"The police are shooting to kill, the students’ blood is running in the streets, and Ortega and his wife will rot in hell."

From the updated text to the first post of the day, here.

"How can you dialogue with your assassins? This was the biggest rally yet. It was a homage to mothers who lost their sons at rallies in April and May, and they wound up adding 15 more mothers to that list."

Said Gonzalo Carrión, of the Nicaraguan Center for Human Rights, quoted in "Nicaragua Protest on Mother’s Day Kills at Least 15" (NYT).

The protest on Wednesday capped six weeks of what has been described as a national rebellion against the government of President Daniel Ortega. The government has denied responsibility for any of the deaths and insists that it is the victim of a vast conspiracy....

“The demonstration was peaceful,” said Juan Sebastián Chamorro, a negotiator on the national dialogue committee. “There were children there. It was a peaceful manifestation that ended up with people shot in the head and killed deliberately by snipers.”

Guillermina Zapata, 63, said protesters had told her that the bullet that hit her son, Francisco Javier Reyes Zapata, 34, came from a sharpshooter perched on the top of the national baseball stadium. Mr. Reyes was struck in the eye and died, she said.

“They have to go,” Ms. Zapata said of the president [Ortega] and his wife, Rosario Murillo, who is also the vice president. “He is a murderer, and a murderer cannot continue to govern Nicaragua. They have to leave. I believe that dialogue is no longer an option. That’s sitting down to talk with the devil, who is killing the people.”

ADDED: I am told by someone I trust that this video is a good summary of what's been going on in Nicaragua for the last 5 weeks:



AND: Let me add this, with permission, from my friend in Nicaragua:

[Wednesday] was Mothers’ Day in Nicaragua and, after 42 days of protests and 80 plus students killed, the citizens held their third march, one of mourning for their lost sons, entitled The Mothers of April and May. Five hundred thousand people, ten percent of the country’s population, showed up.

The National Police and Sandinista Youth attacked the march as it approached the universities and killed 15 student protesters, amongst them the son of the founder of the National Police after the original revolution in 1979. He was shot in the head from long distance by a police sniper. The police are shooting to kill, the students’ blood is running in the streets, and Ortega and his wife will rot in hell.

"The Comandante's Canal: Will a grand national project enrich Nicaragua, or only its leader?"

"Last June 15th, Daniel Ortega, the President of Nicaragua, held a ceremony in Managua to announce his newest and most audacious plan to help the country’s poor: a transoceanic canal, stretching from the Atlantic Coast to the Pacific, a few hundred miles north of the Panama Canal."

“This is a project,” he promised, “that will bring well-being, prosperity, and happiness to the Nicaraguan people.” The last time Ortega attracted the world’s attention, it was as Ronald Reagan’s great adversary in the Contra war of the eighties: a fighter “against the domination of the capitalists of our country, in collusion with the U.S. government—i.e., imperialism.”...

Ortega’s canal would be the largest civil-engineering and construction project in the world. To lead it, and to bring in money and expertise, he had recruited an obscure Chinese tycoon named Wang Jing, and two days before the ceremony, the National Assembly had approved a concession that put a large swath of the country at Wang’s disposal as a building site....

You'll need a New Yorker subscription to read much further. I have and I highly recommend it. But here's an open article in Scientific American: "Nicaragua Canal Could Wreak Environmental Ruin."

The project threatens multiple autonomous indigenous communities such as the Rama, Garifuna, Mayangna, Miskitu and Ulwa, and some of the most fragile, pristine and scientifically important marine, terrestrial and lacustrine ecosystems in Central America.

"As was the case with Chavez's tendentious present, Ortega's speech was intended as a slap."

"Obama was correct not to walk out on the speech. But... [w]hen Obama spoke later, he should have prefaced his promising call for an 'equal partnership' with other countries in the hemisphere with some strong pushback against those who would rather relive the insults of the past than move forward."

Says Eugene Robinson (who just won a Pulitzer Prize).

Yes. As in his campaign, Obama is very bland. For some reason — possibly vaguely racist — Americans liked the bland. But at some point, bland is not what you want.

"Obama held his tongue when asked what he thought about Ortega's speech. 'It was 50 minutes long. That's what I thought.'"

"President Obama endured a 50-minute diatribe from socialist Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega that lashed out at a century of what he called terroristic U.S. aggression in Central America and included a rambling denunciation of the U.S.-imposed isolation of Cuba's Communist government. Obama sat mostly unmoved during the speech but at times jotted notes" [writes Major Garrett at FOXNews.com.]

Notes, eh?

America responsible for evils of world.

Ortega angry.

I'm bored.

Communism... good for Cuba? Wd b much more successful if not for U.S. evil.

Racism

expansionist policy of U.S.

Look serious. Pretend these are real notes. Listen thoughtfully.

Sandinistas... Contras... check info

Look thoughtful

He can't blame me. I was 3.

When is this idiot going to shut up?

Boooorrrrringggg

ADDED: Actually, Obama said "I'm grateful that President Ortega did not blame me for things that happened when I was three months old." That rhetoric sounded familiar. Remember this?



IN THE COMMENTS: Maguro said:

Not sure why he needed to take notes since he listened to the same sermon at Trinity Church for 20 years. You'd think he'd have it memorized by now.