20 de agosto 2024
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“I would have had my Psychology degree today, but that possibility was taken away from me,” laments Mariana, who used to study at Managua’s Central American University (UCA). One year ago, the dictatorship of Daniel Ortega and Rosario Murillo ordered the university closed and confiscated; on August 16, 2023 the university confirmed it had ceased operating. Since then, Mariana has gone through grief, rage, hopes and great uncertainty.
She recalls the pain she felt when she saw how they stripped off the letters above the university entrance to replace it with a new name: “Casimiro Sotelo Montenegro National University.”
Mariana only needed to finish one course and her thesis to finalize her degree, which complemented her work in Human Resources for a manufacturing company. “It’s sad to see that they tried to leave me with no possibilities for studying,” she comments.
A few months ago, searching for a way to complete her studies, she attempted to register in the new university now controlled by the regime. However, they told her there was a problem, and they couldn’t accept her.
“The woman I talked to just gave me back my documents. I could hear her telling other students that she couldn’t register them, but she didn’t tell any of them why,” Mariana says.
Following the regime’s confiscation of the Managua UCA, the Jose Simeon Cañas Central American University in El Salvador and the Rafael Landivar Central American University in Guatemala, both Jesuit centers of higher education, offered the Nicaraguan students the opportunity to continue their studies, on condition they enroll for at least a year.
However, during the first semester this year the Psychology classes were only offered in person. “I couldn’t leave my job, and I felt frustrated,” the young woman comments, adding that she was even ready to enroll in another university in Nicaragua although it might mean starting all over again “in first-year.”
On July 20, Mariana began her first semester in the Rafael Landivar University, with online courses on Saturdays. Even though almost a year has passed without being able to study, she now has hopes of someday getting her diploma.
That diploma “doesn’t represent me”
Carolina was finishing the last semester of her degree at the UCA when it was shuttered. Her thesis – which she was scheduled to defend in November 2023 – was in the last stage of review. The confiscation of the university provoked a mix of emotions in her – feelings that one year later she’s still not capable of describing. “Like the world had come down on my head,” was the closest she could come.
She rejected the possibility of continuing her studies in the “new” Casimiro Sotelo University, because, to her, doing so “was a betrayal of all the values I’d learned” in the Jesuit university. Her professors, however, made her reflect that it was “her best option” for obtaining her diploma in a short time.
“It was unfair that five years of education and sacrifice would be left up in the air. Worse still, it was a waste of all the teaching and training that the UCA had given us, specifically aimed at making a change in society,” Carolina emphasizes.
On January 15, 2024, Nicaragua’s National Council of Universities finally opened classes in the “new” university, following two failed attempts – first on August 28 and later on September 25 of 2023. The actual opening took place five months after the theft of the UCA campus. Returning students such as Carolina had lost one semester of classes.
The classes in Casimiro Sotelo were also not on a par with the confiscated UCA. They assigned Carolina an advisor for her thesis, which had already been written before the confiscation. The new advisor reviewed the document and told her to change some elements of the structure and to add in things that, in Carolina’s judgement, were “unnecessary”.
Carolina will finally obtain a degree from the Casimiro Sotelo Montenegro National University. This creates an internal conflict for her. She is aware that this document will allow her to practice her profession, at least in Nicaragua, but “I don't identify with that diploma, it doesn't represent me or all the training I received at the UCA,”. she says.
The “Company of Jesus” order demands justice
The Ortega regime’s courts accused the UCA of “terrorism” for sheltering hundreds of students who demonstrated against the dictatorship during and after 2018. Spanish priest Jose Maria Toieira, spokesperson for the Central American Province of the Company of Jesus [Jesuits] regarding the Nicaraguan crisis, denounced that the confiscation represented a reprisal on the part of the government.
“It’s true that they’ve confiscated a number of other private universities, but since the UCA had a certain prestige as a more complex university, I believe its closure was fundamentally in reprisal for having opened the UCA’s doors in 2018 to a population that was fleeing a demonstration dissolved by government guns, with wounded and dead,” the Jesuit priest stated during an interview with the Argentine news site Infobae.
In Toieira’s view, all that happened with the UCA was “part of a project that the current Nicaraguan government has, for eliminating any opposition in the country – not only political opposition, but opposing thoughts, opinions, etc.”
The Ortega-aligned judge Gloria Maria Saavedra Corrales, who presides over the Tenth District Criminal Hearings Court in Managua, ordered the seizure of all the UCA buildings and their bank accounts, claiming that “it functioned as a center of terrorism, taking advantage of the conditions created through lies, to elevate the levels of violence and destruction by organizing armed and hooded criminal groups that employed terrorist methods.”
The Central American Province of the Company of Jesus, administrator of the UCA assets, demanded justice from the Ortega-Murillo regime as they marked a year “of unpunished and unjustified confiscation” of the UCA, its research centers, libraries, collections of historic documents, catalogues of natural resources, properties, and financial resources.
“We reiterate that all this has caused incalculable damage to Nicaragua’s scientific and cultural patrimony, and continues being a grave violation of the right to education of the thousands of young people who studied in the UCA or planned to do so; to the academic freedom of hundreds of faculty members who were contributing to the country’s cultural and scientific development; to the labor rights of all the university personnel; to the property rights of the Company of Jesus; in addition to being a grave violation of the inalienable right to legal due process and legitimate defense,” the Company expressed in a statement.
