But still I hoped that after the worldwide condemnation of his bloody handling of that revolt, he would tread carefully as he faced the end of his third term and elections on Nov. It’s true that hundreds of people were killed in 2018 when he cracked down on the mass protests - which began when the government imposed a 5% fee on peoples’ pensions and broadened into a nationwide revolt after snipers began shooting unarmed students. Much as I disliked the man Daniel Ortega had become in the years since then, which led me to resign from the Sandinista party in 1993, I thought there were some red lines he wouldn’t cross.
I joined the clandestine urban resistance of the Sandinista National Liberation Front when I was 20 and knew Ortega and his now-wife Rosario Murillo during the years we were together in the revolutionary armed struggle that toppled the Somoza dictatorship in 1979. When I left my house in Nicaragua in May to visit my children abroad, a fleeting thought crossed my mind: What if I was never able to return?Īlthough Daniel Ortega’s regime had grown sharply more repressive and dangerous in response to a citizens revolt in 2018, I still didn’t seriously imagine that in a few months I would find myself in exile.
