This chronicle is part one in “2018, An Uprising Crushed”: a series on the birth of the ongoing repression in Nicaragua. It first ran in El Faro in Spanish on June 5, 2018. Read parts two and three.
Masaya is closed.
Entering the city via the 25-kilometer highway connecting Masaya to Managua now requires registration at one of seven checkpoints belonging to “the resistance”; cobblestone walls built on the highway and watched over by the civilian population. Here they call them tranques, or roadblocks.
It is the morning of June 4, 2018, and the sun is rising after a violent weekend in the city. Nine civilians and one police officer died in violent confrontations, or from shots fired in the night by gunmen in civilian clothing. Those watching over the checkpoints are nervous and alert. They are on the frontline.
Checkpoints are manned by balaclava-clad youths alongside middle-aged men and women who, in their maturity, typically keep order. Tree branches serve as doorways to grant access to approved vehicles. The guards demand identification, inquire about the reasons for a visit, look over equipment, and open the back of every vehicle then inspect the underside. Their intention, they explain, is to avoid police infiltration, or anyone bringing in guns. They repeat the procedure seven times. From the second control point another question is tacked onto the inspection: “Can you confirm they did not ask for any money at the previous checkpoint?” No. No-one asked us for money.
Checkpoints are the new means to control traffic and security in Nicaragua, a country where two months of crisis have transformed everyone’s lives. The newspaper La Prensa calculates that 70 percent of the country’s highways are blocked and under the control of the civilian population who oppose the Ortega government. Citizens who organized during this crisis, which began on April 18, call themselves “the blue and white”, “the self-summoned”, “the resistance”, or, in the rural areas of the country, simply campesinos — peasants.
In Masaya, the majority of these people are young and profess pride in their inheritance from their parents’ generation. This city was the bastion of the Sandinista Revolution that reverberated around the world in 1979 when the dictator Anastasio Somoza was toppled. It was here that the commander Camilo Ortega Saavedra, Daniel Ortega’s brother and a venerated hero, fell amid the insurrection. Here, the Sandinista Front retreated before their entrance into the capital. Every June 27, Commander Ortega returns to commemorate the strategic 1979 retreat his guerrilla movement made before preparing to march on Managua to victory. But this is a place that wants rid of Ortega.
His wife, Vice President Rosario Murillo, has said that this is a crisis caused by delinquents. She has called them a plague and said that the people of Masaya shouldn’t forget that. On one of the walls is written: “Here’s your plague, cursed witch.” Throughout the city center are murals accusing Ortega of murder or featuring a silhouette of Sandino pointing to a caricature of the President with his trademark mustache. Underneath is written “Go to hell, Daniel”.
At the entrance to the Monimbó neighborhood is a ruined house called El Comandito. It is covered in these painted slogans. Until just two months ago it was a functioning museum of the revolution, established here because of its history as a place of military planning for Sandinista commanders. It was the first thing locals destroyed at the start of this crisis. As a symbolic gesture, they left only the portrait of Camilo Ortega intact.
Today the city has the appearance of a battle scene: more stone walls on each block close off the streets to traffic, with just small spaces at each end to allow pedestrians to pass through. Each one was built by the population and is overseen by residents of each block.
To build these defenses, or barricades, they take cobblestones from the streets and assemble them like Legos. Two stones on top of one. One on top of two. That way, they don’t collapse. At the sides of each wall is a small wooden support, half the height, that serves as a ledge and creates a kind of canal for water to circulate in the gap below. A narrow space between the wall and the wall of a house on the street corner serves as an entrance point for pedestrians and motorbikes, the only vehicles currently in circulation.
From the door of her house, a 59-year-old woman who identifies herself simply as Juanita explains how they learned to put up these barricades: “I’ve been here since the revolution. The Sandinistas taught us to do them. The dictator Somoza put the cobblestones there, the ones we’re using now. It was back then that we learned.”
Juanita and her neighbors take turns watching over their block, to prevent looting. When police, or unknown armed individuals, manage to enter the city an alarm bell sounds and everyone closes their doors. In the early hours of Monday, gunmen dressed in civilian clothing gained access to the center and fired shots from a motorbike. Five people were killed. “I was in this same house during the revolution. This was where the revolution was born, and now this is what’s happening. It’s not the same because, at that time, people were armed. Now all we have are mortars.”
Mortars are the munitions of all the Nicaraguan resistance: artisanal firecrackers that use gunpowder, placed in homemade metal canons, in a design inherited from the revolution. They light the fuse, and when it reaches the gunpowder there are two explosions: first, inside the tube, which functions as a firing mechanism and propels the mortar several meters. This produces the second explosion, the important one. Residents here make “barrage mortars” or mix gunpowder with another kind of munition: glass or nails, which can cause serious injury. But it’s not much competition for bullets fired by security agents or those known as turbas, or “mobs”, groups of armed individuals in balaclavas who fire on protests or any concentration of people who oppose the government.
