On International Women’s day it seems especially appropriate to publish this translation of an article that focuses on what the Nicaraguan government has done to the Women´s Organization OYANKA in Jalapa as an example of its attacks on more than 107 not for profit organizations.
The NGO cemetery of Daniel Ortega
By Divergentes, March 1, 2022
The Ortega-Murillo dictatorship has eliminated 107 legal statuses of non-governmental organizations that had different active projects in Nicaragua. The big losers with this decision are the low-income populations located mostly in rural areas. In spite of the fact that the Sandinista regime alleges that these organizations are promoting “coup supporters” and “financing of terrorism”, just ten are NGOs that work on issues of governability, a sector to which Sandinism declared its animosity since its return to power. The bulk of the projects affected were directed toward health, education and food security of the most vulnerable. This is the blow that the citizenry, including university students, are suffering.
I A shelter closed down
Marbellí Espinoza, with her heart beating a mile a minute from fright, ran to the only place where she knew she could be safe: the shelter of OYANKA, a women´s association against gender violence located in Jalapa, a northern municipality of Nicaragua, close to the Honduran border. The woman had been beaten by a nephew. With bruises on her arms, Marbellí´s fear turned into terror when she arrived at the shelter and found the building closed and under the watch of Sandinista supporters. “Now I don´t know what I am going to do,” she said to herself “I have nowhere to go,” she thought.
OYANKA was the only NGO dedicated to helping women violated in that zone of the country in the province of Nueva Segovia, where machism caused more than 500 cases of gender violence and even three femicides per year. The refuge was one of the flagships of this organization that started in 1993 as a gender program to accompany women from the area, and that in 1998 registered with the Ministry of the Interior. It treated between two to eight violated women a day. “There were always women in the refuge and we would receive them with their children,” says Idanil Peralta, a woman of dark skin, medium height, cheerful and with a happy tone of voice. But now there is no space not even for Marbellí nor anyone else. In August 2021, five months before Marbellí was attacked, the government of Daniel Ortega cancelled the legal status of OYANKA. He closed it down. The refuge, which today is empty, remains surrounded by Sandinista paramilitaries who guard it.
Without any other option, women like Marbellí continue looking for the defenders of OYANKA. Idanil, for example, recognizes that now she has to operate nearly clandestinely. By her side, Marbellí, a 44 year old single mother, unsuccessfully tries to hide the bruises on her arms. “The only thing I can do for now is advise, because we no longer work as before. The Government persecutes us, and we do not understand why,” says the defender with chagrin.
In reality, the authoritarian government of Ortega and Murillo is not just “persecuting” OYANKA. Since April 2018 , after the unprecedented social protests that were repressed with lethal bullets by police and paramilitaries, a new phase of repression began which consisted in the massive beheading of NGOs. The objective of the regime, like what began to take shape in other countries of the region like Guatemala or El Salvador, is to silent critical voices. But what for those other government is still a threat, Ortega has turned into concrete events: and the scythe has been extended to even universities. At the end of February 2022 the Parliament controlled by government supporters has eliminated 107 legal statuses of non-governmental organizations that had different active projects in the country. And the regime has announced that the hunt is far from over.
That same month the government presented a report prepared by the Group for Financial Action for Latin America (GAFILAT), and according to that document, until 2019 there were 1,797 Nicaraguan non-profit organizations (OSFL) considered “vulnerable to terrorism financing (FT).” The invoking of terrorism, and in other cases, money laundering, has been the principal official weapon to say that the organizations will be “reviewed” or silenced.
II. Legalizing the hunt
In Nicaragua, being part of an organization that makes the principal problems of the country visible is a proscribed activity, but the final hunt started in October 2020, when the Law of Foreign Agents was created which criminalized international financing.
That law began without a space for discussion with those affected. In August of 2020 the Secretariat of International NGOs, an entity that brings together a good part of the NGOs that would see themselves affected, reported that each year they managed more than $25.5 million dollars in solidarity aid in Nicaragua. More than 550,000 people in the most remote communities of the country were the beneficiaries, according to the Secretariat.
In an attempt to block the law, the Secretariat explained to the regime that the signing organizations (32 at that time) had fulfilled the legal and fiscal obligations contained in the existing regulatory frameworks, reporting their funds, donations, activities and obligations to the Ministry of the Interior, Ministry of Foreign Relations, General Income Office, Nicaraguan Institute for Social Security, the National Technological Institute, Ministries and Municipal Governments.
