The shooting bursts as Nicaraguan forces settle in a symbolic city



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The Nicaraguan National Police and pro-government armed civilians today besieged a symbolically important district that has recently become a center of resistance to the government of President Daniel Ortega

Government forces began to advance in the Masaya district before dawn.

Residents of the same neighborhood rose up against the strong man Anastasio Somoza in the late 1970s as part of the Nicaraguan Revolution led in part by Ortega himself. But since protests against cuts to the social security system in mid-April have become a wider call for Ortega's resignation, Monimbo has once again become a center of opposition

. Ortega rejected the opposition as a delinquent. State, and seems to want to quell the unrest in Masaya before the three-month anniversary of the beginning of protests across Nicaragua.

Thursday is also the 39th anniversary of the Day of Liberation, which marks the overthrow of the Somoza regime in 1979 by the Sandinistas

Bands of armed men dressed as civilians seem to work in coordination with the police for remove roadblocks erected by the opposition that have harbaded the country's traffic for months. Last weekend, allied forces took over the campus of the National Autonomous University of Nicaragua in Managua, where students had been confined for months.

With gunshots in the background on Tuesday, a woman asked to be identified as Silvia. Silvia, a member of the 19 April resistance movement in Monimbo, said the youths were fighting with homemade mortars to defend the roadblocks erected on the perimeter of the neighborhood, but that the government forces were heavily armed.

"We need (the Organization of American States), international organizations to stop this mbadacre," Silvia said. "We are fighting for democracy, for freedom." Human rights organizations claim that more than 270 people were killed during months of street clashes.

(This story was not edited by Business Standard staff and is generated automatically from a syndicated feed. B, e, v, n, t, s)
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