Sergio Ramírez, award winning novelist and Vice President under Daniel Ortega in the 1980, wrote this piece to describe the impact of the closings of all non Sandinista NGOs that the regime has been doing since 2018, using his family’s NGO as an example.
Erradicate everything, control everything
By Sergio Ramírez, May 3,2022 in DIVERGENTES
The political intentions are very clear with these massive closings: on the one hand, keep civil society from promoting democracy, freedom of information, human rights, critical thinking, transformative culture, and that look for spaces for action for vulnerable groups, like indigenous communities, or civil empowerment, like the women´s movement. In other words, freeze society over, and subject it to the silence of the grave.
The history of the Luisa Mercado Foundation that we started in Masatepe in 2006 is in may ways the history of my family. My mother, in whose name the foundation is named, graduated in 1936 from the Baptist Institute in Managua, where my grandfather Teófilo Mercado sent her to boarding school, and she was the first female graduate in the history of Masatepe, quite a feat at that time for a woman. The recent graduate worked as a teacher with Doña Chepita Toledo de Aguerri, one of the heroes of education in Nicaragua, and then in 1952 was named the principal of the National Institute of Masatepe, where she was also a teacher of language and literature. My literature professor. And she was over seventy years old when she registered for courses by encounter in the UCA, where she got a Masters in school administration.
And in the foundation we created the “Lisandro Ramírez Velásquez” music school, in the name of my paternal grandfather who was a composer and violinist, director of the chapel of the Parish Church of Masatepe, and director of the Ramírez orchestra, which he started with all this children, musicians as well. Dozens of children from both sexes, from Masatepe and neighboring towns, passed through the classrooms of that school, where they learned to play the piano, guitar, violin, flute and participated in concerts to show what they had learned.
With the Luisa Mercado Foundation we had a cultural center like few others, that changed the profile of Masatepe. A library with 6,000 books, part of my own books and those of the poet Vidaluz Meneses, whose heirs donated her personal library to us; thousands of students and their neighbors had free access to its funds, and one of its most attractive programs was the corner of children´s books.
We also held expositions of sacred art, family photographs of the town, and painting and sculpture expositions; conferences, book presentations, we hosted literary circles of young creators, and we held literary formation workshops. The day that they granted me the Cervantes Prize in 2017, after receiving the news, I went to Masatepe where I had to do a writing workshop in the foundation to some twenty young people from the entire country.
I tell all this so that we can begin to appreciate the forest through a tree. The forest of foundations, civil and civic associations, non-governmental organizations, which have been cut down by the axe of the repression. The Luisa Mercado Foundation was felled along with 24 other organizations, through a decree of the National Assembly this month of April, approved just after it was presented, like that forest has been being cut down in these last months, until none of those trees are left standing. It now adds up to 164, eliminated starting in November 2018.
Among them are private universities, whose assets and installations have been confiscated; high schools; associations of doctors and engineers, municipal and communal development association, non-governmental organizations with legal representation in the country; organizations with an ecological interest and environmental protection, human rights organizations, organization for the promotion of free press and social communication; economic investigation institutes and for the promotion of health, education and culture; entities for democratic formation, and even homes for the elderly. In other words, the entire fabric of civil society.
The pretext is strange: not having updated with the Ministry of the Interior the legal documentation, including accounting records, when, and this I know, those documents were turned back every time they were presented, under the allegation that a signature was missing, a piece of data, a date, a period or a comma, because the public order, received from the two-headed presidency, was to not accept them under any circumstance in order to pave the way for their later elimination.
Or, to go even deeper, not having registered as “foreign agents, being obligated subjects because they received donations from outside the country”, because this is another one of the repressive laws, aimed at liquidating any vestige of liberty in Nicaragua.
But there is a legal scaffolding, created expressly to continue felling the forest. It is claimed, in addition, lack of compliance with the law for Non Profit Legal Entities; the Organic Law of the Legislative Branch of the Republic of Nicaragua; and the Law Against Asset Laundering, Financing of Terrorism and Financing for the Proliferation of Weapons of Mass Destruction.
But above all, is the Law for Non Profit Organizations, approved by the National Assembly in March of this year, which, in addition to legalizing the confiscation of assets of organizations stripped of their legal status, reduces the sphere in which private associations can operate. Nothing of human rights, nor democratic development, nor public liberties, nor the promotion of free press, the environment or indigenous peoples, nor feminism nor sexual diversity.
From here on, non-governmental organizations will only be able to exist when they have a religious, charity or beneficent character; or social, cultural or educational, says that law. Which is nothing but another fallacy, because the latter is what the Luisa Mercado Foundation worked on. And in terms of religious promotion there is no doubt that all those that the regime considers subversive will be left excluded, because priests have been repeatedly described in the official discourse as sons of the devil.
And in terms of charity organizations, The Foundation for Nicaraguan Human Dignity which ran in Managua the “Sor María Romero” home for the elderly, on having their legal status eliminated had to close the doors of the home, and in a dramatic press release had to ask family members to come to pick up their relatives; or Operation Smile, which was dedicated to operating on children with cleft palates for free, also eliminated.
The political intentions are very clear with these massive suppressions; on the one hand, keep civil society from promoting democracy, freedom of information, human rights, critical thinking, transformational culture, and that it seek spaces for action in favor of vulnerable groups, like indigenous communities, or civil empowerment , like the women´s movement. In other words, put society on deep freeze, and subject it to the rules the silence of the grave.
And on the other hand, ensure the monopoly of the state in terms of any type of social, municipal or communal action. It is a matter not just of replacing civil society in these undertakings, but not allowing them to be done, even if the state does not replace them. Another way of freezing up the free actions of society and its initiatives.
But if we expand even more the panorama, and connect the attack against civil society to suppressing and eliminating their organizations, with other measures of the regime, we are going to discover that it is a matter of a global plan which is already underway:
Let us add the suppression of political parties, of which not even one independent one is left, and the sentencing and imprisonment of political leaders and presidential candidates.
Let us add the attack against the free communications media, as can be seen with the confiscation of the TV Channel 100% News, the television programs Esta Noche and Esta Semana, and the magazine Confidencial; the disappearance of independent TV channels, placed at the service of the official apparatus through purchase; the military occupation of the newspaper La Prensa.
Let us add the practical disappearance of business association entities, with their leaders imprisoned, and subjected now to silence, and the attempt to replace them by other associations faithful to the dictatorship.
Let us add the forced exile of bishops and priests, the constant threats against other bishops and priests who remain in Nicaragua, the aggression against churches, and the propaganda that places the Catholic Church as an enemy of the regime.
Let us add the annulment of university autonomy, some co-opted, others confiscated, deprived of the right to approve on their own their plans of study and to issue academic degrees.
Let us add the persecution against writers, journalists, academics, artists, composers, singers, forced into exile.
And let us add the declarations from the seat of power that argue the goodness of the single party system, and then we will complete the panorama.
Nothing is casual, nor capricious, nor free. Everything responds to one master plan.
Sergio Ramírez is a Nicaraguan writer, winner of the Carlos Fuentes Award, the Alfaguara Novel and the Miguel de Cervantes Award. This article is part of Republica Finquera a project for the coverage of authoritarianism in Central America and Mexico of the Regional Editor [Redacción Regional], an alliance among media and journalists of the region, among them DIVERGENTES