For three months starting on April 18th this year, Nicaragua’s political opposition and their allies terrorized people across the country. In well coordinated attacks, using firearms and arson, they destroyed or severely damaged offices of central government and local authorities in over a dozen cities. They attacked ambulances, invaded hospitals and schools and destroyed hundreds of private businesses and homes. They murdered at least two hundred people. Their armed activists and paid delinquents extorted or intimidated anyone trying to cross the hundreds of roadblocks and barricades they set up. They abused and tortured hundreds of people identified as government supporters.
The cost of the damage and destruction totaled well over US$200 million. The government’s immediate response on April 21st and 22nd was to call for dialogue with the mediation of the Catholic Church hierarchy. Subsequently, the Catholic bishops set as a precondition the withdrawal of the police from the streets, to which the government agreed in early May. The opposition leaders demanded the resignation of the government and from early May onwards intensified their campaign of terror. That led ordinary people in the main areas affected to organize themselves in self defense. When the opposition refused to stop their terror campaign, the government in mid-June ordered the police to clear all the roadblocks and barricades.
By then, the great majority of people in Nicaragua, sick of opposition terror and extortion, supported the government’s decision to reestablish public order. By the end of July the opposition’s attempted coup d’etat was completely defeated. Nicaragua’s authorities then began to seek out, arrest and send to trial people guilty of the terrible crimes committed against both Sandinista supporters and people with no political affiliation at all. These crimes included the murder of 22 police officers, with another 400 suffering gunshot wounds. Other serious crimes including hundreds of cases of murder or grievous bodily harm, rape, torture, arson, extortion, robbery and criminal damage. Around·300 people have been arrested on such charges in relation to the failed coup attempt. Over 200 more are fugitives.
None of these unquestionably well-corroborated events have been faithfully reported by foreign news media, non governmental organizations or bodies like the United Nations. Information offered by the government has been systematically ignored, while Nicaraguan opposition propaganda has been equally systematically repeated with virtually no responsible investigation or verification. The main initial lie, long shown to be completely false, was that Nicaraguan police massacred students on April 18th and 19th. In fact, no one died on April 18th and the first three deaths on April 19th were all of people killed by opposition activists and allied delinquents. After the success of that big initial lie, the opposition continued flooding social media incessantly with similar lies, above all claiming that the protests were peaceful, when in fact opposition activists persistently used legitimate demonstrations as a cover for their attacks.
By mid-June, most people in Nicaragua had suffered the devastating effects of the opposition terror campaign and the mass propagation of opposition lies via social media lost its effect. That is why, now, inside Nicaragua, very few people take seriously opposition claims of widespread repression, of political prisoners or attacks on freedom of expression. Everyone knows the political opposition control all the main newspapers, most local radio and cable television outlets and at least half of the country’s television stations. Nor are most people concerned about the government’s decision last week to strip nine mainly US funded non-governmental agencies of their non-profit status.
The organization’s affected by the cancellation of their non-profit status are Cisas, Ieepp, Hagamos Democracia, Cenidh, Instituto de Liderazgo de las Segovias, Ipade, Fundación del Río, CINCO and Fundación Popol Na. The government announcement stated:
“This cancellation is due to the fact that these organizations did not comply with the legal requirements for their operation and violated the nature of their functions by actively participating in the failed coup attempt, promoting terrorism, hate crimes, encouraging and celebrating the destruction of public and private property, of domestic residences and businesses, assault on the dignity of thousands of people and families who suffered denigrating treatment, humiliation, unlawful detention, torture and all kinds of threats to their lives in absolute disrespect for the dignity and human rights of all Nicaraguans.
“Until their closure, these organizations organized and channeled their funds and resources so as to commit these very serious human rights violations and disturbances of public order, abusing the right to security and life of people and families in Nicaragua. All these irregular actions, promoting hatred and terrorism and the crimes derived from them constitute a complete contravention of the objectives and ends that justified giving these organizations their legal personality.”
This reality is omitted from the false information imparted by Western media outlets, NGOs, bodies like the UN or the US and allied governments. Among the tiny minority affected by the government move, quoted in Western media reports is the US funded opposition propagandist Carlos Fernando Chamorro. Western media and NGOs invariably describe Carlos Fernando Chamorro as an independent journalist. But Chamorro has received funding from the US authorities via USAID for over a decade, during which time he has been a leading spokesperson for the country’s right wing political opposition. While his CINCO non-profit has been shut down, his opposition media outlet Confidencial continues to operate with its usual mendacious anti-Sandinista news coverage .
The same is true of Miguel Mora, the aggressive right wing activist who heads the 100% Noticias opposition propaganda outlet. Talking to US writer Max Blumenthal in July this year, Miguel Mora invoked a Panama 1989 style invasion, saying, “What I see is the United States doing a Noriega type operation as in Panama. They go, grab the (Ortega) family, take them off without the army here intervening. In a couple of days or 24 hours everything would be solved.” Even so, Miguel Mora and his team, as they have done for many years now, continue to produce their venomous, fact-free opposition propaganda without government intervention.
In effect, Chamorro, Mora and the unrepresentative political opposition aligned leaders of Nicaragua’s non-profit sector have been working in many cases for well over a decade as the agents of foreign powers, principally, but not only, the US. The Nicaraguan authorities have shown remarkable restraint in the face of the permanent assault from those local media and NGOs in sharp contrast to cases in the US like the notorious attacks of the 1980s on Black and Native People’s organizations or more recent attacks on Wikileaks and Julian Assange. Another current case is that of Maria Butina framed by the US authorities as an agent of the Russian Federation.
Maria Butina, in flagrant violation of her rights, is kept in solitary confinement 22 hours a day falsely accused of conspiracy to act as an agent of foreign influence. By contrast, in Nicaragua, people like Carlos Fernando Chamorro are openly funded by the US to advance US foreign policy objectives in Nicaragua. But all that has happened to him and his fellow agents of US foreign policy is that their non-profit organizations have been shut down, while they continue to freely attack the Nicaraguan government as viciously as ever. That is despite President Trump’s decree citing Nicaragua as a threat to the national security of the United States, in effect a declaration of practically unlimited aggression.