Through a letter they asked Ortega to “analyze” new mechanisms that would not cause a “situation of paralysis” of activities. “That bill created a mechanism for registry and monthly reports that could be impossible to manage, given the enormous amount of people who would have to be registered, the complicated procedures and the short time period that is established,” they questioned.
But Ortega Murillo did not cede, and in October the law was approved and they decided to cancel the legal statuses of organizations while, in parallel fashion, they confiscated their assets. On paper the law obligated any organization or Nicaraguan citizen who works for “foreign governments, businesses, foundations or organizations” to register, report on their spending and income, and inform on what the foreign funds were spent. In practice, the hunting and closing of organizations was legalized.
International condemnation was not slow to arrive.
“Under the excuse of the classification as ‘foreign agent´ of any physical or legal entity that might be the beneficiary or have international aid connections, that law intends to silence people and organizations identified as opponents and prevent any exercise of public freedoms, like that of expression, association, participating in the leadership of public affairs, the right to protest and the right to defend rights,” questioned the Interamerican Commission for Human Rights (IACHR).
Organizations eliminated by the regime of Daniel Ortega
DIVERGENTEs prepared a database on the basis of decrees approved by the National Assembly and the publications of the Ministry of the Interior in the daily register, La Gaceta, on the cancellations of organizations, be they non-profits, associations, foundations and clubs. All were classified according to the sector of support that they provided. In this list are excluded the three political parties cancelled by the government. There is a group of nine NGOs that asked for the cancellation of their legal status due to lack of financial resources between December 2018 and September 2020.
The blow has been lethal, above all for those most vulnerable who used to benefit from the programs of these organizations, like Marbellí in Jalapa.
Along with “Foreign Agents”, at the end of 2020 there were also another three laws created aimed at silencing critical voices: the “Cybercrime Law”, with which the government can impose up to eight years in prison if it is thought that a journalist or citizen published something against the government in their social network. The “Law of the People” or better known as “betrayal of the fatherland”, used against opponents who supposedly promote international sanctions against the regime. And lastly the Life Sentence Law which has not yet been applied.
All these laws are just new instruments for legalizing a persecution that trace back to the third government of Ortega. OYANKA, for example, has not worked in peace since 2015. At that time the government harassed the institution: the women´s rights defender received threats from municipal and police authorities because, when they were not heeded in their corresponding entities, they would denounce their cases through the Women´s Voice Radio. The radio was donated to them by international organizations and was heard in several communities of Jalapa, but in 2015 the Nicaraguan Institute for Telecommunications and Mail (TELCOR) suspended their license and confiscated the equipment they had to transmit the denouncements. The first blow was precisely a muzzling of the voices of women.
The second blow was the institutional run around that kept OYANKA from getting their certification to continue operating in the country. The third and definitive blow was the cancellation of their legal status.
The day that the National Assembly eliminated OYANKA, Idanil felt that all her rights for which she had fought were violated. “I felt weak, fearful, and I wanted to cry,” she said. “I wanted to do something for women, but I cannot. We have nothing to use to get around in, we do not have lawyers…I respond on their behalf but at times it is complicated,” she says.
III. Choke off those who help
Nicaragua is eternally the poorest country of Latin America next to Haiti. A nation where the State is not able to supply all the needs of the population and where precisely these organizations, mostly sponsored by the international community, are those who historically have alleviated the deficit.
With the 107 NGOs eliminated so far, the sectors most affected are health and education. Two areas with structural limitations in Nicaragua. And even though the “Foreign Agents Law” is designed to attack critical NGOs, the data collected by DIVERGENTES reveals that only six of the foreign NGOs closed were due to the application of that law. On the contrary, the government has made use of other pre-existing norms like Law 147, “General Law of Legal Non-Profit Entities” and the “Law against Asset Laundering, Financing of Terrorism and Financing for Weapons of Mass Destruction.”
DIVERGENTES prepared a database on the basis of the decrees approved by the National Assembly and the publications of the Ministry of the Interior in the daily registry, La Gaceta, on the elimination of organizations, be they non-profits, associations, foundations and clubs. All were classified according to the sector of support they provided. Excluded from this list are the three political parties cancelled by the government. There is a group of nine NGOs that asked for the cancelation of their legal status due to the lack of financial resources between December 2018 and September 2020.
