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In Nicaragua, The Political Battle Is Moving From The Streets To The Negotiating Table

Associated Press
Nicaragua's President Daniel Ortega speaks to supporters at Las Victorias square in Managua, Nicaragua, on Monday, April 30, 2018.

A meme making the rounds on social media in Nicaragua dryly sums up critics' view of President Daniel Ortega. Labeled "Questions To Be Addressed By The National Dialogue," as upcoming negotiations between the president and his opponents have been labeled, it includes only two: "When are you leaving?" and "Who are you taking with you?"

After two weeks of bloody confrontations in the street between pro- and anti-Ortega forces, the president's opponents, as the meme notes, cannot imagine any settlement in which he stays in power, but most of them also cannot imagine any scenario in which he willingly leaves power.

"He either lives in a civil way, obeying the law and stopping the brutality and the corruption, or he becomes the Nicaraguan version of the Ceausescus," said Nicaraguan journalist Alvaro Cruz, editor of the Salvadoran newspaper Diario El Mundo, referring to the communist couple who ruled Romania during the Cold War and wound up being executed by their own former supporters when they resisted a popular uprising.

Read more at our news partner, the Miami Herald.

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