Today, Explained - When your president acts like a dictator

Episode Date: June 5, 2018

Nicaragua is spiraling into a state of national catastrophe, as clashes between police and student protesters over the past two months have left more than 100 dead. Reuters' Delphine Schrank explains why much of that anger is aimed towards President Daniel Ortega, who critics say is acting more and more like the dictator he helped kick out. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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ZipRecruiter.com slash explain. The smartest way to hire. The smartest way to hire. A new wave of protests seized the Nicaraguan capital of Managua this week. It began in mid-April, with people demonstrating against biting new changes to the country's social security system. Mandatory worker contributions to the scheme were increased and pensions were reduced. After years of alleged corruption by government officials. There's been another round of violent protests in Nicaragua. Violent protests continue in Nicaragua as students seize the engineering university in Managua.

We are not like this! We are not like this! What is the fear of putting so many people in jail? More than 110 people have been killed in the country since mid-April, amid clashes between forces loyal to President Daniel Ortega and opposition groups demanding his removal. The former Sandinista leader has been in power for years, first in 1979 for 11 years, and then again from 2007. The violence has raised questions even among staunch supporters of Ortega. Protesters accuse him of creating a system designed to keep him in power

and to give the president control over Congress, the courts and the military. My name is Delphine Schrank, Reuters chief correspondent for Mexico and Central America. Right now, we're over a month into protests that began after President Daniel Ortega sort of capriciously changed the social security system, which led to the first few students heading out into the streets in protest. Police opened fire. Paramilitary forces as well. And that, that brutal put-down sort of inflamed the entire country. After the first protests and the crackdowns on that, the government actually backpedaled. Five days later, they turned around the Social Security reform.

So it's really more the sort of years of frustration with Daniel Ortega's increasing consolidation of power. People talk a lot about the fear that they feel when they have in the past tried to protest. There are a few independent media outlets, but most of it's controlled by the government. People are very frustrated by their lack of freedoms, and that's really what they're protesting now. The brutality was very evident this last week, particularly on Wednesday. There was supposed to be a Mother's Day parade in honor of the mothers of young people who had been killed in the protests since April 18th.

The most precious thing in our lives is being taken away. All of our children are in danger. And that ended up turning into what people are calling a massacre because the end of this massive peaceful rally through Managua, the capital of the country, police and paramilitary forces opened fire. By the end of the day, the death toll, 15 people dead, more than 80 critically wounded, and that adds to a death toll that's now over 100 people

since April 18th, and over 800 severely wounded. They're peaceful during the day. You just see people out in the streets waving the Nicaraguan flag, shouting slogans that date back to the revolutionary period, singing songs. Pupali! Pupali! Pupali! Calling for the ouster of Daniel Ortega, there's a lot of, you might say, aggressive graffiti on the walls. This protest is bigger than all the rest because people have grown tired. People are worn out from the violation of rights, rights of the people. And lots of young people walking around with morteros, which is basically homemade mortars

that look like bits of piping and they're shooting out firecrackers. What you see is a lot of scared young people who are at the forefront of these protests, who are masked in bandanas. The state has to be completely cleaned up. This country cannot pay with their hunger and our lack of opportunities. Bracing by night time when they say, and there's evidence of this, that they're being attacked by paramilitary forces

working in collusion with the police police who have been shooting to kill. According to the police themselves, police have been wounded in the last few days. So there's some violence on both sides, but the government really still has the monopoly of power here. You mentioned young people. I've seen images of protesters holding up sort of wooden crosses with names of those who have died in these protests and backpacks hanging on the crosses. Are they students? Is this sort of a student-led movement? Students have definitely been at the forefront of

this and leading the charge. And yeah, absolutely, the majority of the ones who've died have been very young, everywhere from like 14, 15 years old through to sort of their early 30s. So we are talking about mainly a lot of young people. And are they inspiring other people to get involved? So the students, by repeatedly showing that they're sort of brave enough to stand in front of the guns and sort of that they're fed up with the regime of President Ortega's increasing authoritarianism, they have absolutely inspired a lot of other people to come out into the streets. The rising death toll has become itself a rallying cry, and people sort of gather around these memorials,

