Five years after the social rebellion which put the government of Daniel Ortega and Rosario Murillo on the ropes in Nicaragua, the TUI together with its Nicaraguan section Alternativa Anticapitalista, convened a Forum held this April 22. This activity is part of the resolutions voted in the recent II World Congress of the International Socialist League.
The event featured a very representative panel:
*Yader Parajón, young activist exiled in the US who was recently ex-prisoned by the dictatorship.
*Lludely Aburto, former FSLN militant and student leader during the 1979 revolution now exiled in Costa Rica and member of the Articulation of Social Movements.
*María José Lechado, Nicaraguan immigrant in Costa Rica and member of the Costa Rican PRT.
*Mohamet Pacheco, exiled Nicaraguan student and militant of Alternativa Anticapitalista, ISL-Nicaragua.
After a first round of presentations, the speakers presented different current debates of the Nicaraguan and Central American fighting vanguard. Why is that Nicaragua and Central America were epicenters of revolutions in the 1980s and have now regimes like the one in Nicaragua or Bukele in El Salvador? Why didn’t the process advance during that period? What were the main conclusions of the rebellion of April 2018? Why is there a subsequent brutal repression and consolidation of a regime of capitalist dictatorship with Stalinist methods in Nicaragua? What tasks does the internationalist and critical left have in this scenario?
The meeting had moments of high emotion and deep political reflections: Yader’s testimony and the more than a year that he served in prison during his last imprisonment (he was imprisoned three times), the disappointment with the project of Sandinismo narrated by Lludely, and the historical criticism of the limitations of the FSLN raised by María José. All the contributions recognized the powerful role of the International Socialist League from the first steps of the rebellion, as well as in all the subsequent process, insisting on the need to ratify that course. Mohamet was the last speaker of the Forum and elaborated on the debate of the tasks of international solidarity carried out on the balance of the International Commission headed by the ISL, which played a role of great regional impact just a few months ago, and which contributed to the liberation of more than 200 political prisoners, among which Yader was included. At the same time, fundamentally, he stressed the need to build a political tool in Nicaragua and Central America with a revolutionary socialist and internationalist perspective, rounded off an activity followed with great eagerness by militants, sympathizers and activities from different countries. There were greetings from Costa Rica, Brazil, different regions of Argentina, Dominican Republic, Paraguay, El Salvador, Brazil, Spain, among others.
The final round raised the challenge of creating new initiatives of international solidarity for the freedom of political prisoners still held by the Ortega-Murillo regime and for the definitive fall of that dictatorship.
In summary, a positive initiative followed by hundreds of online participants and in person meetings in different places who self-convened to attend the event.