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MANAGUA, Nicaragua – The first student I met outside of the Church of Divine Mercy had a bullet hole in the lower back.
"It's ugly in there," he said.
"There" was the vast campus of the National Autonomous University of Nicaragua (UNAN) which, Friday afternoon, had become a battlefield. Far from the initial fighting, the Catholic Church, a supposedly safe yard, and the besieged and wounded students arrived from the front lines by truck, motorcycle and on foot. "We had to evacuate," Jonas Cruz, 18, said. "They are invading the barricades, they are already inside."
These students, and much of Nicaragua, have revolted against the government of President Daniel Ortega in the last three months, enraged by the way in which he has consolidated almost total power over his four terms as president. institutions, and allowed his security apparatus to employ lethal force against the protesters. More than 300 people have been killed since the beginning of the conflict in April, the vast majority of civilians.
From Friday afternoon, a new crisis erupted. The pro-government militias set out to crush the student rebellion at UNAN, one of the last bastions of open resistance in the capital. During a 15-hour siege, some 200 university and other students were trapped by gunshots inside this small Catholic church. Two students were killed and at least 10 others were injured before the senior Catholic clergy negotiated their release on Saturday morning and escorted surviving students through the police lines.
The Ortega government finally regained control of this campus – as well as other rebel cities across Nicaragua – but the cost to its government could be high. There is a growing international condemnation of Ortega's brutal tactics to break the protests. Business leaders and former allies have called for early elections or his departure.
Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega poses for photos with police in Masaya, Nicaragua on Friday. (Cristobal Venegas / AP)
"They shoot at a church," said Erick Alvarado Cole, one of the priests of Divine Mercy, as the shooting raged on the outside. "The government says it respects human rights Does this respect human rights?"
Ortega did not talk about the headquarters, but an official government information site, El 19, describes students as " terrorists and criminals" who had attacked a caravan of Sandinists earlier in the day and then burned buildings on campus as they fled . He published pictures of the weapons found in the church after the students were taken away.
Over the past week, convoys of armed men in civilian clothes, who are known here as paramilitaries and seem to be co-ordinated with the police, have swept through several cities. barricades in bloody battles while they try to reaffirm the government's control. Last weekend, these militias crushed the protests in Jinotepe and Diriamba, two cities south of the capital, ransacking churches and leaving more than 30 dead in the region, human rights groups said. On Friday morning, armed and masked men stood in these two places, watching the few frightened people who dared to go about their daily business.
UNAN was one of the last demonstrators in the capital. On Friday, the paramilitaries started to change that.
Students had fortified their campus with brick and barbed wire fences. Some carried firearms, but most had rudimentary weapons such as homemade stones, spikes or mortars. When the shooting began, they were quickly invaded, and many retreated to the church to seek refuge and healing.
The enclosure had two main buildings – the church and priests' quarters – separated by a courtyard. A metal door was blocking the entrance to the road but the backyard was open on the campus. Inside, there was the hectic and confusing energy of a field hospital run mainly by non-doctors. Patients squirmed on the desks and on the floor when volunteers inserted IVs and bandaged wounds. The teenagers were smoking cigarettes through ski masks and hoods.
Shortly after 18h, with a series of sharp cracks, the mood took a dark turn. The distant shot was suddenly close. The paramilitaries had appeared, cutting off the only exit from Divine Mercy and firing on the remaining barricade just outside the church.
It became clear that everyone – dozens of students, at least two priests and two doctors, neighbors, volunteers, and journalists, including me – would go nowhere.
Most students accepted this achievement with remarkable stoicism and calm. Many had taken and extinguished a sporadic fire for two months, and they seemed to get used to it. They transported the wounded to Reverend Raul Zamora's presbytery and put them on chairs or on the floor in blood-splattered tiles. Outside, at the barricade, other students shouted and fired their mortars against the invisible attackers
A UNAN student who hid for a night in a church during an attack from the forces Government arrives Saturday in a bus with comrades at the Cathedral of Managua. (Marvin Recinos / AFP / Getty Images)
Over the next few hours, the fighting has gone down and sunk. A gust of gunfire would force everyone inside, so people would drift into the yard. Sometimes they sang "Viva, Nicaragua", fired their mortars into the air and swore never to leave their posts. At dusk, dozens of them knelt down, pressed against each other and prayed.
"Thank you, my God, for saving us from death," said the chief of prayer. "You are always above us."
This moment was interrupted by a pickup truck that skidded into the yard with a young man who had a portion of his right foot shot. Another woman, an 18-year-old medical student, was shot in the right leg and the bullet broke her femur. Police and paramilitaries outside have cordoned off the area, removing ambulances.
"The ambulance is out and the paramilitaries have blocked it," said Carlos Duarte, a cardiologist and volunteer who treated the students and on the phone with his colleagues at Vivian Pellas Hospital. "They threatened to kill the drivers."
The medical student, who asked not to be named, spent hours on the floor with her bloody leg in a splint of sticks and cardboard.
It was impossible to determine the course of the battle from within the church – who was firing, or where – but it was unmistakable when it was getting closer. ! Everyone on the floor! Zamora yelled at some point to the dozens of people huddled in the dark on the floor of her living room
"These are windows," he says looking at the other side of the room. "No matter what the bullet pbades by, it will kill you."
At that time, the shooting was on the street and was aimed at the house, some of the bullets seeming to have pbaded through. Students were silent and trying to cover the lights of their cell phones, wounded, there were stifled groans of pain, a young man began swearing angrily and others reprimanded him. [19659026ThroughallthisZamorathepriestandhissubordinateErickAlvaradoColewerecallingontheCatholicclergyofNicaraguatoseekhelpandnegotiateapeacefulresolutionwiththegovernmentcalledforaradioshowinDirectandcalledforhelpThestudentshadleftthebarricadesoftheuniversityhesaidsotherewasnoreasonforthegovernmenttocontinueshooting
"C & It's like they wanted to murder all the students, "he said. sure. "I call the conscience of the authorities.If they have already left the UNAN, why are they attacking the church?
" They can not attack a sacred place ", was he said,
The firing was getting closer, you could hear the voices, half a dozen people, including the priest, gathered in a back room and hugged the ground. a quiet prayer
"Lord, we ask you to protect us right now," he said.
"We believe in you, Lord, those of us who have no force against this great army "he murmured." Help us, Lord. "At 22:30, the Catholic Church and the State Department persuaded the Nicaraguan government to allow an ambulance convoy and negotiators to cross the police lines and carry three wounded students and me to the church.After their departure, the firing resumed quickly, according to those who remained, all night and after dawn.
The deadlock ended on Saturday morning when the two most important leaders of the Catholic Church in Nicaragua, Bishop Waldemar Stanislaw Sommertag and Cardinal Leopoldo Brenes arrived at the church and negotiated the release of the students.
Just after nine o'clock, about 200 students and others who were pinned all night, as well as two dead and three wounded students, crossed the city under a sky the Managua Metropolitan Cathedral, in five ambulances and two school buses white.
Parents of UNAN students who survived a rush night in buses when they arrive at the Cathedral of Managua. (Marvin Recinos / AFP / Getty Images)
Read more
In Nicaragua, a "City of Fighters" is at the Heart of a Crisis Intensifying
"The people have lost their Fear ": how the new Nicaraguan revolution took shape
Today's cover of the post of correspondents from around the world
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Ismael Lopez Ocampo contributed to this report.
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