The reaction to the campaign (see the last post) was to use real pictures of the violent repression with the slogan “The blue ones. Murder Police” or to use pictures of the students in prison with the slogan “the blue ones are my favorites” (the prisoners' uniform is also blue).

This is an example of one of the official government campaigns. After killing several citizens, including teenagers, the police´s image has been completely discredited. Using cartoons and the slogan “the blue ones are my favorites” (the police uniform is blue) the government tried to improve the image of the police.

PLEASE READ THIS

i don’t use this website to talk about what happens in my country (nicaragua) but right now everything is upside down, Daniel Ortega and Rosario Murillo (president and vicepresident) made some huge changes to our taxes because they used money from our social security and we couldn’t handle any more bs so we began this revolution pacifically, but now college students are getting killed by the police, the government is threatening many people just to get them to shut everyone up who is against them, they burned and destroyed many universities, almost burned a building while people were inside, hurt many elders and kids, censored many channels on national tv to manipulate information, i’m just-

WE ARE NOT EVEN BEING VIOLENT WE ARE JUST PROTESTING PACIFICALLY FOR OUR RIGHTS, PROTESTING BECAUSE WE’RE TIRED OF HAVING A GOVERNMENT THAT JUST TAKES ADVANTAGE OF THEIR POWER, THEY TOOK EVERYTHING FROM US, WE CAN’T TAKE ANY MORE INJUSTICES, WE WANT THEM TO LEAVE

WE ARE GETTING KILLED AND WE ARE SCARED BUT WE WANT TO BE HEARD, WE NEED THE WHOLE WORLD TO SCREAM WITH US

NOS ESTÁN MATANDO

POR FAVOR AYÚDENNOS A SER ESCUCHADOS

#SOSNICARAGUA

Day of the dead with so many young faces. They will remain among us. They will always be present and we will continue their claim for justice. They will not be forgotten.

This selection of images depicts many of the things that happened on April 18th. In the first image contains the call for protest in which we passed a list of precautions to be considered since we already knew we were in danger.

The second and third image shows the violence on behalf of the government’s supporters towards those protesting against the social security reforms in the city of León.

The fourth and fifth image shows tweets regarding the environment of intimidation towards the protest that was taking place in Camino de Oriente before the violent acts initiated. The people on white t-shirts with colored letters are the government’s supporters and you can tell how they’re aligned in front of the protestors. (I will add a video that better represents this environment in the next post).

The sixth image is from when the violence had already taken over and it shows how the 100% noticias’ cameraman was assaulted. The seventh picture presents some of the tweets that were being sent at that moment, asking for help for the protestors being assaulted in Camino de Oriente.

The last picture shows the protest that was held afterward in front of the UCA’s main entrance (I am somewhere in that picture).

Campaign shared on April 18th by officialist accounts. Neither the protests nor the repression was mentioned at all. They try to show they have “the people’s” support. In my opinion, the images are a reflection of the fanaticism characteristic of the government’s supporters.  

In the last image you can see the protest in front of the UCA’s main entrance seen from the mob’s side.

On April 18 we called for the protest against the social security reforms. A few hours before the time that was set for the protest we let people know the location where we were going to meet. It was the parking lot of Camino de Oriente (a place with small business). I was going to reach them after work. The protest started, the riot police was there to intimidate the protesters, the shock forces appeared and started beating people, they stole the protesters’ belongings and some of the journalists’ equipment. Some media and some of the protesters transmitted live on fb. Some people were hiding inside the stores next to the parking lot, some of the business opened their doors.

Those of my friends who were hiding warned me not to go to Camino de Oriente. They told me that we were going to meet in front of the main entrance of the Central American University and to tell people that wasn´t in the protest yet, to go there. I changed my clothes (I was wearing a dress) and put on comfortable clothes in case I needed to run.

We started the protest with around 30 people. Unlike other days, people were showing sympathy to us. People from cars or buses sounded their horns and screamed in support to our claims. More people came and joined us, some were students, some people that were passing by simply stayed with us, we still weren’t a big group but we were more than other times. And then, the shock forces (turbas) arrived.

