Adiós Muchachos: A Memoir of the Sandinista Revolution 9780822394594

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ADIÓS MUCHACHOS

american encounters/global interactions A series edited by Gilbert M. Joseph and Emily S. Rosenberg This series aims to stimulate critical perspectives and fresh interpretive frameworks for scholarship on the history of the imposing global presence of the United States. Its primary concerns include the deployment and contestation of power, the construction and deconstruction of cultural and political borders, the fluid meanings of intercultural encounters, and the complex interplay between the global and the local. American Encounters seeks to strengthen dialogue and collaboration between historians of U.S. international relations and area studies specialists. The series encourages scholarship based on multiarchival historical research. At the same time, it supports a recognition of the representational character of all stories about the past and promotes critical inquiry into issues of subjectivity and narrative. In the process, American Encounters strives to understand the context in which meanings related to nations, cultures, and political economy are continually produced, challenged, and reshaped.

a book in the series latin america in translation/en traducción/em tradução Sponsored by the Duke–University of North Carolina Program in Latin American Studies

ADIÓS MUCHACHOS

Sergio Ramírez

A Memoir of the Sandinista Revolution

Translated by Stacey Alba D. Skar

Duke University Press Durham and London

2012

∫ 2012 Duke University Press All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper $ Designed by Heather Hensley Typeset in Warnock Pro by Keystone Typesetting, Inc. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data appear on the last printed page of this book.

To Dora María Téllez

The epic song was a newspaper carried off by the wind . . . ernesto cardenal, oracle on managua

Contents

preface to the spanish edition published in 2007 The Shadow of the Caudillo

xi

acknowledgments

xix

introduction

1

1. Partial Confession

5

2. Saintly Living

17

3. The Age of Innocence

35

4. The Swan over the Burning Coals

49

5. The Age of Malice

65

6. Monkey on a Leash

81

7. Manifest Destiny

93

8. The Likely Number Thirteen

113

9. Heaven on Earth

127

10. The Year of the Pig

143

11. Rivers of Milk and Honey

159

12. The Palace at Last!

173

13. Saturn’s Jaws

191

epilogue

207

chronology, 1979–1990

211

glossary

223

index

229

P R E FAC E TO T H E S PA N I S H E D I T I O N P U B L I S H E D I N 2 0 0 7

The Shadow of the Caudillo

W

hen this memoir was originally published, twenty years had passed since the 1979 triumph of the Sandinista Revolution, one of Latin America’s major twentieth-century events. With the publication of this new edition, I believe that the book deserves some opening remarks, given that the Sandinista Front again came to power following Daniel Ortega’s electoral victory in the November 2006 elections. The revolution lasted for a decade of illusions and confrontations, culminating in a defeat at the polls for that same Daniel Ortega in 1990. I stood beside him then as his vice-presidential candidate. Violeta Chamorro won that election in the midst of a war that was nearing its end. Ever since then, Daniel has continued to run repeatedly as a presidential candidate. He was defeated in 1996 by the Liberal Party’s caudillo, Arnoldo Alemán, and then in 2001 by Enrique Bolaños, also from the Liberal Party. That was until his fourth opportunity, when he finally managed to secure a victory. From an international perspective, this triumph could easily be perceived as part of the new Left that has risen to power in several Latin American countries. This shift marks the failure of the neoliberal economic model imposed at the end of the cold war, which also coincided with the end of the Sandinista Revolution. However, Nicaragua’s case is really quite different, even though it would also be impossible to assert any homogeneous model for the experiences being lived in Brazil, Argentina, Uruguay, Venezuela, Bolivia, or Ecuador.

