MANAGUA -- A new brand of subversive is being born in a country with a history of traditional guerrilla movements: clean-cut youths who wear Hollister shirts and conspire on Facebook.

The cyber-revolution was inspired by a hunger strike launched this month by 1970s rebel leader Dora María Téllez, of Nicaragua's old-school revolutionary left, to protest what she calls the ''dictatorial intentions'' of President Daniel Ortega's government. At issue is a ruling by the Supreme Electoral Council to eliminate two minority political parties in the November municipal elections.

A small and unlikely group of students from well-to-do Managua families showed their solidarity through the simple gesture of forming a Facebook group called ''We Support Dora María Téllez.'' Within a week, more than 1,200 people had joined the Internet group, and the movement began to show signs of transcending the confines of cyberspace in a nation where citizens can vote at age 16.

The Facebook group posted daily Internet messages calling on its members to show up for nightly demonstrations at Téllez's protest camp at the main traffic roundabout in downtown Managua.

At first, the students responded by the dozens, and then by the hundreds. YouTube video posts from the various demonstrations provided an additional incentive for others to join. A linked Facebook group, ''Daniel Ortega Doesn't Represent Me,'' has attracted about 1,600 members.

Similar cyber-outreaches have taken place among youths elsewhere in Latin America.

In Venezuela, students used the technology last year to organize opposition to a controversial constitutional reform that would have given President Hugo Chávez broadened power and declared Venezuela a socialist state. The Dec. 2 referendum proposal was rejected by voters.

In February, a group of Colombians used Facebook to rally millions in a global protest against that nation's four-decade-old insurgency, known as the FARC. Demonstrators from Miami to Paris called for an end to violence and kidnappings carried out by the guerrillas. More than 700 captives are in FARC jungle encampments. The movement ''A Million Voices Against the FARC'' drew international attention.

4,000 IN MARCH

At the Managua gathering Friday night, about 4,000 people marched to downtown and called for democracy.

''Democracy yes, dictatorship no,'' chanted protesters -- many of them students who had followed the cyber-movement.

The protest was the largest so far against the government since Ortega took office Jan. 10, 2007.

''We as youth are already organized on the Internet, thanks to networking groups like Facebook and Messenger, so it's been natural [to use the Internet] to mobilize people,'' said Luciana Chamorro, a 17-year-old recent high school graduate who has become a driving organizational force in the online community.

Chamorro says that many students are increasingly frustrated by the current state of affairs in Nicaragua, both economic and political. But above all, she said, the recent Internet mobilization is spawning a social movement of energetic and educated youths who are organizing against a government they say is reducing democratic spaces for participation.

''We need a place to express ourselves. We need to find a space to channel our ideas into concrete actions,'' said Chamorro, the granddaughter of former President Violeta Barrios de Chamorro and legendary newspaper publisher Pedro Joaquín Chamorro, who was gunned down in 1978 for his fiery criticisms of the Somoza dictatorship.

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