Although the government alleges in its discourse that these organizations are promoting “destabilization”, “coup promotion”, and “financing for terrorism”, just ten of them are NGOs that work on issues of governance, a sector that Ortega has declared animosity toward since his return to power in 2007, because they criticize his authoritarian drift.
Another nine are NGOs related to the defense of human rights. The tombstone for the Nicaraguan Center for Human Rights (CENIDH) was one of the first ones that Ortega planted in his cemetery of NGOs in December 2018, getting one of the most rigorous and seasoned organizations that was denouncing abuses in the country out of the way.
Nevertheless, the bulk of those affected worked in the field of human development, and particularly health and education. In the health sector there are 19 that have been closed, and in education 29. These 29 include the eight private universities that were eliminated and confiscated at the end of 2021 and the beginning of 2022. Among them is the Polytechnical University of Nicaragua (UPOLI), the birthplace of the student rebellion of 2018.
Understanding the magnitude of the impact on the population is complicated, above all because officials and former directors of the NGOs are afraid of talking with the press. Nevertheless, there are examples that show the dimension of the problem: at least 18,000 students have been left in limbo after the confiscation of the eight private higher education centers.
Or like this other one: in the community of San Juan de la Penca in Chinandega, in western Nicaragua, Blanca Azucena Centeno lost her dream of finally getting a manzana of land to be able to plant corn and sell it in the local market. “I already had the improved seed, the training, not to mention the will. We were only waiting to start the project,” says this 62-year-old woman, mother of five and grandmother of six.
Blanca was a member of Women in Action, a cooperative sponsored by the OXFAM Intermon Foundation. One of the principal projects that went down the drain after Ortega eliminated OXFAM was granting loans to women without access to land through the Coordinator of Rural Women.
“All of us were happy because finally we were going to have that independence for which we had struggled so much. We believed that it could be made a reality,” says Lisseth Escalante Zavala, the vice president of the cooperative. The project would begin at the end of 2021 and the beginning of 2022. Nevertheless, on August 16, 2021 the regime cancelled the legal status of OXFAM alleging non-compliance with their legal obligations and blocking “the control and oversight” of the Ministry of the Interior “in terms of their financial statements and origin and beneficiaries of their donations.” Accusations that the organizations have denied at every turn. In fact, they have denounced that the Ministry of the Interior imposes a series of obstacles or refuses to receive the documents in question.
In the rural areas of the country, it is complicated for women to have access to loans to buy land. Financial entities ask for collateral on the homes. Nevertheless, in the zones served by the cooperative, at least 80% of the owners of the homes are men. That is why the project is important for them, because with this organization they were not going to have the obstacle that they have faced all their lives as women. “We did not get involved in anything political. In the end Nicaragua needs the support of these organizations to change the vision and defend human rights,” says Lisseth Escalante, who still cannot understand why the government closed down OXFAM.
“Those of us who lost out were women from the cooperative that was benefitting us with carrying out projects. Now we are no longer going to have that support that we had before. We are like exposed to the elements,” lamented Blanca.
But there is more. Among the organizations eliminated there are a dozen that provided food security programs, attention for development, poverty, nutrition, environmental management family agriculture and housing; five of them were international organizations.
IV. “The Comandante took support away from us and everything has gotten worse”
The closing of the OYANKA shelter also provides perspective: it is abandoned. The walls are full of dust. The purple paint that the feminists used as the color of their struggle is opaque and several bars are missing from the windows. No one enters the building anymore. The neighbors on the block warn that it is risky to be there, take photos or make videos “On the other corner is a paramilitary who runs around on that motorcycle and is watching to see if someone wants to go there,” said a citizen who asked to remain anonymous for security reasons. DIVERGENTES did a tour of the area and confirmed the security that the neighbor had mentioned. All the photos were done in a passing vehicle. This has become the only way of doing journalism with relative security in Nicaragua.
Idanil, a founder of OYANKA, feels outgunned in the face of Marbellí and her suffering. There is no shelter and resources to help this victim of gender violence. It is a similar situation: OYANKA quit serving more than 200 women who suffer domestic and psychological violence and who have sued to receive food support on the part of their former spouses. Without having training on the rights women have in society.
“Who are most affected by the closing of OYANKA?”
“The women. They now are left defenseless,” she responds with anger.