Daniel Ortega survived the series of defeats hiding behind an unwavering vow to fight for the poor and most marginalized. He never ceded in his rhetoric except when his electoral campaign strategists advised him to lower his tone or keep quiet. At the same time, he knew how to communicate with the Sandinista Front members around him by appealing more to personal loyalties than to ideological loyalties from years past. Meanwhile, he eliminated his adversaries, especially those who threatened his leadership, through periodic purges. None of that would have been sufficient in itself, though, if not for his political pact with Arnoldo Alemán, the Liberal caudillo sentenced to twenty years in prison for money laundering in 2003 due to illegal undertakings during his presidency. This pact involved deep reforms to the Political Constitution, introduced in 2000 and then again in 2005. It was devised to implement a redistribution of power and to facilitate complete control of state entities. It left control of the courts, the electoral system, and the Comptroller’s Office up to the personal will of both signatories, which facilitated appointments for political supporters. This was clear enough from the sole example of the Supreme Court, whose membership increased to seventeen, a scandalous number for a poor country of barely 5 million inhabitants. The only objective was to distribute appointments among unconditional supporters. Political pacts between caudillos are not new in Nicaraguan history. For similar reasons, General Anastasio Somoza García, founder of the Somoza dynasty, signed a ‘‘pact of generals’’ on behalf of the Liberal Party in 1950 with General Emiliano Chamorro, who signed on behalf of the Conservative Party. Besides the distribution of appointments and parliamentary seats, that pact protected a constitutional reform that allowed Somoza to run as a candidate for reelection in 1956, when he was fatally shot by a young poet by the name of Rigoberto López Pérez. With the Ortega-Alemán pact in 2000, and through a constitutional reform, Daniel managed to have the number of votes needed to win an election in the first round reduced to 35 percent. Then he won the 2006 election with 38 percent of the vote against a fragmented opposition. In return, he allowed the courts to release Alemán from prison by declaring him valetudinarian, in other words, disabled due to mental decrepitude. This was an unusual measure that can only be explained by the judges’ subservience. With this verdict, Alemán was first placed under house arrest, then restricted to Managua, and finally confined within Nicara-

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gua’s borders, which allows him to travel everywhere in the country on a proselytizing campaign. Meanwhile, Daniel won the unconditional support of Cardinal Miguel Obando y Bravo, longtime enemy of the revolution and the epitome of the Right. He is now a member of his government. Daniel similarly aligned himself with former leaders from the Nicaraguan Resistance, the Contras who fought against Sandinismo during the eighties, advised and financed by the cia. One of the members of the Contra leadership that operated out of Miami was Jaime Morales Carazo, and he was chosen this time by Daniel as his vice-presidential running mate. Some view these alliances as a display of political skill, or as the cold application of a pragmatic vision. I have reason to see them more as the consequence of a loss of ethics. Moral principles held great importance in the epic story of the revolution, though they have now been replaced with ambition for personal power that forgoes any ethical consideration. It is a power that no longer serves any transcendental project, and it is just like any other traditional power in the nation’s history. There is a confused contradiction in which the passionate discourse from the Left finds itself making fundamental concessions to the most intransigent Right, to the point of becoming identical with it. A cruel and painful example is the criminalization of therapeutic abortion, even to save the life of the mother, which was recently ratified in a reform of the penal code. Therapeutic abortion had been permitted by law in Nicaragua since the mid-nineteenth century, even prior to the 1893 Liberal Revolution. It has now been made a crime punishable by years in prison, thanks to Daniel’s support, as proof of his shift to practicing Catholicism. Yet this is not Catholicism’s liberation theology of the eighties, but rather Cardinal Obando’s regressive Catholicism, which persecuted priests who were politically committed to the revolution. Despite this, from outside of Nicaragua’s borders, the question could arise as to whether there exists any continuity between Daniel’s current government and the revolution of the eighties in the past century, in which we were both protagonists. I say that there is not, and a rereading of this book while faced with the current reality confirms that for me. The revolution was a transcendent historical phenomenon that when it triumphed engulfed the entire nation in its storm. It had two dimensions back then: idealism and power. The first was based on a handful of ethical and ideological principles defended with youthful passion, and the second

