User blog:EmpyrealInvective/I Shook Hands with a Monster

I’m sorry for the disjointed nature of all of this. It’s late, and I’ve spent a lot of tonight and the last few nights talking to people from the community I used to live and work in from 2011 to 2013. I’m tired but I can’t sleep. It’s four in the morning and I have to do something in four hours. I’m too anxious to sleep so I’m going to try and organize everything into a simple document and try to make sense of it all. I don’t know if I’m trying to compartmentalize it and tuck it away, maybe even delete it and pretend this has nothing to do with me anymore. Remove myself from what’s going on in Nicaragua. Ignore the Facebook posts featuring dead students, livestreams of reporters being shot as they try to record the violence, and police firing into crowds from the back of trucks. It’d make sense and probably save me a lot of grief, it’d also be terrible. If you’re seeing this, then I didn’t do that, but that doesn't mean it didn’t cross my mind.

To set the stage for the title above, it was July 28th, 2011 (my birthday). I don’t know if it was the exact day or the weekend of my birthday, but the events were so closely tied together I can’t help but associate them. The 50th anniversary of the Peace Corps being in Nicaragua was being celebrated (with a hiatus due to the Contra-Sandinista war) and on the day of our Peace Corps inauguration and swearing in, we were hastily informed that we had been summoned to meet with the president of Nicaragua (Daniel Ortega) for an impromptu congratulations.

To say we were nervous was an understatement. Imagine celebrating the start of your service in the Peace Corps after three months of training and hard work and then being given the opportunity to meet the most powerful man in a country with no idea of what to expect and only a few scant hours to prepare yourself. Add onto that Nicaragua’s tenuous relationship with the United States (We supplied the Contras in the Contra-Sandinista war before pulling out which partially precipitated the Sandinistas winning which led to the Sandinistas seizing complete control.) It was nerve-wracking especially given the fact that my level of Spanish at that time was abysmally low. I could string together a broken conversation, but I would blank on phrases wholesale and my mouth would get ahead of my brain and then derail like a forty car pile-up on the freeway resulting in Spanglish and embarrassment. I calmed myself by thinking that it’d be a quick thing; he’d talk at us for an hour and the awkwardness would be over.

That impromptu congratulation turned out to be three-plus hours as Daniel Ortega interviewed each one of us and broadcast the entire thing across the country for hundreds of thousands of people to see. Fun stuff.

We were crowded (There were about fifty volunteers and Peace Corps staff with a cadre of reporters, government officials, and the Juventud Sandinista (more on them later).) into a large room with AC blasting on us. We were dressed in formal clothes and some of the female volunteers were in dresses. The U.S.’s relationship with Nicaragua hung over us like a funeral pall due to Ortega’s tendency to bring up anti-U.S. rhetoric in his speeches. It was frigid in every sense of the word.

Daniel Ortega opened with a speech that I can’t remember (given the abomination that is my Spanish language comprehension) and then proceeded to ask a question to every Peace Corps volunteer in a mock-interview no one was prepared for in a manner that feels completely absurd. I talked about my projects (poorly). He quizzed someone on their favorite sports. He signed the baseball that one of the volunteers had brought as he was going around shaking all of our hands for a photo-op. It was all so surreal and ridiculous.

During our Peace Corps service, they held an election for Daniel which happened to be in violation on Nicaragua’s constitution as it (originally) limited presidential terms to two sessions. He was running for a third term. My community which was Pro-Sandinista supported the vote to eliminate election limits and re-elect him. The night of the results, one girl from my community would later confide in me that she was terrified Ortega would lose and what would happen to the country under someone else’s guidance.

Daniel Ortega didn’t lose. He won in a landslide. Cities, towns, and villages voted overwhelmingly in his favor. Even communities that supported the fractured liberal parties running against him experienced a sudden surge of Sandinista support and voted for him. All the Nicaraguan news channels were abuzz with celebration of this monumental election. Very few Nicaraguan stations would bring up the discarded ballot boxes that they found on the side of the road which happened to contain votes in opposition to Daniel Ortega. Even less would mention that those ballot boxes happened to be tied to communities who supported liberal candidates, but whose votes still happened to be counted as Pro-Sandinista despite their political standing in the election results.

It was picked up by a few international news stations, but the voting fraud was treated with a shrug of the shoulders. I also happened to shrug my shoulders at it and resign myself to a bit of defeatism. He controlled the media, had propaganda, and was relatively charismatic. Of course he would win, even if he didn’t stuff ballot boxes, he would have likely won due to going up against a fragmented party with multiple candidates running and sapping votes away from one another. My service ended in late July 2013 and I returned to the United States with a few stories under my belt and some experiences I’ve been known to overshare from time to time. My community recently got a cell phone tower in their vicinity which strengthened their signal and resulted in a number of them getting Facebook on their phones and us randomly talking and reminiscing at times. This is how I learned about everything that’s happening.

I’m realizing this setting the stage has quickly devolved into delaying the inevitable so here we go. The protests and violence in Nicaragua started in mid-April with proposed social security reform. President Ortega wanted to decrease public debt so he proposed an increase to the amount the employed had to pay and decreased the amount pensioners would receive. To put it in simpler terms, he wanted to increase wage tax that workers paid and decrease the amount pensioners would receive after their retirement.

