NICARAGUA

Nicaragua's crisis is political and personal simultaneously. The 2018 protests, when students and citizens rose against the Ortega government, were met with lethal force — over 300 people killed, mostly young men. The aftermath created a generation of exiled, imprisoned, or traumatized men who believed in change and received violence. For the men who remain, the surveillance state means that even private conversations about pain can be dangerous if overheard or reported.

The Sandinista revolution of 1979 created a masculine template that still haunts: the committed revolutionary who sacrifices everything for the collective. But when the collective project fails or is corrupted, the men who modeled their identity on it are left purposeless. Former Contras and former Sandinistas — men who fought on opposite sides — now share the same bars and the same silence, united in a disillusionment they can't articulate. Meanwhile, the Catholic-evangelical competition for souls in Nicaragua creates a religious marketplace where men are told by both sides that their suffering has spiritual meaning, which sounds like comfort but functions as suppression.