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involved the articulation of a political and military apparatus that would serve to support the project of political, economic, and social transformation, which would take several generations to develop and solidify. The Sandinista Front that supported Daniel once again as a candidate in the 2006 election differs both in spirit and in nature from the one that took up arms and conquered power in 1979. It is different from that Sandinista Front that persevered in a ferocious struggle to implement a program for the people. Despite the mistakes, false conceptions, and many setbacks, it was originally inspired by a kind of mysticism with deeply held ethics, now replaced with ambition for personal power. The return of this other Sandinista Front to the government, really Daniel Ortega’s return, along with that of his wife, Rosario Murillo, has not restored the original ideals, which are even more blurred. Nor is it the same political project, because its articulation responds to goals that ceased being revolutionary some time ago. This means that there are vast differences in both respects. From a rhetorical perspective, however, Daniel’s discourse has not changed. It is a discourse that is marked by exacerbated radicalism; fundamentalist and monotonous perceptions of United States imperialism, European colonialism, and neocolonialism; and class warfare viewed through the same lens of the old Soviet manuals. Those were very widespread beliefs in the eighties, fruit of the revolution’s youthful spirit of rebellion, but there was a very real connection between words and actions in those days, as misguided as those actions sometimes became. What’s more, that passion was the enemy of scheming and duplicity, which are both vices that come with age. Today, the loftier the flights of rhetoric become, the less effective the discourse evaporating in stagnant air with nothing to show for it. Back then, words corresponded to actions because, as the pages in this book illustrate, there were no great capitalists among the Sandinistas. They could then be demonized in all fairness because faithfulness to principles emphasized a rejection of material goods. It was a code of conduct. Now reality dissociates actions from words because the current Sandinista Front has so many great capitalists in its ranks, truly wealthy ones. Their presence contradicts the aggressive words of a discourse that, as it looks to the past, makes those words fall like rotten fruit. That is to say, the words lack that essence that was so abundant before: credibility. Furthermore, the devil of duplicity does not stop at spreading his sulfur

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on the rhetorical stage. Despite the diatribes against the United States, and despite the fact that the International Monetary Fund is ‘‘imperialism’s preferred financial instrument,’’ Daniel’s government signs agreements with the imf that require it to exercise fiscal restraint and to maintain the same structural adjustment programs that the former governments on the Right themselves signed. Similarly, while he pompously attacks caftadr, the Free Trade Agreement with the United States, signed by Enrique Bolaños’s former government, he complies strictly with its application. The left hand never knows what the right hand is doing, or it knows very well. I do not believe that it would be in the best interest of the country to break ties with the imf, or to denounce the cafta-dr; nor do I believe that there should be a return to confiscating private business assets. However, the artificial climate of hostility and distrust that Daniel’s vicious rhetoric creates, both nationally and internationally, is not beneficial for a country afflicted with the chronic illness of poverty, which cannot be cured with words. What I am demanding is coherence between words and actions. The times changed, and the political climate changed in Nicaragua and around the world. Many of the Sandinista Front’s former allies died, or disappeared, or became disillusioned. The landscape was abruptly altered. Yet in emotional and ideological terms, Daniel continues seeing the same static image from before, no matter how much he shades it in pragmatism. If he does use some telescope to shape his vision, it is one that President Hugo Chávez lends him from Venezuela, appearing before his eyes as the new paradigm of the old third world, and it is a telescope that also leaves his hands covered in oil. In this way, his discourse becomes obsolete, just as his proposals are, full of what are now known as regressive utopias. He hopes to recapture a world that no longer exists, that of the cold war and old alignments, the ghost in rags of the third world as a geopolitical concept, the decrepit club of the Nonaligned, as if nostalgia were sufficient in an environment that has changed radically over the last two decades. The other noteworthy example of this delusion is the persistence with which he resists the meaning of democracy. Democracy demands respect and strengthening of institutions, the very ones he has chosen to put at his personal disposal, even when their effectiveness presupposes alternating between parties in power, rather than political continuism. He has chosen authoritarianism. It is what all these years in the opposition party convinced him to do while he was accumulating power and playing games

