Solidarity in Crisis: The Nicaraguan Protest Movements Ties to Warren Wilson College
Jasper Everingham | April 6, 2023
Content Warning: Discussions of graphic violence, discussions of torture.
For the last fourteen years, the people of Nicaragua have been living under a violent, autocratic dictatorship. The President, Daniel Ortega, functionally has no term limits, and his first lady, Rosario Murillo, is also the vice president.
After putting down a wave of protests starting in April 2018 with military force, the Ortega-Murillo dictatorship holds the entirety of Nicaragua in a martial grip, said Seimy Mendoza, a Warren Wilson College (WWC) student and activist.
Originally from Honduras, Mendoza lived in Nicaragua for years while attending college there and later fought to protest the Ortega-Murillo dictatorship. She has since fled the country and said she cannot return for fear of death or imprisonment and torture.
“I was a senior student when the crisis in Nicaragua started in April 2018,” Mendoza said. “Back then, I was working also for the European Union Commission to Nicaragua and Panama. Through the delegation, I was working on matters of education access and human rights, so when the crisis began that made me be involved in the front line, [it] gave me the chance to learn from Nicaraguan people what solidarity means in times of crisis.”
Protests started in Managua, the Nicaraguan capital, then spread to León, another major city, and from there rippled out across the nation. Most of the protests, according to Mendoza, were organized, led and run by college students.
“Students took over the universities,” Mendoza said. “Universities canceled class and students started a movement called Los Autoconvocados de Nicaragua… this was a collective of students taking over the streets of Nicaragua.”
The Ortega-Murillo dictatorship saw the protests as a threat to its power, and it was determined to maintain power.
“A series of protests happened, and then the assassinations began,” Mendoza said. “In a period of three months, about 356 people were killed.”
Mendoza said that she personally witnessed and experienced the violence perpetuated by the Nicaraguan government on its people. On the first day of protests, Mendoza was going from the U.S. embassy to her university when she encountered a group of student protesters fleeing the police and government sympathizers.
“Students started running towards the university,” Mendoza said. “I was attacked that day running towards the school, because if you see people running, run. I was hit by someone completely dressed in black with a bat in my back. [The university] became a hospital that night, because they shot people. After that night, that was the beginning of everything. Students felt that their commitment to Nicaragua was fighting in the streets.”
The determination of the students and protesters only grew after that day, and with it Mendoza said, the government’s willingness to bloodily put down dissent.
“There was a fifteen-year-old high school student, Álvaro Conrado,” Mendoza said. “He was shot in the throat. He couldn't breathe right in his last moments of life, and he was saying ‘me duele respirar’ — ‘it's painful for me to breathe.’ College students used that [as a rallying cry] because when you're under oppression, it’s even hard to breathe.”
The government’s response was staggering in its scope and brutality in many ways. In the first months of protest, the government made it illegal for protesters to receive admittance to hospitals, effectively denying shot and beaten protesters medical care, Mendoza recalled, and they were indiscriminate in their use of arrest, imprisonment, and torture.
Mendoza also said that government forces did not hesitate to use military-grade weapons against civilians.
“I remember Mother's Day,” Mendoza said. “They had already killed about 150 students, so mothers of these students organized themselves to protest for Mother's Day. That was one of the biggest shootings that happened. They were using snipers against people, and three of my closest, closest friends were assassinated that day. One of them was a volunteer for the Red Cross, he was shot in the head. I was standing right next to him.”
Despite the violence and bloody opposition, the people of Nicaragua still fought and are fighting for a free country.
“You would see the streets full of people,” Mendoza said of the early protests. “They knew [the police] were shooting people and arresting people, and people were still showing up. A whole year went through and people were still on the streets; while their kids were being killed, while their kids were being tortured. There was a point in the crisis where they [the protesters] built barricades, and you would see people cooking and giving whoever was in the barricades taking care of neighborhoods food and water. When there was shootings happening, universities would open gates and secure their students.”
The government’s persecution of political dissidents and activists has also spread to the U.S.
On Feb. 9, 2023, the Nicaraguan government stripped 222 political prisoners of their citizenship, froze all of their assets, and had them flown to the U.S. in an international deal that even at present remains mysterious and poorly understood. Although most have been able to rely on connections and incredible generosity to find places to stay, the situation for many is tenuous at best, especially considering that many are physically or psychologically unable to work or find employment as a result of the imprisonment and torture they experienced immediately before coming to the U.S.
Elena Hendrick, an American activist and spiritual community builder who lived and worked in Nicaragua for almost 40 years before moving back to the U.S.
“This is 222 people and their families,” Hendrick said. “[The prisoners] went from being in prison and being tortured — anywhere from months to four years — all of a sudden to being put on a plane having no idea where they were being taken. There was support from the US government, there was support from a lot of nonprofits, Nicaraguans from all over the place and those of us who are in solidarity with Nicaragua, we're showing up, but many many of [the released prisoners] are living with strangers who accepted them in their home.”
Mendoza said that even though she was forced to flee the country, she remains staunchly dedicated to the Nicaraguan cause. She also added that there are many ways for people in the U.S. who care about Nicaragua to have a real, positive impact.
“I encourage [Americans] to learn about what is happening in Nicaragua,” Mendoza said. “To know that there's college students like Warren Wilson students who are in the frontlines in Nicaragua, who had the courage to step up against a dictatorship.”
Mendoza believes that being educated and discussing what is happening in Nicaragua is doubly important because the issue doesn’t receive mainstream attention in the U.S.
“What is happening in Nicaragua is not of interest to the international community,” Mendoza said. “Our small countries don’t make it in the front page of the big newspapers, but I feel like if people show interest for their stories then maybe journalism can start taking some interest in what is happening in the region. There's so much that happens in Latin America that is summarized and ignored by the U.S. media [but] I feel like we Warren Wilson students are privileged enough to be in a place where we can speak up and advocate for others who are not being allowed to do so right now.”
Hendrick spoke to WWC’s strength as a space built around inclusivity and welcoming others. She co-taught at WWC in the spring of 2022 and said that while she was amazed by WWC’s diversity in many regards, in terms of immigration, she feels the school could do more to be welcoming.
“What could Warren Wilson, as a community, do to welcome [immigrants]?” Hendrick asked. “There are many young people from Nicaragua in the United States trying to get asylum — what would it be like for Warren Wilson to welcome five young people and provide them a place to study and be welcomed and embraced?”
Another, more fiscally concrete way for people in the U.S. to show their support of Nicaragua is to give aid to political prisoners, both those in the country and the 222 released to the U.S. last February. Hendrick said that The Center for Victims of Torture, a nonprofit dedicated to healing survivors of torture and violent conflict, has a fund to help the 222 prisoners currently in the U.S. Additionally, the organization Nica Family Support is dedicated to raising money to help the families and children of activists imprisoned by the Ortega-Murillo government.
Hendrick and Mendoza both emphasized that the most important thing is that people know and care about the atrocity currently unfolding in Nicaragua. Despite the oppressive power of the Ortega-Murillo dictatorship, Mendoza believes this is a fight the Nicaraguan people can win, but that they need any support they can get in fighting.
“I was privileged,” Mendoza said. “I was able to make it without any scar. I'm here, I'm standing here. But a lot of my friends aren't, and they died believing that Nicaragua would be free someday.”