What Are You Managua bout it? Nicaragua, Covid 19 and a Government in Denial

A trip through Central America. A year abroad and hopefully a dream realised. The opportunity to learn Spanish, soak in the Latin culture and trace the footsteps trod by the Incas and Aztecs hundreds of years before us. Until the whole world came to a standstill that is. Well, all but Nicaragua.

It was March 10th and we were in El Tunco, a cosy surfers village in El Salvador, when the rumours began. The President was intent on closing their borders. And we were on the wrong side. Covid 19 had arrived. The vagaries of quarantine and social distancing were by now normalised in Europe and Asia but only recently had they made their way across the Atlantic to the Americas. The countries of Central America don’t boast medical resources of the same standard as the developed world and this, justifiably, called for immediate action. It’s instructive to note that Japan has 13 hospital beds per 1,000 inhabitants while Germany and France have 8 and 6 respectively. Nicaragua has 1.2. The rumours held true and El Salvador was locked down on March 11th. March 15th, Honduras followed suit. March 16th, Guatemala & Panama. March 18th, Costa Rica. March 19th, 20th, 21st… April… May… Nicaragua, hello?

It took a month for the Nicaraguan government to even acknowledge the existence of the virus. It’s June now, and even though the severity of the situation here is well known by the locals, the government have still done nada. Nero at least fiddled while Rome burned – the Nicaraguan president has not even managed that.

We took a last minute flight to get out of El Salvador back during the March Madness and aimed in the direction of Managua, Nicaragua. It’s an incredible country, speckled with lava filled volcanos, idyllic freshwater lakes and an abundance of wildlife that merits its own nature doc on BBC. We’ve been isolating (stuck) at a small beach called Playa Maderas with a group of backpackers who have landed themselves in the same situation. We take care as much as possible; avoiding unnecessary contact with people, wearing facemasks while doing a grocery run, not touching fellow surfers during the morning high tide session. You know, the usual precautions everyone else in the world is used to (minus the surfing). Years from now people will talk about their experiences during the infamous Covid 19 lockdown.  The social distancing.  The 2km rule.  Friday night Zoom calls with a bag of cans.  But I won’t be able to empathise.  It was just business as usual in Nicaragua.

But why? Why has the governing FSLN party not enforced any restrictions? Why are restaurants, bars and mobile phone repair shops still open for business during a global pandemic? The answer; Daniel Ortega. The President of Nicaragua. After the first official case was announced in the country on March 19th (played off as a transmitted case from Panama) Ortega wasn’t seen publicly for a month. The vice president Rosaria Murillo, who happens to be Ortega’s wife, rather than advise the public to socially distance, actually encouraged the people to partake in marches and gatherings which she named “amor en tiempos del Covid 19” (love in times of Covid 19). Crazy, right? Even looking at the Paddy Power app you would know there is something strange; where the English PL, Spanish La Liga and Italian Serie A used to occupy the football section, now we just see the Nicaraguan Primera Division (and the Belarusian League strangely).

As time passed, cases stayed consistently low. The first case was announced on March 18th and by May 18th there were only 25 official cases. Compare that to Ireland or Italy or Peru, who all enforced stringent measures early on. How could this country manage to contain this extremely contagious virus without taking any action? Oh yeh, probably because they didn’t. As the weeks went on it seemed that Ortega and Co. went from ignoring the pandemic to flat out concealing it.  Pictures have emerged of bodies in beds being abandoned out the back of hospitals due to low capacity.  The “express burials” bringing bodies from hospitals to cemeteries during the night are becoming ever more frequent.  The people are enforcing their own rules now and they are asking questions of their president. 

It’s not the first time Ortega has been involved in some fishy business. Nicaragua was ruled by a dictatorship until 1979 when Ortega and the leftist FSLN helped overthrow it and establish a democracy. The FSLN governed the country until 1990 when Ortega handed over power to the opposition party. Ortega kept running in every presidential election until he was finally re-elected in 2006, except this time he decided he was going nowhere. Since then he has been involved in a number of questionable incidents surrounding elections and has amended the constitution so he could be re-elected again and again.

In 2018 there was a state of civil unrest in the country where the people actively tried to overthrow Ortega. The Ortega regime proposed a social security reform that would raise income and payroll taxes while also decreasing the pension benefits, hitting students and the elderly hard. This sparked outrage and numerous protests took place in opposition to Ortega. He responded with a violent repression. What started as peaceful protests escalated to tear gas, rubber bullets and finally live ammunition. There were ad hoc protests and riots throughout the country all year where more than 300 people lost their lives. Ortega tried to suppress this information by controlling media outlets on TV and Radio. Oh yeh, Ortega and his family own/run 4 of the 9 free to air TV stations in Nicaragua. The other 5 are said to be run by closely aligned allies. On top of that Ortega made political protests illegal in November 2018. Dictatory? Shhh, you can’t speak out against Ortega, what if they hear you?

So what is going to happen in Nicaragua? The people have taken matters into their own hands. Recently we’ve noticed an ever increasing amount of people wearing masks, many non essential shops have shut their doors and there’s rules upon entering the supermarkets. It’s unknown exactly how many cases and deaths there have been here but if the government isn’t going to take any action, the people certainly aren’t just going to sit around and watch things unfold.  When they united in 2018 Ortega backed down and the tax reform was rescinded. 2 years later they are coming together again, albeit in a different way.  The peculiar cruelty of coronavirus has rendered marches and physical protests counter-productive, but it will take more than Covid-19 to prevent the people of Nicaragua from taking the action they deem necessary.

Daniel Ortega may have fled the public eye, but the pride and determination of this country is still evident for everyone to see.