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with Arnoldo Alemán. While this choice reveals long-standing ideological allegiances, it also reveals how he truly defines power, as a caudillo. This regressive proclivity guided his creation of the Citizen Power Councils (cpcs). These are said to be instruments of direct or participative democracy, designed to compensate for how a representative, formal democracy operates. Yet he sees this as having little value because, again, it conflicts with the old ghost of proletarian democracy, always rattling its chains. While it is true that the cpc’s most recent model is Venezuela’s Citizen Power, instituted by Chávez, it is more reminiscent of People’s Power in Cuba, or the Sandinista Defense Committees that were instituted in the eighties, following the Cuban model. In any case, the cpcs have little to do with current reality in Nicaragua, or with the way society behaves, resistant to any organizational model that is closed and exclusive. Also worth noting is the peculiar fact that these parallel Citizen Power structures have not only been assembled extralegally, but they also seek to replace the legitimate authorities that the Sandinista Front already controls, among them a large number of municipal councils. Nostalgia for paradise lost is stronger than logic. At the head of the cpcs is Daniel’s wife, Rosario Murillo. Organized town by town, neighborhood by neighborhood, block by block, they spiral upward to what is called a ‘‘national cabinet.’’ This is a supreme authority taken from a magician’s hat, and here the delegates from the councils sit beside the ministers who are also called ‘‘ministers of people’s power’’ or ‘‘citizen power,’’ just as in Venezuela. The councils exert influence downward with decision-making and fiscal authority over a multiplicity of political and administrative matters, from authorizing loans for the microcredit ‘‘Zero Usury’’ program to approving names of recipients for the ‘‘Zero Hunger’’ program, which donates cattle, swine, poultry, and farming equipment to rural families. They can also demand the removal of civil servants at any level, and it was officially announced that they are to have ‘‘voluntary’’ authority as watchdog groups throughout the country on par with the police. Furthermore, these committees are not pluralistic entities, which would give them easy access to diverse sectors of the population. The citizens who compose them are all militants or government party supporters, and they are controlled by political secretaries or local commissioners who represent that very same party. It is a net that is sown with the same threads and with the same knots. While it could seem excessive, it is not, because it guarantees control, just as it ensures power for the long term.

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In this way, someone could in fact claim that there really is a correlation between the revolutionary project from the eighties and the one today, and that would be the desire to remain in power. Yet there exists a fundamental difference. It may be true that the Sandinista leadership’s message back then was explicit regarding the revolution’s messianic nature, which implied a continued permanence of the party in command. However, it was never a project surrounding any one individual, much less an individual and his family. The implicit slogan was from traditional organic Leninism, which says ‘‘men may come and go, the party remains.’’ That messianic party, its collective leadership with Daniel as a primus inter pares and a Leninist-inspired structure and discipline, no longer exists. It has been entirely replaced by the personal will of Daniel himself, and his wife, Rosario Murillo. Once more, as has occurred throughout the history of Latin America, the family becomes the mold into which a political party is poured, and the state is emptied. Defying time, the shadow of the caudillo reappears. Meanwhile, the old revolutionary project now clearly lies in the obscurity of the last century, very distant from what it once was in terms of its ideals and structures. Daniel now demonstrates an unequivocal desire to remain in power. He follows his own logic that his personal project, interrupted in 1990, is once again a long-term endeavor. He is also making use of long-term structures for this, ones that are necessary for a caudillo, just as on so many other occasions in Nicaraguan and Latin American history. The cpcs are a cornerstone of this. However, if he wants to remain in power, as it appears he does, he will also need a constitutional reform that will allow him to run for reelection or that at least will allow the election of his wife, who now seems to share governance for all intents and purposes. For someone who was elected with 38 percent of the vote, while the other side had a polarized majority against him, the search for consensus would make good sense. Even so, Daniel’s actions tend to move away from consensus, and to again polarize society. First and foremost is his intention to remain in power given that reelection and family dynasties have been the most pernicious vices of Nicaraguan politics, and always with tragic consequences. It was the cause, no less, of the Sandinista Revolution that defeated the Somoza family. In the realm of past illusions, filled with the idea of permanent revolution, consensus was not deemed necessary. Now, however, an intractable vision such as his does nothing more than ignore the landscape or perceive

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it in a way that no longer exists. In today’s political landscape, society demands the right to plurality and dissidence; freedom of expression and thought; diverse sources of information; transparency in government actions; accountability; and the presence of social and political organizations that do not answer to a single interest; in other words, everything that forms the fabric of democracy. This landscape is the product of many years of struggle and experience. It underscores democratic progress, marked by the very pluralism that today surrounds a multiplicity of interests and opinions that cannot coexist except through diversity. Consequently, aspiring to only one form of political conduct, dictated from the top down, has little possibility for success as long as society holds on to its present structures: independent media; civil society organizations; political parties; and businesses of all sizes, with small ones being the most abundant. Furthermore, one of the revolution’s most visible institutional legacies is the existence of the National Army and the National Police. Both function as modern and professional entities that are protected under the Political Constitution. They have earned the prestige they enjoy in Nicaragua precisely by declaring themselves free from any allegiance to a political party, a family, or an oligarchy, without any ‘‘doublespeak,’’ as the army chief of staff has stated publicly. This is also part of the new landscape, and it robs authoritarianism of one of its traditional, fundamental features: the unconditional support of the military and security forces. Once again, Nicaraguan history is at a decisive crossroads. It will be necessary to employ each and every resource of democratic conscience to protect us from any authoritarian project. We must strive to preserve the constitutional character of the military and security forces, to reclaim the judicial system’s independence, and to prevent continuism in the form of reelection and dynastic succession. In other words, institutions must be protected from the shadow of the caudillo. sergio ramírez

