© Reuters
A demonstrator holds a homemade mortar during a protest against Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega's government in Granada, Nicaragua June 6, 2018.
A demonstrator holds a homemade mortar during a protest against Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega's government in Granada, Nicaragua June 6, 2018.
The government strategy has been to accept extraordinary levels of opposition violence and intimidation so as to allow the opposition to discredit themselves with public opinion.
Nicaragua has been a good example of how Western corporate and alternative news media are able to create a custom-made bizarro-world to suit the propaganda requirements of their countries' elites. The current media onslaught against Nicaragua uses the whole toolbox of propaganda tricks portraying aggressors as victims, reporting non-existent massacres of peacefully protesting students, denying systematic destruction by opposition paramilitaries of public property and private businesses, even omitting attacks on hospitals and ambulances. The big fundamental fiction has been that a majority of people in Nicaragua reject the Sandinista government led by President Daniel Ortega. The converse of the lie is that most people support the so-called Civic Alliance composed of right-wing business leaders, right-wing political parties, reactionary Catholic bishops, US-funded NGOs and university students allied to those interests.
But events in real life contradict the minority opposition storyline. On April 22nd, the supposed dictatorship proposed a national dialogue mediated by the Catholic church. It took the opposition almost three weeks to agree. They did so on condition the government withdraw the police from the streets. In fact, police had already been ordered not to intervene against the violent opposition paramilitaries. The government agreed, but when the dialogue began the bishops refused to condemn opposition violence while still falsely accusing the government of violent repression. The opposition never tried to negotiate in good faith, simply demanding the government resign and refusing to dismantle roadblocks which the government, supposedly a dictatorship, allowed to operate so as to avoid more violent conflict.
Comment: You can bet that revolutionary movements are being manipulated when the trigger for the violence sompletely blown out of proportion. In the case of Nicaragua, the unrest began as a result of the state's failure to handle forest fires and limited cuts of pensions and social security payments - which the government later took back. Sure, the Nicaraguan people no doubt have much to complain about the Sandinista government, but do does reasons sound like justification enough to kidnap, torture and murder people on the streets? The average person would very much prefer to stay away from bloodbaths, so civil society discontent is normally expressed through peaceful demonstrations or voting someone else in. So who is trying to push Nicaragua over the edge, much like has happened to Venezuela in recent years? See:
Nicaragua's bloody unrest has US fingerprints all over it