Officials did not ask themselves if Phone Number List economic growth also entailed the harassment of dissidents, Nicaraguan society, however, took its toll in 2018, when thousands of young people took to the streets to protest. At the beginning, the mobilizations focused on denouncing the discomfort caused by the reforms of the pension system and the government's mismanagement in the face of the fires in the Indio Maíz biosphere reserve, but various groups quickly joined and challenged the regime in its entirety. , due to its arbitrary, repressive and Phone Number List corrupt nature. With this, the elites who had agreed with Ortega to ignore democratic governance in exchange for stability saw the dream of social peace come to an end. In the end, the stability that was bought was very volatile and paid for dearly, with the erosion of the institutions and norms necessary to guarantee long-term peace. The 2018 crisis tested the stability of the regime and shook Phone Number List the historical base of the Sandinista Front.
Instead of managing it through concessions or a genuine process of dialogue with the new groups, the government made it worse, opting for a strategy of repression. The “cleansing operation” – a term borrowed from the Somoza era – worked, in the Phone Number List sense that the roadblocks and barricades were eliminated. But in addition to the terrible human cost – more than 300 deaths, according to the count of the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR), hundreds of political prisoners and thousands of Phone Number List exiles, the majority to Costa Rica – the recovery of territorial control implied a cost politician for the regime. It was in this context that the informal coalition between the government, the economic elites and the churches broke down, However, the crisis did not mean the fall of the FSLN. Many expected Ortega to leave, as happened with 15 presidents in nine countries in the region between 1992 and 2016. But although in the 2018 crisis there were some factors present in other episodes of presidential falls–the Phone Number List economic recession, corruption scandals.
