Gioconda Belli

There’s been a lot of talk lately about criticism within the broad sector that opposes the Ortega-Murillo dictatorship. A collective catharsis is taking place in the social networks.

I don’t know how much importance can be given to the refusal by Ortega-Murillo to continue with the dialogue. I think that at the international level the announcement will act like a boomerang that will fall on them.

Every day I read fiery statements. Various trends, fears and dreams are expressed from social networks about what should or should not happen in the Nicaragua of the future. The opinions are very diverse, but it is remarkable how the patterns of our history are repeated in them.

In 2016, the day of the presidential elections, when I went out to cross Managua to see with my own eyes the level of abstention that was rumored and saw the voting centers empty, the streets as sleepy as on any Sunday in the city, I began to harbor doubts about my pessimism.

The next stage of the struggle in Nicaragua must lead to defining an organization that can bind together and legitimize the self-organized movement; a body that succeeds in uniting us around proposals and ideals that move away from the failures that we’ve experienced.

On January 1st, time gives us 365 days in blank. How will those 8,760 hours be filled in this homeland besieged by the storm of a people blowing winds of change against the closed gate of stubbornness and cruelty of its rulers? What have they gained in these months? Their victories are pyrrhic, deceitful, fragile victories.

The recent cancellation of the legal status of 9 Nicaraguan NGOs* has nothing to do with legality. An NGO like the Center for Human Rights (CENIDH), legally constituted and acting responsibly for 28 years can’t be suddenly annulled from one day to the next.

There was a time, the time I come from, when being a Sandinista meant putting your life on the line. It was a time when the FSLN was a clandestine organization, and belonging to it was a secret that only you knew: a time where Somoza proclaimed, “Sandinista seen, Sandinista dead”. Many of our companeros died in those years when the FSLN was being shaped.

“At this juncture how can I not ask myself if it was worth it to have given over my youth and a large part of my life to a revolution that I saw as the most beautiful thing that could possibly happen to me? The horror of the events that have occurred in Nicaragua since April 18th, when a citizen protest was violently repressed, doesn’t cease to astonish me.

This situation could be defined much more easily if we had the humility to simply face the fact that a forceful civic struggle like the one carried out over these past 6 months in Nicaragua must now reconsider how best to confront a ferocious repression.