Yorlis Luna y Patricia Ruíz, Nicaragua Solidarity Campaign,, November 22nd 2021
Graphic: The Grayzone
On 31 October, in a large scale crackdown before the Nicaragua elections, Facebook, Twitter and Instagram – owned by the newly rebranded Big Tech giant Meta – suspended 1,300 Nicaragua-based accounts run by pro-Sandinista media outlets, journalists, and activists.
Patricia Ruiz and Winnie Narvaez write about the so called freedom of expression promoted by the Nicaragua opposition and the transnational media who define freedom of expression as the right of the powerful to decide who speaks and who is silent.
The Nicaraguan right wing is so discredited among the people and among their own followers, that they have been forced to ask for external help from the US State Department.
[In the run up to the elections] they carried this out through Facebook and the social networks that are part of the imperialist media control so that they can achieve what they themselves cannot, to silence the Sandinista people, to silence the people of Nicaragua.
Of course, they do not have an authentic base among Nicaraguan people that speaks coherently and represents a political project.
Democracy and dictatorship, the favourite words of the right wing coup mongers, are so empty of content that listening to them calling themselves defenders of democracy and fighting against a dictatorship seems like a comedy.
[In the lead up to the elections] they silenced and closed thousands of pages on the social networks of flesh and blood people, friends, neighbours and anyone who published Sandinista content.
Meanwhile, Nicaraguans identifying with the opposition walked in security and peace to an upper middle class bookstore to listen to the presentation about a book called "the dictatorship in Nicaragua" and in a park people openly listened to opposition radio and television channels.
Anyone who has lived in or read about Latin American dictatorships [knows how to] compare this hollow discourse with the reality of Nicaragua.
This attack on Sandinista social media pages is a human rights violation, they are personal pages that have existed for a long time, that, over the years have been consolidated and have a large number of followers, pages that tell the truth.
[The accounts] are those of people who are not just [sitting] behind a computer but on the basis of their daily lives around the country provide information about projects and advances that the government has developed.
This enables us to spread information to reach more users of the same networks inside and outside the country.
[The suspension of these accounts] is a flagrant violation of the rights of Nicaraguans to freely elect their authorities. This is obvious from the fact that [these accounts] were shut down only a few days before the elections.
But the same people who accuse other people rending their garments for freedom of expression and giving lectures on human rights are the ones who laugh and enjoy the demonization carried out by transnational media power.
This has led them to silencing the words, the ideas, the feelings and the reality of the electoral climate in Nicaragua.
So for them, freedom of expression is the freedom of the powerful to decide who speaks and who is silent.
Nicaragua and Our America has been forced into more than 500 years of silence in the soul and body, our voice has been brutally silenced, but they could not stop us, however, the people have wisdom, the people of Nicaragua are the only ones who can choose and control their destiny and they did so on 7 November.