The population has taken control of their city: They make the decisions; they organize the city. The city’s population is the authority. In Nicaragua there is no civil war, but in daily life there may as well be. The situation is so extraordinary that everything that seemed banal, part of normal life in the community, today seems absurd — like traffic laws, sidewalks, or the sale of uniforms for industrial work.
So does the Consumer Rights Office in Masaya; in a city that doesn’t consume anything, it remains closed. Ninety percent of businesses are closed. The last bank to close operations did so last Friday. No restaurants are open, nor bodegas, nor food stands. Just one pharmacy remains stoically in service, queues of local residents at its doors. The police are in their stations; residents keep watch.
But as absurd as it may seem, given the circumstances, funeral homes are shut. “They’re scared of being looted. Things have gotten very dangerous around here,” says the shy owner of one of them, who answered when I rang the bell but now speaks from behind a curtain.
“From a slightly cynical point of view,” I say, “one would think that these are the times that your business might see the most demand.”
“If someone wants a burial, they’ll have to call,” he replies. “Our business is open, but the offices are closed. But at the moment no-one has died of natural causes, and we don’t attend to people killed by bullet wounds ourselves.”
Two blocks from Juanita’s house, a woman is holding a mortar between her legs. Her name is Isabel and she is 52 years old, though she seems far younger. She is sitting on a chair outside the door to her house. Some meters away a few young people, scarcely out of adolescence, are having a typical conversation for anyone their age. They talk in pairs, in front of one of the young women’s parents, who talk back from their own front door. The young people have two motorcycles propped across the street. One of them approaches Isabel, rocket launcher in hand. She hands him the mortar and the young man fires it into the air. “So that they know we’re here, we fire rockets into the air sometimes. You’ll hear them all over Masaya”, she says. And the police? “The police used to be for the people. But they’ve been screwing us for years, we don’t trust them anymore.”
The city center, where just two months ago tourists would buy artisanal goods in the central market or visit the historic landmarks of the revolution, today is the scene of new skirmishes.
In front of the central market, three men from three generations of the same family are packing away machinery at their small locksmiths. “There’s no business here anymore,” says the most senior, Efraín, a man over 70 who lost both legs in a train accident. In front of him his nephew, 54 years old, takes apart one of the machines with a resigned look. The youngest, 17, is not keen on talking and keeps his gaze on the street. Today, something has finished for him. Something is being born in his mind, or in his bitterness. In the street in front of him are the remains of the weekend’s battle: pieces of glass, cardboard, concrete slabs used as shields.
On Saturday the market was set alight. Hours of confrontations between residents armed with rocket launchers and the police followed, with their station located right in front of the market, backing onto the locksmiths. The protesters wrote a message in white aerosol on the front door of the police station: “Daniel is a murderer”.
Today, the police station is a mouse trap. A time bomb, a snare. In charge is Commissioner-General Ramón Avellán, who the population accuse of repression. Today, he finds himself more or less under siege. Surrounded by a labyrinth without a single entry point free of barricades; surrounded by a hostile and angry population burying their dead.
Avellán is a skinny man. Today he looks exhausted. His hair is unbrushed and dark circles around his eyes reveal sleepless nights. His voice seems on the brink of giving in. “We’re worried because a lot of police live here in Masaya, and now they can’t go home,” he says. “Yesterday they killed a colleague. A bullet hit him in the brow. We can’t even get him out of the hospital.” It’s surrounded.
On Sunday morning, after working a violent shift in the market, Commissioner Avellán received a visit from the priest Edwin Román alongside the local representative of the Nicaraguan Human Rights Association (ANPDH), Álvaro Leiva. The pair act as a humanitarian contingent in the city; they were coming to hand over a police officer that the residents had captured. In exchange, the Commissioner gave them back 38 detained residents of Masaya. “It was a coordinated exchange,” Román says.
This Monday, Leiva and Román have had a lot of work. Around midday they received news that a young man was being held prisoner by residents of the Monimbó neighborhood, Masaya’s most hardened. Dozens of residents had him tied up and were scolding him. The young man – “under 18,” is the son of a police officer. Leiva and Román went to rescue him. They put a shirt over his face so that he could not be identified, nor could he see the people roused against him. They moved him all around the neighborhood on foot, followed by a hundred or so people. Some shouted, “Leave him here so we can interrogate him!”, “Traitor!”, “Beast!”; “Let him go so his dad can see what it feels like to have their child killed.” Every few steps, Leiva would face the multitude and demand that they keep their distance. Arriving at the central park he called out to them more directly: “You all can’t continue. The police are two blocks away and have snipers. We’re not going to put anyone in danger. It’s not the fault of this young man. He hasn’t done anything, and we’re handing him over to the police. Don’t come any further than this, please.” The crowd obeyed and hung back. Leiva and Román, accompanied only by another priest and two human rights defenders, walked the young man to the police station.
