More than eight years since the April Rebellion in Nicaragua, the resistance has taken many forms: protesting, documenting, going into exile, keeping the memory alive, and refusing to be silenced. None of these efforts have been in vain; they have been a means to defend life and keep the possibility of justice alive. But after all this time, an uncomfortable question remains: What happens when a society directs all its energy outward and puts off looking inward?
For a long time, we understood that resistance meant focusing our efforts outward: denunciations, raising awareness, international pressure, and sanctions. Today it is clear that profound transformations —in a person, in a movement, and in a country— do not occur solely when the external environment changes, but when we have the courage to examine who we are as well.
This critical self-examination is not isolation, nostalgia, or a spiritual retreat. It is an uncomfortable political practice and an exercise without anesthesia. It involves recognizing what forms of violence, silences, power dynamics, or wounds we continue to collectively reproduce even as we invoke democracy.
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I had to undertake that exercise.
I didn’t turn inward to find peace or to rebuild myself emotionally. I turned inward to sustain myself politically, to avoid blaming my country for all the pain I’ve experienced, to maintain the connection even amid so much violence. To stay on course, to understand what happened to us as a society, and to decide where to go next without ending up as a reflection of the very thing I was fighting against. I also turned inward to see myself over these years: my limits, my contradictions, my light and my shadows.
After all, no body is merely individual. Bodies are political: fear, resistance, and history are inscribed within them.
That same self-examination that an individual owes to themselves, the resistance as a collective body owes to itself as well. It is not enough to oppose the authoritarianism of the moment if we replicate its practices in the name of freedom. Nor is it enough to challenge vertical hierarchies if we inhabit spaces where self-criticism is shut out, where disagreement is equated with treason, or where political legitimacy depends on maintaining a supposed moral purity intact.
Democracy is not merely demanded; it is practiced. In societies ravaged by political violence, dignity does not stem from moral purity, but from the capacity to reflect, transform, and avoid repetition.
Finally, there is the country. The body-country that aches both from afar and up close. For years, we sought a way out beyond the country’s borders and beyond ourselves. All of this matters. But resolving Nicaragua’s crisis also requires turning our gaze toward its own roots: its history, its political culture, and the ways in which we learned to relate to power. A country is not transformed by replacing one government with another; it is transformed when it is capable of taking ownership of the history it helped build.
That memory does not allow for simplistic dichotomies between absolute righteousness and absolute guilt. A nation’s history also belongs to those who fought, remained silent, resisted, or simply tried to survive. What we did and what we failed to do are part of the present we inhabit. This does not equate responsibilities or erase power asymmetries, but it confirms that no society breaks the authoritarian cycle by turning memory into a contest of moral sanctity.
Defending Life Does Not Mean Giving Up Resistance
Societies do not break their authoritarian cycles merely by remembering the past, but by understanding how such cycles were possible. Introspection is not an anchor to the past; it is the foundation of non-repetition. Memory is not nostalgia. Memory is responsibility.
There comes a time when the individual, the resistance, and the country must look up and make decisions. And that decision is always political. The way out was outward when it was a matter of saving lives. The way out is inward if we ever want to change the country.
*Claudia Vargas M. is a feminist human rights defender exiled from Nicaragua. Spain granted her citizenship as a protective measure. Today, her voice denounces transnational repression and demands justice for the political assassination of her husband, Roberto Samcam.