Introductory Essay

When you live in Nicaragua, says 31-year-old poet Ulises Alaniz, “It’s
like you never get over things. It’s like tragedy after tragedy after tragedy.” In
recent years, Nicaragua has enjoyed relative peace in a region otherwise torn by
violence. In April, all of that changed. The government of President Daniel
Ortega and his wife and vice president, Rosario Murillo, have killed at least 322
and as many as 500 people involved in protests. About 500 people have been
jailed as political prisoners, and many of them have been tortured. More than
50,000 Nicaraguans (the country has a population 6.5 million) have fled, mostly
to neighboring Costa Rica. Commented [ua1]: Will you include sources? This part is
kind of controversial because the numbers vary. The
The initial spark for this blaze was small. On April 18th, university government says the dead are less than 100 while the HR
students and pensioners organized marches both the capital, Managua, and Leon, organizations speak of the 500 plus.
the country’s cultural capital and home to one of its biggest and most important
universities, protesting reforms to Social Security that would increase workers’
contributions and decrease pensions. Riot police and so-called “paramilitary
groups,” Ortega sympathizers armed and organized by the government, beat the
protestors with sticks and launched tear gas. But rather than quieting down,
protestors showed up again the next day, this time in larger numbers and in towns
and cities throughout the country. This time they were met with rubber bullets and
live ammunition. Two civilians and a police officer died, the first victims in what
has become a prolonged massacre, one that the Nicaraguan poets presented here
have lived in the flesh.
On April 18, poet and musician Kevin Berry was managing La
Bibliothèque, a new café, bookstore, and live music space in Leon. As the protests
unfolded, he began organizing poetry readings and concerts in support of the
marches. He saw it as a natural part of being an artist. “We have a great weapon,
that’s a pen and a paper,” says Berry. “It’s a great responsibility because we
transmit messages to whoever reads us...we have to define what side of the road
we’re going to stand on, and write from there.” His poem “April, I Have Kisses
for You,” memorializes two of the first victims. One is 15-year-old Álvaro
Conrado, shot in the neck in Managua on April 20 while bringing water to student
protesters. The other is 42-year-old journalist Angel Gahona, father of two
children, who was shot in Bluefields while transmitting video of the protests on
Facebook Live. The police have arrested two men, 18-year-old Brandon
Cristopher Lovo Taylor and 20-year-old Glen Abraham Slate, in relation to the
murder. Months later, they are still waiting to stand trial; their arrest is widely
considered to be a coverup.
On April 19th, seventy-eight-year-old Leon native Jorge Eduardo
Argüello, who splits his time between Nicaragua and Florida, was driving into

