Paramilitary and Terror in Nicaragua
The riot squads and the hooded “voluntary police” are the shock forces of the regime to squash any internal dissent.
By Monica Baltodano (Confidencial)
HAVANA TIMES – A few weeks ago, another noose of oppression closed around the necks of the Nicaraguan people. As if their legal system were made of Play-Doh, dictators Daniel Ortega and Rosario Murillo molded and adapted it to fit the exact measure of their interests in conserving personal power. They have now applied that supposed “legality” to using weapons, jail, banishment, confiscations, and terror. The entire country under their boots, controlled by fear, includingtheir own followers and employees, also prisoners of their own fears.
From exile, hundreds of us banished Nicaraguans have classified as an “auto-coup” what they continue calling a “Constitution,” with which they attempt to adjust the letter of the law to the absolute control that they’ve been progressively imposing since Ortega returned to power in 2007 with 38% of the vote.
In January of this year, the National Assembly, now transformed into nothing more than the legislative arm at the service of the co-presidency, established that the application of the “new Constitution” would be retroactive. Hence, even though power was invested in a president and vice president following the 2021 electoral farce, both are now already signing documents as co-presidents.
Similarly, in order to avoid having to conduct a new electoral farce in 2026, they extended their period in power: one additional year for deputies, mayors, city council members and, of course, the co-presidents. They also extended to six years the mandate of Army head Julio Cesar Aviles, who will soon surpass the number of years that former dictator Anastasio Somoza spent at the head of the armed forces. In the case of Aviles, who assumed power in 2010, Ortega broke the norm for military succession, which had been established as five years. The same thing transpired with the Police Chief, Francisco Diaz, a relative by marriage of the co-dictators who was first appointed in 2018.
In reality, Rosario Murillo’s tailored-madeConstitution has laid bare the pretentions of Murillo and Ortega to install a monarchy. To confront the rejection that the majority of the Nicaraguan population silently maintains for them, they’ve adopted every possible type of repressive measures, enhanced by a choreography that makes their force appear as devastating and invincible. The recent swearing-in of over 76,000 paramilitary is an example of that choreography.
Who are the paramilitary?
In 2018, Ortega justified the actions of paramilitary – who fired at civilians without pity in the cities and rural areas, especially at the students in their universities – by claiming that they were “voluntary police,” a category that had been created internally in the National Police to involve the population in the fight against crime. However, the paramilitary of 2018 were shock troops, expressly called up by Ortega and Murillo from among the mayors, old guerrilla leaders, and FSLN Party leaders, to recover the control they had lost in cities engulfed by the growing protests of April, May and June of 2018.
At that time, it was ordered that by July 19 – the anniversary of the 1979 Revolution – all the country’s streets should be open to traffic. [One of the chief tactics of the protesters was to erect barricades blocking the principal streets and highways.] Armed with war-grade weapons, communications apparatus, and identifying insignias, these groups of paramilitaries, interspersed with the police, fired on and killed demonstrators all over the country.
It was clear then, as the recent report of the Group of Experts from the UN Human Rights Council established, that the [paramilitary] were led by Army and Police officials with access to intelligence information. Their bloody actions increased the number of the murdered to 350, the number that the Inter-American Commission for Human Rights established in the Report of the Inter-Disciplinary Group of Independent Experts for Nicaragua, along with an estimate of over 2,000 wounded. Dozens of the latter lost eyes and other body parts.
It shouldn’t be overlooked that the members of these paramilitary groups were called to action in the name of the revolution, of the heroes and martyrs of the struggle against the Somoza dictatorship, and in defense of the maximum leader, anointed by God to save Nicaragua. Some of the old guerrilla Comandantes reemerged to join in these tasks. Others, such as the ever-expedient Eden Pastora (who went from being a member of Nicaragua’s Conservative Party to a guerrilla leader, then a counterrevolutionary at the service of the CIA, and finally a great hero of the Ortega clique, which awarded him the Order of Sandino for his services) boasted publicly of once more wielding arms against his enemies.
Now, under Murillo’s Constitution, these bodies of “voluntary police” have been officially incorporated as a factor for repression. In order to cause the population, and even their own followers to tremble, numerous “swearing-in” ceremonies have been held in the cities and towns. Dressed in white shirts, their heads and faces hooded, standing in perfect formation, they swear loyalty to the pair of co-dictators, who – we can’t forget – represent in themselves, “the homeland, sovereignty and all progress.” Naturally, they make use of the FSLN Party official flag, that devalued red and black symbol now become the national symbol.
The majority of those thousands of men and women that we’ve seen with their faces covered, to hide their identity and also their shame, aren’t paramilitary. In 2018, the volunteers mobilized by the repressive agents never surpassed a few hundreds. That’s why they acted in a rotating manner, town by town, just as Somoza’s National Guard had acted against the towns that rose up during the popular insurrections forty years before, in 1978.
Among these hooded figures are fanatical militants who did act as paramilitary and are willing to once again fire at any government opponent. But the majority aren’t. For months, the public employees in the ministries and towns have been forced to receive military training, held under the strictest secrecy. Some have revealed anonymously what this instruction consisted of. After that, the employees were obligated to form lines and present themselves as a compact body, in swearing-in ceremonies that are really choreographies, an art that Rosario Murillo is an expert at.
If you study History, you’ll find similarities to the presentations of the Nazis and fascists of Germany, Italy and Japan, but also to regimes such as North Korea. According to the data, these paramilitaries are more numerous than the police and soldiers in the armed forces. The purpose of these displays and the pubic oaths of the supposed paramilitary is to deepen the terror and paralyze any effort of the population to organize and coordinate efforts, since they don’t know whether one of these hooded figures might be their neighbors, ready to denounce them for the least sign of disagreement with what is happening in Nicaragua.
The Army officials are also supposed to feel themselves no longer indispensable for defending the dictatorship, and the police are to worry that they could be replaced. The rest of the public employees can’t know whether their office mate is a spy, for which reason they must appear docile and submissive at all times. In the end, their family depends on the miserable salary they earn, and especially now, when the alternative of emigration has been closed off, you have to buckle under and defend your job. In addition, any dissenter could be taken directly to the border and expelled if so decided by Murillo, the bloody ringed finger in the presidential residency of El Carmen.
The cruelties, terror, and crimes of Ortega and Murillo, their Stalinist dictatorship, always bring to mind the end of the Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceaucescu and his wife Elena, who with rage yelled “Coup promoters” at their rebelling people. In the end, the shots from the firing squad that ended their lives came from the rifles of their previously loyal paratroopers. You can dominate a people through terror and deceit for a time, but you can’t dominate them always. That’s a known fact.
First published in Spanish by Confidencial and translated and posted in English by Havana Times.