Francisca Ramírez, widely known as Doña Chica, is one of Nicaragua’s most influential peasant leaders. She became well known while leading the resistance against the ultimately abandoned Grand Interoceanic Canal project, emerging as a powerful advocate for land rights and environmental protection. Since 2015, she’s stayed fully committed to this cause, even after facing assassination attempts, persecution, exile, losing her citizenship, and having her property taken away. In exile, she has rebuilt her life alongside 23 other peasant families displaced by the Ortega-Murillo regime’s repression. They’ve set up a camp in Upala, Costa Rica, where farming is not just about survival—it’s part of their unbreakable drive to “break free from the dictatorship and return” to Fonseca, the rural community in Nueva Guinea where Doña Chica was born during yet another dictatorship
Each day before dawn in Upala, Francisca Ramírez is already up by the stove, making a hearty breakfast for the men who’ve been up since early morning milking the cows. Sometimes, she cooks up thick, filling tortillas to go with the meal. There’s always fresh cheese, sour cream, plenty of coffee, eggs, gallo pinto, fried pork, and pickled onions with hot peppers and vinegar. Even amid the morning rush, she keeps her phone close, juggling a steady stream of messages and calls.
“Good morning,” answers Doña Chica, as she is known by everyone in this camp that she founded in Costa Rica in 2019, with 23 exiled peasant families. At this point, five years later, calling this place a “camp” no longer does it justice. It has become more of a micro-community, evolving from makeshift zinc and scrap structures to sturdier homes made of wood and concrete.
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What started as a camp with makeshift shelters and tired faces has grown into a close-knit peasant community bound by two driving forces: the land they farm and their commitment to “organize” to end the Ortega-Murillo dictatorship. For these farmers, this shared mission is their only path back to Nicaragua, where their farms were taken and political persecution still looms over them.
Seeing Doña Chica at the stove, whether she’s cooking or organizing breakfast with her cell phone in hand, perfectly captures the unique spirit of this camp. With her phone, she coordinates dairy sales, orders farm supplies, arranges construction materials—and stays connected to Nicaraguan news, keeping the spark of political activism alive. She’s engaged in international advocacy against the regime and builds solidarity among those still in Costa Rica.
Doña Chica a few years ago in what were the beginnings of the peasant camp in Upala. Carlos Herrera | DIVERGENTES
In recent years, hundreds of peasants have headed north for better opportunities in the United States, weighed down by Costa Rica’s high cost of living—often called the “Switzerland of Central America.” But rather than feeling lonely or tempted to join the migration to big U.S. cities like some of her family members, Doña Chica insists she’s most at home on this rented land in Upala. “Peasants like us need three meals a day, and we enjoy eating well… we know that only the land can guarantee that. Here, we work the land and plant everything we know. Having land to work on has helped us so much mentally,” she says.
The camp sits about forty kilometers from the Nicaraguan border in a region of humid mountains, dense forests, muddy paths mingled with cattle tracks, and crops of cassava, corn, malanga, and beans. Gusts of wind stir the leaves, carrying with them the earthy scents of the countryside—fresh air occasionally broken by the distant hum of a motorbike or the call of a cow to its calf. Upala looks a lot like the lands these farmers left behind; it reminds Doña Chica of La Fonseca, the remote village in Nueva Guinea where she was born in 1977. It was there, in June 2014, that she learned Daniel Ortega had granted a concession to build an Interoceanic Canal, a project promising to lift Nicaragua out of poverty.
At first, Doña Chica believed in the canal project. Truthfully, most Nicaraguans either believed in it or were at least intrigued by this grand plan, a long-dreamed gateway to reduce poverty and bring progress to the country. But when Law 840 came into Doña Chica’s hands, and she and other farmers pored over its terms, they decided to oppose the canal project. They had two main concerns: the canal would threaten Lake Cocibolca, Central America’s largest freshwater reserve, and its planned route cut right across their lands.
