Nicaragua is rising

As I often explain to visiting friends, here in the San Francisco Mission district, Nicaragua and all of Central America feel very close by. "Nicaragua is rising" says the poster that recently appeared in a store window on Mission Street. It refers to the popular struggle which has rocked that country since April and has cost some 200 lives in what was recently the most peaceful nation in its neighborhood.

Nicaragua is close, not only because so many local residents migrated from there, but also because so many San Franciscans participated in the struggle of the 1980s against our own government's determination to crush Nicaraguans' attempt to replace a dictator with democracy and justice. That dream lives on in the hearts of many experienced activists now bent on resistance to the Trump/GOP regime's cruelty and greed.

In her latest article for Tom Dispatch, Nicaragua at the Barricades ... And a Crossroads, Erudite Partner describes both, some of the story of Nicaragua's liberation struggle, as well as some of the history of how North American supporters learned from Nicaraguans. She asks, why should we care that Nicaragua is suffering renewed violence amidst our manifold troubles at home?

...there was a time when Nicaragua’s imaginative, idiosyncratic revolution offered the world an example of how a people might shuck off the bonds of U.S. dominance and try to build a democratic country devoted to human well-being.

This was "heady stuff" in the repressive, GOP/Reagan-afflicted 1980s. North American allies could not always internalize the most important lesson Nicaraguans tried to teach us: that the success of their revolution ultimately would depend on whether we too could remake our country into a place of democracy and justice. E.P. shares that story and more in this new article.

From here, we can have at best little idea where Nicaraguans' contemporary struggles will take them; we can have confidence that our domestic struggles for human decency, for democracy and justice, increase the space for theirs.