Avellán greeted them. The police officer listened bitterly to the human rights defenders’ speech, given facing a half-dozen journalists, about a regime in which there are no freedoms, and about the repression of the dictatorship. Avellán received the detained young man and then addressed the journalists, his voice exhausted: “He hasn’t done anything. Being the son of a police officer isn’t a crime,” he said, and walked the young man, still trembling, to an office. Soon the young man would have company.
Twenty minutes after leaving the police station, Father Edwin Román was back, alongside Leiva and the other members of their civic committee, arm in arm with a man about 40 years old. The man wore a red polo shirt with the logo of the Nicaraguan Judicial Branch stitched onto it. The man was still fighting back tears as they walked. He had been detained, and was about to be lynched when these men rescued him. They knocked on the door of the police station again, then walked toward the main building. Commander Avellán was already there, waiting for them. They told him that people had detained this man after finding him with a police badge. He says it is an old badge. But he is on guard. Commander Avellán no longer even thanks them. “We’ll check right away,” he said, walking the man, who had shed two tears, to the office of the fearful.
For Commander Avellán, it is a question of time. Of how long he can resist the siege without leaving the hideout. He has no provisions, no cleaning supplies, nothing.
Nobody else in Masaya has those things; with the city closed, food distributors do not reach them. “We must resist for three months,” proposes Rolando Acuña, a 62-year-old man who from a plastic chair outside a house on a street corner observes the comings and goings of Monimbó. It’s an old house that has already seen multiple uprisings and revolutions. Serene, Acuña smiles: “No-one here is going to die of hunger. I’m already thinking I’ll have to eat one of my little pigs that I’m raising. Here, we’re going to resist. All revolutions take some blood. Today we only defend ourselves with mortars, but people always find a strategy.
Together with two contemporaries he watches as over one thousand Monimbó residents congregate in the square, in front of the church. More are inside, where a funeral mass is being carried out for Jason Putoy, a young man who died in the middle of the night while watching over one of the blockades. Two civilians on a motorcycle shot him in the back.
The church is full to burst and outside, in nearby streets, an even greater number of people await the coffin’s departure to accompany its procession to the place of burial.
At around three in the afternoon, with mass still underway, a rumor spread that in the baseball pitch of another neighborhood of Masaya people captured a female soldier who was going around in civilian clothing. Two men board a motorcycle, its licence plate hidden with a red headscarf. They make a hasty departure, intending to bring the soldier to a computer lab located just opposite the church. The lab is named after Camilo Ortega.
In the community the atmosphere seems eager for a lynching, exacerbated by Saturday’s deaths during the confrontations at the market. There are still no official investigations, nor confirmation from human rights organizations, but the version shared throughout the population is that a young man, 15-year-old Junior Gaitán, was shot at point blank on Saturday afternoon. They say —the whole town says— that he was detained and, already subdued, spoke his last words: “Loco, don’t kill me, I’m not involved in anything.” A police officer shot him in the chest. Everyone is convinced that that is how Gaitán died.
“You do not pay the people in bullets or by making them disappear. We’ve been trampled for too long. No people could stand it,” says Acuña, the 62-year-old man, while waiting patiently to see what happens first in front of his house: the coffin’s departure or the arrival of the captured soldier.
But the coffin comes out, followed by a band of chicheros, playing “Nicaragua, Nicaragüita” and “Vivirás Monimbó” with tubas and trumpets. These are the two songs that locals associate with the Sandinista Revolution and its victory over the dictator Anastasio Somoza.
Logistical issues mean that the funeral march moves at a snail’s pace. On its way to the cemetery the coffin must travel down the narrow pedestrian passageways created by each barricade. On every block. But, the march continues.
On the other side of Masaya, Leiva and Román rescue the soldier and set out toward the police station. Commander Avellán receives them once again.
A storm is drawing close over Masaya.
From outside his front door, Doña Juanita watches over her street. I ask her about the police. She says that the Masaya residents lost confidence in Commander Avellán a long time ago, and that he is responsible for repression of the locals. “We used to call the Somoza police commander Macho Negro [Black Macho]. That’s what we now call Avellán: Macho Negro.”
“What happened to the original Macho Negro?”
“He was brought to justice in the square.”
The storm is arriving. In a few minutes the rain floods the streets, its currents colliding into the cobblestone walls and streaming around the sides. They will soon give way.
Some of the street barricades are now deserted, but not the seven tranques to enter or exit Masaya. Those ones continue with the same vigilance. With the same checkpoints. With the same dust, albeit wet. The guards there are preparing. When night falls, they say, they are expecting another attack. “Let them come,” says one of the guards, a young man with a handkerchief covering his face and a mortar in hand. “Let them come. We’re waiting for them.”
This chronicle, translated by Ali Sargent, opens a three-part series on the birth in 2018 of the ongoing repression in Nicaragua. Read parts two and three.