This meant that their properties—under the terms of the concession agreement and the law published in English by the Sandinista Parliament (an unprecedented move since 1855, when the filibuster William Walker published decrees in English as president)—would be expropriated. Farmers would be compensated based on cadastral rather than market values, which were significantly lower than the real value of the farms and were subject to arbitrary decisions with no option for appeal.
Anger spread quickly. A group of about twenty farmers who initially examined Law 840 with Doña Chica expanded their activism across Nicaragua’s South Caribbean. They traveled up from Puerto Príncipe along the Caño Chiquito River, connecting with Punta Gorda (where the canal company planned a massive reservoir that would flood the community) and reached out to the Polo de Desarrollo and Rama Kriol communities in the Caribbean. Over time, their resistance spread along the entire 286-kilometer canal route—from the Pacific’s remote beaches in Brito, through the village of Obrajuelo by Lake Cocibolca in Rivas, across the paradise of Ometepe Island, and along the muddy shores of El Tule on the San Juan River. But the heart of the peasant resistance was La Fonseca, where Doña Chica, together with farmers like Medardo Mairena and Nemesio Mejía, unexpectedly became leaders of a national movement opposing both the canal project and, ultimately, the authoritarian rule of Ortega and his wife, Vice President Rosario Murillo.
Since 2015, Doña Francisca hasn’t changed much—physically, at least. Over the years, however, her political instinct as an activist has only sharpened, making her one of the most respected voices against the Sandinista regime. Her voice is credible, unwavering, and deeply loyal to her core principles: defending the land and the peasantry. These values even led her, at one point before her exile, to turn down an offer to run for a legislative seat.
When I first met her at her farm in La Fonseca—where she supervised crops on muleback—she was somewhat shy, her words hesitant, yet ultimately resolute in saying what she thought. Short, stout, and with deeply tanned skin from working in the sun. Her black hair hinted at brown streaks, though now in exile it shows some gray, and her voice is now more mature and determined, used not only to denounce the regime but also to call out the opposition’s shortcomings when, according to the peasants, it fails to look out for the common good.
She’s traveled to dozens of countries—from Europe to the U.S., South America, and Central America—but she always comes back to her people, bringing with her the recognition she’s gained in exile to benefit the camp in Upala. What began as small harvests of red beans, cassava, and corn, just enough to feed the peasant families there, has grown into a more productive setup with crops, pig farming, and a modest herd of dairy cows—fewer than 30 animals. They started with eleven young heifers, which Doña Chica was able to acquire with support from two international aid organizations, Bread for the World and Oxfam Intermón.
Their livestock’s growth has allowed them to start dairy production, but their dream is to eventually have one hundred cows—not only to regain the financial security they had in Nicaragua but also for a purpose that Doña Chica considers fundamental: “to ensure food security for the families and to improve housing in the camp, because there are many children and adolescents who need to live in dignity.”
Before 1979, the La Fonseca region was called Somoza, after the dictator at that time. In the 1960s, the dictatorship ordered these still-untouched lands to be populated “as a strategy to ease agrarian conflicts caused by the aggressive expansion of cotton cultivation that devoured small farms on the Pacific,” recalls writer Sergio Ramírez. Thousands of farmers were displaced, and Doña Chica’s family was one of them.
After the overthrow of the Somozas, the area was renamed La Fonseca, in honor of Carlos Fonseca Amador, a founding figure of Sandinismo. Then the war began, and Doña Chica’s father abandoned the family. Her mother was left to care for five children. The young Doña Chica decided to start working to help support the family, especially because her mother was imprisoned for four months, just eight days after giving birth, leaving Doña Chica in charge of her younger siblings. Today, both her mother and some of her siblings live in exile in Costa Rica.
Doña Chica commands respect as the undeniable leader of her family, a status she earned back in that turbulent decade: at just twelve years old, she would travel to Managua to sell goods she bought from producers in La Fonseca. She’s seen the brutal toll of war—the dehumanization, the pain, and the losses on both the Sandinista and Contra sides. She knows well the complex dynamics within anti-Sandinista rural communities. And despite everything the Ortega-Murillo regime has put her through, including stripping her of her Nicaraguan citizenship, there’s no trace of bitterness or desire for revenge in her words. She speaks only of ending the dictatorship and reclaiming freedom, for she and her fellow farmers see their land as their most precious freedom.
