The Enduring Mark of April: Memory Against Official Lies

The sun was beating down on the streets of Managua April 18, 2018, when the first shouts of protest spread across the capital. The government responded with an old tactic, one that until then had never failedin silencing any expression of discontent: they organized mobs, deployed the Police and beat people indiscriminately. But by the next morning, the protests had spread to the universities and other cities across the country. And, for the second day in a row, the police, shock forces and members of the Sandinista Youth continued to their beatings. They also began shooting, and that second night the first three deaths were reported. “Puchitos”, “vandals”, “little ants”, were the terms used by a furious spokeswoman for the regime, Rosario Murillo, in a first attempt to control the narrative of the events and silence the protests. But one by one, various sectors began rising up against Daniel Ortega’s government, sparking a social outburst that would mark a before and after in Nicaragua.

That April 2018, the country was shaken by a wave of mass protests, originally triggered by the rejection of reforms to the Social Security system. Unilaterally, the government imposed an increase in the percentage of contributions, a reduction in the percentage of pensions and increased the minimum age for retirement from 60 to 65. But the bloody repression with which the government responded—leaving over twenty dead in less than 72 hours—quickly transformed the protest into a generalized call for justice, freedom and democracy, lasting for more than five months until the imposition of a de facto police state to silence the social discontent.

CONFIDENCIAL contrasts the attempts of the official narrative, which seeks to impose disinformation as truth, with the testimonies of the protagonists of the April Rebellion, to rescue the historical memory of the protests.

The false “true truth

“Seven years since the massacres. Seven years since the unforgivable nights and days of terror,” says Rosario Murillo with a pained voice at the start of April 2025. But these statements are not about a mother who lost her son, or any victim, but about Rosario Murillo herself. The spokeswoman of the dictatorship -now self-proclaimed “co-president”- thus began the seventh anniversary of the April Rebellion of 2018: taking ownership of the date and trying to reverse the roles of the massacre. “Seven years since the supreme betrayal of the homeland and the people. Seven years since the unjustifiable onslaught of hatred, cruelty, and ambition,” she continued.

From the heights of power, the structures of the ruling Sandinista Front and its propaganda apparatus today speak of a “true truth,” insisting on portraying themselves as the victims of the protests that the regime violently repressed. They claim it was a “failed coup attempt,” orchestrated by opposition forces and financed by imperialist sources.

However, the testimonies of those who lived through the April Rebellion recall the events very differently.

Massacre and impunity

Francys Valdivia was a young lawyer in 2018 and one more Nicaraguan who took to the streets to protest. “I was a worker, I was an INSS contributor. Then, when I analyzed this reform to the Social Security law and what it implied, I got involved in the social protests of April 18 and 19,” she recalls. Her brother Franco Valdivia was involved in those same protests.

Franco was a third year law student at the Universidad Internacional de la Integración de América Latina (Unival) in Estelí. In his spare time he produced rap songs under the stage name of “Renfan”. He also worked in a carpentry workshop and on weekends he was a baseball and softball umpire.

On April 20, 2018, Franco met with a group of friends to protest against the INSS reforms. Minutes before being shot in the head, he had told a local radio station, “We were at a peaceful protest and they came to shoot us,” he said while showing a rubber bullet in his hands.

“His lifeless body was mistreated and dragged by the aggressors, who abandoned him at the San Juan de Dios Hospital in Estelí. The following day, workers of the Estelí Mayor’s Office cleaned up the crime scene, hiding fundamental evidence to advance the investigation and individualize the culprits,” said a report by the Interdisciplinary Group of Independent Experts (GIEI), the first international organization to document and denounce the dictatorship’s crimes against humanity.

Weeks later, Francys joined the Mothers of April Association (AMA), which brings together mothers and relatives of the victims of the massacre.

Francys points out that after her brother’s murder, government authorities refused to give her a copy of the autopsy performed on him and despite all her efforts she did not have “access to justice”.

The case of another university student, murdered in Managua on May 30, 2018, is also another case in impunity.

Josefa Meza, mother of the young man, denounces: “My son was a university student. We all participated in that march on May 30 and he was murdered there. The narrative that the government wants to give us now, saying that they were delinquents, is a lie…. Never ever has the government approached us to give us support or help or anything, or to clarify these murders”.

