Presentation of the event
Four years after the popular uprising of 2018, the human rights crisis in Nicaragua has disclosed the increasing deterioration of the rule of law and democratic institutions in the country. Despite the circumstances, Daniel Rodríguez Moya, a Spanish academic and journalist who specialised in Nicaraguan history from the 20th century, infiltrates the resistance to the Ortega and Murillo’s regime to capture the testimonies of those who have raised their voices for a free country that respects fundamental freedoms.
The screening took place on the 30th of May 2022 as a way of commemorating the Mothers’ Day massacre in the Nicaraguan cities of Estelí, Chinandega, Managua, and Masaya.
After the screening, the Spanish filmmaker took part in a debate with Alicia Homs, Nacho Sánchez Amor and Mónica Silvana Gonzalès, all three MEPs from the Progressive Alliance of Socialists and Democrats group.
Synopsis
August 2018. Four months have passed since in Nicaragua a popular insurrection unprecedented since 1979 put in check the government of Daniel Ortega and Rosario Murillo, turned into a de facto dictatorship. Hundreds of people are dead, as well as missing persons and political prisoners. The police and, especially, paramilitary forces have unleashed a house-to-house manhunt to imprison the main leaders of the revolts, including peasants, journalists, environmentalists and former Sandinista guerrillas.
In this context of terror, a Spanish journalist and university doctor specialized in the Sandinista Revolution infiltrates the resistance to the Ortega regime to learn first-hand the nature of protests that go beyond just another revolt. With a direct style and a narrative that ranges from the purely literary to the strictly journalistic, the film provides invaluable testimonies of protagonists who soon after had to go into exile or were imprisoned by the Ortega regime.
From the role of the Catholic Church, the feminists, the LGBT community, the esoteric character of the Ortega regime, the role of the humblest classes such as the peasantry, the role of the students, who were accused months before of lacking social and political concerns, or the construction of new leaderships, all these are revealed throughout the film, always with the permanent threat of being intercepted by the repressive forces of the regime. Testimonies that configure all the faces of a popular insurrection that has bet on the peaceful way and that has transformed the old slogan of the Sandinista revolution “Free country or die” into the hopeful “Free country to live”.