Over the years, Doña Chica managed to build a good life with her husband, Migdonio López Chamorro. They not only raised a family but also became business partners—together they bought land in La Fonseca (three farms, two of which were later confiscated) and trucks to transport their goods to Mayoreo, a major wholesale market in Managua. By the time Ortega’s grand canal project was announced, Doña Chica was a leading producer in the area, though her face was still unknown across Nicaragua.
That changed when some representatives from HKND Group, the Chinese company involved, came to survey her property, and Doña Chica’s face began to appear in news reports. The farmers, well aware of the contents of Law 840—which they saw as a blow to national sovereignty—established the National Council for the Defense of Land, Lake, and Sovereignty. Farmers from across the country, united in their opposition to the canal project, organized and held more than a hundred marches in their communities and in Managua. This was unprecedented under the Ortega-Murillo regime, as they emerged from their communities and descended from the hills, self-organized, using their own resources… on horses, mules, bicycles, pickups, and trucks.
I covered many of these marches and remember Doña Chica’s round, plump, and tan face organizing the farmers with a megaphone in hand. Sometimes she was mounted on her trucks, leading the protests. At first, she was wary of the cameras, but she soon understood that they were essential for explaining to Nicaragua—and the world—the farmers’ opposition to a project promoted by the regime and Chinese businessman Wang Jing as “the largest project ever built by humankind.”
The peasant anti-canal movement challenged and won the streets from the Ortega-Murillo regime, and the marches were often repressed. Eventually, the farmers’ pressure was so strong that the project never went forward. Partly because Wang Jing never truly had the financial means to execute the colossal venture, and also because the farmers’ protest against the expropriation of their lands gained international resonance, drawing attention to the countless flaws of the canal project—especially its technical, environmental, and commercial infeasibility.
When Wang Jing’s companies went bankrupt on the stock market, the farmers cautiously returned to their farms, but they had already established a nationally recognized organization. Then came 2018 and the eruption of social protests against the Ortega-Murillo regime due to social security reforms. The repression left at least 355 people dead, with lethal shots to the necks, chests, and torsos of children, youths, and adults alike.
The farmers were an active part of the resistance against the armed police and paramilitary forces. They set up roadblocks, and the government deployed deadly weapons to dismantle them. The Nicaraguan Resistance (the Contras) is in their blood, which keeps them torn between the desire to take up arms to topple a government that has violently shut down all peaceful avenues for democratic change. The farmers in the camp no longer want war—they have children and grandchildren—but sometimes, when frustration builds from the prolonged exile, these thoughts arise in silence.
The persecution of the peasantry has not ceased since 2018, when the Lóvago roadblock was harshly repressed—one of the “most violent incidents during Operation Clean-Up,” according to the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR). At least 20 farmers were killed, and hundreds fled to Costa Rica through hidden paths. Dozens arrived in San José with bullet wounds still bleeding, where the solidarity of the diaspora gave them food and tended their wounds in a makeshift camp in La Merced Park.
Before the Lóvago massacre, an attempt was made on Doña Chica’s life. In April 2018, while leading a protest in Nueva Guinea, a Sandinista supporter lunged at her with a knife. A young man named Uriel García intervened, taking the knife meant for her. It became clear to Doña Chica that the regime had not forgiven her for her leadership against the canal project. If they weren’t going to kill her, they at least wanted her imprisoned. On September 15, 2018, in the midst of a police crackdown and political persecution, she sought refuge in Costa Rica. With her now well-known face, it took her fifteen days to evade the military checkpoints along the border’s blind spots. She finally arrived in Cartago, a mountainous province in Costa Rica’s Central Valley—more urban than rural. Doña Chica and her fellow “displaced” farmers—a term she began using almost daily—felt out of place. A farmer without land is like a fish out of water, they say.