Wendy Lisseth Centeno also feels anger because she cannot free herself from her aggressor. Anger and fear to speak the truth. A feeling that does not paralyze her. In San Fernando, a municipality that neighbors Jalapa, she has denounced constant threats that a neighbor has made to her. In recent weeks she has gone between the Police and the Prosecutor´s Office but has not gotten a response. An institutional silence that highlights the importance of the accompaniment of OYANKA.
Wendy´s aggressor does not only harass her when he sees her in the street, he also shows up to her home with a machete to threaten her and her daughters. “I am afraid, but if I do not take the case forward, everything is going to remain as if nothing is happening, and I have to take care of my daughters” says the 32-year-old woman.
“I know that with OYANKA accompanying me this would have already ended. But since the comandante (Daniel Ortega) took their support away from us, this has gotten worse. The men do not respect us, they feel they have more rights over you and our denouncements are shelved. Now we are alone. Who is going to defend us? The law does not function in San Fernando,” says Wendy
Idanil regrets the fact that the situation of Wendy and her daughters is being ignored by the municipal authorities. But she cannot do much because she does not even have those volunteers who were ready to respond to the call to accompany women in filing charges. The persecution has limited their actions, and the exile of some members of the team has weakened their field work.
Even though Idanil does not have the exact figure for how many women OYANKA has accompanied in recent years, because the offices were confiscated with all their belongings and files, she maintains that machist violence decreased up to “90% in Jalapa.”
V. The “Foreign Agents” Labyrinth
Lucrecia and Abigail watch from inside a pickup truck with darkened windows the offices of OYANKA in Jalapa. They are shocked, they comment to one another the changes that the authorities of the Ministry of Education have done to the place.
“Look, they removed the picture that was on the front,” says Lucrecia surprised. “There on that chair there were some papers. It makes me mad, they took everything,” responds Abigail. Both women were part of the final board of directors of OYANKA.
The organization not only lost their legal status. The Sandinista regime, just as it has done with other organizations and communications media, confiscated their properties: the offices where they would go to analyze the cases of the women who denounced domestic violence and the shelter for the women violated or at risk of death.
“The first blow of the dictatorship was the cancellation,” explained a lawyer consulted by DIVERGENTES who asked to remain anonymous. “With that it was able to paralyze the activities of the organization and did not allow them to continue operating.”
There are two paths for an organization to be eliminated and confiscated: they refuse to submit to the “Foreign Agents Law”, or they cannot negotiate the bureaucratic labyrinth imposed by the regime. Even though there is no exact figure, there are several NGOs that closed down in order to not submit themselves to the norms. Among the first who refused is the Violeta Barrios de Chamorro Foundation which worked for more than 25 years on the training of journalists in Nicaragua and PEN Nicaragua, a group of writers, poets and journalists who promoted freedom of expression.
“It is a matter of clear manipulation that seeks to paralyze the operations of organizations that the Government considers contrary to their guidelines, in evident violation of universal human rights, freedom of thought and expression, democracy and the Rule of Law,” declared a year ago the organization founded by Cristiana Chamorro, former presidential candidate for the 2021 elections and today a political prisoner of Ortega over an alleged case of money laundering.
On the other extreme, those who try to comply with the law quickly realized how the legal trap works. The Permanent Commission for Human Rights (CPDH) decided to register but denounced that each time they showed up to the registration window they demanded that they meet new requirements, which made it impossible to finish the process. The CPDH has navigated those obstacles, but at the end of February 2022 they have denounced that the Ministry of the Interior has placed it outside the margins of legality by not receiving their financial statements. “We presented our financial statements to the Ministry of the Interior, and they were rejected. We do not understand the reasons, there is no valid reason,” said the vice president of the board of directors of the CPDH, Denis García, in a press conference.
The dagger in the “Foreign Agents Law” is in what the CPDH is denouncing. The NGOs must comply with a series of tortuous requirements that scuttle daily functioning. To understand it, DIVERGENTES spoke with three directors of NGOs who continue functioning in Nicaragua. Some, for obvious reasons of security and to avoid reprisals, agreed to talk without being identified. “It is a bureaucratism that kills,” warns one of the sources.
