At least 30 people were killed after several days of rampant violence all across Nicaragua after rioters went wild in what they claimed was a “peaceful democratic protest” against the state’s plans to reform the bankrupt social security system. The government was in fact proposing a slight increase in contributions to its national fund, but this is less severe than what the IMF and the country’s business community wanted it to do in raising the retirement age by five years, among other changes. The comparatively milder reforms that the state wanted to implement shouldn’t have resulted in this much chaos, and while some might speculate that the situation would have been much worse had the authorities gone with the IMF’s much harsher so-called “solution”, it can be argued that this entire social security episode in general was predetermined to be a “trigger event” for sparking larger unrest no matter what was ultimately decided.
After all, some of the rioters were wielding improvised weaponry and had a bloodlust to kill that’s disproportionately at odds with simply protesting a slight increase in social security payments. The violence that exploded across the country seemingly on command looks as if it may have been a Hybrid War test run for probing society’s reception to regime change disturbances and the government’s response to them. President Ortega, a former socialist who defended his country against US-backed narco-terrorists during the Old Cold War, wisely withdrew his planned payment increase as a de-escalation measure meant to divide the real protesters from the rioters, but there’s a chance that the latter might back down and blend in with the former until the next time that they decide to strike. About that, there’s no doubt that they’ll return for a second round sometime in the future because Nicaragua is becoming much too important in the New Cold War for their patrons to ignore it.
This former proxy battleground is once again geostrategically significant but not for any reason related to the outdated “domino effect” model that used to drive its former conflict. Nowadays Nicaragua is the host of China’s planned Transoceanic Canal that’s meant to rival the Panamanian one but which has thus far sluggishly struggled to get off the ground, though like almost everything in contemporary International Relations, there’s also a Russian angle to it as well. Moscow and Managua have deepened their military and even space partnerships in recent years, and this has already drawn considerably negative attention from the Western Mainstream Media, which was more than eager to fear monger about supposed Old Cold War parallels. As expected, a coordinated infowar against the government picked up steam during this time in portraying it as a “corrupt dictatorship” that “cares nothing for environmental rights” and is “suppressing indigenous minorities” along the Caribbean coast.
Whether sometime soon or later in the coming future, there’s a high likelihood that Hybrid War unrest will once again break out in Nicaragua if President Ortega doesn’t distance himself from his multipolar partners of China, Russia, and also the Venezuelan-led ALBA grouping as a strategic concession in the face of the US’ latest asymmetrical aggression, as it’s clear to see that Trump is continuing his predecessor’s “Operation Condor 2.0” hemispheric-wide unipolar operation to regain control of Latin America and won’t stop until he gets what he wants.
The post presented is the partial transcript of the CONTEXT COUNTDOWN radio program on Sputnik News, aired on Friday Apr 27, 2018:
DISCLAIMER: The author writes for this publication in a private capacity which is unrepresentative of anyone or any organization except for his own personal views. Nothing written by the author should ever be conflated with the editorial views or official positions of any other media outlet or institution.
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