By Stephen Kinzer 
As a mass of unarmed protesters filed past Dennis Martínez Stadium in Managua, Nicaragua, on May 30, snipers inside the stadium began firing at them. That day’s casualties joined a list of about 100 dead and 1,000 wounded and missing in the last two months. Among those outraged was the person for whom the stadium is named. Dennis Martínez is the most celebrated of all Nicaraguan baseball players, immortalized by pitching a perfect game for the Montreal Expos in 1991.
“It pains me to see the national stadium bearing my name being used for violence against my brother Nicaraguans,” Martínez declared in a public statement. The novelist Sergio Ramírez, who was Nicaragua’s vice-president in the 1980s, tweeted that with this statement, Martínez “pitched another perfect game.” Ramírez had just been awarded the Cervantes Prize, the highest honor in Spanish-language literature, and dedicated it “to the memory of Nicaraguans who have in recent days been killed on the streets for demanding justice and democracy.”
Nicaragua is a land of volcanoes and earthquakes. At times it seems that the fury churning underground must somehow be reaching above the surface, making national politics especially turbulent. This is one of those times. Protests that shook Nicaragua in mid-April did not quickly fade, as some expected. The opposite has happened. Nicaragua has entered a phase of civic insurrection. For the second time in as many generations, Nicaraguans are rebelling against a decadent family regime. A historic turning point is approaching.
During the 1980s Nicaragua was a battleground for proxy armies representing the interests of the United States and the Soviet Union. Since then, it has remained poor and, over the last decade, become steadily less democratic. Nonetheless it seemed stable. President Daniel Ortega, who helped lead the revolution that brought leftist Sandinistas to power in 1979, appeared to have consolidated his authoritarian state. He continued to use anti-imperialist rhetoric, but allowed the business elite to make economic policy and won the support of Catholic bishops by banning abortion.