CITIZEN PROTESTS AND GOVERNMENT REPRESSION IN NICARAGUA Beyond Left and Right: Grassroots Social Movements and Nicaragua’s Civic Insurrection by Jennifer Goett | Michigan State University | [email protected] Nicaragua has become unrecognizable in criminalize protesters, grassroots activists, human just a few short months. Those of us who have rights defenders, and journalists. Meanwhile, tens followed events closely since the April 18 protests of thousands of citizens have applied for asylum against social security reform have witnessed the in Costa Rica.3 Claiming divine protection, Ortega disintegration of a country through the mechanism and Murillo have responded to international of state repression. The standoff between the condemnation with a disinformation campaign, popular resistance movement and the government labeling the diverse and largely nonviolent of Daniel Ortega and his wife and vice president resistance movement “satanic,” “terrorist,” “criminal,” Rosario Murillo has resulted in levels of brutality “golpistas” who are working at the behest of the US not seen since the civil wars of the 1970s and 1980s. government to overthrow the socialist state. Although violence has been documented on both sides of the conflict, national and international Despite clear evidence of gross human rights human rights organizations have attributed the abuses by the government, progressive sectors vast majority of human rights abuses and deaths to in the United States remain divided on how to the Nicaraguan state. According to these sources, respond to the crisis. Some on the Left are reluctant police and parapolice have killed more than 300 to disavow a leftist state, even one that has become men, women, and children, resulting in a massacre increasingly violent and authoritarian in the last of significant proportions in this country of just 6 decade. Others have expressed concerns about million people. Thousands of citizens have been US intervention and maintain a healthy distrust injured, and hundreds have been illegally detained of mainstream media coverage of Latin American or disappeared. In contrast, violence against affairs. A vocal group of solidarity activists and government forces and supporters has resulted in commentators have defended the Sandinista state, the deaths of some 50 people.1 reproducing the Ortega/Murillo narrative. These sources suggest the US government has played In addition to the astonishing violence, Ortega and a lead role in orchestrating the civic insurrection. Murillo have sought to punish their critics, suppress They label the resistance movement “right wing,” the resistance movement, and deny responsibility focus on opposition violence, calling into question for the bloodshed and instability. For instance, the findings of human rights organizations, and the state funds parapolice forces, or masked frequently overstate the progressive achievements gunmen in double cabin pickup trucks, to terrorize of the state. The Sandinista Revolution, as one of communities and obfuscate its role in the violence. the few successful examples of popular national Catholic clergy have been threatened and attacked resistance to the long and bloody history of US for their efforts to mediate the crisis. Hundreds of intervention in the region, looms large in the doctors and other hospital personnel have been pieces. They fall short, however, on serious analysis terminated from their positions for providing care of Nicaraguan politics since the 1990 elections to injured protestors, leaving a shortage of medical removed the Sandinistas from power.4 Thus, as staff in public hospitals.2 In July, lawmakers passed an antiterrorism law that the state has used to LASA FORUM 49:4 25 the standoff continues, there is little consensus on in 2013. Not surprisingly, my perspective on the the Left about the origins of the crisis or how to crisis is informed by my years of engagement respond to the violence. with Monkey Point and other community-based struggles for land rights in the region. What strikes This article offers some starting points for me most about these grassroots movements is the understanding the conflict via an account of social continuity in forces that drove mobilization against movements that oppose the state’s plans to build the neoliberal Right (1990–2006) and those that an Interoceanic Grand Canal. The resistance has now drive resistance to the self-styled socialist Left been represented in the now defunct National (2007–2018).6 Although each era has seen distinct Dialogue with the state by the Civic Alliance geopolitical alliances, state ideologies and agendas, for Justice and Democracy, an amalgam of and degrees of official inclusion in the political diverse interests from the private sector, student sphere, certain conditions endure. State violence movement, grassroots social movements, and and land dispossession under mestizo racial rule civil society. Spanning the political spectrum, continue to shape the everyday lived experience of these groups make for strange bedfellows, giving community people. the Alliance a certain ideological incoherence beyond the desire to see Ortega and Murillo step Indigenous and Afro-descendant demands for land down, a restoration of democratic institutions, and self-determination date back to Nicaragua’s and an end to the violence. An examination of military annexation of the Caribbean coast in grassroots social movements, however, provides 1894. Nevertheless, contemporary movements an often-overlooked entry point into the roots of for territorial demarcation emerged after the the civic insurrection. These movements illustrate Sandinista state negotiated regional autonomy why traditional ideological and political divisions as a settlement to armed conflict with these between the Latin American Left and Right have communities in the 1980s. The Sandinista state limited utility for parsing relationships among enshrined multicultural citizenship rights in 1986 diverse sectors of the resistance movement and the with the adoption of a new constitution followed state. An analysis of the factors that drive grassroots by the passage of an autonomy statute for the mobilization against Ortega and Murillo, such as region in 1987. After the 1990 Sandinista electoral Sandinista economic policy, corruption, autocratic defeat, however, neoliberal administrations rule, state violence, racism, gender oppression, and were generally hostile to multiculturalism as land dispossession, reveal a Sandinista state that no a project of the Left and treated indigenous longer embraces leftist politics and a country that and Afro-descendant lands as little more than has outgrown its old political categories. vehicles for economic development. Despite state intransigence, international human rights decisions A View from the Caribbean Coast upheld community demands for territorial recognition,7 while multilateral development banks I first traveled to Nicaragua as a graduate student sought to reconcile capitalist accumulation with in 1998. Since then, I have spent more than four indigenous and Afro-descendant property rights. years on the Caribbean coast of the country, where Both compelled the state to negotiate territorial my research and activism focus on indigenous rights with communities, which it did reluctantly, and Afro-descendant territorial rights. Most of ultimately resisting demarcation and titling. During my work has been with a small Afro-descendant these years, demarcation became the central Kriol community called Monkey Point, which demand from communities that were experiencing since the late-1990s has been at the center of extractivist exploitation, megaproject development, national debates over a series of interoceanic canal mestizo land colonization associated with the proposals that have targeted communal lands for advance of the agricultural frontier, and “drug war” infrastructure development.5 The US$50 billion militarization. Chinese-backed Interoceanic Grand Canal, the centerpiece of Sandinista economic policy, is the latest and most controversial proposal to emerge LASA FORUM 49:4 26 Given the neoliberal state’s resistance to territorial The Interoceanic Grand Canal recognition, Daniel Ortega’s return to power in Although communities of the Rama-Kriol Territory 2007 after a 17-year hiatus was met with cautious have been challenging infrastructure concessions hope that he would fulfill his campaign promise on their lands since the 1990s,11 after the passage and title indigenous and Afro-descendant lands. of Law 840, the massive and unprecedented scale Between 2007 and 2016, the Sandinista state did of the canal project spurred a national protest just that, titling some 30 percent of the country.8 As movement led by mestizo campesinos living along part of this process, Monkey Point and eight other the proposed route. Particularly shocking were the indigenous and Afro-descendant communities terms of the canal concession, which privatized received title to the Rama-Kriol Territory in 2009. the venture and authorized subprojects such as But after titling, most of the contradictions of free trade zones, tourism resorts, and a petroleum state-led capitalist intensification remained, even pipeline as well as any other infrastructure intensified, as did the repressive strategies used to deemed necessary by the concessionaire, a Hong secure these policies. Like neoliberal predecessors, Kong–based firm backed by a Chinese billionaire. this new Sandinista state proved unwilling to stop The