Tortilla con Sal
A group of people in solidarity with Nicaragua’s Sandinista Revolution have recorded, transcribed and translated numerous testimonies to illustrate the experiences of people at grass roots in Nicaragua of the violent failed coup attempt between April and July of 2018. These testimonies supplement existing reports by independent writers and journalists. A list of the testimonies and earlier reports on opposition violence can be found here.
No human rights organization and practically no journalists, writers or academics out of all those who write so glibly about the crisis of 2018 in Nicaragua have taken the trouble to talk to any of the thousands of victims of violent opposition attacks during that crisis.
Among writers, the only exceptions of which we are aware are the Italian journalist Giorgio Trucchi, Max Blumenthal of the Grayzone media outlet, US human rights lawyer Dan Kovalik, independent journalists Dick and Miriam Emanuelsson, Steve Sweeney of the Morning Star and the Redfish documentary team.
The very simple reason for this is that the mainstream account of the violent failed 2018 coup attempt in Nicaragua portrayed the very opposite of what really happened. International human rights institutions like the Inter American Commission for Human Rights and the office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights completely ignored opposition violence so as to be able to claim with the utmost falsehood that the government attacked peaceful protests with disproportionate, brutal violence, which is a lie.
These testimonies demonstrate the shameless false witness of those international inntitutions, of human rights NGOs and international news media, who comprehensively failed to report the facts. A recurrent theme in gathering these testimonies was the total lack of interest in these people’s experiences and suffering on the part of representatives and researchers of the Western human rights industry who nonetheless issued reports based exclusively on faithless opposition testimony.
Three things are important to understand in order to make sense of these interviews.
Firstly, the testimonies refer almost exclusively to incidents that took place while Nicaragua’s police were confined to their police stations. On April 22nd President Ortega publicly asked the Catholic Bishop’s Conference to organize a national dialogue between the government and the opposition. The bishop’s took two weeks to reply when they did they set various conditions one of which was that the police be removed from the streets.
The Nicaraguan government agreed to this condition prior to the talks starting on May 16th and this explains why the general population was exposed over so many weeks to violent attacks and intimidation by the opposition activists as described in these testimonies.
A second important point to understand is the operation of the so called “tranques” or roadblocks set up by opposition activists both at strategic points in Nicaragua’s national highway system and within urban centers. These roadblocks served as bases for the opposition to carry out their crimes and as control points to intimidate, monitor, rob and extort anyone passing through them, as these testimonies vividly describe. The roadblocks were operated by opposition activists and paid delinquents who often ended up fighting among themselves over what they stole from all the people they extorted before letting them pass.
A third recurrent theme in these interviews is the issue of the 2019 amnesty setting free all the opposition activists and their delinquent accomplices charged, tried, convicted and imprisoned for criminal offences committed during the 2018 crisis. For bereaved families and for people who suffered directly from opposition violence in 2018, it took a huge act of faith on the part of Nicaragua’s people in the wisdom of President Daniel Ortega, Vice President Rosario Murillo and their government for that measure to be as successful as it has been.
That is why for people in Nicaragua, all the victims and relatives of victims of opposition violence during the failed coup attempt are regarded as Heroes of Peace because they put the need for their country to heal and reconcile above their own personal suffering and grief.
But that is something far beyond the pitiful moral understanding, wholesale intellectual abdication and sly cynicism of practially all North American and European media journalists and editors, university academics, functionaries of the OAS and the office of the UN Human Rights Commisioner’s or any of the representatives of leading international human rights NGOs.
