Keeping your Head Down

Pediatric pulmonologist Maria Exania Lagos Rugama started noticing a complicated work environment three months prior to her dismissal. Since March 2020, when the first Coronavirus case in Nicaragua was reported, she had decided to wear a mask, and her colleagues warned her that the authorities had instructed them not to wear masks to avoid alarming patients in public hospitals.

Lagos Rugama took care of herself and even donated masks and alcohol to her colleagues at San Juan de Dios hospital in the city of Esteli, northern Nicaragua, where she was the only specialist in her area. She initially did it overtly, and when it became a clear affront to authorities guidance insisting on minimizing the pandemic, she began giving masks away secretly to specialists who visited her at home.

The tensest moments she had to face came from colleagues that supported the government’s party. “One day I was leaving the office and a janitor who is a Sandinista wanted to remove my mask. I felt intimidated. I didn’t say anything to him, but he could have hurt me. In subsequent meetings (at the hospital) they even said I had to be fired for failing to comply with the central government’s order”, explains Lagos Rugama.

Finally, on June 9^th, 2020, her dismissal letter arrived. The hospital’s director put an end to her career: 28 years in which she was absent for only two days on the grounds of health leave, plus, she never received a single warning. The verbal argument for her dismissal was that she was often four or seven minutes late in her entry, an act of alleged indiscipline that failed to be logged in the official report. The official report cited that they were letting her go following orders of the Ministry of Health, her employer.

In May, Lagos Rugama was one of 700 signatories of a letter written by doctors and health practitioners of the public and private sectors. In it, they invited the executive branch to acknowledge the community-based spread of Covid-19 and to adopt prevention measures, events that had not occurred by then.

The case of the dismissed doctors acquired international notoriety when organizations such as Human Rights Watch, in the United States, reported that at least ten health practitioners had been fired, exposing the State’s mishandling of the pandemic.

“(Daniel) Ortega seeks to intimidate and punish health practitioners for trying to protect Nicaraguans’ health and for exercising their fundamental right to freedom of speech”, stated Jose Miguel Vivanco, Director of the Americas Division of HRW.

It wasn’t the first time that doctors were victims of the State’s repression. In September 2018, the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (CIDH) condemned the arbitrary dismissal of 300 professionals of the health sector who assisted wounded opponents during the protests.

The report of the OAS organism was overwhelming. “The layoffs were likely a retaliation for assisting people who were wounded protesting against the government or for having manifested a critical stance in the framework of the crisis of that country”, he added.

According to 2020 official statistics, cited by Vice President Rosario Murillo, the Central American country has 150,000 public servants. Although those who openly identify as Sandinistas support Ortega in this sector, it is a fact that some officials disagree with the government but refrain from criticizing it to avoid problems and to keep their job. This group in particular has reported mistreatment and abuse to labor rights.

Testimonies collected for this story portray a photograph of public employees in Nicaragua, they face mandatory participation in activities held by the Sandinista party, arbitrary layoffs –such as that of Lagos Rugama– when opposing government decisions, as well as political monitoring from members of the party that are part of public institutions who report their participation in political activities in support of Ortega.

State employees are immerse in an adverse environment, heightened by a recent law that punishes fake news dissemination with jail, known as the Special Law of Cybercrimes, passed with unclear criteria yet to be established and which the CIDH and the Relatoria Especial para la Libertad de Expresion have deemed “threatening to the freedom of speech”. Along with that law, Ortega also passed a decree that contemplates a national strategy pertaining this matter, condemning disgruntled employees as possible sources of “cyber threats” and intimidates punishment for posting any leak of information.

Braulio Abarca, lawyer of the human rights collective “Nicaragua Nunca Mas”, exiled in Costa Rica who receives denounces by State employees and requests for help in labor cases, states that harassment against State employees is permanent and that the new legal provisions aim at generating fear to silence the voices of those who think differently.

Abarca says these claims come from former Police officers who refused to suppress others, health personnel, university professors, doctors, elementary and secondary teachers, people with a profession and a life of public service who lost their jobs because they dared to think differently, or were close to 2018 repression victims, or protested against injustice.

The “Traitor” sucks

“Julio” was a faithful militant of the Sandinista National Liberation Front in the DGA (national customs directorate, for its Spanish acronym). He collected the t-shirts he wore each July 19th, the commemoration of the Sandinista revolution in Nicaragua, on this date, thousands of public employees attend an event in which Ortega addresses his followers.

“If they told me we had to participate in the roundtables in our neighborhoods, they knew they could count on me, I felt it was a way to support my professional work and avoid getting fired. I am a father of three”, he explains.

Yet, something changed during the repression, cases reported included the incineration of a family by his party’s paramilitaries in the Carlos Marx neighborhood in Managua, and the murder of nineteen people on May 30th, 2018, when Nicaraguans took to the streets on Mothers’ Day as a way to support women who had lost their children.

And then, Julio posted on social media to express his solidarity with children who were victims of State repression. From that moment on, the members of the party in the DGA targeted him as an enemy.

