Contenu du sommaire : Nicaragua : une crise révolutionnaire

Nicaragua, a revolutionary crisis
Since April 2018, Nicaragua has experienced a crisis reminiscent of the one that marked the end of the Somoza regime forty years ago. Provoked by the refusal of a social security reform project, a protest movement quickly spread. Within days, this movement of young people began also to attract employers, churches and women's movements who called – during increasing demonstrations from April to July of 2018 – for a resignation of the government and for the organization of general elections. How best to understand this protest movement, a testimony to the collapse of the legitimacy of the Ortega and Murillo regime? What kind of dictatorship are the Sandinista leaders trying to establish in Nicaragua? What is the nature of this crisis that has been affecting Nicaragua since April 2018?

“The sandinism belongs to the past”. Interview with Madelaine Caracas
In this interview with Delphine Lacombe, Madelaine Caracas, co-founder and spokesperson for the University Coordination for Democracy and Justice, political opponent of the current Nicaraguan dictatorship, talks about her participation in the events of April and May 2018 which marked the contestation of power embodied by the presidency of the couple Daniel Ortega – Rosario Murillo. It evokes the first demonstrations against government inaction to extinguish the fire that ravaged the Indio Maiz forest reserve. She returns to the mobilisations against the reform of the Social Security Institute, which heavily repressed, have led to the country's tipping into crisis. She relates her participation in the “national dialogue” between civil society and power, organized under the auspices of the Episcopal Conference. Finally, she returns to what Sandinism is today and the capacity of “National Blue and White Unity” to embody a political alternative.

Testimony of a Nicaraguan student during the civic insurrection in Managua
This testimony from a Nicaraguan student, delivered in November 2018 during a public meeting in Paris, describes the way this young man lived the events, from the premises of the first protests to the crisis' intensification. It also aims to distinguish different stages of the mobilizations and the government's repressive reactions, from April to July 2018.

Voice and exile. Itinerary of an opponent Azul y Blanco
Based on the testimony of a young Nicaraguan girl who ran away from the repression of May-June 2018 and took refuge in Spain, this story highlights how Front supporters have turned towards criticism and then rejection of Sandinism. Returning on the contradictions of the orteguist regime, we see a young girl gradually being caught up in the events and then in the repression led by the FSLN. Forced to exile, her history demonstrates the extreme strategy of the Orteguist dictatorship and a deeper reflection on the fears of his followers.

The rebellious youth of April through older generations' eyes
In 2016, a lot of people said or thought that the Nicaraguan youth was apathetic, individualist and distant from their country's issues. Less than two years later, especially since the unexpected events of April 2018, these people witnessed the independent youth of Nicaragua fighting to change their country, a decision that lead some of them to paying the highest price, losing their lives or their freedom. These young students have been the leaders of a social movement that continues to resist. How have the older generations of Nicaraguans reacted to this movement? This article aims to explain and analyze the different aspects of this question: from scathing criticism to an enthusiastic optimism by older Nicaraguans towards the attitude and actions of the student movement from 2016 to the current political crisis.

How Managua was around 1979 the place of a linguistic revolutionnary event
The Nicaraguan Revolution in 1979 was concomitant with the structuration of the deaf community in Nicaragua. Until that date deaf people lived in isolation all over the country and lacked any common mean of expression and communication. After they were enrolled in two main schools in Managua, an autonomous sign language emerged, outside of the framework imagined by the linguistic planners. That sign language (afterwards called the Idioma de Señas de Nicaragua, ISN) does not consist in a form of signed Spanish and does not borrow either to any international sign language. It is the result of a horizontal fusion of idiosyncratic protolanguages when their speakers are finally reunited. This phenomenon was unique in the history of sign languages and has quickly intrigued the linguists at MIT, who were themselves a period of revolutionary ebullition, after the publication of Chomsky's work on the nature of language. They conceived of the emergence of ISN as a living test of their hypotheses. We report in this article some of the debates that continue to interest linguists till today.

Feedback to the notion of “slave labor” in Brazil : ZARA and bolivian migrant workers
The concept of slave labor is regularly used to designate forms of exploitation that may appear more and more diverse. In Brazil, the Bolivian workforce of garment factories is particularly concerned by this term, as these migrants are associated with clandestinity, precariousness and exploitation. Through the slave labor case that affected the multinational ZARA in 2011, we will question the heuristic value of this category in Brazil, whose singularity allows to consider the work in the confection only as an experience of domination, and not as an experience of emancipation, thus denying the ability of migrants to act.