Over 200 Protesters Killed Since April in Nicaragua

The Nicaraguan regime’s deadly ongoing crackdown on protesters discontent with the policies of the ruling government of the communist Sandinista dictator Daniel Ortega has already left over 200 people dead since demonstrations erupted in April.

Ortega’s repression has reportedly killed more people (over 220) than his counterpart Nicolás Maduro’s in last year’s brutal repression of protesters in Venezuela, not counting those who died of starvation, lack of medical care, or lack of access to water. According to the Venezuelan media outlet Runrunes, which kept a running tally of protest-related deaths in 2017, 158 Venezuelans died that year as a result of government-driven violence.

“There’s no civil war here. There is no confrontation between two armed forces, but government forces who are carrying out a massacre against a civic insurrection,” Carlos Fernando Chamorro, publisher of Nicaragua’s political newsmagazine Confidential, told the Miami Herald late last week and unveiled the fatality count.

Mainstream media outlets in the United States have largely failed to cover the bloodshed in Nicaragua, prompted by the government’s offensive against anyone who opposes Ortega, a move that prompted the killing of at least 220 people and imprisonment of an estimated 2,000 others.

The killings at the hands of Ortega troops appear to continue, with the Agence France-Presse (AFP) news agency noting on Sunday:

At least two demonstrators were killed and 11 others wounded in Nicaragua Saturday, a rights group said, as thousands of demonstrators marched against President Daniel Ortega across the Central American country.

Dubbed the Flowers March, the protests honoured the youth killed in the more than two months of anti-Ortega unrest met with repression by government forces that has left at least 220 people dead.

Despite the deadly crackdown in Nicaragua, the Miami Herald notes:

Amazingly, there is hardly an international uproar over what’s going on in Nicaragua. You don’t hear much talk about adopting international sanctions against top officials of the Nicaraguan regime, like the financial and travel sanctions that the United States and European and Latin American countries have imposed on top Venezuelan officials.

It’s not like there’s any confusion over who’s to blame for the recent killings amid Nicaragua’s political violence. Virtually all human rights groups agree that Ortega’s police-backed paramilitary goons are the culprits.

The Mexican President-elect Andrés Manuel López Obrador has expressed a willingness to work with the U.S. to secure the southwest border and try to help Latin Americans remain in their homeland with their loved ones.

He has proposed “to build 12 naval bases in the rivers that divide Mexico, Guatemala, and Belize, which in recent years have achieved little to reduce the flow of immigrants,” the Statesman reports.

Moreover, he indicated that he might be willing to help young illegal immigrants deported from the United States by taking them in Mexico.