be they sort of people who are honoring the mothers of the dead, or that's become a way of sort of inflaming national sentiment. And what's Daniel Ortega's response to people being frustrated with just his, you know, general leadership? He has talked about violence on both sides, but he hasn't really explicitly condemned that his own security forces

have brutally cracked down on the population. The economic sector, the church, which has considerable influence in Nicaragua, they've pulled back from him. The army has been pulling back. So he seemed to be in a position of increasing isolation and fragility after these weeks of protests. About two weeks ago, he and his government conceded to what's called a national dialogue, a series of talks. But a lot of people have been saying that was really just a delaying tactic by the government. Well, meanwhile,

they were just sort of trying to double down and see if they could sit these protests out. Other people on President Ortega's side, does he have any allies? From Ortega's standpoint, it looks like there's a lot of support for him. He also has control of some of the TV stations who sort of are putting out a narrative that is entirely supportive of him and depicts the students as sort of anarchists, effectively. There was this one protest I went to with hundreds, I mean, thousands of people waving the flags of Ortega's party, the FSLN. But there were buses upon buses upon buses outside this rally. And when I was talking to these people who were standing in the rally, I mean, some of them were just, you know, they had no idea why they were there. They sort of come in from three hours away.

And when I talked to bus drivers, they said, you know, they can't tell you, but they've all been paid $6 a day to come in there. You said police and paramilitary are opening fire on the protesters, but I wonder, like, what about the actual military? Where does the Nicaraguan army fit into all this? The army have been sitting this out in barracks. So the army has held back. If they've been given orders to go out and shoot,

they have not followed those orders. On the other hand, the police have been out in the streets. You can see plenty of video of this circulating, or it's pretty evident. One of my colleagues took a photo of them shooting their guns directly into the face of protesters. And there is plenty of evidence now. There are two international human rights reports on this based on local rights reports.

A report from Amnesty International says Nicaraguan officials are using a shoot to kill policy to deal with recent protests. Police have been shooting above the waist. So they've been targeting chest, head, eyes, sometimes with rubber bullets, and that ends up blinding people if you're shooting there, sometimes with live fire. Police have been answering orders, whatever those might be, to go out into the streets to shoot to kill. Are any of these parties talking to each other, or is it all just being sort of hammered out in the streets? There is a backdoor attempt to at least sit down and come up with some kind of resolution to all of this.

Through the auspices of the church, the government and representatives from the students, from civil society and the economy, were invited to join in national talks as of about two weeks ago. The church has now twice suspended those talks because they seem to be leading nowhere. But there was an attempt to sort of sit down and hash out, well, here's what we need.

And from the people's side, what they're really demanding now is a series of democratic reforms and really nothing less than Ortega's ouster. So the stakes are pretty high. President Daniel Ortega, the man at the center of all of this unrest, Nicaraguans used to think he was the best thing to happen to their country. That's next. This is Today Explained. Remember that one time we posted a job to ziprecruiter.com slash explained and we got like hundreds of applicants oh my god so many applicants and now at long last it being june and all june guess what we've got we've got interns not one but two two. Two interns. Summer interns. The first ever. This is history, brother.

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It's fair to say that Nicaragua has been at war with itself for decades. Daniel Ortega is president of Nicaragua and a familiar face from the final years of the Cold War. He came to power as a leader of the far-left Sandinista revolutions. Ortega set about reforming the country, the poor benefiting from redistributed property, better health care and education. Against him, the rebel Contras formed. These Contras, as they're called, are armed, trained and supplied by the United States Central Intelligence Agency. Backed by the US President Ronald Reagan.

