MANAGUA, Nicaragua -- Nicaraguan national police and armed pro-government civilians on Tuesday laid siege to and then retook a symbolically important neighborhood that has recently become a center of resistance to President Daniel Ortega's government.
Government forces began advancing on Masaya's Monimbo neighborhood before dawn
and had largely regained control of it by the afternoon for the first time since protests against Ortega's government began in mid-April.
Youths fired homemade mortar rounds from behind barriers of stacked paving stones pried from the streets in the town about 16 miles southeast of the capital.
But they were outgunned by government loyalists who within hours had advanced to the heart of the neighborhood and began posting videos on social media of themselves firing semi-automatic rifles into the air in celebration.
Alvaro Leiva, director of the Nicaraguan Pro-Human Rights Association, said Tuesday that there were preliminary reports of three people killed in the fighting and dozens of wounded.
The same neighborhood's residents rose up against strongman Anastasio Somoza in the late 1970s as part of the Nicaraguan Revolution led in part by Ortega. But since protests against cuts to the social security system in mid-April became a broader call for Ortega to leave office, Monimbo has again become a center of the opposition.
Ortega's government has dismissed the opposition as delinquents attempting a coup d'etat and wants to quell unrest in Masaya before Thursday's three-month anniversary of the start of protests. Thursday is also the 39th anniversary of Liberation Day, which marks the overthrow of the Somoza regime in 1979 by the Sandinistas.
The government says more than 200 people have been killed since the unrest began, but independent rights groups say the number is higher.
A Section on 07/18/2018