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Nicaraguans flood migration offices in bid to flee crisis
MANAGUA, June 15, 2018 (BSS/AFP) – One evening as she watched some local
kids play outside in her Managua neighborhood, Nicaraguan Mireya Alegria was
shocked to see police, motorcycles and a white van carrying hooded men speed
past.
“They started firing,” she says. It was the moment she decided enough was
enough.
Now Alegria is one of the thousands of Nicaraguans desperately seeking to
process migration documents and flee to neighboring Central American
countries, as two months of anti-government dissent has triggered
increasingly violent state repression.
“Thousands of people come daily to do paperwork,” said Nubia Manzanares, a
migration agent, adding that many come with their children.
Lines in offices such as hers are endless, as families and young people
attempt to leave in particular for Costa Rica, the primary destination of
Nicaraguans since the country’s 1980s civil war between President Daniel
Ortega’s Sandinistas and the US-backed contras.
Jonathan Pena, 19, says his top reason for leaving is because he sees the
government “persecuting and killing young people.”
He spent hours working to get a visa and travel by plane to Costa Rica,
because at the land border activists have erected barricades in an attempt to
intensify pressure on Ortega.
According to analyst and ex-deputy of the opposition Eliseo Nunez, part of
Ortega’s strategy is to incite panic to trigger migration particularly from
the middle class, an especially anti-government sector.
The crisis sparked by relatively small protests against now-abandoned
social security reforms morphed into an explosive movement demanding Ortega
along with his wife and vice president Rosario Murillo leave office.
But Ortega appears set on staying, and the past two months has seen more
than 160 people die in bloody clashes between armed government-backed forces
and activists brandishing slingshots and homemade mortars.
The deluge of passport applications has swelled notably in the past two
weeks, which have seen a sharp uptick in violence from armed hooded men
roaming the streets by night aboard vans and motorbikes.
– ‘Forbidden to be young’ –
Nicaraguans say the gangs have marked youth — who have spearheaded the
mass movement against Ortega — as their primary targets.
“Now it’s forbidden to be young,” says Xiomara Vargas, a 54-year-old
housewife who accompanied her nephew, a computer science student, to the
migration office.
Costa Rica’s Foreign Minister Epsy Alejandra Campbell Barr said last week
her government is prepared for a massive influx of Nicaraguans.
That Central American country also said last week it would provide visas to
relatives of diplomats accredited in Nicaragua who want to leave.
Nearly 500,000 Nicaraguans already live permanently or temporarily in
neighboring Costa Rica, many of them working in agriculture, construction and
domestic service.
Many Nicaraguans like Eime Monge — seeking to move to Costa Rica with her
husband and two children — believe Ortega will stop at nothing to maintain
power.
The vast majority of the country’s roads are barricaded by protestors,
semi-paralyzing transport and commerce in the country, which on Thursday held
a 24-hour national strike to protest government repression.
According to the country’s Foundation for Economic and Social Development,
the crisis has endangered between 20,000 and 150,000 jobs.
Some Nicaraguans have already lost their livelihoods in recent months, like
Manuel Perez, who now has Panama in his sights.
There’s no point in staying, the 40-year-old says, because he doesn’t
foresee the country’s “distress” improving anytime soon.
It’s an attitude analyst and former politician Nunez echoes: “Ortega will
try to navigate between the rubble and reach the end,” he says.
“Regardless of the human and economic cost.”
BSS/AFP/RY/11:40 hrs