The life of Francisca Ramirez took an unexpected turn when in 2013 the government of President Daniel Ortega announced that she would be expelled from her lands because of the construction of an interoceanic canal, one that would link the Pacific Ocean with the Caribbean Sea. This 41-year-old peasant woman lived in the small community of La Fonseca, an area known for being one of the leading agricultural hubs of Nicaragua.

After the announcement, she became the leader of a peasant movement that is now a symbol of resistance in the whole Latin American region. She protested not only the expropriation itself but the obscure plans of endowing the country to the mysterious Chinese tycoon, Wang Jing. Although the canal was never built, the shadow of displacement continued to disturb the citizens.

In April 2018, a reform to the social security system, pushed Francisca and her colleagues back into the streets again, unleashing a popular rebellion of students, peasants and large sectors of civil society, that until this date has left more than 327 people killed according to data by the Inter American Commission of Human Rights (IACHR).

Nowadays, Francisca lives in exile in Costa Rica. She fled Nicaragua on September last year due to death threats and persecution. Still, she continues to denounce the government of the Sandinista leader Daniel Ortega and his wife, Vice president, Rosario Murillo.

President Daniel Ortega announced on April 16, 2018, a social security reform that triggered the current crisis. His plans increased the quota that companies and workers contribute to the system, and cut 5% of their pensions toretirees. This made vulnerable sectors like students and elders angry. They went to the streets to protest on the following days of the announcement and were answered with brutal repression by police and paramilitary troops linked to the ruling Sandinista National Front (FSLN).

US media widely covered the reform and its aftermath, and the changes were pointed out as the primary (and sometimes only) cause of the rebellion against Ortega, although several neoliberal policies implemented in the previous years shaped the way towards the discontent of large sectors of the civil society. Before April, there were already groups against the government, rejecting projects such as the inter-oceanic canal and the alliance with the private sector.

"Anyone who says that everything was normal before April is a liar, because there was some social seismology, there were small social tremors, which moved in several parts of the country, linked to government policies that could be in fact categorized as neoliberals", agrees Sergio Cabrales, a Nicaraguan sociologist that has been studying protests in the country since 2016.

Sounds paradoxical that Ortega, the leader of the Sandinistas, the revolutionary leftist guerrilla that in 1979 overthrown the Somoza dictatorship, nowadays not only adheres strictly to the book when it comes to neoliberalism but also follows the path of a dictatorship by increasingly becoming authoritarian and using police and paramilitary to repress any dissent.

Daniel Ortega publicly boasts that his government is socialist, he mostly aligns with Leftist "champions" Cuba and Venezuela and talks about "Yankee imperialism" in his speeches all the time.

When it comes to the economy, however, he is not only shamelessly market-oriented but also a remarkable apprentice of capitalist ways.

During the period he served as president during the '80s his government pursued strictly Marxist policies, but when he was reelected in 2006 (after 16 years out of power), he shape-shifted into becoming the Neoliberal he is today.

The confusion tends to be mesmerizing, especially for those outside Nicaragua, but facts are correct.

He follows closely the so-called "Washington Consensus"(the handbook of neoliberalism): His government being a good "alumni" of Bretton Woods organization like the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank, he benefits from commerce agreements like CAFTA, and he also serves as an ally for national and international investors, among other aspects.

When he developed the Social security reform- the one that triggered the crisis-he was actually following the advice of the IMF, and organization that supported the government and its policies despite various proof, the system was going bankrupt because of the corruption the government was doing. In 2012, Alberto Jaramillo, an official of the IMF stated to a Sandinista outlet that Nicaragua was advancing well, with good use of resources.

For years the Nicaraguan media denounced the use of resources of the system for third-party investments, and in 2017 the Nicaraguan Newspaper La Prensa published a detailed investigation that recalled that more than 11 million Córdobas ( about 343 thousand dollars) were lent to private investors close to Ortega without any public consultation.

The corruption in the Ortega's regime is not something quickly ignored considering Nicaragua ranks second as the most corrupt country in Latin America (only surpassed by Venezuela) according to figures from Transparency International. Also, the country has been listed for years as the second poorest country in the Western Hemisphere, only surpassed by Haiti, points data by the U.S. State Department.

In 2013, when the Ortega government announced a concession to a Chinese businessman for the construction of an interoceanic canal, citizens and scientists alike ringed the alarm, as they were worried the implementation of this neoliberal policy, will give the corporation full control on the national territory and the citizens.

According to the study, "Concession of the Interoceanic Channel in Nicaragua: 185 Serious Impact on Human Rights," the legal terms of the concession didn't provide a balance between the rights of the State and the ones of the investor.

Although the Canal was never built, and the Chinese businessman is nowhere to be found, the fact that a government indiscriminately handed over the national territory to a private corporation made it clear that Ortega was not interested in the State maintaining protection over its citizens.

"We did more than 100 marches demanding respect for our rights, demanding that there couldn't be a project like that without consulting the people, without a referendum, knowing that it was the destruction of Nicaragua. We resisted for five years now, enduring repression and police hostility", says the peasant leader Francisca Ramírez.