“I still feel in limbo”
Some weeks ago, Laura, a marketing student, began her second semester online at the Rafael Landivar University, thanks to a scholarship. She says there were nearly 40 students in her group, but some have dropped out.
She only had one more class to pass plus her thesis, in order to finish her studies, but she resigned herself to having to do an extra year. “It’s hard, because now we have classes from 6 – 9 pm, Monday through Friday, and it’s tiring to come home from work and begin to study,” she confessed. In addition, she has to stay up late to get her coursework done.
Laura explains that the majority of her classmates work, and sometimes they don’t have time to go home, “so they connect from their worksites and stay there until nine pm.” This second semester, there are also classes on Saturdays.
The young woman now sees her dream of graduating “coming closer,” although she’s also worried how much it might cost her to culminate her studies and transmit the diploma; and if she’ll have to go to Guatemala for her graduation.
Given all that, she admits that she’s weighed the possibility of finishing up her career in the Casimiro Sotelo. However, Laura says, the times she’s gone to the new university, she’s felt “watched.” She’ll have to decide what to do about her professional future in the upcoming weeks.
“One way or another, I still feel in limbo,” she concludes.
Almost half the UCA students looked for other Jesuit universities
Combined data from the Jesuit universities in El Salvador and in Guatemala indicate that of the 5,000 students that were at the UCA when it was closed, 2,301, or 46%, sought to enter the other Jesuit universities in Central America. Of that number, 2203 sought to enter as undergraduates, most of them in the final years of their studies or in the process of getting their diplomas. Ninety-eight others applied for post-graduate programs.
During the first semester of 2024, 407 Nicaraguan students were continuing their studies in the Jose Simeon Cañas of El Salvador or the Rafael Landivar of Guatemala: 158 students had relocated and attended in-person classes, and 249 were attending online. An additional 34 Nicaraguan students were accepted for the second part of the year, but only 29 of them finalized their registration.
Of these students, between 45 and 72% are receiving some kind of scholarship for some portion of the year, according to data.
Both universities offer 15 different career tracks, including Economics, Finance, Marketing, Public Accounting, Business Administration, Legal Sciences, English, Social Communication, Psychology, Industrial Engineering, Systems Engineering, Civil Engineering and Architecture.
The Nicaraguan students have also received help and support for their immigration papers, registering their titles, and the special regulations that determine course equivalencies. They have also received emergency psycho-social accompaniment and in some cases therapy, plus individualized academic tutoring and reflection session with faculty members.
“I refused to indoctrinate students”
After the theft of the UCA installations, former university professor Raul concluded that any university, school, or company in Nicaragua “was at the disposition of the dictatorship.”
The UCA takeover took this academic by surprise while he was giving classes at a technical institute. That semester, he hadn’t asked for a slot to teach in the UCAs Industrial Engineering program (part of the UCAs Department of Technological and Environmental Sciences) because he had some private contracts to fulfill.
Everyone he spoke with that day, especially his colleagues in the faculty there, expressed “frustration, anger, disappointment.” He remained in contact with them over the next few days but cut off all communications when he began to receive calls asking him to reveal information about them.
Like several other colleagues, a few weeks later Raul received an offer to continue teaching in the new university. Everyone knew that refusing this offer could put their safety at risk. His strategy was to say yes, but to ask for time before he entered.
When they told him they’d hold the place for him, he took advantage of the weeks of leave to sell everything he could, then migrate to Costa Rica over unmarked borders, together with his wife and daughter.
Now settled in San Jose, Raul works as a Class “B” technician, since he’s been unable to receive equivalent validation for the degrees and diplomas he carried with him. He notes regretfully that Nicaraguans in Costa Rica are treated “as if they were people with fewer rights.”
The former UCA professor refuses to recognize any merit for the new university, even though his first students have begun to graduate from there. He asks:” What values can be inculcated in that place, given that the university was set up as the result of a robbery.”
The UCA was “my second home”
Lucia worked in the administrative area of the UCA for fifteen years, right up until the day it was confiscated. She spent more time in the university than in her own home, and the day it was stolen she felt she’d lost more than her job – she’d lost “a home.”
“A year has gone by, and I still can’t get over the way they illegally took over the UCA,” Lucia says. She adds that the university was her home, and that it still pains her to recall the moment when she had to put her personal effects “into a garbage bag,” in order to remove them from the office.
After the confiscation of the UCA, Lucia couldn’t find another job in the Nicaraguan private sector, and the majority of the NGOs where she applied for work were also confiscated.
“I looked for a work of any kind, but that ‘any kind’ of job didn’t exist,” she emphasizes.
Unemployment and fear of the Ortega regime pushed Lucia to emigrate to the United States at the end of 2023. She’s now trying to rebuild her life in that country, “working in something that’s not what I studied.”
She laments the fact that “there’s no employment stability” in Nicaragua, and “if you don’t support the government, the best thing to do is leave the country.”
This article was published in Spanish in Confidencial and translated by Havana Times. To get the most relevant news from our English coverage delivered straight to your inbox, subscribe to The Dispatch.