They were cramped in Cartago, spent New Year’s 2019 in confusion and depression, with walls closing in on them. Little food, a few bottles of liquor to numb the pain of exile. Broken families, lost lands, and empty pockets. They had to find work in the city: construction work, or selling mangos at the Cartago market. But it felt strange to them. They weren’t producing the mangos themselves, depending on others. Ever since they had acquired their farms in Nueva Guinea, they’d only sold what they produced. And to make things worse, it was barely profitable.
“One time, we saw that we only had five plantains that we’d bought from the supermarket. We had to share them among many people. We didn’t have enough beans, which are essential for us; no cheese… Cooking with wood… For us, firewood adds a flavor that only nature can provide,” Doña Chica recalls.
In Cartago, going to the grocery store was a shock for them: “You can’t just go to the supermarket to ask for things or take what you want. It’s very different when you farm your own land and have what you need at hand.”
Through years of political activism, Doña Chica has found a way to express the struggles of the farmers. She began calling their lack of proper food and cramped living conditions in Cartago a “humanitarian crisis.” “Because of that crisis, we decided to rent land here in Upala. We were 23 families, but five chose to go to the United States. Eighteen families stayed, a total of 83 people. We’re finding ways to survive, because they took everything from us—our nationality, our property—but they didn’t take our farming knowledge or our hope for a free, democratic Nicaragua. And we continue to resist,” Doña Chica says, her voice filled with determination.
They arrived in Upala and built temporary shelters. Over time, they’ve improved their living conditions. The first time I visited their camp in 2021, in the central hall where the farmers gather for meetings, a statement painted on a wooden wall read, “Farming from exile, to resist and fight for freedom. Only the people save the people!” A mantra for their collective resistance.
And this resistance is not just about political activism that Doña Chica leads, but also about the daily struggles they face as farmers in Costa Rica. Navigating more complex regulations than in Nicaragua to market their agricultural and dairy products. With the support of international aid organizations and, above all, through their own efforts, they have managed to sustain themselves by selling cheese and cream. Recently, they installed a milking station, which speeds up the process. They also built a small room to process cheese, skim milk, and pasteurize. Doña Chica coordinates the dairy sales in San José. For now, it’s a small industry they hope to expand as the cows reproduce.
“We dream of being self-sustaining. So far, we’ve managed to secure food. We’ve been working on improving the housing, as there are many children and teenagers who deserve to live with dignity. So, we’re improving things for them here in exile. We have to move forward until we can return to Nicaragua, even though we don’t know when that will be, as the crisis shows no signs of improving,” says Doña Chica, rounding out her thoughts with a satisfied smile.
The farming families have already had children in the Upala camp. A new generation born in exile. Doña Chica—mother to her own children and, in some ways, to everyone in the camp—sees this new generation as a source of resilience for the dual goals of their lives and the camp itself: land for the farmers to cultivate and freedom for Nicaragua, but all framed by one of her most often-used words: “dignity.”
“This effort goes both ways—so they can have dignity or feel worthy of living here in exile. To them, this isn’t exile. But we’ve managed to teach them that working the land is important, as is community integration. We’re in a rural, farming area, and most of the people around us do the same work we do. So, that’s why we’re here, so the children don’t lose their farming culture. But we’re also making sure they can get an education. Many have already started university, and this year more will graduate without having stopped studying. “For us, it’s essential to think that they have to educate themselves, to become different kinds of people—useful people for our country, who can contribute to its development when we return,” says Doña Chica with conviction. Dusk settles over Upala. The rain has just passed, and the dogs stir from their sleep as the fire for dinner—a little after four in the afternoon—comes back to life. Doña Chica stands by the crackling firewood, the rich aroma of coffee filling the air in the rustic, picnic-style wooden dining area. The third meal of the day is a gift from the land the farmers work and nurture. Soon, it will be time to sleep, as they’ll need to start milking early in the morning. Doña Chica silences her cell phone.