In spite of the threat that the project implied, other sectors of the country like the private sector celebrated the plan because they assumed that their long-term alliance with the government would facilitate benefits in the canal.

Since 2006, this alliance allowed them to negotiate directly with Ortega, such things like minimum wage, natural resources exploitation and Banking tariffs.

Nicaraguan journalist and politician, Danilo Aguirre, baptized this model as "corporatist" back in 2014. "This is a "Plutocracy," a government of the rich, where decisions are made between the economic oligarchy and the head of political power in detriment of institutions and the rule of law," explained Aguirre to national outlet Confidential.

Likewise, the president of the Inter-American Dialogue Organization, Michael Shifter, wrote in 2016 for Foreign Policy magazine that, "through regular consultations, the Nicaraguan confederation of business associations, known as COSEP, built a cosy relationship with the government -with the understanding that it will not meddle in politics and, in turn, Ortega will allow it to do its business with little interference and low taxes", Shifter wrote.

This is perhaps a clear example of the deviation of Socialism Ortega personifies. He uses the "left" only a rhetoric formula but uses neoliberalism for the real deal. The hypocrisy of the regime of Daniel Ortega and his wife Murillo grandstands in their slogan visible in all official propaganda.

The words "Christian, socialist and solidarity.", always appears next to their pictures.

In addition to its neoliberal tendencies, Ortega has also become increasingly authoritarian, just like his former enemy; the US-backed dictator Anastasio Somoza, overthrown by the Sandinistas in 1979.

When he came back to power in 2006, Ortega amassed control not only of the entire executive power but also of the legislative branch, the judiciary branch and the Electoral power (this one allowed him to be re-elected twice through frauds).

Once a revolutionary leader, now a dictator he also seized control over the military and the police which helped him repress the protests against his government all these years, many of them, as in the case of the canal protests, against his neoliberal policies.

In the Washington Post profile, titled "From rebel to strongman: How Daniel Ortega became the thing he fought against", the journalist Joshua Partlow quickly sums up all the incarnation Ortega has personified in the eyes of US presidents.

"To Ronald Reagan, Ortega was a dangerous Marxist — a "little dictator" backed by the Soviet Union. During the Obama administration, Ortega was seen as an ageing, but not entirely benign, leftist who had warmed to capitalism and kept gang violence at bay. Now 72 and in his fourth term as president (..) this incarnation of Ortega is the most dangerous of all: He has waged a merciless and bloody attack against protesters who want him to resign, prompting many to liken the former guerrilla commander to the dictatorship that he helped overthrow nearly 40 years ago (..)", the article declares.

"It was small elements that made this happen. There where small decisions that degenerated in everything we have seen now. A sum of many factors and it was just about timing", says sociologist Cabrales who was not that surprised when the protest started to increase exponentially.

For years, Ortega maintained control of social protest through repression, using the police and the army whenever he could. The clearest example was the persecution to anti-canal leaders-like Ramirez- or when Ortega in 2015 sent police to attack miners who were protesting against the Canadian company B2Gold.

"There were conditions of tiredness within the population, and also of social violence and economic exclusion, the social security reform only came to trigger, but there were already preexisting conditions," adds the economist Sáenz.

According to Cabrales, the protests against the governmental negligence on a Forest fire in the Indio Maíz natural reserve, created an organizational structure within the university students, the same that was activated when the reform was announced. "It was a bad political calculation," Cabrales explains.

On April 18, the students went to the streets, but this time the repression was so brutal, that the rebellion became massive. When people started dying later that day peasants and large sectors of civil society joined.

While the students barricaded themselves and fought peacefully from the universities, in all the departments of the country, the citizens raised barricades in the streets and used home-made mortars to protect their neighbourhoods from the aggressions of police and paramilitary groups related to the regime.

Although in May 2018 Ortega sat at a "dialogue" with the student sectors, peasants and civil society organizations, the negotiations failed and in July the president unleashed his "clean-up operation", which left balances of up to 20 dead per day in some cities of the country, according to numbers by the Nicaraguan Center of Human Rights (CENIDH).

Up to this day, data shows more than 327 people killed since the crisis began. A report by the GIEI, a decentralized arm of the IACHR, points to Ortega and its leading operators as suspects of crimes against humanity.

Among the crimes attributed to them are the excessive use of force by the national police and the creation of parastatal armed groups, charges that according to international standards do not prescribe.

Many US media were astounded by the "surprise" rebellion in Nicaragua, a country that both the governments of powerful countries and international organizations such as the IMF, had exalted for their "advances" in previous years.

The brutal crackdown showed the international community the real face of Ortega as a repressive dictator, but the situation was not a surprise for people like Francisca Ramírez.

"The world needs to know is not a leftist, he is a dictator. The ideals of the left are that human rights are respected and Daniel Ortega does not represent that at all. He represents the capital and a threat to the people and our natural resources. Daniel Ortega has stripped the poor out everything, nowadays also he attacks us by torturing and murdering us. Ortega says he is socialist, but he is not", states Ramirez.