To tourists in Nicaragua, Masaya is known as the City of Flowers, the site of an artisans’ market where people come down from the capital to buy rocking chairs, hammocks, and folkloric masks. To locals, it is also a bastion of rebellion. In 1912, when the United States intervened in Nicaragua, Masaya’s defenders fired on a contingent of marines, and though the town was quickly captured, the members of the resistance became heroes. In 1978, rebels fighting a repressive government erected barricades against the National Guard, and held out until they were overwhelmed by airplanes and tanks. This spring, as a new uprising began, the narrow backstreets of the city’s indigenous neighborhood, Monimbó, were again a center of resistance.

The strife in Nicaragua began in April, after President Daniel Ortega announced cuts to social-security benefits, along with increases in worker contributions. Tensions had been building for years, over Ortega’s tenacious hold on power, his occasionally arbitrary decrees, and a widespread sense that his family and a few cronies had enriched themselves at the country’s expense. Nicaragua is among the Western Hemisphere’s poorest countries, and the prospect of greater privation inspired outrage. Students joined elderly pensioners on the streets to protest, and Ortega’s police opened fire. Within a few days, twenty-six people had been killed. As the lines of confrontation hardened, young partisans across the country blocked streets with barricades of paving stones to hold back government forces.

In June, the protesters in Masaya declared the city “territorio libre del dictador”—territory freed from the dictator. Ortega, insisting that they were terrorists, began trying to dislodge them. The assault was led not by soldiers but by paramilitary fighters—masked, heavily armed men—who took up positions, alongside police, on the edge of town. Masaya, which is flanked by an active volcano and a crater lake, has few roads in and out, and before long the paramilitaries had effectively sealed off the city. Nearly every day there were battles, between rebels armed with homemade mortars and slingshots and Ortega supporters with military weapons.

For eleven years, Ortega had sustained his power through shrewd dealmaking and accommodation. Although he began his career, four decades ago, as a Marxist revolutionary, he has aligned himself with business leaders and cultivated the Catholic Church by imposing a total ban on abortion. He still fulminates about Yankee imperialism, but he has courted the International Monetary Fund and allowed a wave of American retirees to settle in Nicaragua, to take advantage of the good beaches and the cheap real estate. In recent months, though, as Ortega has tried to regain control, he has adopted a strategy employed by autocrats in Turkey, Egypt, Venezuela, and elsewhere: condemn your political opponents as traitors, incite mobs to violence, and then deny responsibility. Across the country, hundreds of protesters have been killed, and many more put in prison.

Not long after I arrived in Nicaragua, in July, I met a few of Ortega’s men. Off the main square in Monimbó, three of them were resting in the shade next to a pickup truck, after a clash with protesters. They wore balaclavas and carried automatic rifles. Their leader introduced himself as Chispa—Sparky. He was burly, and in the midday heat he was sweating through his blue T-shirt. I asked who they were: soldiers? policemen? “We’re just ordinary citizens who want to defend the government, and our country, from terrorists,” he said. When I pointed out that they seemed awfully well organized and well supplied, Chispa shook his head. The terrorists had been better armed, he insisted, and gestured at a paltry stash of confiscated weapons in the bed of the pickup: a pair of homemade mortars and strings of nails. The international media had distorted what was going on, he told me. There had been a lot of “noticias falsas”—fake news. But I should believe him, he said through his mask. He was telling the truth.

Ortega was silent on the first day of the protests. On the second day, his wife, Rosario Murillo, broadcast a statement denouncing the demonstrators as “tiny, petty, mediocre beings.” They were not activists, she suggested, but “vampires demanding blood,” who were inventing stories about the deaths of protesters.

The aristocratic tone did not surprise Nicaraguans. Ortega and Murillo dominate the country, with a husband-and-wife co-Presidency that is unique in the modern world. Ortega is the more recessive of the two; he is a wily negotiator, with a street fighter’s swagger, but he is a clumsy speaker and avoids public appearances. Murillo, a thin woman with long, wavy hair, appears on the radio nearly every day and expounds at length on the news and on her personal philosophy. A self-described poet who professes a variety of religious faiths, she wears dozens of rings and vivid clothes in blue, yellow, fuchsia, and purple—colors that she believes give off “good vibrations.” During Ortega’s second term in office, Murillo was named the Presidential spokesperson, and early last year she became Vice-President. “She does all the day-to-day running of the government,” a Western diplomat told me. “She’s a fruitcake, but a brilliant fruitcake.”

The Ortega-Murillos control a portfolio that includes several television and radio stations, an advertising agency, and much of the country’s oil industry; they have seven children, and many are involved in managing these businesses. One of their sons, Laureano, is a key adviser for ProNicaragua, an agency that promotes foreign investment. A few years ago, he was at the center of an ambitious deal in which a Chinese company was given rights to build a canal across the country; the project has faltered, and has been criticized for a lack of transparency. Laureano, who is also an operatic tenor, recently oversaw a lavish production of Verdi’s “Rigoletto,” in which he played the Duke of Mantua, supported by a cast brought in from Italy. His sister Camila runs a fashion business, which was hired to supply the costumes.

“Don’t be such a martyr—at least let me carry the groceries.” Facebook

Twitter

Email

Shopping

The First Couple’s influence is evident across Nicaragua. Public buildings have been repainted in Murillo’s favored colors. On her orders, the main avenues of Managua, the capital, were lined with a hundred and forty “Trees of Life”: fifty-five-foot metal structures that resemble gigantic carpet beaters, studded with electric lights. As the protests grew fiercer, the Trees of Life became a favorite target. Demonstrators cut through their bases with hacksaws and pushed them over, cheering. Like the Iraqi celebrants who attacked Saddam Hussein’s toppled statue in Firdos Square, in 2003, the Nicaraguan protesters scrambled onto the fallen trees to jump up and down in momentary triumph.

A few days after the uprising began, Ortega reappeared in public. He seemed uncertain what to do, at first insisting on the social-security reforms and then agreeing to cancel them. He asked business leaders and the archbishop of Managua to help resolve the “dramatic situation.” But by then the protests were no longer about social-security reforms. The demonstrators had formed an opposition group, the Civic Alliance for Justice and Democracy—a coalition of students, business groups, farmers’ organizations, and human-rights activists, united mostly by anger at the government’s abuses. They wanted Ortega and Murillo out of office, and justice for their friends who had been killed. By May 16th, when a “national dialogue” was finally convened, with the two sides meeting in a conference room at a Catholic seminary in Managua, nearly sixty people had died.