This of course resulted in public outcry and protest as it was viewed as taxing the poor and lining the pockets of the wealthy. Students and workers took to the streets to protest this proposed change. Daniel Ortega and his wife, Rosario Murillo (who happens to be his vice president), quickly retracted this reform, but the damage had been done. Compounded by a forest fire that the government mishandled in its response resulting in the loss of 9000 acres, the demonstrations changed targets from protesting social security reform to decrying government corruption. Now their focus was on Ortega himself, calling for his resignation.

The Nicaraguan president responded to the protests with the Juventud Sandinista (the Sandinista Youth). They were bused out to areas where protests were occurring to oppose them. The Juventud Sandinista responded to these public protests with violence. Why maintain political discourse when you can just punch your opposition in the face with the support of the government behind you? This of course resulted in full-scale fighting between students and Sandinista Youth.

Here’s a video of protestors building barricades out of the roads themselves with the help of a mother in preparation for a protest. That’s the only video I’m going to share. It’s the only video I feel comfortable sharing, if you want to see mothers openly weeping and consoling each other in front of posters featuring their deceased children, students shot and bullet-holes in beaten bodies, you can search that up on your own. Facebook and Twitter has compiled most of them. I don’t want to see them again.

A medical brigade which was composed of medical students (including someone who lived in my community) responded by trying to provide treatment to the people who were injured in the protests. Their supplies were confiscated by police who were also responding to the violence. The responding medical brigade was prevented from treating people with claims that a majority of people were violent criminals (I’ll address that below). It was in this dark moment that the police became more involved in the protest.

I’m not going to link to videos of police gunning down civilians who are protesting or just happen to be in the same vicinity as protestors. There’s a video of police swathed in riot gear firing on crowds of people from the back of police trucks. There are videos of people hugging the street as motorcycles roll by, spraying bullets. There’s a livestream from a reporter in Bluefields covering the violence who is shot and left for dead by an unknown assailant. There are a lot of horrible things. Most of them on social media, not many on news outlets.

The propaganda machine has groaned to life and has started to try and discredit the protestors. Protestors are being labeled violent criminals and operatives trying to sow insurgency. The police said that the violence that resulted from the march on Mother’s Day, populated with mothers who have lost their children in the violence, which resulted in over a dozen people dying. A lot of the Facebook posts feature comments from people espousing the belief that this is the work of violent thugs targeting the protestors and propagating the lie that the government is a blameless victim of this smear campaign.

Here’s a brief breakdown of the events. Here is a report from one of the most violent protests which happened to coincide with Mother’s Day and resulted in at least eleven reported deaths with numerous unconfirmed fatalities and injuries. Here is the most recent report of violence involving police laying siege on a church that housed protestors as of writing this (it won’t be the last report I fear) today. Here. I have no fucking clue what to do with any of this information. Here. Please take this and do something with it. Tell someone, share it somewhere, bring it to someone’s attention. Here.

I’m sorry for all that. The sun’s coming up and I’m a mess. I’m going to try and rein it in.

My community is a little ways away from the capital so a majority of them are isolated from all the violence. I know a few people who are attending university in Managua so I’m keeping my eyes on their feed to make sure they’re alright. As of writing this, they have been (Gracias a Dios), but this is an ongoing issue. This is not a temporary thing. This has been building for years and the violence has been ongoing since mid-April.

I keep going back to that moment in 2011 and I keep thinking this: I shook hands with a monster. I was feet away from him and I extended my hand to him and shook it. I remember thinking about the absurdity of it all. I was a kid out of college, a nobody, and I was meeting someone who had risen to power and controlled the fate of an entire country. It was comical at the time. There was no warning signs. My soul didn’t shudder at the sight of him like we’ve come to expect from media. He didn’t exude a violent aura. I didn’t feel like there was anything sinister about him in that moment. He was joking with the reporters and making light of us fumbling for words. He was having a good time. He just seemed like a harmless goofball, a ridiculous example of random happenstance that resulted in his election or the Peter Principle on his promotion to power cranked up to max. He’s not. That is the thought that’s repeating in my head like a broken record, he was just a normal guy. He’s average. You could have run into him on the street and not be any the wiser of the horrible things he’s orchestrated. He’s human. I think that may be the most horrifying thing I’ve ever typed.

At that time I thought, “He’s a clown.” Here he is signing a volunteer’s baseball and non sequitur-ing another friend by forcing him into a conversation about sports after interviewing the previous volunteer about where they were going to work and live. He’s harmless. That’s what I told myself. At that time he seemed like a man who blundered into the position of president and was just rolling with it. He may have stolen an election but he wasn’t actively hurting anyone and at least he has a few projects that help out the poor. He’s harmless. The system was screwed to begin with so why try to upset it again when our involvement resulted in a full-blown war? The Contra-Sandinista war was muddled with U.S. interference and it drastically hurt our relationship with them and resulted in the deaths of thousands. I told myself that he was harmless in the grand scheme of things. He is not harmless.

I’m realizing that a number of people said the same thing about Idi Amin. That’s my mistake. I downplayed a dictator and excused the actions of a monster. I can’t do that anymore. He’s not some inept fool blundering and saying ridiculous things in his speeches. He’s responsible for the deaths of over one hundred people and the injury of thousands. His police have actively participated in the torture and murder of his own people. These are human rights violations and they need to be shared. This needs to be spread. This is going to keep going as long as other countries are overlooking it and lumping it under the nebulous term ‘third world unrest’ that we shouldn’t get involved in. This is not civil unrest that can proceed unchecked and will 'fix itself'. These are atrocities. These need to be seen by the rest of the world.