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masatepe, september 2007

Acknowledgments

I

want to thank Juan Cruz and Sealtiel Alatriste for conspiring to induce me to write these memoirs, and Carmen Lacambra as well. To Saúl Sosnowski, associate provost for international affairs, and a professor in the Spanish and Portuguese Department, at the University of Maryland, College Park, for his support. To Edmundo Jarquín, for the time he took to revise the rough draft and for his valuable annotations. To the historian Roberto Cajina and to my assistant Betty de Solís, for their long-distance support. And to Dora María Téllez, to Claudia Miranda, and to my son Sergio, for sharing their memories with me.

Introduction

It was all left in time, It all burned in the distance . . . joaquín pasos, war song of the things

T

he year 1999 marks twenty years since the triumph of the Sandinista Revolution. It is becoming part of the past, but it still rises up like a restless tide under my window to astound and move me. Nothing has ever been the same for me since then. As I find myself growing older, full of memories that always return with that tide, I tell myself that I would have missed it altogether if I had been born a bit sooner or a bit later in that century of illusions. Then, just as someone who awakens from a bad dream, I check to make sure that I did not miss it. It is there, in all its majesty, in all its glory and its misery, its anguish in my mind, and its joys. It is just as I lived it, not how anyone told me it was. Bernal Díaz del Castillo penned his soldier’s memoirs in his retirement in Santiago de Guatemala because someone else wanted to tell him the story of his own life. Francisco López de Gómara, who had never taken part himself in the adventure of the conquest of Mexico, had recently published his General History of the Indies written in Valladolid. That was when Díaz del Castillo, out of pride, began writing his True History of the Conquest of New Spain. I did not carry a weapon in the revolution, and I never wore a military uniform. Nor do I find myself at the verge of forgetfulness due to old age, and no one is contradicting me with a different book of the events that I experienced. In fact, the revolution has run out of chroniclers at this end of a century of broken dreams, after having had so many during the years when it inspired the

world. I myself keep over 500 books in my library that were written in every language during those years. In fact, contrary to Bernal, it is precisely due to the excess of forgetting that I write this book. It is an unjustifiable forgetting. The Sandinista Revolution is missing from the lists currently being made of the twentieth century’s great events. Perhaps this is because it faded away without ever changing history, as we believed it would, or because today many think it was not worthwhile, an endeavor that ended in great frustration and considerable disillusion. Or perhaps it was mismanaged. But was it worth it in the end? The Sandinista Revolution was collective utopia. Just as it defined a generation of Nicaraguans who made it possible and who fought to sustain it, it also gave a generation around the world a reason to live and believe. That same generation fought to defend it in many trenches and on many fronts when the war against the Contras and the embargo from the United States began. They came from Europe, the United States, Canada, and Latin America, promoting solidarity committees; collecting funds, medicine, school supplies, farming equipment; and writing in newspapers, gathering signatures, pressuring legislatures, and organizing marches. People from everywhere kept coming to Nicaragua to help in any way they could. It was a solidarity movement only matched by the solidarity that the Republican cause awakened during the years of the Spanish Civil War in the 1930s. There were North Americans, French, and Belgians who gave their lives, murdered by the Contras, while they worked to build schools, plant crops, practice medicine, and teach throughout rural Nicaragua during the war. The Sandinista Revolution altered the structure of international relations during the cold war. Then, when it became the principle focus of United States foreign policy during Ronald Reagan’s imperialistic presidency, it created an immense solidarity worldwide to help defend David from Goliath. In a less-than-heroic end of the century, it is worth remembering that the Sandinista Revolution was the culmination of a rebellious age and the triumph of numerous converging beliefs and feelings shared by a generation that abhorred imperialism and that believed in Socialism and national liberation movements: Ahmed Ben Bella in Algeria, Patrice Lumumba in the Congo, Ho Chi Minh in Vietnam, and Che Guevara and Fidel Castro in Latin America. It was a generation that witnessed the triumph of the Cuban Revolution and the end of colonialism in Africa and Indochina; a