Yader Parajón, a political prisoner and member of AMA, also reports that after the murder of his brother, Jimmy Parajón, government representatives approached his family with the intention of making them “sign a document” in which they misrepresented the facts. Their refusal to accept the government’s version led them to be victims of persecution and threats.

“No one has ever paid us.”

On July 19, 2018, Daniel Ortega gave his first account of what happened in April 2018. Everything, he claimed, was part of a plan created by the United States, in collusion with NGOs, priests, businessmen, and other sectors. According to him, they organized, armed, and manipulated the population through social media. Instead, he said, his government was the real victim.

“That was the plan, and they began to invent again what they had already been working on for years, with funding from organizations, from U.S. agencies, they began to work through social media with greater force to provoke that clash and destroy peace,” he said.

Tamara Dávila, who was a political prisoner of the dictatorship, responds to the accusation of external financing: “That question has been asked to the more than 5,000 political prisoners that Ortega has held in jails since 2018. No one ever paid us anything. I never received a single cent.”

Dávila explains that her motivation, and that of many others, was much deeper: “We want to live in a country where the law is respected, a law that covers all of us under the light of human rights that we all have, regardless of where I come from, where I was born, what ideology I have, or what party I belong to.”

Dora María Téllez, the former Sandinista guerrilla who was also a political prisoner of the regime, ironically addresses the accusations of foreign funding for the protests: “They said I financed them. And I never got a dime… The United States isn’t interested and has never paid a cent to fund a protest.” According to Téllez, what really happened was “a sum of grievances that exploded in front of the government, and the government reacted tyrannically.”

“They responded with bullets.”

The April 2018 protests were initially triggered by reforms to the Social Security system, but quickly evolved into a broader movement against the Ortega and Murillo regime.

The repression and massacre with which the government responded was the bloodiest episode in the nation’s history during peacetime. This unprecedented violence destroyed the trust many sectors had placed in Ortega when he returned to power in 2007. However, a national dialogue was established in an attempt to restore democracy.

The bishops of the Episcopal Conference of Nicaragua, as mediators of the dialogue, proposed an agenda to guarantee democratization and justice in the country, including reforms to the electoral system, renewal of national authorities, guarantee of human rights, compensation for victims and the installation of an international truth commission.

Government representatives did not accept the agenda, firmly demanding the dismantling of the roadblocks, which had multiplied as a form of pressure.

“They thought we were already defeated, just because we had patience, patience, patience… Their plan was unbelievable, they were so coordinated that I even remember they set a condition for the dialogue meeting, for the dialogue to be installed: that the police had to be quartered, meaning locked up,” Ortega said in July 2018.

Azahálea Solís, a constitutional lawyer and feminist activist stripped of her nationality, was a member of the Civic Alliance for Justice and Democracy, which brought together the various sectors presenting demands. Solís recalls the origin of the demands raised in the protests and the dialogue: “The demands were not invented at the dialogue table. The demands had been accumulating for a long time, because they had to do with institutionality, democracy, rule of law, respect, submission of the authorities to the law”.

A detailed report by the United Nations’ Group of Experts on Human Rights in Nicaragua (GHREN), presented in February 2025, detailed how even the Nicaraguan Army “actively participated in the repression” against the 2018 demonstrations and “committed extrajudicial executions.”

According to the report, on April 20, 2018, when the protests were at their peak, a meeting was held with the participation of active officers of the Special Operations Command and the Directorates of Doctrine and Training, Intelligence and Counterintelligence, General Staff and Directorate, in which it was said that “the country was facing a coup d’état orchestrated by social organizations”. Thus, the Army also participated in the order “let’s go all out”, which intensified the repression.

About those days, Téllez reflects on the government’s message: “Let’s go all out, they said, and they went all out and killed people, killed and killed, wounded, repressed, beaten, brought out paramilitaries, everything.

The state of terror

Seven years after the protests, the situation in Nicaragua remains critical. In September 2018, the dictatorship imposed a de facto police state of surveillance and persecution that has forced hundreds of thousands of Nicaraguans into exile and maintains in the country a “state of terror so that no one moves, so that there is no mobilization, so that there is no protest,” says Tellez.