A group of motorcycles started running on the street from one side to the other. This happened in front of the police that was just around the corner. Some people started leaving because they were afraid. The university closed all the doors, we kept the main door open but students and other workers were afraid to come out because the Turbas were outside. Then, government supporters came in a bus and stopped in front of us. They were screaming insults to us. Then, the mobs arrived in another bus. They started to throw rocks at us. People were going inside the university, everybody was scared. I was scared too and I also wanted to leave but I didn´t want to leave while my friends were still there. We were almost the same amount as we were at the beginning, other people were inside, on the other side of the door. They started throwing a rain of rocks and we ran inside the university. I was one of the last to get inside and some guys behind me closed the door. I didn´t know where my friends were but I was inside the university and I felt safer. I climbed the stairs on the building in front of the main door trying to see them from above and what I saw were the mobs trying to get inside the university. I went down and saw some girls crying. I was trying to calm them down and telling them that we were safe inside when I heard a huge noise and people screaming that the mobs were inside, so I panicked and I ran trying to find a place to hide. I found one of my friends and we started to think about what to do. You could hear mortero noises and other noises that sounded like shots (I was never sure if they were real bullets), and you could hear people running and screaming.

That night, when I finally arrived at my house I checked my phone and a lot of people were trying to reach me, they saw the news and were worried. That day some people were hit, robbed and terrorized. I remember I told one of my friends that at one moment when I was running I thought they were going to kill us, and I was relieved, talking about this like if it was an exaggerated thought. I didn´t know that the killing was going to start the next day.

This video shows the moment in which we were seeking shelter inside the university while the mobs were coming behind us.

“In early April peaceful demonstrations led by environmental groups, rural peasant population (campesinos) and students erupted in different parts of Nicaragua to denounce the slow and insufficient response of the Government to forest fires in the Indio Maíz Biological Reserve.” (OHCHR, 2018. p.13). As usual I participated in these protests and I want to share the images in this video to show how our protests usually went.

We used music, microphones, speakers, megaphones, we created slogans, we painted signs, and we didn´t get involved in violent actions. We knew that the government “shock forces” (fuerzas de choque), “mobs” (turbas), and the riot police were going to harass and intimidate us and maybe beat us, probably they were going to fire tear gas, but we still went into the streets and screamed for what we thought was right.

Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights. (2018). Human right violations and abuses in the context of protest in Nicaragua. 18 april-18 august. Retrieved from https://www.ohchr.org/Documents/Countries/NI/HumanRightsViolationsNicaraguaApr_Aug2018_EN.pdf

I live in a country where 18 of my 30 basic human rights have been raped by the government.

I live in a country where the “president” raped his stepdaughter for more than 20 years, and when she was able to speak, no one believed her, including her mother the vice president…

I live in a country where police officers arrest you if they see you in the streets with your national flag.

I live in a country where the public universities are paramilitary quarters

I live in a country where government forces shoot to kill during pacific protest.

I live in a country where the independent media is attacked by government supporters, is censuared and driven out of signal if they talk about the repression.

I live in a country where being young is equal of being a terrorist.

I live in a country where inocent people is being tortured by the police at jail

I live in Nicaragua. where the government armed forces has killed more than 400 citizens, other 2000 people injured, more than 300 arrested and 197 unfairly judicialyzed  

As one can expect, in reality, a lot of people were mad. Social security is something that affects a lot of different groups with different backgrounds and ages, so this particular decision was something that created a feeling of rejection against the government on a lot of people. Independent media were raising questions about the causes of the social security bankruptcy. They were also calculating how the reforms would change the domestic economy of different people. Independent media and social media were focusing on the effects of the reforms. One social media campaign took the images of the official campaign and added how this would affect people with different incomes. We started making a new call for a protest that was going to take place on April 18th in Managua (the capital). At that moment we didn´t reveal the location so the government wouldn´t block those streets. People in different cities started to echo the call for protest.

On April 16th Daniel Ortega’s Government approved a ruling establishing reforms to the social security. This was a neoliberal measure that put the majority of the crisis’ burden on the workers. The reforms were approved secretly and without major consultation even to the corporative and tripartite instances Ortega’s government had promoted. The reforms were applied through a presidential decree that doesn’t even need to go through the Legislative Assembly. No other government, as far-right as it were, would dare to that much.

According to La Prensa(19/04/2018): “The decree 03-2018 (…) orders to increase, starting from July, the workers’ contribution in 0.75%, which means it’ll go from 6.25% to 7% and the employers’ contribution from 19% to 21% starting from this year’s July. The private sector will also have two increases, one in 2019 and another one in 2020, reaching 22.5% (…) the quote will ascend in January 2019 and in 2020 it will reach 22.5%. The measures also include a 5% deduction from the retirement pensions.

The reforms to the social security were portrayed as something to be thankful for, something to celebrate. As usual, the images of government´s leaders Daniel and Chayo were used in the official campaign.