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INTRODUCTION

generation that protested in the streets against the Vietnam War; the generation that read Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth and Charles Wright Mill’s Listen, Yankee. It was also the period of the Latin American Boom writers, who were all from the Left back then. It was the generation of long hair and sandals, of Woodstock and the Beatles, the rebellion in the streets of Paris in May 1968, the Tlatelolco massacre in Mexico that same year. It was the same generation that watched Chilean president Salvador Allende stand firm in the La Moneda Palace and that cried for Víctor Jara’s broken hands following the coup d’état in September 1973. Finally, in Nicaragua, it found retribution for the lost dreams in Chile, and even further back, for the lost dreams of the Spanish Republic, passed down through generations since the 1930s. It was the Left. It was an era that was at the same time an epic. What’s more, the revolution transformed feelings within Nicaragua over an entire decade. It altered the way we perceived the world and the nation itself because it created a desire for identity. It changed values, individual behavior, social relations, family ties, and customs. It created a new ethics of solidarity and detachment from material things, a new everyday culture. It even changed language and ways of dressing. It also opened an enormous space for political participation, above all for young people, providing a historic sense of generational breaking from the past. Even so, many who fought to conquer power first and defend it later, the generation of the revolution’s youth, were doubly frustrated in the end. This was not due to losing the election in 1990—a problem that could have been remedied since, after all, losing is within the parameters of democracy—but because the electoral defeat brought with it a collapse of the ethical principles that defined the revolution’s foundation. Consequently, it sowed disappointment, skepticism, and resentment in the hearts of many young people, who began to see themselves as the lost generation. The world changed at the end of the eighties. The entire framework of ideals broke down, and the illusions collapsed as well. Yet in Nicaragua, there were glimpses of the first real model for change that the country had ever experienced, its first chance for a future in sight. It was not simply a top-down revolution trying to create a new order with decrees and measures, but a revolution that took place among the people. With this, once the barriers had been broken, a new way of living and feeling became possible. It was a phenomenon with instantaneous outcomes, a transformative force that carried everyone with it, that filled

INTRODUCTION

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3

spaces that had remained empty for centuries, and that created the illusion of a future, the idea that everything, without exception, became possible, achievable, with complete contempt for the past. It was a great tide, a bolt of lightning. Today, for many in Nicaragua and internationally, the revolution continues to represent a kind of nostalgia for the way life used to be and old memories. It is remembered just as one recalls a lost love, but it is no longer a reason to live. Now and then, when I visit the homes of friends who live outside the country, I hear Carlos Mejía Godoy’s revolutionary songs midway through the evening during some cocktails. It is as if they are paying me, and themselves, homage, and I listen to the music from back then with heavy sadness. It is a feeling of something I sought and was unable to find, but that remains pending in my life; and as time passes, I am afraid I may never ever find it. The revolution did not bring justice for the oppressed as had been hoped; nor did it manage to create wealth and development. Instead, its greatest benefit was democracy, sealed in 1990 with the acknowledgment of electoral defeat. As a paradox of history, this is its most obvious legacy, although it was not its most passionate objective. Other benefits also remain, albeit hidden under the wave of disaster that also buried its ethical dreams. I am convinced that these dreams will return sooner or later to inspire a new generation that will have learned from the mistakes, the weaknesses, and the lies of the past. I was there. Just as Dickens in the first paragraph of A Tale of Two Cities, I still believe that ‘‘it was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair.’’

