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mia

(8,356 posts)
Thu Jul 19, 2018, 07:20 AM Jul 2018

Nicaragua is living an Orwellian nightmare....

This is horrifying. My sister-in-law is from Nicaragua and can't get back home. She fears for her relatives, friends, and country. The Sandinistas are dancing in the streets with their attack dogs and neighborhood snitches.




Everyone is an enemy who's deserving of death, rape and jail': Death squads have returned to Nicaragua

Nicaragua is living an Orwellian nightmare....

Over the past three months, Daniel Ortega's government of "reconciliation and national unity" has killed more than 300 people, injured thousands and abducted and disappeared hundreds more. Sandinista "death caravans" of hooded police and government paramilitaries raid towns like hordes of invading Huns, firing battlefield weapons at unarmed protesters, dragging people from their homes, torching buildings and leaving dead bodies in the street....

It's happened so fast that the Ortega regime hasn't had a chance to change its official letterhead, which still reads: "The Government of Reconciliation and National Unity!" The anachronistic slogan is symptomatic of a government whose messaging hasn't caught up with its actions....

"They went on a three-day rampage, grabbing people off the street, inside the market, out of businesses and busting down doors to private homes," a local resident said, under the condition of anonymity. "The snatch squad units are a mix of riot police and professional paramilitaries. The low-grade, thuggish paramilitaries race around in pickup caravans intimidating people on the highway and in neighborhoods."

The regime is now targeting everyone suspected of helping to dig up streets to build self-defense barricades. Police and paramilitaries go door-to-door with lists of names provided to them by neighborhood snitches, known as orejas — or ears. People are pulled from their house without a warrant and thrown into the back of unmarked Hilux pick-up trucks and hauled off to El Chipote, the government's dreaded torture prison....


https://www.pri.org/stories/2018-07-18/everyone-enemy-whos-deserving-death-rape-and-jail-death-squads-have-returned
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Achilleaze

(15,543 posts)
2. republicans too busy betraying the USA to help neighbors
Thu Jul 19, 2018, 07:41 AM
Jul 2018

besides, helping would be caring and compassionate, and repubes are anti- that teaching of Christ, among others.

 

Lee-Lee

(6,324 posts)
3. I'm disappointed that the left leaning Sandinistas have gone this way
Thu Jul 19, 2018, 07:58 AM
Jul 2018

After the end of Ronnie Rayguns meddling and backing the Contras I had high hopes that left to their own devices they could show a good path for Central America.

I guess not.

ck4829

(34,974 posts)
4. I would imagine what we're seeing today is a consequence of this
Thu Jul 19, 2018, 08:07 AM
Jul 2018

Many of the contras were Somoza's men of the previous and brutal regime, along with murderers and rapists... Not justifying what the Sandinistas are doing today, but maybe they see this as preventive to stop contras 2.0

 

Lee-Lee

(6,324 posts)
6. Maybe, but it doesn't make this any less bad
Thu Jul 19, 2018, 08:56 AM
Jul 2018

There are ways to maintain order in a civil society that don’t end up like this.

mia

(8,356 posts)
8. Children of the Revolution - How the Sandinistas lost the youth of Nicaragua.
Thu Jul 19, 2018, 09:05 AM
Jul 2018
In 2006, I voted for Daniel Ortega. I was 17 years old, a freshman in college, and strongly influenced by the stories my parents told me about the Sandinista Revolution he helped lead in the 1970s. Oral history took a toll on me. Even if I hadn’t even been born in those times, I was able to imagine what my parents felt when they heard they were free.

Ortega fought with the Sandinista National Liberation Front, the FSLN, in its long struggle against Anastasio Somoza’s dictatorship. After taking power and adopting socialist economic policies, his government fought a brutal civil war against the U.S.-backed Contra rebels throughout the 1980s. He was defeated in the 1990 election, then returned to the presidency in 2006. He was re-elected in 2011, and after changing the constitution to allow him to run for a third consecutive term, again in 2016.

Over the past 11 years, I, and many other young Nicaraguans, have come to see Ortega not as a revolutionary hero but as the face of dictatorship. But until a month ago, it was hard to believe that anything would ever change. Today, I get the impression that we are about to witness another kind of revolution and another moment of freedom. This time, we hope, it will be different....

But something changed on April 18. That day, the government informed Nicaraguans that the president had approved a decree that would dramatically transform our social security system. Not only would workers and companies have to increase their financial contributions to the Social Security Institute, but elderly citizens were going to get less money from their squalid pensions. This is a significant cut in a country where the minimum salary ranges between U.S.$130 and U.S.$160 dollars per month.

https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2018/05/why-young-nicaraguans-have-lost-faith-in-the-sandinistas.html







Archae

(46,260 posts)
10. It's because Ortega is an opportunist.
Thu Jul 19, 2018, 09:55 AM
Jul 2018

He gained power by being "leftist," during the 1980's battling Somoza and his goons.

Now he gained power again by going full-Somoza.

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