“I said that a true revolutionary did not murder children”, he shared. The representative of the CLS (Sandinista leadership committee, for its Spanish acronym) referred to him as a “traitor” in a meeting of Sandinista supporters in the institution. The accusation came along with printed screenshots of his Facebook status, in which he criticized the Front and, based on these findings, institutional authorities dismissed him in August.

The CLS were created as spaces for partisan political training within the Consejos de Poder Ciudadano (citizen power councils) in each institution, neighborhood and community, these are directed at national level by the Vice President

“Julio” warns that things went further than his dismissal; he was subsequently harassed and threatened to the point he had to seek exile. “I worked for almost 15 years in the DGA and I didn’t receive severance pay; it turns out that I don’t have the right to claim it because the terms have expired. I have nothing, not even a recommendation letter, because the traitor sucks and nobody wants anything to do with me”, he adds from his exile in Costa Rica.

At least 100,000 Nicaraguans had to leave the country and seek protection as a result of insecurity driven by the State’s repression in 2018, per theCIDH.

There is no updated official figure on the number of State employees that are part of the group of exiled Nicaraguans, or on those dismissed in the 13 years of the Ortega administration, which can be explained by the current environment of lack of transparency. Independent unions are disappearing; Alvaro Leiva, human rights advocate and one of the first to denounce the State’s layoffs had to move to Costa Rica.

Leiva said that 4,000 State employees were fired in the first 100 days. The figure grew to 26,691 in 2013, but there is no current data from that point on.

Eugenio Membreño, of the CPDH (Permanent Commission on Human Rights), who is based in Nicaragua, claims that he has 55 cases of public servants who were dismissed due to “discrimination and retaliation” and explains that his work made him face acts of intimidation when visiting State offices, he has been photographed by strangers whom he suspects are police officers.

“There is serious affectation to labor law in Nicaragua because criteria differs for State employees, especially when politics are involved, as evinced in what happened with doctors. Evidently, an order has been given to deny justice”, Membreño affirms.

According to the lawyer, Nicaragua has a very interesting labor law regulation: if the laws and collective agreements were enforced, the country would be the best place to be an employee of the State in the whole world.

Membreño lists the country’s laws, such as Civil Service, Labor Code, Judicial Career, General Law of Health, of Education, aside from collective agreements in each institution and unions intended to protect labor rights. He quickly touches down and says that despite this entire legal framework, layoffs are a response to partisan political ideologies.

“When taking office in 2007, an alliance between private companies – State left a legacy of loss for workers, no one complains since unions are with the official party (Sandinistas), a single phone call from a pro-government union member and everything was approved without consideration for public or private employees”, Membreño comments.

Employees’ Political Monitoring

Salomon Manzanares, former professor at Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Nicaragua (UNAN), is a social communicator who was in the students’ protests in 2018 with the goal of reporting for some outlets. He was sent to jail in Leon for two days because he was mistakenly considered a member of the opposition.

His problems with the Front go way back to when he was a public university professor. Back then, he used to protest against the government in his free time. Consequently, he was singled out by his colleagues especially by his students at Centro Universitario de la Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Nicaragua (CUUN), the main pro-government student movement.

But the final straw came in 2017, amidst a boundary dispute between Nicaragua and Costa Rica in the International Court of Justice, a group of students participated in the party’s activities to reaffirm the country’s claim. Per Manzanares, directors verbally instructed teachers to give the students top grades. This displeased the professor and he decided to ask for that instruction in writing. In response to that challenge, and considering his prior history of political activism, the institution terminated his contract.

Manzanares decries that monitoring actions are in place in university classrooms, student leaders place one or several students in each class, be it for a scholarship, for being pro-government, or because they have political aspirations, these students are responsible for recording teachers and reporting them if they fail to be aligned with the government. They are rats.

“We were aware that the CUUN was the political arm of the Front in the UNAN-Leon, but what has happened now is that they distrust anyone with a brain, there is a constant auditing that is intensifying”, Manzanares adds.

Some professors dodge student leaders and refrain from protesting, he affirms, because getting fired from UNAN for failing to be aligned with the party limits your chances to find a job in other institutions.

Refusing tuition to students who participated in the protests, and laying-off faculty is the result of a “black list” compiled with photographs taken by students who support the CUUN, student organizations formed after the 2018 events confirmed.

State’s workers are required to undertake different functions, such as installing altars to the Virgin Mary in Managua’s city center, in Avenida Bolivar to Chavez. Since they depend on the government, they must attend religious activities even if they are not Catholics, for instance “Alejandra”, exiled in Costa Rica following his husband’s desertion from the police force.

“Alejandra” is Evangelical and doesn’t believe in Catholicism’s Virgin Mary, yet she had to duly attend the altar in the Ministry of Governance. These places didn’t even have a bathroom and hours usually spanned until midnight. They were not allowed extra hours and sometimes had to find their own transportation to go back home.

They told us we were getting t-shirts to differentiate us on July 19th in the altars, but that came out of our pockets and we couldn’t refuse, so those extras were paid by us, that is what kept us from being fired”, she claims. Other concerns included the difficulties deriving from police discipline; her husband was usually stationed in dangerous places. She couldn’t stand it.