My fellow Americans, I must speak to you tonight about a mounting danger in Central America that threatens the security of the United States. The Sandinista Liberation Front. It will grow worse, much worse, if we fail to take action now. I'm speaking of Nicaragua. No one was prepared for their surprising announcements that money from the controversial Iran arms deal

was secretly funneled to the Contra rebels. The Reagan administration justifies its actions by claiming that Nicaragua is supplying weapons to leftist guerrillas in neighbouring El Salvador. The resulting civil war saw thousands of people killed. The US backing of the Contras, who were these sort of right-wing rebels who were fighting the Sandinistas,

who seemed to be the left-wing rebels, who, of course, in the height of the communist era, the US backed the Contras to effectively not allow the sort of Marxist-Leninist-leaning Sandinistas to take power. That backfired, as we know. The Sandinistas ended up winning and US efforts to back the Contras didn't work out at the time. The people that are in the streets now, they're either the grandchildren or the children of guerrilleros or soldiers who fought with the Sandinistas or against the Sandinistas in the Civil War, or they're ex-soldiers and

ex-guerrilleros. I mean, everyone at one point had to either fight in the army or sort of they were drafted into the army. You know, it's a country that's been at war for a very long time. Tell me more about Daniel Ortega and how he came to power. President Daniel Ortega is a former Marxist who had been one of the leaders of the Sandinista revolutionaries who, in the 70s, overthrew former strongman Anastasio Somoza. He and the Sandinistas have a great sort of romantic power in the country because they effectively overthrew a dictator in the 1970s. He was out of power for a long time and then came back to power in Nicaragua as president in 2006 and is now in his 11th year as president. In the last elections in 2016, he won about 66% or 70% of the vote. But a lot of people accused him of rigging it

because effectively his government had destroyed any opposition. And in the last 11 years, he's basically become Somoza. He's become the strongman that he led the charge to kick out. And how has Nicaragua been doing in the last decade under Ortega? Nicaragua is among the poorest countries in Central America, but if you compare it to its neighbors, to Honduras, El Salvador, Guatemala, and the Northern Triangle, compared to them, Nicaragua seems like a sort of relatively calm, tranquil, secure country where you can walk in the street. So there have been some sort of net positives, you could say.

And are those positives thanks to Daniel Ortega? A lot of people credit Ortega with bringing stability, I should say. I was hearing this repeatedly from people from the private sector, particularly were telling me, we thought democracy meant stability. Having said that, as they told me, there was a marriage of convenience. They were effectively relying on Ortega and the executive for favors.

And the minute things started getting a little, should I say, shaky, and certainly in the last weeks, Ortega looks increasingly incapable of ruling the country, people have been pulling away from him. So things don't seem so stable anymore. Is there any legitimate political opposition to him? Certainly in 2016, there was an effort to dismantle the main opposition party. There was a 70% absentee rate in the 2016 elections. And people are telling me now, well, those 70% are out in the

streets. They were just so cynical and disgusted by what had happened, which is that the real credible political opposition parties had been effectively neutered. And then Ortega comes in and gives the vice presidency to his wife, which wasn't exactly a sign of democratic reform by any stretch. The United States obviously has this long, complicated history with Nicaragua. Where does it stand now on all of this? What's been very clear is the United States government, certainly the State Department, has been repeatedly condemning the brutality and the violence that's been going on.

I think they're very concerned. I think behind the scenes, the US ambassador has been involved in the national talks in the last two, three weeks, trying to basically sort of bring people to the table. It's near Panama. It's an important transit zone. It's also a key player or has been in trying to stop narco trafficking,

in preventing more migration towards the United States in various ways. So the U.S. has vested interest. So what's next? Is there a way out of this that doesn't leave more dead students in the streets? Is there a way for Nicaraguans to elect a new leader? It's not clear what will happen. We've seen in the past few years what happened in Syria

when it seemed very early on that Assad would fall. We've seen what the past few years what happened in Syria when it seemed very early on that Assad would fall. We've seen what's happened in Venezuela. People protested and that didn't seem to kick out Maduro in the end. Ortega in the last week appears to be doubling down. As many people said to me, what he has is brute force right now. But he's in an increasingly weak and fragile position. I think there's a good chance that he will have to leave under considerable pressure from his own people. You know, there's plenty of evidence that if it's non-violent, the chances are much greater that you can build a stable new way afterwards. So over the long haul, this may,

you know, lead to a net positive in terms of being able to build the country towards the real stability and freedoms that they're hoping for. Delphine Schrenk is a reporter for Reuters. I'm Sean Ramos from This Is Today Explained. you think I should get the interns on to like talk about the whole ziprecruiter.com slash explained experience yeah why not they seem cool yeah I guess we'll bring them on and talk about ziprecruiter.com slash explained the smartest way to hire the smartest