism and its agents, the Sandinista Youth, the National Union of University Students of Nicaragua (UNEN), the unions and the Citizen Power Councils (CPC), into gears of state and non-state violence, reconverting them in paramilitaries with the addition of active civilian police and ex-military.
Changed the way of living
This repressive regime and its decision to jail and banish anyone also changed the way of life in Nicaragua. They are changes in sociability due to running out of friends who have gone into exile or who have emigrated in search of a better life; forced changes in the workplace for fear that the profession is among those criminalized by the regime, such as sociologists, journalists, doctors, artists, among others; Mistrust in others, among neighbors, among people in a queue, on the bus, in those at the neighboring table, and even among family members. In short, destructive changes to the bases of what is known as social capital.
The opportunity for change
But the April barrage, like all crises, also opened windows of opportunity. The sharpening of the contradictions with the dictatorship has also placed us before better horizons than before 2018. We have gone from disaffection to commitment, and from silence to the testimony of everyone, every day and anywhere. There are no historical changes that do not bring opportunities to end tyranny.
In the words of Galeano, “No story is silent. No matter how much they burn it, tear it up, and lie about it, human history refuses to shut its mouth.”
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