Eimeel Castillo

Perhaps more than any other country in Latin America, Nicaragua’s self-identified left-wing government has failed its citizens, especially women, during the pandemic.1 COVID-19 arrived after two years of continued political repression and deepening economic crisis. In April 2018, Nicaraguans went to the streets to object to the mismanagement of a wildfire in a natural reserve and the promulgation of a presidential decree reducing benefits to pensioners. While these were immediate motivations for the civil unrest, demonstrations were a reaction to rising authoritarianism and corruption. President Daniel Ortega (2007–) and his wife, Vice President Rosario Murillo, responded to widespread demonstrations in major cities with state-sponsored terrorism and by criminalizing all forms of protest.2 Ortega, as commander in chief of police, approved the order to shoot live rounds at protesters and organized paramilitary groups to intimidate the population, which resulted in more than three hundred civilian deaths, three hundred imprisonments, and 103,000 exiles.3 Accused of crimes against humanity by an international group of lawyers in December that year, the ruling couple has since struggled to project stability and normalcy amid the impunity and illegitimacy that have become hallmarks of their regime.4 The scenario brought on by the pandemic has demonstrated that Ortega’s political maneuvering takes precedence over protecting the lives of Nicaraguans and has illustrated how authoritarianism often augments the vulnerability of women, especially young women.5 The impunity and lawlessness that reign in Nicaragua are key to understanding how the pandemic has worsened the already existing epidemic of domestic violence and femicide. As they document the increase in gender-based violence, women’s rights activists affiliated with long-standing local organizations such as the Women’s Autonomous MovementPage 251 → are demanding government accountability for a culture of impunity that extends to the domestic sphere.

Gender-based violence has been a major concern for women’s rights activists and human-rights defenders in Nicaragua for decades. Years of grassroots organization and advocacy by a coalition of women’s movements organized around the Women’s Network against Violence led to the promulgation of Law 779 (Comprehensive Law Against Violence Against Women) in June 2012.6 This law expanded the notion of violence to include its psychological and economic forms and defined femicide as a punishable crime for the first time. However, the law faced opposition from the executive. Ortega, who converted to Catholicism in 2005, gained the sympathy of the Catholic Church by forcing his party’s deputies to legalize a total abortion ban in September 2006, just two months prior to the presidential elections. In line with his newly adopted Christian persona and in alliance with religious groups, Ortega prevented Law 779’s full implementation.7 A little more than a year after its approval, he ordered a reform that instituted a process of mediation between victims and abusers and established partisan councils that intervene in the legal process to “preserve the unity of the family.”8 As the state disempowered victims, domestic violence continued unabated in this country, in which more than half of Nicaraguan women who live with a male partner have experienced some form of violence in their homes.9

Women’s rights activists from an array of local movements have denounced the government’s role in worsening the situation through its responses to the pandemic. They have documented a shocking rise in violence against women, including murder, even though the regime never declared shelter-in-place orders, as most countries have. For example, Católicas por el Derecho a Decidir (Catholics for the Right to Decide), an association of laypeople supporting women’s rights, which estimates that the annual number of femicides over the past five years ranged from fifty-three to fifty-eight, documented ninety-seven cases of femicide or attempted femicide in the first seven months of this year.10 Only thirteen of these cases are being prosecuted, and 60% of the victims are women under the age of thirty-four, which indicates the particular vulnerability of young women.11

While activists such as Católicas director Martha Flores have pointed out that the situation of self-quarantine facilitates abuse, the proliferation of gender-based violence cannot be ascribed exclusively to longer hours in contact with abusers in the home.12 The Observatory for Women’s Lives, an organization that monitors news on gender-based violence, has noted that due to the climate of lawlessness that has reigned supreme in Nicaragua since the Page 252 →2018 political crisis, abusers are committing crimes at higher rates. Activists point out that abusers are aware that the police and the judicial system are likely not to prosecute them, and that if they are convicted, they may be pardoned. The government and its institutions are devoting all their resources and attention to persecuting dissidents and applying a “politics of officialized impunity” to criminals.13

Moreover, the regime’s discourse and actions reflect a forcefully misogynist stance. For instance, members of Católicas were outraged by Ortega’s release of five hundred sexual offenders in May 2020, a measure they saw as a “legal aberration that creates an even greater lack of protection for women victims.”14 In a press release, authorities stated that the government had freed the abusers because it wanted to reunite families during “Mother’s Day month.” The complicity of the government has had concrete, tragic results for women: one of the released abusers assassinated his former partner, a thirty-year-old schoolteacher, in June.15

Activists reacted quickly as domestic violence surged during the months of the pandemic. Building on a long trajectory of grassroots collaboration among multiple feminist and women’s rights groups, they continued diverse advocacy efforts that include prevention, bringing charges against perpetrators, and supporting abused women. They also initiated new services, such as a recent hotline for women seeking counsel. This work is done despite extremely adverse political circumstances, including the aforementioned inability to organize demonstrations or to express any criticism of official policies without facing charges. For example, the national police constantly harass activists from the Women’s Autonomous Movement for criticizing the government’s actions in regard to women’s access to the law or reproductive rights.16 It is worth emphasizing that Nicaragua is one of the few countries in Latin America, alongside El Salvador, Honduras, and the Dominican Republic, that have a total abortion ban.17

Social distancing measures have propelled innovative uses of digital forms of activism, with young, self-identified feminists leading the way. These feminists have developed an array of educational campaigns, including livestreaming of seminars and talks, transmission of podcasts and sketches, and the creation of digital magazines that are later distributed through social media. These efforts raise awareness not only of the importance of following international public health recommendations, in the absence of governmental guidance, but also the gender-specific dimension of the pandemic.18

The case of Nicaragua illustrates how quickly women’s rights can erode Page 253 →when we add a pandemic to an already established authoritarian regime that enjoys a culture of impunity. It can also teach us about the key role that civil society organizations, such as the women’s movement and feminist collectives, exercise in leading the way forward and fighting back against a political and judicial system that disregards real threats to the population, whether in the form of the epidemic of violence against women or the COVID-19 pandemic. Law 779 represents an important step in creating a legal framework within which to break the silence and prevent the innumerable forms of violence that Nicaraguan women experience in their day-to-day lives. However, there is much that needs to be done to ensure its effective implementation, and any initiative to enforce it more comprehensively would certainly require a democratic system. It is unlikely that any legislation to protect women’s lives can be put into real effect if the national police do not properly enforce it, since this police force is the same institution serving as repressive tool to sustain the ruling couple. Amid this gloomy scenario, new generations of women’s rights activists and feminists are leading the way and are not afraid to speak and act, despite the governmental impunity in Nicaragua.