This talk offers some starting points for understanding Nicaragua’s civic insurrection via an account of social movements that oppose the state’s proposal for an Interoceanic Grand Canal. The opposition has been represented in the now defunct National Dialogue with the state by the Civic Alliance for Justice and Democracy, an amalgam of diverse interests from the private sector, student movement, grassroots social movements, and civil society. Spanning the political spectrum, these groups make for strange bedfellows, giving the Alliance a certain ideological incoherence beyond the desire to see Ortega and Murillo step down, a restoration of democratic institutions, and an end to the violence. An examination of grassroots social movements, however, provides an often-overlooked entry point into the roots of the civic insurrection. These movements illustrate why traditional ideological and political divisions between the Latin American Left and Right have limited utility for parsing relationships among diverse opposition actors and the self-proclaimed socialist state. An analysis of the factors that drive grassroots resistance to Ortega and Murillo, such as economic policy, corruption, growing authoritarianism, state violence, racism, and land dispossession, reveal a Sandinista state that no longer embraces Leftist politics and a country that has outgrown its old political categories.

Jennifer Goett is Associate Professor of Comparative Cultures and Politics at James Madison College, Michigan State University. She is a cultural anthropologist, specializing in political and feminist anthropology. Her research interests include race, gender and feminist theory, social movements, human rights, violence and the state, and critical security studies in Latin America. She has published work on indigenous and Afrodescendant social movements for multicultural rights in Central America, particularly Nicaragua, and on state sexual violence, racialized policing, and infrastructure megaprojects. Goett is the author of Black Autonomy: Race, Gender, and Afro-Nicaraguan Activism (Stanford University Press 2016). The book examines the gendered strategies that Afrodescendant Creole women and men use to assert autonomy over their bodies, labor, and spaces in the context of drug war militarization and state violence in postwar Nicaragua. Her articles have appeared in American Ethnologist, Journal of Latin American and Caribbean Anthropology, The North American Congress on Latin America (NACLA) News blog, and other journals and edited volumes. For two decades, she has engaged in activist work with indigenous and Afrodescendant communities in Nicaragua and Honduras, focusing on collaborative research to secure collective rights to land and natural resources.

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