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And the young people returned to the streets of Nicaragua

2021-04-13T14:05:15.902Z


The documentary 'Homeland free to live,' made during the April 2018 uprising, collects numerous testimonies that account for the heterogeneity of the Nicaraguan spring and the repression suffered. Now it opens in Spain


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It all started with a burning forest.

In March 2018, the Indio Maíz reserve, one of the most important tropical lungs in Nicaragua, suffered a fire for days.

The passivity of the authorities stirred up many young people who took to the streets in peaceful defense of their environment.

Shortly after, that proposal joined that of many older people against a reform of the social security law, which would cut their limited pensions.

The whole country began to live in an effervescence similar to the Arab Spring, Central American version.

  • Nicaragua: two years after the April 2018 uprising

  • Tribune |

    The brave three

  • Analysis |

    Nicaragua, zero hour

Immediately, the response of violent groups followers of the Ortega and Murillo regime was unleashed against the old and the young.

The bloody scenes were recorded live by hundreds of cameras, and that caused many more people to take to the streets in outrage.

The repression had only just begun.

The first dead arrived soon, such as a 15-year-old boy, Álvaro Conrado, who was shot while carrying water to the students who were taking refuge from the attacks.

A public health clinic closed its doors to her and she was unable to get the urgent medical care she needed until later.

A moment from the interview with Silvio José Báez Ortega, Nicaraguan Catholic bishop, Daniel Rodríguez Moya

Nicaragua has not managed to get out of the last positions in the Human Development Index of the region.

And among the causes and consequences is the degradation of its democracy towards a family and authoritarian regime, like the dictatorship against which Ortega himself fought in his younger days.

Three years have passed since the April 2018 uprising. On November 7, elections are scheduled that, for the moment, are governed by a system totally controlled by the presidential couple, Ortega and Murillo, who have been governing for 14 years and aspire to a fourth consecutive term.

As Daniel Rodríguez Moya, author of the documentary

Nicaragua, a free country to live

,

explains

, the young people who rose up in 2018 are the children and grandchildren of those who made the 1979 revolution. The documentary rescues the testimony of many of them, but also of other students, intellectuals and exiles.

The wick that aroused Rodríguez Moya's interest was a memory and a few words, as he says from Granada, where he lives: situation in the country, I remembered what Fernando Cardenal told me, in an interview I conducted when he presented his memoirs in Spain: 'Young people will return to the streets to make history'.

That interview I did with him was also published in Nicaragua and the phrase turned into graffiti on the walls of Managua ”.

Another moment of the documentary 'Nicaragua, free country to live' Daniel Rodríguez Moya

Rodríguez Moya is an Andalusian poet and journalist, with strong ties to the Central American country.

This April 14 begins its presentation in Spain, at the Casa Encendida in Madrid, after the tour was interrupted by the pandemic, after having been screened in France, together with the activist Bianca Jagger.

In addition, on Friday April 16 it will be screened at the Francisco de Vitoria University, at 12 noon.

And in the afternoon, it will also be exhibited in the Faculty of Political Sciences of the Complutense University, at 3:30 p.m.

The young people who rose in 2018 are the children and grandchildren of those who made the 1979 revolution

Daniel Rodríguez Moya, author of the documentary 'Nicaragua, free country to live'

Rodríguez Moya, who has studied in depth the history of Nicaragua for the last 15 years from the academic, literary and journalistic fields, was disturbed by “the evident dictatorial drift” since Ortega's return to power in 2007 and the absence of an alternative that I could face it.

“When I saw the first images of April 18, 2018, I sensed that I was beginning what had been waiting for so long and what I had talked about so many times with my

Nicaraguan

friends

.

Patricia Flakoll Alegría, daughter of the great poet Claribel Alegría, told me, in a talk in Granada: 'What do you do that you are not in Nicaragua to be able to see and tell about everything that is happening?'

I just needed someone to verbalize what I started thinking on April 18, "he says.

The circumstances in which the documentary was shot were dangerous.

For a time, Rodríguez Moya's team was able to go unnoticed and conduct more than 50 interviews in the places where many of the people who were persecuted by the regime were located.

But “a security error left us vulnerable,” he recalls, “and I received a call from someone handling information: 'They know you are recording a movie and they are already looking for you.

You have to leave the country right now. '

Within hours of that call we were already in San José.

Who did he tell us? I can't stop thanking him that this hasty departure allowed us, in addition to avoiding a scare, to have a few days in Costa Rica in which to document the drama of exile ”.

The circumstances in which the documentary was shot were dangerous.

For a time, Rodríguez Moya's team was able to go unnoticed and conduct more than 50 interviews with people persecuted by the regime

Three years after the socio-political and human rights crisis, more than 100,000 Nicaraguans have requested asylum in third countries, as confirmed by the latest report by the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, Michelle Bachelet, published in February this year. .

More than six million people live in the country.

Its traditional migratory routes have been those of Costa Rica, Panama or the United States, but since 2018, Nicaragua became the fourth country with the most asylum requests in Spain, after Venezuela, Colombia and Honduras.

With more than 300 people dead (although other sources estimate 500), 2,000 injured and 1,614 arbitrarily deprived of their liberty, according to Bachelet's report, the country suffers serious consequences “of economic and humanitarian dimensions, recently exacerbated by the Covid pandemic. -19 and, in November 2020, due to the hurricanes in Central America ”.

In its recommendations, the UN urges profound reforms in the electoral system, without which free elections cannot be guaranteed.

The uprising was heterogeneous and multicolored: from the Catholic Church to feminist and LGTBI groups, along with students and peasants.

The clamor for Ortega's departure and the return to a real democracy was massive until repression and harassment crushed any possibility of peaceful protest.

Rodríguez Moya's documentary also includes one of the last recorded testimonies of the poet and priest Ernesto Cardenal (who died in 2020), along with those of Sergio Ramírez or Gioconda Belli, among others.

The words have changed.

The youth of the protests in the streets of Managua reversed the old slogans of their Sandinista parents and grandparents.

In this way, the "homeland free or to die" became a "homeland free to live" when they faced repression, mostly unarmed, knowing the traumas inherited by successive conflicts in the country and in their families.

But the repression by the police and paramilitaries has not yet stopped.

Among the vicissitudes that happened to make this documentary, Rodríguez Moya especially remembers the ethics of many of the people interviewed.

And also the pain: “When Yader Vásquez told me how his 19-year-old son Gerald was murdered, we couldn't continue talking, neither he nor I.

We just hugged each other.

Long.

And that's when I truly understood that there can be no impunity again in Nicaragua, that without justice for these crimes it is impossible to build a democracy ”.

All this is pending in Nicaragua, both the reforms and the old aspirations of the ideal to which the country aspired in its day, and which many young and old took up with renewed words.

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Source: elparis

All news articles on 2021-04-13

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