In principle, in order to be able to register as a “Foreign Agent” with the Ministry of the Interior organizations must have a “certificate of compliance” that the Office for the Control of Non Profit Organizations that has that portfolio issues. And in that process there are those who complain about receiving instructions only verbally; or about not accepting the information that establishes the records of boards of directors or financial statements. This is mostly applied to organizations that are more likely to make public denouncements, explains Haydée Castillo from exile, the former director of the Leadership Institute of the Segovias (ILLS), an NGO closed down in 2018 for “destabilizing the country and forming part of the coup attempt.”
Those who can register, deal with Kafkaesque labyrinths established at the whim of the officials of the Ministry of the Interior. For example, one of the directors consulted explained that they show up to demand in person weekly reports to be aware of all the movements of the organization. “It is absurd because you have to ask permission even to buy a broom,” he gave as an example. “We have had to hire an accountant exclusively to be able to comply with the endless requirements that they impose on us. There is always another requirement, you provide it, but you already know another one is coming. And in that to and fro, the validity expires of some of the documents which you need to operate,” says another director.
Each donation that the NGOs receive must be reported up to three times before being received, and again when they land in the bank account. At the end of the year, everything gets repeated. “The level of scrutiny has reached the absurdity of demanding routing sheets of vehicles to justify fuel expenses. The big problem is that the regulations are written so openly that they are left up to the interpretation of the official,” complains another director of an NGO that is trying to survive in the labyrinths of the Ministry of the Interior.
The Ministry also produces “administrative delays” in the approval process; and this causes the organizations to make late payments of other obligations with the State, like Social Security, the General Tax Office and the Ministry of Labor. Later, these other institutions apply fines even though the delay was the responsibility of the State itself.
And you have to add to all of this the discretional fines that the Ministry of the Interior imposes for non-compliance with requirements. The law establishes that those who operate outside the norms can be fined up to a half million dollars. “There are too many absurdities, like the fact that they do not accept a board meeting if one of the members participated virtually. Other times you must travel in the early morning to Managua, because they impose specific hours for turning in reports,” complains one of the directors consulted.
[See 11 page listing of NGOs cancelled in original article in Spanish]
Haydée Castillo maintains that even though they have not invoked in a massive way the “Foreign Agents Law” to cancel NGOs, this does not mean that it is not fulfilling its mission of strangulation. “It seems to me that the law was created as a form of self-annihilation. You do not even have to attempt to go through the process, because it is nearly impossible to comply with it,” she says.
“In Nicaragua there are approximately 4,000 registered organizations and I can tell you that approximately 100 of us were the direct target of the regime, because we are more connected to the denouncement of human rights violations, “ maintains Castillo. “But then there are a large amount of a social nature that practically and progressively are annihilated with the Foreign Agents Law.”
OYANKA is one of those. The lawyer consulted by DIVERGENTES clearly summarized it: the second blow, by confiscating their properties, “what it does is not just intervene, but ensure that you are not going to be able to get up from the first shock, and that on not having anything with which to survive, to definitively close down in the country.”
After the cancelation of the legal status, in August 2021, the women who made up the board of directors of OYANKA decided to occupy the offices and the shelter to prevent the authorities form confiscating both buildings.
They lasted until the irregular elections without competition on November 7, 2021. “After the elections the Police showed up to the place and never let us back in,” recalls Idanil. The last confiscations against the other organizations happened at the end of January 2022, after the regime eliminated the legal statuses of eight private universities in the country. The Assembly, after the cancellations, approved in an urgent and irregular way three laws to make a new abuse appear to be licit.
Yader Morazán, a legal expert in the administration of the Nicaragua justice system, points out that the creation of the three laws and the new higher education centers in the same infrastructure of the eight universities which were closed, is an act of confiscation, whose figure is prohibited in the Constitution of Nicaragua. Morazán explains that the Carta Magna is clear when it stipulates that universities and “their assets and income cannot be the object of intervention, expropriation, nevertheless, except when the obligation that is being enforced has its origin in civil, commercial or labor contracts.”
The National University Council (CNU), by taking over the university installations, violates article 44 of the Constitution that prohibits confiscations. “The confiscation of assets is prohibited. Officials who violate this disposition, will respond with their own assets at any time for the damages incurred,” points out the Constitution.
These abuses have not bothered the government and its followers. The celebration of the confiscation of the UPOLI is the best reflection of this overwhelming policy: students who identify as followers of the Government of Ortega on February 8th danced in the private university campus turned into a state campus.
