Stephen Sefton, Tortilla con Sal 24 de marzo 2019
The massacre at Morrito on July 12th 2018 was organized by leaders of Nicaragua's so-called Anti-Canal Movement, Medardo Mairena, Luis Pineda and Pedro Mena. They were convicted and sentenced to long prison terms on the basis of abundant documentary proof, witness testimony, and data from their smartphones, among other evidence. Their close associate Francisca Ramirez has fled the country, thus escaping arrest for whatever involvement she may have had in that particularly heinous crime, as well as other very serious crimes.
Interview in Morrito with the widow of teacher Marvin Ugarte, murdered by Anti-Canal Movement paramilitaries.
Click for sub-titles in English
Apart from criminal charges in relation to the Morrito massacre, as the National Dialogue develops with government pardons for serious crimes for the sake of national peace and stability, Ramirez may well also escape criminal charges based on plentiful witness testimony for serious crimes involving extortion, assault and robbery at the numerous roadblocks she and her accomplices openly boasted of having set up across Nicaragua's south western departments of Chontales and Rio San Juan. As the Anti-Canal Movement representatives themselves stated during the abortive National Dialogue in May 2018, they did so with the deliberate aim of strangling Nicaragua's economic life, in other words trying to make it impossible for many hundreds of thousands of people to meet basic needs and enjoy fundamental social and economic rights.
The Nicaraguan opposition's cynical blockade lasted for three months, from late April until early July 2018. Students were prevented from going to classes. Patients were blocked from getting medical care. Businesses large and small were unable to access supplies or carry out bank transactions. Farmers and rural working families were unable to get their produce and livestock to market. People could routinely only get through the roadblocks if they paid money to do so to the armed thugs paid to operate the blockade by Ramirez, Mairena, Mena and others. As elsewhere in Nicaragua, at roadblocks operated by people from the the Anti-Canal Movement, people suspected of Sandinista sympathies were intimidated and beaten, occasionally kidnapped and tortured and sometimes, as at Morrito, murdered.
For Francisca Ramirez, all of this was a natural extension of her cynical opportunist behavior ever since she came to prominence leading Nicaragua's Anti-Canal Movement. She and her associates have always made astute use of intimidation to impose their agenda in the rural communities where they operate and have years of experience setting up the kind of roadblocks they operated during the attempted coup in 2018.
The murderous attack in Morrito by around two hundred well armed paramilitaries coordinated from roadblocks controlled by the Anti-Canal Movement of Ramirez, Mairena and Mena amounts to a categorically damning indictment of everyone who continues to support Francisca Ramirez as a human rights defender, including among many others, Amnesty International, Frontline Defenders, Global Witness and the supporters of SOS Nicaragua and associated Nicaraguan opposition groups.
Beyond its terrible human cost, the Morrito massacre has enormous significance as an irrefutable contradiction of the big lie that the 2018 protests in Nicaragua were peaceful. That is why the massacre is never mentioned by any of the human rights organizations reporting on events in Nicaragua between April and July last year.
As in other less well publicized and documented incidents, like the shooting of over 20 Sandinista supporters on May 30th in La Trinidad, near Estelí, the testimonies of witnesses and survivors of the massacre in Morrito vindicate the Nicaraguan government's insistence that opposition activists were generally armed and violent. They were indeed, and not just at Morrito, but right from the very beginning of their attempt at regime change , when armed opposition supporters killed police officer Jilton Manzanares, the first fatal casualty on April 19th 2018 of Nicaragua's murderous, chronically mendacious opposition.