Repetition, Alliance, and Protest in Contemporary Nicaragua

Abstract

This chapter situates the return of the Frente Sandinista de Liberación Nacional to power in the 2000s within Latin America's “pink tide” and the longer history of international development and intervention. It recounts Nicaragua's relations with the United States, and the rise of the current Ortega regime and the subsequent unraveling of its support. The chapter also elaborates on the most frequently noted vulnerabilities of the pink tide governments before the wave of protests and election losses that overtook them in the 2010s: governments' overreliance on resource extraction. It highlights how it led to pollution, corruption, and inequality which helped spark popular discontent. Nicaragua's precarious neoliberal present brought about a new process of alliance formation that recapitulated many of the aspirations of the early days of modernization while pushing Nicaragua's history once again to the brink of catastrophe.