By DIVERGENTES, March 20, 2022
Since the April 2018 rebellion the repression of the regime against the Central American University has increased: first, it tried to strangle it economically, and then harassed it through audits of the National University Council. Now it has taken away its funds from the 6% of the constitution. The president was threatened with death for providing refuge to demonstrators during the most serious massacres in 2018.
The regime of Daniel Ortega and Rosario Murillo inflicted another blow to the Central American University (UCA) this past Thursday, March 31 by approving a reform of Law 89, the Autonomy Law for Higher Education Institutions, with which they excluded it from the National University Council (CNU) and the funds that they previously received from the 6% constitutional mandate. The measure is the latest reprisal that the institution has suffered after the role that it and its students played in the April 2018 rebellion in Nicaragua. Now hundreds of scholarship students are affected.
The key point of the reform has to do with the change of numeral 9 of article 58 that reads “approving the policy and distribution of the funds assigned to the universities established in article 56 of this law, serving the student population and operational costs.”
The universities that article 56 refers to are: the National Autonomous University of Nicaragua of León ((UNAN-León); The National Autonomous University of Nicaragua (UNAN-Managua); the National Engineering University (UNI); the National Agrarian University (UNA); and the recently created National Polytechnical University (UPN); the Francisco Luis Espinoza Pineda National University and the Ricardo Morales Avilés Multidisciplinary National University. The article adds the Caribbean Universities: Bluefields Indian Caribbean University (BICU), the Universities of the Autonomous Regions of the Nicaraguan Caribbean Coast (URACCAN) and “a private university designated by the CNU”. In the previous law the UCA was a part of the CNU as a private university.
DIVERGENTES tried to communicate with the Vice President of the UCA, the scientist Jorge Huete, but he did not respond to messages. A source confided to this communication media that the authorities of the UCA since 2018 have been harassed in two ways: through the National University Council (CNU), the lead organization for higher education in Nicaragua, and the General Tax Office (DGI).
The harassment of the CNU was exhaustive and extraordinary reviews of the accreditation of the majors and masters degrees, which were burdensome and generated a tremendous amount of work for those responsible. “They asked for these accreditations from the UCA with special animosity,” said the source. Meanwhile, the DGI delayed the processing of the paperwork for equipment that was being imported, a practice similar to what they used against the newspaper La Prensa to economically strangle it.
What has followed has been denying them the annual permit from the Ministry of the Interior, another one of the actions that the regime has carried out against the Non-governmental Organizations (NGOs) to keep them in a state of illegality. Along with that, they would frequently ask them for information from their records but would not give them any certificate nor annual permit. They have not given the UCA the permit since 2019. This results in a legal limbo which creates misgivings for the national banks to approve transactions or financing.
Revenge on the Jesuit University
The pressures against the UCA have worsened with the crisis of 2018, because the campus was the cradle for the students who protested over the fire in the Indio Maíz biosphere reserve, and then over the reform of the Nicaragua Social Security Institute (INSS). Several of the students who confronted the dictatorship, like Lesther Alemán, were from that campus. Alemán was found guilty for the alleged crime of “conspiracy to commit harm to the national integrity” this past February 3rd.
On May 30, 2018, when the regime ordered the attack against one of the largest demonstrations of people who were in solidarity with the mothers and relatives of those murdered in April of that year, the president at that time of the UCA, Fr. José Idiáquez, opened the gates of the campus to provide refuge to more than 5,000 people and prevent a larger blood bath. The priest denounced that fact that they threatened him to death and held the government of Ortega responsible for what might happen. “Ortega is going to end up a murderer”, Idiáquez said on June 15, 2018 to the newspaper El País.
Since then, the regime has cut the budgetary assignment to the UCA to try to strangle it economically. This year it only granted it a million córdboas (less than $30,000), when in 2018 its budget was more than 251 million córdobas. These measures have affected the scholarship students, who fear a definitive closure of the school. The authorities of the UCA said some weeks ago to DIVERGENTES that these measures “affect the possibilities of the University to continue granting total and partial scholarships to students who, due to their social and economic condition, see themselves prevented from handling the costs of their university education.” The campus authorities added that “until now the University has not affected the active scholarships, nevertheless, the number of new scholarships granted for new entering students has been significantly limited.”
