Perth Indymedia

Recent months have seen a wave of protests against Daniel Ortega’s government in Nicaragua. Picking up where a similar set of student and pensioner-led protests in 2013 left off, the growing movement has been met with brutal repression, with hundreds killed and injured. Famous for leading the Sandinista National Liberation Front, first in overthrowing the Somoza dictatorship in 1979, and then resisting US-backed death squads throughout a decade-long civil war, Ortega’s political legacy is now, to say the least, a contested one. Alex Whisson caught up with long time Nicaragua solidarity activist, Lori Hanson, and began by asking if it was accurate to describe Ortega’s government as a form of neoliberalism with an ostensibly left wing face.