They ride in the back of Toyota double-cabin pickup trucks, assault rifles slung over their shoulders. No one knows their identities. They always wear black ski masks or hoods.
The gunmen — between 1,000 and 1,500 of them, according to some estimates — are part of a recently formed paramilitary force protecting the continued rule of President Daniel Ortega against a three-month-old civilian uprising. Their main tactic is terror. They conduct roundups, fire at protesters, carry out dark-of-night raids and menace the population.
The Pro-Human Rights Association of Nicaragua said Thursday that paramilitary forces have conducted 595 “kidnappings” and disappearances of citizens since the uprising began April 18. The group said it has tallied 97 killings since July 11.
“Today in Nicaragua, there exists an undeclared state of siege,” Alvaro Leiva, executive director of the rights group, said at a news conference.
An armed Sandinista paramilitary before the arrival of President Daniel Ortega, in Masaya, Nicaragua, Friday, July 13, 2018.
Cristobal Venegas AP
Police statements make no mention of hooded gunmen when describing deaths, such as that of Brazilian medical student Raynéia Lima, who was shot and killed Monday night in Managua. Police said a private security guard shot the 31-year-old. But they have made no arrests, and her vehicle has vanished. Brazil lodged a diplomatic protest.
In some ways, the paramilitary forces have achieved their objective. Almost none of the scores of massive roadblocks that paralyzed the country from the uprising’s onset in April remain. In public statements, Ortega sounds upbeat, claiming that the country is returning to normal.
“It’s been a week now that turmoil has stopped,” Ortega told Fox News on Monday.
While Ortega may feel he’s gaining the upper hand, his opponents say he’s taken Nicaragua on a dark path. Tourist arrivals have plunged, and 800 of the nation’s 2,500 restaurants are dark. Jittery Nicaraguans have yanked some $715 million from banks since the beginning of April.
“People go home at 5 or 6 and they don’t leave at night out of fear,” said Lucy Valenti,president of the Nicaraguan National Chamber of Tourism, a trade group.
Heavily armed pro-government militia occupy the Monimbo neighborhood of Masaya, Nicaragua, on Wednesday, July 18, 2018.
Alfredo Zuniga AP
Ortega denies that he had anything to do with creating the informal militias that continue to patrol city and country roads, though less visibly than week or two ago. But the fiction is blatant. Television broadcasts from July 14 show the 72-year-old revolutionary-turned-autocrat embracing hooded gunmen after they dislodged protesters in Masaya, where opponents of Ortega had turned the city into a citadel against his rule.
”They can detain people on the highway. They can search vehicles, ask for papers, search cellphones,” said Sergio Ramirez, an acclaimed writer who served as Ortega’s vice president from 1985 to 1990 but is now a bitter critic. “You can turn up tortured on the side of the road or jailed in El Chipote,” a notorious prison.
Uniformed police often accompany the paramilitary forces but it is the militias who are better armed. They carry high-caliber rifles, including ones with telescopic sights. One was photographed with a rocket-propelled grenade.
“They don’t answer to anyone,”Ramirez said. ”It is as if in the United States the Ku Klux Klan would appear carrying weapons and doing roundups, and the police were protecting the actions of the Ku Klux Klan.”
Leaders of an opposition alliance seeking Ortega’s removal before his term ends in 2021 have pledged to use nonviolent means, but the fierce crackdown may imperil that objective.
“The more time that passes, the more desire people have to defend themselves,” said Fidel Moreira Flores, leader of the Center for Governance and Democracy Studies, a non-governmental organization with offices in Nicaragua. He said young people are restive. “They are shouting: Look for weapons so we can defend ourselves.”
Like many civil society leaders, Moreira fears that his own arrest may be imminent.
“Some friends called me yesterday and told me I am on a list and should leave the country,” Moreira said, adding that his contacts are connected to the government.
Sandinista militias stand guard at a dismantled barricade on Tuesday, July 17, 2018, after police and pro-government militias stormed the Monimbo neighborhood of Masaya, Nicaragua. Heavily armed police and militias laid siege to and then retook the symbolically important neighborhood that had recently become a center of resistance to President Daniel Ortega’s government.
Cristobal Venegas AP
Lesther Alemán, a 20-year-old university student who took part in early rounds of Catholic Church-mediated negotiations between Ortega and the opposition, said paramilitary forces are pursuing anyone deemed supportive of the opposition.
“People who offer provisions are being hunted. People who go to the marches are being hunted. Those who have lent their homes as safe houses are being hunted. They are on a constant witch hunt,” Alemán said in taped responses sent to a reporter from a secret location.
Alemán said he wasn’t personally afraid but “I am very worried about my family.”
Those who look down the road say they fear the paramilitary units eventually will turn to open criminality, making Nicaragua look more like its violence-wracked neighbors to the north: Honduras, El Salvador and Guatemala.
“You create them but you don’t control them. They have their own social dynamic. They are starting to rob on the streets,” said Óscar René Vargas, a sociologist.
Armed groups aren’t Ortega’s only tool to combat his opponents. The Sandinista Front-controlled National Assembly on July 16 approved a sweeping antiterror law that allows the state to prosecute anyone who causes death or injuries or destroys public or private property.
The loose wording lets the government interpret the law to go after “people who are simply exercising their right to protest,” Rupert Colville, spokesman for the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, told a U.N. news service.
But Nicaraguans are not prone to bottling up their feelings, and even as ordinary citizens hunker down in fear they have made life difficult for officials who venture into public.
“You see now that the principal Sandinista officials can’t go to the supermarket. They board airplanes and people start shouting at them, ‘murderers,’” said José Adán Aguerri, president of Nicaragua’s largest business and agricultural group, the Superior Council of Private Enterprise.
