Conflicting Sovereignties: Confinement, Revolt and Repression in Nicaragua

• In Event: Exploring the Punitive Turn, Carceral State, and Sovereignty from Below (1 of 2)

Abstract

Since 18 April 2018, the force deployed by the Sandinista state against a surge of popular protest has left 400+ dead, 2,000+ injured, and hundreds extra-legally detained, beaten, and disappeared. This heavy-handed repression, the appearance of paramilitary, and the rampant numbers of illegal detentions now resulting in convictions for “terrorism,” all point to the long, yet well-hidden, hybrid nature of this carceral state. It also reveals an increasingly authoritarian politics of cauterization and confinement that has long flown under the radar of scholarly attention, especially when it comes to Nicaragua’s reputed citizen security model and regional “safety.” In particular, the chain of events that the anti-state revolt set in motion brought practices veiled by public secrecy into the public eye, particularly the extralegal workings of the “Sistema” and the Sandinista state’s understandings of sovereignty as these publicly collided with the protester’s practices of sovereignty from below. It is here that the prison environment serves as a fruitful starting point for an exploration of what is happening in the country at present. Drawing on an analysis of the state from inside its prisons (2009-2016) and of the popular revolt based on conversations with protesters and extensive media research (2018), I hold that a politics of cauterization long reserved for the “excludable” has now reached far out of the prison system and into public view. This process is contingent upon the defacement of the Sandinista state and has tightened the Sistema’s transcarceral grip around everyone who dares to challenge it.

Author

• Julienne Weegels, Centre for Latin American Research and Documentation CEDLA