The cancelations and confiscations of private universities, added to this reform to the University Autonomy Law, have been seen as a plan for total control of the Sandinista regime over all levels of Nicaraguan education. Professors, former presidents, students and political scientists consulted agree that the ruling couple are trying to eliminate university plurality and free thinking, and to push students to choose between two paths: professionalize in a campus whose political indoctrination is the same as what is preached in El Carmen, where the home of Ortega and Murillo is located, or leave the country, to the extent possible, to continue with their professional dreams.
Up until April 2018 one of the strongest Sandinista arms within the public universities was the National Student Union of Nicaragua (UNEN). Nevertheless, the rebellion also dynamited their structures: some leaders turned into opponents and they lost control over the students. The political scientist Pedro Fonseca thinks that the political doctrine of the UNEN now will be made obvious in the education that students will receive, because the campuses, some private and other public, will pass over to be administered by the National University Council, dominated by Sandinism. Fonseca believes that what is being conceived is a partisan transformation of education, where control will be exercised over what, how, and which people and events they will study.
According to Fonseca, this process of taking over universities is not just the implementation of a punishment over those that played some role in the rebellion, but a threat for the universities that continue operating.
The Sandinistas pressured the UCA in the 1980s
Some months after the triumph of the Sandinista Front in 1979, a commission of Cuban specialists arrived in Nicaragua to “study and make recommendations on the ground on the orientation and structure that higher education should have in Nicaragua,” according to the book “The UCA: a history through history,” written by Enrique Alvarado Martínez, who was the vice president of that university.
The commission of Cubans worked for three months and wrote a document called the “Blue Book”, because of the color of its cover, where a transformation of the curriculum and methodologies were suggested. Nevertheless, the authorities of the UCA rejected the document, arguing that the recommendations “did not correspond to the Nicaraguan reality”, and they highlights “the costs of adapting the system to the rigid block system” that the study recommended. The National Council for Higher Education (CNES), a structure that was new for controlling universities, responded that the model proposed by the Cubans “is a political decision.”
The document stated, for example, that the School for Communication Sciences of the UCA was not necessary, because the School of Journalism of the National Autonomous University (UNAM) already existed. According to Martínez, Daniel Ortega himself then president of the Junta de Gobierno, made reference to this discrepancy. “The model of education proposed in this moment was a pretty faithful copy of the system used in Cuba and the Soviet Union,” wrote Martínez.
Another one of the problems that the UCA faced in those years was economic. Since the State absorbed all the institutions of higher education, the UCA began to depend on State resources and therefore, this caused conditions. For example, a representative of the government on the Board of Directors of the university was accepted.
The relationship of the UCA with the Sandinista government had its ups and downs. Nevertheless, it never broke completely, because several of the authorities of the UCA had a good relationship with the government. In addition, presidents, like Amando López, tried to lessen the tensions acceding to pressure from the Sandinistas, even though that brought criticism upon him. “What possibly the critics were not able to understand was the level of pressure and the threatening situation that hung over the UCA, at a time when the Sandinista Front had unlimited capacities to implement their system.” That period is described by the Board of Directors of 1982 “as one of the most difficult in the history of the UCA”
The Ortega-Murillos studied in the UCA
The UCA was founded in 1961. It offered majors in engineering, business administration and law. Daniel Ortega was a law student in his first years, but withdrew in 1963 to join the Sandinista Front. Even in 1990 the president César Jerez gave the Sandinista strongman an honorary doctorate. Juan Carlos Ortega graduated with a major in Social Communication and Daniel Edmundo Ortega in sociology, two of the children of the couple.
Several of their Sandinista leaders graduated from the UCA, like Casimiro Sotelo, Julio Buitrago, Bayardo Arce and the deputy Wálmaro Gutiérrez, just to mention a few.
During the nineties the UCA was one of the places where the UNEN protested for the 6% for the public universities, when Daniel Ortega was in the opposition and caused uprisings for the governments at that time.
With the reform of the Law, also left separated were the Institute of the History of Nicaraguan and Central America (IHNCA), and the Institute for the Development of Foreign Commerce, which previously were centers of thought affiliated with the UCA. The Center for Research and Documentation on the Caribbean Coast (CIDCA) also of the UCA, now will be taken on by the BICU.
The Institute of the History of Nicaragua and Central America (IHNCA) has a unique bibliographical collection in the country. Among its files are a good part of the Institute for Sandinism, which previously was under the protection of the Army but later was donated to this institution.