Nicaragua: A Lie That Will Never Be True
Daniel Ortega and Rosario Murillo know their behavior is pathetic. Their actions have validated like no one else the challenge of that April, when thousands shouted for them to go.
By Gioconda Belli (Confidencial)
HAVANA TIMES – “April is the cruelest month,” wrote T.S. Elliot in his poem “The Waste Land.” He spoke however, of a landscape just the opposite of what we think of in the countries where April marks the driest time of the year, the time of field-burning and torrid afternoons. Elliot, in contrast, referred to the cruelty of being sad when spring arrives, and nature explodes with greenery and flowers.
In Nicaragua, since 2018, April is indeed the cruelest month. A month dyed red by the blood of the three hundred-plus Nicaraguans killed in the war the Ortega-Murilo dictatorship unleashed against a people who had assumed their freedom to protest. Although the protest began because of a law that affected the pensions for the elderly, it later generalized into an unequal confrontation when people rebelled against the savage repression they were the object of.
The experience reawakened the collective memory of the past Somoza dictatorship: the police, the shock troops armed with sticks and backed by the riot squad, beating the youth with no restraints. News and shared videos of it brought out more people to protest.
Students and residents took refuge in the nearby universities to defend themselves: the University of Central America (UCA), the National Autonomous University of Nicaragua (UNAN), the National Engineering University (UNI), and the Polytechnic University (UPOLI). On April 19, there were three deaths and 48 wounded. “We’re going in with all we’ve got,” Rosario Murillo had announced. And that’s what happened. Between April and June of 2018, over 300 people were assassinated in Nicaragua, victims of a declaration of war issued by a government far removed from reality, which had changed the rules they were elected under, in order to perpetuate their hold on power. The citizens’ rebellion was also Nicaragua’s April spring.
Neither the “Christian and empathetic” Rosario Murillo, nor her husband – who this year named her “co-president” as a reward for maintaining him in power with her lies and repressive actions, have never accepted their responsibility for converting a protest into a massacre. Although they’d had excellent relations with the United States since 2007, the ruling couple pulled out of their sleeves their antiimperialist rhetoric from the 80s, so that people could superimpose this discourse over the reality they had seen.
For seven years, in a ferocious campaign to cover over the truth, they’ve never ceased repeating the lie that they were victims of an attempted coup d’etat. They’re aware that it’s a lie so big, a manipulation so clumsy, that day by day, year after year, they’ve never stopped repeating it. They couldn’t rest until they had closed all of the media outlets that demonstrated the opposite, and had banished from the country all those who knew the truth.
In the Communications field it’s said: “a lie that’s repeated enough times becomes the truth.” That’s what they’ve bet on happening.
What barbarities haven’t they done to cover up the misery of their invented reality? Prohibiting, confiscating, denationalizing, imprisoning all possible electoral contenders, some of which would certainly have been elected in November 2021. And more recently, changing the Constitution to assure Madame Murillo’s power if Daniel Ortega should die.
Daniel Ortega and Rosario Murillo must know that their behavior is pathetic. That they themselves have validated like nobody else the importance of that challenge of April 2018, when we forced them to hear forever more the cry of demonstrators, echoed by thousands, demanding “that they go.” We, who had no weapons, were able to defeat them morally and ethically.
It’s pathetic to see them finishing April 2025 with an act where they spoke to extol peace. Even as they spoke of this, blocks of people they’ve convoked due to the fear they have of their own people, stood in formation in the plaza, exhibiting their preparation for a war. The duo knows: the only thing they have left to continue in power is threat: an army of paramilitary with hooded faces. The repression of freedom though armed forces.
Rosario Murillo and Ortega have become caricatures of themselves. Isolated, agitated, frenetic, they invoke a God that’s a product of their own invention. Rosario has even come to believe herself immortal when she swears that the absent ones she has banished will never return. She can be sure that they will, in fact, be back. They’ll walk over her grave to remind her that she doesn’t have – nor did she ever – the power to deny a homeland to those of us who have loved it.
First published in Spanish by Confidencial and translated and posted in English by Havana Times.