Tim Johnson, 202-383-6028, @timjohnson4
In this file photo, pick-up trucks filled with heavily armed police ride around the Monimbo neighborhood of Masaya, Nicaragua, Tuesday, July 17, 2018. The police and pro-government militias laid siege to and then retook a symbolically important neighborhood that had recently become a center of resistance to President Daniel Ortega’s government. Cristobal VenegasAP
Read more here: https://www.mcclatchydc.com/news/nation-world/world/article215568330.html#storylink=cpy
Keep these in mind as you contemplate the direction of the American government over the past 50 years and especially since the Obama election.
The Goals of Communism
(as read into the congressional record January 10, 1963, from "The Naked Communist" by Cleon Skousen)
1. U.S. acceptance of coexistence as the only alternative to atomic war.
2. U.S. willingness to capitulate in preference to engaging in atomic war.
3. Develop the illusion that total disarmament of the United States would be a demonstration of moral strength.
4. Permit free trade between all nations regardless of Communist affiliation and regardless of whether or not items could be used for war.
5. Extension of long-term loans to Russia and Soviet satellites.
6. Provide American aid to all nations regardless of Communist domination.
7. Grant recognition of Red China. Admission of Red China to the U.N.
8. Set up East and West Germany as separate states in spite of Khrushchev's promise in 1955 to settle the German question by free elections under supervision of the U.N.
9. Prolong the conferences to ban atomic tests because the United States has agreed to suspend tests as long as negotiations are in progress.
10. Allow all Soviet satellites individual representation in the U.N.
11. Promote the U.N. as the only hope for mankind. If its charter is rewritten, demand that it be set up as a one-world government with its own independent armed forces. (Some Communist leaders believe the world can be taken over as easily by the U.N. as by Moscow. Sometimes these two centers compete with each other as they are now doing in the Congo.)
12. Resist any attempt to outlaw the Communist Party.
13. Do away with all loyalty oaths.
14. Continue giving Russia access to the U.S. Patent Office.
15. Capture one or both of the political parties in the United States.
16. Use technical decisions of the courts to weaken basic American institutions by claiming their activities violate civil rights.
17. Get control of the schools. Use them as transmission belts for socialism and current Communist propaganda. Soften the curriculum. Get control of teachers' associations. Put the party line in textbooks.
18. Gain control of all student newspapers.
19. Use student riots to foment public protests against programs or organizations which are under Communist attack.
20. Infiltrate the press. Get control of book-review assignments, editorial writing, policymaking positions.
21. Gain control of key positions in radio, TV, and motion pictures.
22. Continue discrediting American culture by degrading all forms of artistic expression. An American Communist cell was told to "eliminate all good sculpture from parks and buildings, substitute shapeless, awkward and meaningless forms."
23. Control art critics and directors of art museums. "Our plan is to promote ugliness, repulsive, meaningless art."
24. Eliminate all laws governing obscenity by calling them "censorship" and a violation of free speech and free press.
25. Break down cultural standards of morality by promoting pornography and obscenity in books, magazines, motion pictures, radio, and TV.
26. Present homosexuality, degeneracy and promiscuity as "normal, natural, healthy."
27. Infiltrate the churches and replace revealed religion with "social" religion. Discredit the Bible and emphasize the need for intellectual maturity which does not need a "religious crutch."
28. Eliminate prayer or any phase of religious expression in the schools on the ground that it violates the principle of "separation of church and state."
29. Discredit the American Constitution by calling it inadequate, old-fashioned, out of step with modern needs, a hindrance to cooperation between nations on a worldwide basis.
30. Discredit the American Founding Fathers. Present them as selfish aristocrats who had no concern for the "common man."
31. Belittle all forms of American culture and discourage the teaching of American history on the ground that it was only a minor part of the "big picture." Give more emphasis to Russian history since the Communists took over.
32. Support any socialist movement to give centralized control over any part of the culture--education, social agencies, welfare programs, mental health clinics, etc.
33. Eliminate all laws or procedures which interfere with the operation of the Communist apparatus.
34. Eliminate the House Committee on Un-American Activities.
35. Discredit and eventually dismantle the FBI.
36. Infiltrate and gain control of more unions.
37. Infiltrate and gain control of big business.
38. Transfer some of the powers of arrest from the police to social agencies. Treat all behavioral problems as psychiatric disorders which no one but psychiatrists can understand.
39. Dominate the psychiatric profession and use mental health laws as a means of gaining coercive control over those who oppose Communist goals.
40. Discredit the family as an institution. Encourage promiscuity and easy divorce.
41. Emphasize the need to raise children away from the negative influence of parents. Attribute prejudices, mental blocks and retarding of children to suppressive influence of parents.
42. Create the impression that violence and insurrection are legitimate aspects of the American tradition; that students and special-interest groups should rise up and use united force to solve economic, political or social problems.
43. Overthrow all colonial governments before native populations are ready for self-government.
44. Internationalize the Panama Canal.
45. Repeal the Connally reservation so the United States cannot prevent the World Court from seizing jurisdiction over nations and individuals alike.
.JPG "Nicaragua Protests (9).JPG")
.JPG "Week That Was In Latin America Photo Gallery(2).JPG")
.JPG "In this file photo, pick-up trucks filled with heavily armed police ride around the Monimbo neighborhood of Masaya, Nicaragua, Tuesday, July 17, 2018. The police and pro-government militias laid siege to and then retook a symbolically important neighborhood that had recently become a center of resistance to President Daniel Ortega’s government.")
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