The hashtag for this campaign was #1demayoInssTrabajoyPaz. (#May1InssWork&Peace) This really bad hashtag makes an allusion to the celebration of international workers’ day (a big celebration in “socialist” Nicaragua). They introduced the word peace in the hashtag because they wanted to portray Nicaragua as a happy and quiet country, especially after they had trouble dealing with the social demand that rose in the last weeks due to the Indio Maíz protests, where they lost popularity. Through their official news channels, online newspaper, and social media they tried to create the image that the reforms were good and that they were supported by the elderly, workers’ unions (I already explained that the unions were controlled by the government), and young people. The main topic of the campaign was to highlight what they didn´t change with the reforms.

Magic Words (breaking a spell) 

I highly recommend this documentary to understand what was happening in Nicaragua before April 2018. Political Violence is not new. 

In 2006, the Sandinista Front for National Liberation (FSLN) lead by Ortega rose to power through an alliance with the corrupt leaders of the liberal parties, the hierarchy of the churches and the entrepreneurial bourgeoisie. Ortega began to destroy the government apparatus, destroying the democratic institutionality and creating a system that supports him as a figure and the dynasty of Ortega-Murillo. This is how he consolidated the power around his figure (which is spread to his family).

A capitalist economic model was established, which obeys the guidelines of the IMF, allied with foreign capitol, big transnationals, the national private sector (COSEP, which does not represent the small businesses), free zone enterprises. So there was an economic growth, but within a neoliberal model.

The social programs impulsed with the funds from the Venezuelan cooperation such as Zero Hunger, Zero Usury, Productive Bonus, housing improvement plans, school lunch, etc. only served to patch the real causes of the problems, without dealing with the structural poverty. These programs fed a patronage and assistentialism structure. They established like never before a socioeconomic regime in which the poor are doomed to seek for a life chance in informal, precarious jobs, working on their own or for miserable salaries during long working times, forced to emigrate to other countries in search for a job and to get precarious retirement pensions. This is a social inequity regime, with an increasing process of welfare concentration in small groups of people.

Ortega also changed the constitution into allowing him to stay in power and committed electoral fraud to achieve that, which was an easy task for his party because they have absolute control of the supreme court and the electoral council.

That’s how we got to the point of having an administration characterized by corruption, a normalized illegality and a government that functions around the entrepreneurial project of the ruling couple, but which has been sold under the slogans of a “Christian, socialist, and solidary” Nicaragua, and a “blessed, prospered and victorious” Nicaragua. A leftist speech was maintained through an anti-imperialistic language that clearly reflects the rupture between what’s real and what’s official.

Also, the Ortega-Murillo administration took control over popular political and civil organizations and created various tentacles from which they could control the people. Instances of auto-critic within the party were continuously eliminated, movements and organization that represented an opposition or alternative to the official narrative were dismantled, room for opinion was closed and repression towards protests and other ways of manifesting discomfort slowly became normalized.

Ortega took control over the party, the police and the army, as well as the threats that the media daring to denounce the country’s situation had already received all guaranteed that almost nobody protested against them for many years and that barely nothing was ever mentioned in the exterior about it.

Countervisuality and Visuality among Nicaraguan protests. 2018.

on April 18th, 2018 while some Nicaraguans protested against one of the usual authoritarian decisions from the dictatorship (this time the protest was about the reforms to the social security), they were attacked by violent groups commanded by the State and protected by the police. The attacks took place in the cities of Managua and Leon and the main targets were the college students that usually organized the protests. These attacks were broadcasted live in Facebook, Instagram and Twitter and they took the blindfold off the Nicaraguan society, putting an end to the collective conformism.

As a strategy to make people aware of what was happening, and to make people join the resistance, social media began to boil with pictures and testimonies about the repression, political terror, and civil and political rights violations. Independent medias and some international medias also started to report about the riots. In order to combat the bad publicity Nicaraguan government use their media (they own most of Nicaraguan media) and started a campaign of discredit and denial.

I want to contrast the official version of the story, that blames the affected population for the violence and calls them “golpistas” (coupists) and terrorists, with the version of the resistance, that documents the political violence. I intend to contrast both visions using images from the official government campaigns and official government media, and comparing them with images from social media, independent press and the work of independent artists. One by one, I am going to contrast the images of emblematic moments and cases.

In this case, the authority builds an official image and official speech creating information and ideas, categorizing the resistance as “golpistas” or terrorists that break the normal state of things, making a separation from them and trying to aesthetize this segregation. On the other hand, the resistance is using other kind of images to expose our truth, to claim autonomy, to claim our right to be alive, and our right to look at what is really happening and also to be seen. We are searching for recognition and we refuse to be segregated.

With this project I want to raise awareness in non-Spanish speakers about the violence that is taking place in Nicaragua, and to expose the government's campaign to crush and hush social activists and everyone that is part of the resistance.