“In the office they said we needed to go everyday, there would be sanctions for those who didn’t show up, although Managua was chaotic, I had to cross blockades in my neighborhood and protesters knew my husband was a police officer”, she added.

Religious activities are political for the interests of the government party. The history of public employees in Nicaragua is associated with partisan strategies that sent employees to Managua’s main round points to pray for work and peace. They were dubbed The Prayers and were featured in national newspapers such as La Prensa, their presence in public places and this Christian idea actually prevented manifestations for years before 2018, afterwards, the Police started guarding these places.

FSNL’s “White Unions”

Between 1990 and 2006, before Ortega became President, the unions of the FSLN enthusiastically asked for the rights of the working class with massive rallies that often paralyzed the country for weeks, a stance that made even the most popular opponents criticize Ortega’s unreasonable position.

In a video dating back to 2000, published by the AP news agency, former Vice President Enrique Bolaños said: “Sandinismo knows only about whims, cudgels, blood, assault, mobs, fire, riots. It is just sad!”

Those union leaders keep their heads down now. Their leader is Gustavo Porras, current President of the National Assembly and one of the operators closest to Ortega and Vice President Rosario Murillo. In the meantime, guilds that oppose Sandinismo languish, including: Unidad Sindical Magisterial (USM), Confederacion Nacional de Maestros de Nicaragua and Central Nacional de Trabajadores, which accused the Ministry of Work in 2016 of leaving them outside the law and without union jurisdiction after they did not allow the registry of new unions and confederations’ executive boards, leaving them in the dark.

“Workers’ rights have been canceled; in the case of teachers, they can’t go against their directors’ orders, even if these guidelines endanger their health and physical integrity. Sometimes all it takes is a suspicion of not complying and they are dismissed”, explained Lesbia Rodriguez, professor at USM.

Per Rodriguez, teachers had never been as mistreated as in Ortega’s government. “We make a comparison, and not to say that I am pro-Somoza, but back then it was forbidden to raise a different flag than our country’s in schools, photographs of the President were not hanging on walls and a month’s salary provided a dignified life”.

Sandinista unions are facing a division between Porras, the Director of the pro-government Frente Nacional de los Trabajadores (FNT), as well as Federacion de Trabajadores de la Salud (Fetsalud), and Roberto Gonzalez, a former parliament member. Last September, the latter criticized the former.

“Gustavo Porras is Leon’s scorpion; he is doing whatever he wants in this Mayor term; he is to blame for arbitrary layoffs and for many irregular things happening in Leon", Gonzalez accused him in a report published by 100 % Noticias.

Despite these confrontations, both are loyal to Ortega. CONNECTAS tried to contact them last October in the FNT Congress, held in the Ruiz Ayesta Auditorium at UNAN-Leon, but access to journalists was restricted. Moreover, a request for information of Luis Barbosa, Sandinista legislator and an ally of Porras was blocked; he is also the union leader of the Confederacion Sindical de Trabajadores Jose Benito Escobar (CST-JBE).

Barbosa’s office is located in Managua; it is filled with Ortega’s advertising. The union’s strategy has been “the defense of the revolutionary government and the support of Commander Daniel Ortega; for the defense of our conquests and the revolution”, a press release read.

“Carmen”, who worked in the Mayor’s Office in Leon, was fired after complications occurring after breast cancer surgery, this condition forced her to be absent from activities to attend medical appointments; she was entitled to a month of post-surgery leave. She used to be a Sandinista militant.

“Before, a Sandinista militant card was earned in the streets doing the hard work for the party”, she says nostalgically. She has been a member since childhood, actively participating in territorial tasks when the FSLN was not even in power. And she says she keeps her militant card as a treasure in an old photo album, with news clips, an album in which she bitterly stores her dismissal letter dated June 2^nd

“The Mayor’s Office can’t pay the salaries, but we know it has hired personnel to fill vacant positions. They believe we are not aligned with the party. In my case, the Mayor’s Office political secretary can’t let go of the fact that I did not attend partisan activities while I was sick, they don’t respect medical leaves, is as if I was sick to work but not to march”, she stated.

Lawyers consulted for this story expressed that there is an unwholesome practice by the State of the Republic of Nicaragua in terms of firing employees and failing to pay compensations, which renders the working class defenseless.

Institutions fail to pay because the budget allocated to compensations exceeds the amount of layoffs, hence institutions dilate proceedings for more than a year, requesting the presence in the institution but without paying former employees, the same sources described.

Membreño, an official of the CPDH, expresses that although the Labor Code reads that the right to compensation is inalienable, the Ministry of Work has arbitrarily determined that the right to claim the compensation prescribes a year after being dismissed. They also state that there aren’t enough funds to pay compensations.

Employees such as Alejandra, Salomon, Julio or Maria came forward because they are out of the reach of the State. But those who are dissatisfied with their work in institutions remain silent out of fear of losing their job. Managua bursts with symbols of power and photographs of the Presidential couple, but there are other images that portray situations experienced by employees who were instructed to pray in the streets, teachers who gave good grades at the party’s discretion or doctors that have given up on self-protection to avoid unemployment. They are at the lowest level of public institutions, obeying orders without complaining with the purpose of collecting their monthly check.