of neoliberal administrations. In 2006, Ortega once again won the presidential elections. Since he has been in office in 2007, poverty has fallen from 48.3% in 2005 to 24.9% in 2016 after plateauing for during the series of neoliberal administrations that followed the 1990 defeat of the Sandinista government. From 2006 to 2017, the GDP has increased by 38 per cent. Ortega has enjoyed high popularity ratings, but to say that the people of Nicaragua unliterally love him would be a lie. His record is complicated: it was before the protests, even more so now. But the fact that the gains made by his administration have been left out of much of the coverage around Nicaragua’s most recent protests gives rise to a bigger question, one that iscontext for understanding the protests and relate violence in Nicaragua. The United States has in large part created the crisis in Venezuela through economic sanctions and other means and subsequently used the consequences as a pretext for intervention. Self-determination is a threat to US and corporate interests that stand to benefit from natural resources, trade deals, and cheap labor in the region. In the case of Nicaragua, Daniel Ortega’s administration has aligned itself with the leftist Venezuelan government, raising its fist to the beast of US imperialism. It is brave to stare US imperialism in the eye (according to Tricontinental: Institute for Social Researches In the Ruins of the Present,the US has the most powerful military in the world at $611.2 billion per year), but it is not