Excerpt from The Murals of Revolutionary Nicaragua, 1979-1992

By July 1990 a mural at the airport by the Panamanian Felicia Santizo Brigade, showing an insurrection at the barricades, of the kind that led to the 19 July 1979 revolution, was painted out- the first major victim, unnoticed by the press. When I arrived in Managua that month, in the first mural I encountered (on which I had worked myself a few years before, photo here), I saw how the face of a small boy carrying the FSLN flag had been carefully peeled off. Faces in other murals proved to have had their eyes poked out-an old act of superstition common to iconoclastic outbursts throughout history. Sandinista martyrs in little monuments such as arescattered allover the country began to be decapitated and otherwise mutilated.

Also in July the mayor made his first attack on the dignity of the popular former president. The painters immediately converged upon the principal wall threatened, which was decorated with what they called the Mural de la Dignidad, a series of designs (none of them political) by a dozen different artists, now covering close to a hundred meteres, intended to protect Ortega both magically and physically. In 1993 great quantitites of paint were issued by the Ministry of Education to schools all over Nicaragua, with orders to use it to obliterate any murals on school premises (most of which had been painted by the children themselves.
-From David Kunzle, The Murals of Revolutionary Nicaragua, 1979-1992

"The ongoing destruction of the work of Nicaraguan artists is a bitter counterpart to a decade of brutal terror for which one day, in more civilized times, we may feel a fraction of the shame we should. Meanwhile these marvellous and evocative expressions remind us of what could have been, and yet may be."--Noam Chomsky