Ana Margarita Vijil, who was also a political prisoner of the dictatorship, questions the popular legitimacy that the regime claims to have: “If Rosario Murillo really believed what she says, there would be free, fair and transparent elections in Nicaragua, and they would not end up imprisoning any candidate who opposes her…. If Rosario Murillo and Daniel Ortega really believed that they are popular and loved people, they would not have this fear”.

Vijil recalls that during police interrogations she used to say: “If a broomstick runs against Daniel Ortega, it would win.”

Felix Maradiaga, one of the presidential hopefuls imprisoned ahead of the 2021 general elections, questions that the alleged coup attempt is “another of the many official lies” that the regime repeats to justify its violence. “The protests were not imported or bought, they were a spontaneous civic explosion against years of accumulated indignation. No embassy told the people to take to the streets,” he stresses.

He adds that “under no circumstances” can the Ortega and Murillo regime be considered legitimate, and maintains that the last national voting was “a grotesque farce” in which the dictatorial couple was proclaimed elected “without competition, without freedoms and with all the presidential pre-candidates in jail or in exile”.

Tamara Dávila also points out the economic consequences of the repression: “Daniel Ortega and Rosario Murillo want Nicaraguans to remain on the ground. That is why the policy of repression, that is why the policy of expulsion from the country, because – in addition – expelling Nicaraguans has been extremely profitable for them. More than 20% of Nicaragua’s Gross Domestic Product income comes from remittances from people outside Nicaragua”.

It’s true: “People don’t want coup plotters”

One of the most repeated accusations by the government is that the protests were an attempted coup d’état, and they celebrate the exiles and banishments.

“We were attacked during the harshest month of the planting season and we defeated them. They’re failures, and that’s what they can’t stand. How it hurts them, how it burns them when we remind them of their failures, their defeat… those who were born traitors, who are unworthy, who are cowards, vandals, lackeys, slaves of the imperialists of the world—they are not Nicaraguans,” said Murillo in March 2025.

Solís assures: “I actually think there’s one thing we can agree on with Rosario Murillo and Daniel Ortega—that people don’t want coup plotters. That’s exactly why people don’t want them: because they’ve carried out a coup against Nicaragua. And it’s been legally proven that this has been the case since 2011.”

Josefa Meza, the mother of the murdered young man Jonathan Morazán, is firm: “We are not coup plotters. We’re ordinary citizens of the people, and we were unarmed during that march… We weren’t there trying to stage a coup—never, not in a million years. No one paid us to do that.”

The regime’s lies vs. April’s truth

The contrast between the government’s official narrative and the testimonies of those who lived it—alongside the documented repression—reveals a deliberate campaign of disinformation by the Nicaraguan government. While it insists there was a “failed coup attempt” funded from abroad, testimonies and documented evidence point to a genuine, spontaneous civic uprising in response to growing authoritarianism and social injustice.

The most recent UN report details the structure of the repressive state and the chain of command responsible for human rights violations, including the active participation of the National Police, pro-government groups, and even members of the military. This reality contradicts the official narrative that seeks to absolve the state of the violence unleashed in 2018.

Official disinformation seeks not only to rewrite the past, but also to justify the continued repression. The same Group of Experts report notes that after brutally repressing the protests, the Government moved forward with its plans to silence critical voices, using tactics such as banning demonstrations, constant surveillance, selective arbitrary arrests and the cancellation of the legal personality of civil society organizations and political parties.

Far from a coup attempt, as alleged by the Government, the April 2018 Rebellion in Nicaragua was a powerful expression of citizens’ weariness with an increasingly authoritarian Government.

The pro-government narrative, promoted by Daniel Ortega, Rosario Murillo and the state apparatus, seeks to distort the truth and perpetuate the impunity of those responsible for the brutal repression.

However, the living memory of the protagonists and the documentation of international organizations on Nicaragua are fundamental to preserve the historical truth and demand justice for the victims of state repression, making the defense of collective memory part of the civic resistance against repression.

As Francys Valdivia expresses from exile: “I would do it a thousand times demanding justice, demanding truth, freedom, democracy, what all citizens of a nation should have and without a doubt, we would do it again and we continue…. We continue to demand that truth, that justice, that freedom, that democracy for Nicaragua, because one day, sooner rather than later, we are going to return and we are going to build that country that we deserve”.