HoraCero: The Ortega-Murillo government claims that Nicaragua is one of the most progressive countries in Latin America when it comes to gender equality and political representation. What narratives does the government use to justify such a claim? Are these claims true?

Cristina Awadalla: Nicaragua has made many claims of being super progressive in terms of women’s political representation and gender parity. These narratives might seem to feed into a global development discourse. But the claims that they make and the proof they show really fall into what is called the politics of patronage.

Even though there has been growth and parity for women in office, abortion is still not even something that can be talked about. There are public office kind of parity laws, but on the other side, the politics of patronizing is used to claim that they (the Ortega-Murillos) are a government that is working for women, and one that wants to improve gender equality.

Social programs like “hambre cero”, the zero hunger program, are another sort of neoliberal poverty reduction type programs that have been implemented. But if we look under the surface, we can quickly see that there are a lot of issues that arise. These programs are a part of these broader clientelistic patronage networks that secure legitimacy for the regime, secure loyalty and and support. 

HoraCero: Does the international community buy into this? Is it more of an internal strategy?  Do you think that people believe these claims?

Cristina Awadalla:  Pre-2018, I would say certainly that these sorts of narratives were used for both a domestic internal audience, but also an external global audience, to particular nations in the European Union that would provide funding.

There is a narrative for the internal support and amongst Nicaraguans, and then there’s also a narrative for the global arena that presents Nicaragua as the safest country in Central America and the most progressive.

I think they model their work for multiple audiences. And I think for a long time it was accepted as true. 

HoraCero: In what ways has the government used the language of “protection” or “traditional values” to justify restrictions on reproductive rights, sexual education, or LGBTQ+ visibility? Do these narratives align with the so-called “left-wing” tendency of their party?

Cristina Awadalla: In more recent years, we heard a lot about authoritarian populist figures like Orbán in Hungary or Bolsonaro in Brazil, and they use the term “gender ideology” to condemn feminism and women’s rights.

I think it’s the populist rhetoric that enables them to blend this very social conservative rhetoric and values with a seemingly anti-imperialist rhetoric to still uphold some sort of left ideology. I think they’ve been able to use populist rhetoric to bring together their anti-feminism, but phrase it in an anti-imperialist way.

I think that another way that they try to reconcile their social conservatism with whatever left-wing tendency remains of the party is that they condemn anti-feminism, but they also uplift a language of complementarity.

They say things like “feminism is trying to do away with the family, but here we know that women have their particular value and social roles, and men have their particular value and social roles, and when they come together, then our country thrives, right?” And so the language of complementarity is used to uphold the gender binary, which is supportive of a very heteronormative model of womanhood and motherhood.

HoraCero: Rosario Murillo presents herself as a champion of peace, culture, and an ambassador for the traditional family—yet she has been central to a regime accused of silencing feminist activists, persecuting dissidents, and dismantling civil society. Do you think there is a contradiction in this matter? Does she claim herself a feminist?

Cristina Awadalla:  I don’t think she would claim she’s a feminist because I think she would cling to the sort of gender complementarity lens of women and men having their roles as mothers and fathers.

That just makes it even more perverse when all the things that they say they do in the name of women, and it is even more perverse coming from a figure like Rosario Murillo. We know about her past and the situation with Zoilamerica and how, when Zoila came to speak out in the late 90s about the abuse she faced from Ortega, Rosario didn’t stand with her daughter, and instead she stood next to Ortega.

We see Murillo align herself with power, with Ortega, and that was really where a lot of issues and rifts emerged between her and the growing women’s and feminist movement from the ’80s. But there was already a rift that had emerged between women activists and the FSLN. I think the breaking point is in the late 90s when feminists and women’s movement chose to stand beside and behind Zoilamerica and publicly support her while her mother was denouncing her. 

That created a big fissure between the FSLN-led Ortega and the women’s movement, but also with Murilo and other women activists, and women of the feminist movement. When we have that history in mind, while it may sound like just a personal matter to simplify it, we can see how it reaches the national political stage. 

HoraCero:  As we mentioned at the beginning of this interview, Nicaragua has had a vibrant feminist and women’s movement, which has gone through several political transitions. I want to focus on the most obvious and important political project of the last years, the FSLN. What is the relationship between the FSLN and Nicaragua’s women’s movement?

Cristina Awadalla: The FSLN is recognized as one of the first revolutions with significant women combatants and also women reaching high levels of command and high positions in leading the guerrilla forces.

At the surface, it looks like this was a revolution for women. Or that the leftist socialist revolution is going to empower women. But again, when we look a little bit under the surface, we can start to see contradictions and fissures that we’re always there. Historicizing is always important because it might seem like such a shock that abortion was banned when Ortega got re-elected. But, in the 80’s the FSLN never codified it into the constitution. So if we look at the historical relationship between women within the FSLN and women in general, and the FSLN, there has always been some sort of fraud.

While the FSLN had key figures like Dora Maria Tellez and Monica Baltodano, they didn’t have any women in the National Directorate. Not to downplay the importance of Tellez and Baltonado, but it still reflects gendered relations of women’s roles. 

Women were some of the first to start to call out Ortega for his authoritarian tendencies. It was women, because of their gender and the persistence of patriarchy, who were the first to experience the contradictions of the revolution. That historical memory is part of the ongoing feminist and women’s movement struggles in Nicaragua. And it was ironically in the 1990s where the women’s movement was able to grow autonomously; its autonomy is such a central pillar of the movement and such a core value.

HoraCero: What is the state of the women’s movement today? How has the feminist movement in Nicaragua responded to the political crisis in Nicaragua?

Cristina Awadalla: It’s interesting to look at the Nicaraguan women’s movement now and how the struggle for democracy in a particular national context can be waged outside of the territory itself. A lot of the work has shifted towards supporting women, particularly in Costa Rica, and supporting women who have been exiled or forced to migrate, whether that be around poverty or around gender-based violence, or helping women with their migration status.

I think they’ve shifted to the demands and needs of Nicaraguan women wherever they are, but still siguen con una mirada en Nicaragua. They’re dealing with the everyday demands of survival of being in exile and surviving in exile, but also still looking back to Nicaragua and maintaining a focus on what’s going on there, maintaining the struggle alive, and maintaining memory and alternative narratives to the official state discourses. 

Something that to me has been so beautiful about the Nicaraguan women’s movement is its intergenerational nature, keeping memory alive, and keeping subversive memories alive. That intergenerational dynamic has given the movement historical clarity, which is something like speaking from somebody in the US, I think a lot of times, like our analyses here are ahistorical.

That ability to see the continuities and disruptions has been for me one of the ways or reasons why I think Nicaragua’s women’s movement has some of the most profound analyses.