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Leon after a period in the US. As he maneuvered his car to park close to his
family home, steps away from both the town’s emblematic white cathedral and
the National Autonomous University of Nicaragua (UNAN Leon for its name in
Spanish), he saw students gathering to protest. “Some of them said, ‘Poet, come
join us,’” says Argüello, who is something of a local character. Moments later,
while parking, he heard screaming. “They said, ‘They’re coming, they’re
coming’”--armed Sandinista Youth were on the way to attack the protesters. Commented [ua2]: And also the police. But I might be
mixing up two events. From what I remember the UNAN
Argüello drove a few blocks away to the Iglesia de la Recolección, from which he medicine students had been protesting peacefully in front of
watched the Sandinista Youth ransack banks and an electronics store. the hospital where they receive classes. The police had let
them protest in peace until April 20th, when they started
Within the same few blocks lives 50-year-old Marcia Ondina, another attacking them.
Leon native and lawyer. When the number of deaths reached 63, Ondina, who https://www.facebook.com/eddylopezhernandez/videos/1021
1752670238698/ This is the video of when that happened.
was on faculty at the UNAN Leon, resigned publicly during a meeting; like many And it was that same Friday that they burned down el CUUN
major universities and institutions in Nicaragua, the UNAN is controlled by and the other buildings closed to it, and they ransacked the
businesses. What the poet is telling happened on the 20th, not
Ortega’s Sandinista party. Her adult son, who owns a taxi company in Leon, had the 19th.
begun receiving death threats. But her resignation went beyond the person. Commented [ua3]: I’m sure that there were also other
Staying “would have made me complicit, and responsable, by omission. Because sympathizers and other people who just took advantage of
the opportunity.
lawyers, more than anyone, are fully conscious of what was happening,” she says.
Commented [ua4]: This sentence is unclear.
She is also the daughter of Sandinista revolutionaries who, like President Ortega
and Vice-President Murillo themselves, fought to topple the murderous Somoza
dictatorship. If she stayed at the university, she says, “I would be betraying my
revolutionary principles.”
Like Ondina/s parents, both Alaniz’s mother and father had fought in the
civil war of the 1980s. Even so, Alaniz, a Leon native who currently lives and
teaches English in the town of San Marcos, about 2 hours away, was too
apprehensive to attend. But after seeing the marches on TV, “I sensed that Commented [ua5]: Would it be necessary to complete this
sentence with …. Attend the marches? Or not the repeat the
something very important was going on, and I wanted to feel the energy myself.” marches, you can say something like he was too
At his first march in Leon, he was at first “very uncomfortable,” he says. “But apprehensive to get involved or participate?
then the energy started pulling through me...It was like a sea of people. You could
not see where it all started and where it finished, because it was all flooded with
people.” On May 30, Mother’s Day in Nicaragua, Alaniz and friends attended a
march in Managua meant to call attention to the 91 civilians who had been killed
since April. Things started peacefully, but then, less than a mile ahead of Alaniz,
paramilitary groups began attacking the protesters. “If [the attack] had started 20
minutes later, we would have been where they opened fire,” he says.
Seventeen people died that day in Managua and other towns across the
country. But Nicaraguans continued to take to the streets, each time more
outraged; the death toll, in turn, has continued to rise. What began as a protest
against social security reforms became a categorical demand for Murillo and
Commented [ua6]: I have the impression this section
Ortega to step down. But the government only cracked down harder. A mattress sounds repetitive.
factory in Nicaragua was burned, killing six people, including an infant, who Commented [ua7]: There were two children killed. A
toddler girls and a baby boy, if I’m not mistaken.

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lived in the apartment above it. Young women imprisoned without sufficient
medical care suffered miscarriages in prison. In mid July, the government,
wanting to unseat a group of students who had taken over facilities of the UNAN-
Managua, laid siege to the university for 20 hours, driving them to seek shelter in
a neighboring church, where they were further bombarded. In the ensuing rain of
bullets, in which priests and journalists were also caught, two students were shot
in the head and killed.
It wasn’t long before Berry began receiving death threats on Facebook.
They were so persistent and blood-chilling—one mentioned seeing Berry and his
son after school—that finally, in late July, Berry decided to flee the city, and
stayed away from the marches. “I’m scared” he says. However, “I still help in
ways I can, I just try not to be in the front lines as I did before.” Berry is hopeful
that Ortega will eventually step down, but worries about the deep divisions in
ideology made horrifically clear by the fact that many of the attacks on protestors
were carried out by paramilitary forces—that is, civilian sympathizers. “How are
we going to live in the same country, still having these feelings,” he says. “I’m
going to walk up into somebody tomorrow that today threatened me on Facebook.
Am I going to be able to look him in the eye, is he going to be able to look me in
the eye and apologize. I don’t know. I think, what comes after this, that’s what’s
going to mark how Nicaragua is going to walk for the future.” Commented [ua8]:
OMG! This is so shocking! I had never thought of it that
Death threats have driven Ondina’s son out of the country as well. But way. I think this a pivotal moment of the essay.
Ondina has stayed in Leon, continuing with her private practice. She’s opened a
small shop of items made from recycled materials to try to make up for her lost
salary from the university. And every evening at 6 pm, when the sun goes down,
she bars the door of her house. It’s the house she grew up in, and before the Commented [ua9]: I would double check this. She used to
bar her door during the barricades time. Now, she shuts the
revolution it was used to stash arms. “Here I watched them clean FAL rifles, I gate opening to her garage (where the store is) but she keeps
watched them clean Garrans, .45s and .22s,” she says. In 1978, when Sandinistas her door open.
finally toppled Somoza, an event known as the Triumph, Ondina was ten years Commented [ua10]: The triumph was in 1979 . The
old. She was recruited to make tourniquets and give injections to wounded insurrection happened in 1978 but that was a failed attempt.
It was in July 1979 that the revolution succeeded
soldiers “at the age when other girls were playing with dolls.” For Ondina, that https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4at2XmnPkvw
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f8gKuzL04F4
her son, the grandson of dedicated revolutionaries, has to fear for his life because
of the Sandinista Front, is the greatest of ironies. And the violence and oppressin https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-ejtltZAW3E (this is the
failed attempt of 1978)
being felt in Nicaragua today are all too familiar. In her poem “Similar,” from
Episodios, a book of linked poems her neighborhood, the son of a street vendor is Commented [ua11]:

captured by the National Guard, never to be seen again. This isn’t fiction—he was
a friend of Ondina’s. The arrests, torture, and disappearances happening today in
Nicaragua remind her all too much of the dictatorship the Sandinistas fought and
died to overturn.
As of the 29th of September, it’s now illegal to protest in Nicaragua.
During our phone call, Ondina said, “They’re recording me and they could throw
Commented [ua12R11]: I’m sure she is talking of the
1978 failed attempt. Leon was of the first places where this
insurrection started. But Somoza cracked down on it, and
since this time the Sandinistas were not well-prepared,
Somoza took the control again.
Commented [ua13]: This sentence is unclear.

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me into jail. But well, the mouth was made to speak. The thinker is obligated to
think.” Thirty-year-old poet Ricardo Rios, agrees—he asked to keep personal
information to a minimum, due to fear of reprisals. “We poets are called to
participate in the changes that the nation demands,” he says. “Words allow us to
reach the people’s conscience, and to take the voice of that conscience and
translate it into poetry. The poetry being written in Nicaragua right now is another
means of protest.”
Jorge Argüello, the oldest of the poets gathered here, was stateside when
the Sandinista revolution triumphed. He moved back to Nicaragua soon afterward
to teach, but was later blacklisted for not following party doctrine and had to
leave the country once again if he hoped to find work. But unlike the Sandinista
revolution, which had a clear ideology and leadership, Argüello says, “This
movement is amazing because it has the profile that it doesn’t belong to anybody.
When I was there, you could test it. There was no leader. It was a spontaneous
thing coming from the heart.” But in the meantime, the upheavals have driven
Argüello back to Florida. For a while he stayed in Leon, sleeping at the house of a
poet friend who lives on the outskirts, away from the action. But after two trips to
the hospital for stomach problems that turned out to be due to anxiety, he returned
to the US—“I’m 78 years old,” he says. But he adds, with characteristic
mordancy, “We’re going to win because the people have already decided…They
don’t care if they die or not.”
Alaniz hasn’t been to a march since Mother’s Day. But something for him
has changed. Before these events, he didn’t feel obligated to write about politics
and could focus on what was important to him personally. But now the political is
personal. Desperate to do something, Alaniz floundered at first. “But I got to this
point where I realized the only thing I can do is write. I can’t do anything else.”
The events of the last few months have also changed how Alaniz views his
own generation. Alaniz who has taught English since the age of 20 in universities
and private colleges in and around Leon, had seen his generation as vacuous and
unengaged when compared with his parent’s generation. “Everyone’s worried
about their phones and going to parties and Snapchat. They’re worried about viral
videos.” But extremely young students, many of them under the age of 20, have
led the protest movements. They’ve been killed and imprisoned, but they haven’t
gone silent. “I was wrong,” Alaniz said. “Something had to happen to fire up the
same courage in people. But it was there. It hadn’t disappeared…That is why I
feel that it’s a very painful, but a very exciting time…I feel like what’s happening
now is part of what was started 54 years ago.” Commented [ua14]: I don’t remember what I was saying
here lol. Maybe I meant something that was started more
Berry, speaking from the other side of the country, agrees: “No matter than 40 years ago, taking the revolution as a starting point?
how many bodies you can take away, what you can’t take away is the thoughts

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and the hope of a new Nicaragua. And it’s coming soon. I don’t know when, but
it’s coming soon.” Commented [ua15]: I love this essay! It made me got all
teary-eyed. You brought home some many memories. I feel
like a sort of hero, lol. Thanks Lauren!

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