The brutal and murderous response by Nicaragua’s Marxist dictator Daniel Ortega to protests against his corrupt and oppressive regime is plunging the nation into chaos. Nicaragua is unraveling right before the world’s eyes.

Tim Rogers in The Atlantic:

The Unraveling of Nicaragua

Amid the mass protests against the Ortega regime, the country is showing signs of democratic renewal.

Nicaragua is showing all the symptoms of a failed state. At the center of the storm is the corrupt minority government of Daniel Ortega, the former revolutionary leader who now acts more like a cartel boss than a president. Over the past seven weeks, Ortega’s police and paramilitaries have killed more than 120 people, mostly students and other young protesters who are demanding the president’s ouster and a return to democracy, according to a human-rights group. Police hunt students like enemy combatants. Sandinista Youth paramilitaries, armed and paid by Ortega’s party, drive around in pickup trucks attacking protesters. Gangs of masked men loot and burn shops with impunity. Cops wear civilian clothing, and some paramilitaries dress in police uniforms. “This is starting to look more like Syria than Caracas,” one Nicaraguan business leader told me.

The asymmetrical fighting has claimed the lives of at least 120 people, including one U.S. citizen, and injured more than 1,000, according to the Nicaraguan Center for Human Rights (known by its Spanish acronym Cenidh). Most of the fatalities have reportedly been unarmed young people, including a 15-year-old shot in the neck for bringing water to student protesters. Hundreds more have been unlawfully detained, released days later with ghastly bruises and tales of cruelty behind bars. The ugliest day so far was May 30, Mother’s Day in Nicaragua, when AK-47–toting police indiscriminately opened fire on a peaceful march to honor the dead. As police sprayed the crowd with bullets, government sharpshooters positioned on the roof of the national baseball stadium went headhunting with sniper rifles. Before the sun rose, 16 more Nicaraguans were dead, and another 88 were injured. “This is a terrorist state,” the Cenidh president Vilma Núñez told me. “Being a young person protesting here is a crime that’s punishable by death.”

Nicaragua is now in the throes of a mass uprising against Ortega’s murderous regime. It’s a dangerous endeavor for an unarmed population, especially after the collapse of peace talks last week. But there’s no going back. Nicaragua has experienced a national awakening.

The protests against the connubial dictatorship of President Daniel Ortega and his wife, Vice President Rosario Murillo, began on April 12 when hundreds of university students took to the streets to march in defense of Nicaragua’s Indio Maíz Biological Reserve. Six days later, the protest grew to thousands of people, as students joined a larger pushback against Ortega’s attempt to increase social-security taxes and reduce pension benefits for the elderly.

The Ortega regime, with its long-running zero-tolerance policy towards any type of street demonstration, did not take well to the mounting unrest. Police and the Sandinista paramilitaries, a group of indoctrinated young people that Ortega uses as a shock force, responded with rabid and disproportionate force, firing rubber bullets and tear gas at students, then switching to live ammunition. “We weren’t ready for the massacres,” Valeska Valle, a 22-year-old student leader, told me. “We never thought the government was going to kill us. We never thought being a university student would be a crime in Nicaragua.”

The images of state repression were captured on cellphone videos, shocking a nation still haunted by the specters of past dictatorship and civil war. Nicaragua suffered for four decades under the brutal U.S.-backed Somoza dictatorship, which the Sandinista Revolution ousted in 1979, leading to another decade of U.S.-funded counterrevolutionary “contra” war. “None of our martyrs will be forgotten,” the student leader Fernando Sánchez told me. “For them, for their families, and for all Nicaraguans, we cannot stop. We cannot allow this unscrupulous person to continue in the presidency.”