1338 21 DECEMBER 2018 • VOL 362 ISSUE 6421 sciencemag.org SCIENCEPHOTO: OSWALDO RIVAS/REUTERSM
olecular biologist Jorge Huete-Pérez,
a professor at Central American
University (UCA) in Managua, is
one of many Nicaraguan academics
whose life and work have been up-
ended by an escalating political cri-
sis. A longtime critic of Nicaraguan President
Daniel Ortega, Huete-Pérez was inspired in
April when demonstrations against a pro-
posed cut to social security evolved into a
new movement against Ortega’s stranglehold
on political power and his brutal repression
of dissent. He felt a responsibility to support
the students on the movement’s front lines
and joined their protests many times.
But on 14 October, about 2 weeks after the
government outlawed political demonstra-
tions, Huete-Pérez flinched. “I was about toopen the [car] door to get out and join” an-
other protest, he recalls, when police began
to beat and arrest demonstrators close by. He
slammed the door and sped away. “I literally
felt like I was running for my life,” he says.
“I had not been that scared in a long time.”
Many others, too, have recently stayed
home in the face of an intensifying crack-
down by Ortega, a leader of the Sandini-
sta movement that overthrew a dictator in- Ortega has become increasingly auto-
cratic since beginning his second stint as
president in 2007. More than 300 protest-
ers have been killed and at least as many
have been arrested, according to Amnesty
International; some have been charged with
terrorism. Tens of thousands more have
gone into exile. Just last week, police raided
offices of an independent newspaper and
several nongovernmental organizations, in-
cluding a leading human rights group.
The repression has struck particularly
hard at Nicaragua’s universities, where fir-
ings, arrests, and attacks on students have
brought higher education and research to a
virtual standstill. “It all started with univer-
sity students, so universities have been the
target of repression,” says Huete-Pérez, who
spoke at a 13 December meeting at UCA to
discuss the crisis. The Inter-American Com-
mission on Human Rights now considers
students one of the most imperiled groupsin the country. “The university system is be-
ing held hostage,” says María Luisa Acosta,
a human rights lawyer and president of the
Nicaraguan Academy of Sciences (ACN)
in Managua, which organized last week’s
meeting. (Acosta went into exile in June af-
ter being threatened by paramilitary forces.)
Critics say state universities have been co-
opted by the government, especially the Na-
tional Autonomous University of Nicaragua
(UNAN) in Managua, which fired more than
40 professors and expelled nearly 100 stu-dents who had demonstrated or expressed
support for the movement. “We were fired
because we spoke out against the silence
and complicity that allowed the universities
to permit students to be killed, repressed,
and detained,” says sociologist Freddy
Quezada, another speaker at the meeting,
who lost his job in July. (UNAN did not re-
spond to Science’s interview requests.)
The crisis is also disrupting collabora-
tions with foreign scientists. Huete-Pérez’s
department had to suspend the Nicaraguan
Biotechnology Conference, which UCA or-
ganized every 2 years with scientists from
Harvard University, the Massachusetts In-
stitute of Technology, and other U.S. uni-
versities. Evolutionary biologist Axel Meyer
of the University of Konstanz in Germany
isn’t sure whether he can continue his stud-
ies of fish evolution in Nicaragua’s crater
lakes this winter; Gerald Urquhart, a tropi-
cal ecologist at Michigan State University
in East Lansing who has worked in Nica-
ragua for decades, has postponed fieldwork
indefinitely and canceled his study abroad
program in Nicaragua. “I am saddened by
the limitations this places on my relation-
ship with Nicaraguan colleagues,” he says.
UCA, a private Jesuit university, is one of
Nicaragua’s last remaining bastions of free
speech. In addition to publicly supporting
the student movement, “They opened their
doors to thousands of demonstrators” after
the government fired on a protest in May,
killing at least 17, says Carlos Tünnermann
Bernheim, a former minister of education
and UNAN rector. But teaching has been dis-
rupted, as at most universities. “It’s not safe
enough to bring students to campus,” Huete-
Pérez says. He and others are holding classes
online, but it’s not the same, he says: “I teach
biochemisty and biotechnology. You need a
lab for that.”
Now, UCA faces a more direct threat.
The Nicaraguan legislature is consider-
ing a bill that would end the state funding
the university receives under a law that
designates its work as public service. “It’s
a direct aggression,” says Josefina Vijil, a
UCA education scientist and a member of
ACN’s leadership. Much of UCA’s public
funding goes to scholarships, “so if they do
this, the ones who suffer are the students,”
Tünnermann Bernheim says.
Vijil especially worries about lasting
psychological trauma to the researchers
and students who lived through the crisis.
Still, she and other participants in the UCA
meeting spent time brainstorming for the
day when students are back in classrooms,
and made tentative plans for writing a
book about university autonomy. “We need
to start imagining—and articulating—the
country we want in 50 years,” Vijil says. jUniversities ‘held hostage’ in
Nicaragua’s political crisis
Intensifying oppression paralyzes teaching and research
SCIENCE AND POLITICSStudents, seen here protesting in July, have been at the forefront of the opposition to President Daniel Ortega.By Lizzie WadeNEWS | IN DEPTHPublished by AAASon December 20, 2018^http://science.sciencemag.org/Downloaded from