Free Republic

MANAGUA: At least 121 people have been killed in a wave of protests since Apr 18 against President Daniel Ortega's government, Nicaragua's main human rights group said Tuesday (Jun 5), calling it a "human tragedy." The Nicaraguan Center for Human Rights (CENIDH) said another 1,300 people have been wounded in the protests, which have met with a violent crackdown from the government. "This is now a massacre, a human tragedy where the goal is to exterminate all those young people who think differently than or are critical of the government," the group's executive secretary, Marlin Sierra, told AFP. "It amounts...

Nicaraguan national police and armed pro-government civilians laid siege Tuesday to and then retook a symbolically important neighborhood that has recently become a center of resistance to President Daniel Ortega's government. Government forces began advancing on the Monimbo neighborhood of Masaya city before dawn and had largely regained control of it by the afternoon for the first time since massive protests against Ortega's government began in mid-April. Youths fired homemade mortars from behind barriers of stacked paving stones pried from streets lined by single-story homes and artisan workshops in the town about 16 miles southeast of the capital, Managua.