People
out of power, but who want to be in power, are the more likely ones to shoot you from the shadows, where identity of the shooter is necessarily obscured. Shooting a
journalist with a sniper during a
live broadcast isn't the type of PR that governments enjoy receiving, so it's illogical that Ortega's side ordered that.
We have prior examples where pre-placed snipers shot at opposition demonstrations, but were proven to be highly likely to have been orchestrated by opposition leaders. One is the 2002 Venezuela coup. The coup leaders had pre-recorded their outrage statements which specifically mention "snipers" shooting at protestors: on an unplanned surprise route taken by marchers. e.g. they told everyone they were marching along one route, then partway along, several opposition leaders were suddenly adamant that the march must be re-routed, and only after they made the detour, the sniper shooting started and they played the pre-recorded (recorded several hours before the first shooting, but somehow knowing in detail that it was sniper fire) statement video on TV while the coup leaders enacted their takeover plan.
When talking about the right-wing in Latin America you need to realize the type of people we're talking about here. We're not talking armchair conservatives like most of the GOP supporters in America, we're talking about guys who would have fit right in with the Italian or German fascists of the 1930s - guys wearing a badge, who will shoot you in the back, then dress you up as their enemy so they can claim cash bonuses, militias who will chainsaw villager's children in half as a
warning, or get you to go to one of their rallies, then have you shot at from the shadows so they can blame someone else for it, and take power through violence.
So there's a pattern to these things: Nicaragua for example has a strong history of right-wing terrorism, with the Contras et al. And in the current situation, you have the right-wing clearly setting fire to things and then trying to say the left-wing did it:
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/apr/22/journalist-among-25-killed-as-unrest-escalates-in-nicaraguaIn the city of León, university offices were torched after riot police broke up a peaceful protest. The ruling Sandinista National Liberation Front’s digital publication El 19 Digital blamed the fires on “groups of vandals”, but protesters claimed they were started by government sympathisers to justify its increasingly repressive measures.
e.g. the elected party's web journal just says that the university was set on fire by just "vandals" - a fairly non-politicized statement. But the opposition is going the full conspiracy route saying that pro-
government groups set it on fire as a false-flag operation. But if it was a false-flag operation designed to enact draconian powers, then the government would have blamed it on opposition parties, not just downplayed it as random vandalism. If you give it a bit of thought, it's the opposition who are trying to leverage the violent incident for political gain, here. What happened was that the original protest wasn't broken up with enough
force to be used in the media, so the protestors escalated it to setting things on fire, and when the government then
downplayed the fires, the opposition had to escalate again to calling the whole thing a false-flag operation. It's a classic situation you see by reactionaries who seek to create a coup scenario - the government is merely
responding to events of the opposition's design, but if they don't respond
enough then things escalate to try and provoke them, and then at the end of the day you create conspiracy theories to try and say the government orchestrated the whole thing.
Also, there seem to be an odd bias of these left-wing governments only blowing up left-wing institutions during these supposed false-flag operations. e.g. they set fire to universities and free medical clinics, never banks or corporate HQs. e.g. in these types of incidents
someone trashes public education institutions and public health infrastructure: but banks and other corporate infrastructure are very rarely targeted.
All the available evidence, and some basic logic, says right-wingers did it, but the right-wingers (and pro-right media, basically Latin American versions of Fox News) turn around then says "clearly the left-wing government did it".