Jul 19, 2018
By this, as intellectuals, social activists and academics, we want to express our deep rejection of the very serious situation of state political violence and violation of Human Rights that Nicaragua is going through, [and assert the] responsibility of the current regime of Ortega-Murillo, which has resulted in about three hundred dead in the last three months.
The indignation, the pain, the sense of historical frustration is double when such a political aberration is the product of leaders and governments who call themselves left-wing. What can hurt more than the irony of a leader who calls himself a revolutionary, emulating the criminal practices of that dictator against whom he knew how to raise! And that indignation becomes even more intense when this panorama of state political violence is completed with the complicit silence of political leaders and intellectual (self) proclaimed leaders of the left. The connivance of a certain intellectual establishment – an officialist left that usually assumes the exclusive representation of the “left” – has mutated in the heat of governmental power into a substitute for the most unbridled cynicism.
To denounce this situation that is as painful as it is unacceptable, to speak up against the abuses of the most basic freedoms and rights that the current Nicaraguan government has been carrying out, is not only a duty of humanitarian solidarity. It is also an act and a collective call to defend the revolutionary Memory; to try to avoid the consummation of this political degeneration in progress.
There is no worse theft than the political disappointment of the hope of the people.
There is no worse looting than that which is aimed at preying on rebellious energies for a just world.
There is no worse imperialism than internal colonialism that becomes oppressive violence coated with anti-imperial rhetoric.
All that is happening in Nicaragua. The Earth, which was a fertile symbol of emancipatory hope at the end of the 1970s, has become another field of authoritarianism.
The tainted memory of one of the noblest and most hopeful revolutions in Our America, as Sandino was and still is; the memory of anti-capitalist struggles of a people suffering but brave, now trampled to (try to) cover the typical ordinary violence of a dictatorial regime more, of those that are redundant and repeated in our history. The former revolutionary leader, honoured by the confidence of his people, has today turned into a dictator, blind with power and with his hands stained with young blood. Such, the violently bitter landscape of our beloved Nicaragua.
We raise our voice to condemn publicly the dictatorship in which the government of Ortega-Murillo has become. We express our solidarity with the people and youth today, once again, raised in resistance. To support and accompany their demands for dialogue and peace, to put an end to an illegitimate and criminal government that today usurps the Sandinista memory. We do it with the conviction that it is about not only “saving the honor” of the past, but above all, of rescuing and caring for the emancipatory seeds of the future, which today have been put at risk.
First Signatures :
Alberto Acosta (economist, Ecuador)
Maristella Svampa (sociologist and writer, Argentina)
Raúl Zibechi (essayist and writer, Uruguay)
Horacio Machado Araoz (political scientist, Argentina)
Hugo Blanco (activist, director of Luta Indigena [‘Indigenous struggle’], Peru)
Joan Martinez Alier (Political Ecology Magazine, Spain)
Pierre Salama (economist, France)
Raphael Hoetmer (historian, Peru)
Manfred Max-Neef (Universidad Austral de Chile)
Yaku Pérez Guartambel (President of the Confederation of the Kichwa Peoples of Ecuador – ECUARUNARI and of the Andean Coordination of Indigenous Organizations – CAOI)
Decio Machado (Sociologist, Spanish journalist based in Ecuador)
Pablo Solon (Fund. Solon, Bolivia)
Roberto Gargarella (lawyer, constitutionalist, Argentina)
Massimo Modonesi (Unam, Mexico)
Edgardo Lander (sociologist, Venezuela)
Arturo Escobar (anthropologist, environmentalist, Colombia / USA)
Enrique Leff (philosopher, environmentalist, Mexico)
Pierre Beaudet (Professor Cs Sociales, Quebec, Canada)
Boaventura de Sousa Santos (lawyer, sociologist, Portugal)
Gina Vargas Valente
Jul 19, 2018
Other Aspect 