Nicaragua's Tragedy
I went to Nicaragua thirty-five years ago to report on the Sandinista revolution and on the war against it led by the US-backed “Contra” counter-revolutionaries. I found a country that fascinated and moved me, and it has remained close to my heart. Today I need to talk about the new anguish into which Nicaragua has been plunged.
The revolution that overthrew the dictator Anastasio Somoza in the 1980s was co-ordinated by the Frente Sandinista de Liberación Nacional or FSLN – the “Sandinistas,” in common parlance, named after Augusto Sandino, a revolutionary who had been assassinated by Somoza’s men. The Directorate of the FSLN was made up of nine people, three from each of the three “tendencies” which made the revolution together. There was an intellectual and urban tendency, which included the Vice-President, the novelist Sergio Ramirez, and the multi-talented poet, memoirist and novelist Gioconda Belli. Then there was what one might call an agrarian tendency, which believed that the way to make the revolution was by educating and politicizing the campesinos – the farmers and farmworkers. And lastly there were the armed guerrillas, led by the Ortega brothers, Daniel and Humberto.
I met most of the nine-person Directorate and it quickly became clear to me that they didn’t have much in common. Ramirez and Belli became, and still are, good friends of mine. The agrarian/Ho Chi Minh-ist group remained somewhat distant and opaque. And by the time I left Managua I had formed the strong feeling that Daniel Ortega and his ruthless and self-serving – and widely loathed - compañera Rosario Murillo were a real problem.
Time has shown how big a problem they are. In 1986 I believed that the greatest threat to a free Nicaragua was the United States’ economic blockade and support of the “Contra” counter-revolutionaries. Now it has become clear that the country’s greatest enemies lay within. Ortega and Murillo have become no-holds-barred fascist dictators at least as bad as the despot they once helped to overthrow, banning and jailing all opponents, assaulting the free press, the whole nine yards.
Nicaragua is a small country and its plight hasn’t aroused much international attention or outrage. But fascism is on the rise all around the world, and needs to be confronted in all its manifestations, wherever they occur. I want to use this platform, today, to allow those honorable Nicaraguan intellectuals I met long ago to speak about their country’s present discontents. Here are Sergio Ramirez, in the Guardian, and Gioconda Belli, on National Public Radio (NPR), telling it like it is. Please read what they have to say.
I hope the world listens. I hope you listen, and spread the word.
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‘A feeling of deja vu’: author Sergio Ramírez on ex-comrade Ortega and Nicaraguan history repeating
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/sep/18/sergio-ramirez-interview-nicaragua-ortega-novel?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other
Gioconda Belli:
https://www.npr.org/2021/09/17/1038395184/activist-discusses-the-tension-in-nicaragua-ahead-of-presidential-election
Thank you for highlighting this important issue. I hadn't heard about it before.
Lol if it’s in the Guardian it must be true! Just like Modi is a ‘fascist’ Ortega is another brutal Latin American dictator to you and your fellow left liberal “intellectual” ilk! I think the opposite of what you say is more likely closer to the truth. Living the good life in the West you are just another apologist and a propaganda tool for western interference in other countries affairs, in Lenin’s words a “useful idiot” for them. No wonder VS Naipaul didn’t think much of you.