Word: sandinistas
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With his cap visor pulled low over his face, Jalson Espinoza watches a group of gang members from a rival neighborhood push through a massive throng of Sandinista supporters gathered to hear President Daniel Ortega speak. To the outside observer, many of the other young men in the crowd looked just as tough and menacing, dressed in bandanas and going shirtless to show off their tattoos. But very few of them are true gangbangers, Espinoza says. "You can tell who the real vagos are by the way they walk," he says in a raspy voice, using the Nicaraguan term...
...thug life is a thing of the past, Espinoza says. He has traded in his gang colors for the red and black of the Sandinista National Liberation Front, for which he works as a youth organizer in a rough neighborhood in Ciudad Sandino...
...Nicaragua, a movement that started off channeling youth rebellion into the violent overthrow of the Somoza dictatorship in 1979 is once again the governing party. And in many poor neighborhoods, the Sandinista Front has more street cred than the local youth gang...
...need more jails or laws in Nicaragua, we need more opportunities for young people," says Commissioner Hamyn Gurdi?n, head of the police effort to demobilize gangs. Gurdi?n - who during the 1970s, at age 16, had gone into the mountains to join the Sandinista rebels - says that guerrilla experience, shared by many police officers, helps them to empathize with gang members and identify personally with the three-step demobilization process: cease-fire, disarmament and social reintegration. "That experience made us sensitive to their problems," he said. "Their life, the lack of opportunities they have, that is what it was like...
...course, the battle lines in the region have changed considerably since John Paul wagged his finger at Nicaraguan priest and Sandinista government minister Ernesto Cardenal on a trip to Managua in 1983, warning him to "straighten out the situation in your church." Catholics in Latin America continue to fight for social justice, and disagreements persist about just how and if welfare policy and religious piety should cohabitate. But after the specter of Marxism faded and John Paul proved to be a great champion of the poor, new alliances have formed. Liberation theologians still say and write things that...