Following decades of war, entrenched poverty and gang violence, Nicaraguans are now “breathing peace” in their barrios and around the country.
‘The bullets were flying’
‘I thought they were going to kill us. The bullets were flying past our house, and I was so afraid a stray one would hit us,’ Socorro tells me. She’s recounting a gang fight that took place more than a decade ago right outside the walls of mismatched metal sheeting that surround her garden near Managua.
‘My granddaughter was small at the time, I ran with her and hid behind a barrel, thinking it was full and that the water would help protect us. But the joke was on me, the barrel was empty!’ Socorro laughs. We’re sitting on her stoop and she’s telling that her neighbourhood in Ciudad Sandino, once infamous for violent gang reprisals, has settled into a calm that has now lasted for years.
Rodolfo, who lives in the same neighbourhood, says the barrio was violent from its beginnings. It emerged after thousands of people who had lost their homes in Managua during Hurricane Mitch in 1998 were moved out to a cow pasture by the neoliberal government of the time.
‘The problems followed people when they were moved here,’ he says. ‘Those who came from one place always had problems with those who came from another.’
For decades there were active gangs in the community. During a time most families’ budgets couldn’t even stretch to cover three meals a day, even a primary school education was out of reach for many, and there were no opportunities for young people. Children were limited to begging in the streets, young women to becoming street vendors, young men day labourers. Faced with these bleak prospects, it is no wonder that some turned to glue sniffing, petty theft and gangs.
‘The barrio had to change‘
This situation left young men in poor communities like Socorro and Rodolfo’s stuck in a cycle of retaliation killings that held the people of the neighbourhood hostage at night. I remember one woman showing me bullet holes in her front gate, others describing to me how they locked themselves in their homes for days when the fighting got bad.
‘The barrio had to change,’ Rodolfo says, recalling that it has been more than two years since there the last gang activity in the community. I ask him what has happened to the gang members.
‘They’re in jail,’ he says. ‘Some died, and others are in jail.’
Socorro says that her neighbours who were gang members have reformed. ‘Many are still here, but they’ve shaped up,’ she says.
Opportunities for change
Theirs isn’t the only neighbourhood to have been transformed in recent years: these changes are echoed throughout Managua and around the country. What can these changes be attributed to? Over the past 19 years of Nicaragua’s Sandinista government, the state has applied a range of targeted approaches, providing a host of opportunities for Nicaragua’s youth which have been institutionalised to create gradual and lasting societal change.
These opportunities include free education, preschool through university, including technical degrees; free lunch in schools; tidy, well-maintained parks in each neighbourhood; free sports, dance, art and entrepreneurial business programs; streetlights, community policing, regular home visits from social workers and police; and free family-friendly activities organised every weekend.
This feeling of safety at a barrio level is now widespread around the country. In a recent poll, 82.5% of Nicaraguans report feeling safer today than they did five years ago, with only 3.6% reporting gangs or delinquency as major problems, and only 3.3% reporting being recent victims of robbery or aggression.
Remarkably, 98.6% of Nicaraguans say they “breathe peace” in their country.
This peace has not come easily. In Nicaragua during the 1970s, there was a popular uprising to overthrow the cruel Somoza dictatorship. By the time the Sandinista Popular Revolution finally won, 50,000 Nicaraguans had been killed.
In the 1980s, the US organised, armed, trained and funded Nicaraguan Contras to attack the “soft targets” of the Sandinista Revolution, including teachers, health care workers and farm families. That conflict left another 50,000 Nicaraguans dead. More recently, in 2018, the US led and funded a violent coup attempt which ultimately failed, but left 270 people dead and dealt a huge blow to the economy of the country.
Following each conflict, Nicaraguans have granted amnesty to the aggressors, a more difficult decision than choosing punitive measures. But Nicaragua believes in rehabilitation, and values peace. Here, it is understood that peace is not granted, but must be built through continual hard work.
Honouring Peace and Reconciliation
That work is ongoing: on 2 February, Nicaragua celebrated its newest national holiday, the Day of Peace and Reconciliation in honour of Cardinal Miguel Obando y Bravo.
Over several decades, Cardinal Obando y Bravo served as an intermediary to help resolve conflicts. In the 1970s, he negotiated between the Sandinista National Liberation Front and the Somoza government. And in the 1980s, he helped broker peace to end the Contra war. Following the Sandinistas return to power in 2007, the Cardinal accepted President Daniel Ortega’s request to preside over the national Peace and Reconciliation Commission.
On 9 February, the 100th anniversary of Obando y Bravo’s birth, Nicaragua conferred the honour of the Medal of Reconciliation and Peace “Cardinal Miguel Obando y Bravo” on Jaime Morales and his wife Amparo. In the 1980s, Morales was a Contra leader, one of the intellectual “faces” of the Contra in the US, ‘not firing bullets, but thinking,’ as Co-President Ortega said in his speech.
Morales represented the Contra during the peace talks, and in 2006, when he was running for President, Daniel Ortega invited Morales to be the Vice-Presidential candidate on the Sandinista Alliance ticket. Morales accepted, and two Contra political parties joined the Alliance. Following their electoral win, Ortega and Morales worked together to form the Government of National Unity and Reconciliation, a government led by the Alliance which, 19 years later, continues to focus on national reconciliation.
‘So today is a good day for our Nicaragua,’ said Co-President Rosario Murillo during the ceremony. ‘We have made a conscious choice to reconcile. We have chosen unity, peace, brother and sisterhood. Peace is love, and love is stronger than hate.’
Youth with a conscience
With a national leadership that exemplifies the values of peace and reconciliation, perhaps it should not be surprising that the gangs in Socorro and Rodolfo’s neighbourhood have been able to overcome years of violent conflicts.
‘Things have changed,’ Socorro says as one of the new Chinese buses drives past the park in front of her house and turns down the paved road. ‘I was a street vendor like my mom, I never learned to read or write. I tell my grandkids that they need to take advantage of school and all the opportunities they have today.’
Co-President Ortega has recognised the values of the youth of Nicaragua, who are no longer growing up in gangs.
‘You are not a Youth of empty words. No! You are Youth with a Conscience, with a Heart and who work for the benefit of the People,’ he told the young people gathered for the ceremony to confer the Medal of Reconciliation and Peace.
‘You are an example, an example of Conscience, you are an example of Solidarity, you are an example of Love for the People, you are an example of selflessness,’ he said. ‘You are worthy children of the Heroes and Martyrs.’
From Sovereign Media via This RSS Feed.