“Even though it hurts you! Even though it hurts you! The Comandante is staying. Daniel, Daniel, the people are with him,” a group sang and danced at the UPOLI. “Here we are in the president´s office, where we had a bunch of meetings discussing and fighting for the students. Now this is no longer necessary, because the university is public,” said Veronica Gutierrez, a member of the National Union of Students of Nicaragua (UNEN), linked to Sandinism. Three days later, in another attempt of confiscation, a faraway town 248 kilometers from Managua provided another example of resistance.
VI. The uprising of the “Fabrettists”
On Thursday February 10, 2022 in the town of San José de Cusmapa in the province of Madriz, a group of parents decided to take over a school. The population had become aware that the Minis4try of Education in the anti “Foreign Agents” campaign, ordered the confiscation of one of the rural schools sponsored by the Fabretto Foundation, a religious organization with headquarters in the United States, Spain and the United Kingdom. MINED had made this known through a phone call to the director of the school in Cusmapa.
The information spread like wildfire in the town. Parents decided to meet that very day and reached an agreement that on hearing the ringing of the bells of the church all would march to the school.
“On seeing what was happening we decided that we were not going to just be content with ´if only we would have done this.´ That is why we organized, to keep the same thing from happening to us,” related Carlos, a parent who participated in the defense of the school.
On the following day, Friday, some of the inhabitants did not wait for the bells. Around 6:30am they showed up at the school to protect it. Three hours later, when the bells were finally rung, some two hundred people walked to the school and joined the earlier group. So that when the Police arrived to carry out the order, the entire town was inside of Fabretto.
In San José de Cusmapa is buried the priest of Italian origins and patron of the foundation. Only the gratitude that the people of this municipality have for the religious man can explain the audacity that the parents had on taking the school and keeping the Sandinista functionaries from confiscating the building. Men and women barricaded themselves in the school without caring about the fact that the Police would surround them. Even more noteworthy, many of these citizens, among them teachers, are Sandinista supporters.
In contrast to other municipalities, San José de Cusmapa is not “crammed full” of FSLN flags. You have to go down all the streets to find one or another flag hung on some house or market stall. “Here it is half and half. The mayor is Sandinista, but won because he is popular and because he is a Fabrettist,” says Indira, a mother who agreed to talk with DIVERGENTES under the condition of being identified using a false name. The Fabretto Foundation in Cusmapa has trained around 60 pre-school teachers and 27 primary school teachers. At least 150 students from 23 surrounding communities are indirectly supported by the school with lunches, teacher training and didactic materials.
Indira is 42 years of age, married and has two children. She participated in the protection of the school. This woman was one of those most surprised by the decision of the Government to eliminate the legal status of the Foundation. “Fabretto never got involved in those thorny issues of politics. It always obeyed its mission,” she justified. “The fact is that Febretto is the heart of Cusmapa,” Indira added. “It is our identity” she repeated. “In San José de Cusmapa we are fabrettists.”
The mission of the Fabretto Foundation is to have the children, families and communities from the most disadvantaged areas of Nicaragua “achieve their maximum potential and improve their future opportunities through education programs.” Up to the elimination of their legal status, the organization served more than 40,000 children and youth in nine schools and more than 440 public schools.
For more than 60 years Fabretto has worked in the most vulnerable rural and urban communities of Nueva Segovia, Madriz, Estelí, Chinandega, Managua, Masaya, Granada and the Autonomous Region of the Southern Caribbean Coast (RACCS), offering alternatives in order to improve the future of the beneficiaries in order to break the circle of poverty in which they live.
Karla, a woman with incendiary speech who participated in the protest, thinks that the political issue does not have anything to do with the uprising of the people to protect the installation of the school. She thinks that if it is perceived in that way, it is because in the current context any person who goes against the regime is labelled as a traitor by the party. “And it does not necessarily have to be that way. My entire life I have been Sandinista, my grandparents were, my parents are, I am, I am Sandinista, but my vision is clear, and I can see what is happening. The Government has done good things, but not everything that it does is good,” maintains Karla.
In this town within the mountains, neither Karla nor her neighbors believe in the hunt of NGOs on the part of Ortega Murillo. The town of San José de Cusmapa says that it will maintain the struggle.
“It is that all of us have been benefitted directly or indirectly by Fabretto. And we are not going to let them take our school away. Fabretto is the heart of Cusmapa,” says Karla.