The Christian Science Monitor

How Nicaragua protests snapped Ortega's power grab

On a grassy embankment in Managua, dozens of metal crosses with black flags honoring the dead and disappeared stand as a coda to more than a week of anti-government unrest. Beside the makeshift memorial, protesters dressed in black chant, “They weren’t criminals, they were students!”

Amid a cacophony of clanging cymbals and honking klaxons, Maria, a chef in her late 50s, stands in front of one of the crosses. She laments her silence during the long and increasingly repressive rule of President Daniel Ortega, a Socialist revolutionary who joined the fight to oust a US-backed dictator in 1979.

“With this government, we’ve been quiet,” she says. “We thought that these people who have power now were

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