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INTRODUCTION

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Partial Confession

S

ergio, my eldest, and his sisters, María and Dorel, were born in San José, Costa Rica, Central America’s peaceful oasis from the clandestine cemeteries of the sixties. My wife, Tulita, and I had lived there during our virtual exile since we were newlyweds. Afterward, we all went to Berlin in the German Democratic Republic for two splendid years. This was thanks to a writer’s grant that also allowed me to see all the German expressionist films at the Arsenal cinema. I saw all of Brecht in the Berliner Ensemble on the other side of the Wall, and I spent long afternoons contemplating Lucas Cranach’s paintings in the picture gallery at the Dahlem Museum and enjoying matinees with complimentary tickets to the Berlin Philharmonic conducted by Von Karajan. Those were also years of marches in the snow through all of Kurfürstendamm to Nollendorfplatz to protest Augusto Pinochet’s military junta in Chile or the Greek colonels, or to celebrate Portugal’s Carnation Revolution. Then we finally returned to Costa Rica, with no plans other than to overthrow Anastasio Somoza Debayle’s dictatorship. Sergio is finally writing his thesis, which is about the market for low-fat dairy products. By the time this book is published, he will have already graduated in business management. Today, for example, he left very early this morning for Camoapa, one of the country’s cattle regions, busy working on his research. He is still single, although I know his private feelings because, in the end, after so many twists and turns, we are good friends and trust each

other. His plan now is to specialize in systems analysis, perhaps at the Comillas Pontifical University in Madrid, or at the University of Maryland. While I am not very familiar with that science, he has explained it to me. It is of vital importance to the modern world and works to organize personnel and supplies according to advanced mathematical calculations, similar to armies, but applied to businesses. Born in 1965, he lived the disruptions of a life of moving from place to place, the same as his two sisters. They had their own country, Nicaragua, which they did not even know since they were children of exile. When we went to Berlin, they missed San José, and then in Berlin, by the time they spoke only German with each other, they did not want to leave their friends in the Wilmersdorf neighborhood. It was worse for them back in San José when I was completely devoted to the struggle against Somoza, and even more when I returned to Managua in 1978. This was despite an order for my arrest from the dictatorship—something they never knew about—and with a death threat from ‘‘El Chigüín,’’ (the kid), Somoza’s son. My departure left them and my wife deep in despair, in the worst kind of waiting, because everything in Nicaragua was already marked by death. It was the color of the landscape in which the people moved about. Since I have been digging up memories lately, I found a folder with all the letters my children sent to me in Managua telling me about their childhood routines. Sergio’s are written on squared pages torn from his school notebooks, and María and Dorel’s are on pastel-colored stationery with printed designs that they must have brought from Berlin, with ladybugs, daisies, and wild mushrooms in between the words glück viel glück (luck, good luck). Read in a far-off place, in hiding, those letters seemed full of extraordinary events. It feels that way again now since they do not show any wear, nothing that time would have erased, and they always tremble in my hands like live fish out of the fishbowl that had been our life until then. I later returned to San José. During the final insurrection, our house in Los Yoses became a center for conspiracy, a storehouse for supplies, a treasurer’s office, a barracks, a public relations office, and a safe house. For them, those months involved arriving home from school to find people coming and going as if it were a big market. The living room and hallways were packed full of boxes with medical supplies, bundles of uniforms, and rows of boots. That was until the revolution was finally victorious, and once more they watched me leave one night without knowing if I would see them again. Then they all came to settle in Managua at the end of

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1979, practically strangers and yet missed. They landed in their country, which was so unknown, unfamiliar and uncertain to them, where everything was being reinvented, turned upside down and improvised, and the future was glowing in the distant horizon. They walked into the house full of empty rooms where we would live from then on. Sergio was always shy and reserved, unlike María, who quickly adopted the general enthusiasm and at age thirteen began experimenting with her gift for leadership. Dorel, only nine, was just happy that we were really all going to be together now, which is not what happened, because it was already written that they would be without me once again as I dedicated myself to the revolution’s nonstop schedule. The National Literary Crusade began, and all three wanted to enlist, but Dorel was still too young. There is a photo of her with long pigtails standing next to Fidel Castro when he came to our home. That was on the night of July 19, 1980, the revolution’s first anniversary. He is speaking to her in the photo, and she has a very sad, painful look on her face. We had to take her to the hospital a few hours later to have her appendix removed. Sergio and María had already gone by then, leaving with the boisterous literacy contingents dressed in their gray peasant shirts and carrying their brigadista backpacks to the homes and districts in the depths of rural Nicaragua. This was the Nicaragua of the mountains they did not know, and they were not the only ones. The whole other Nicaragua of the cities was unfamiliar with it. This was how Sergio came to teach reading and writing in Muan, near the Rama River towards the Caribbean coast. He lived there in the adobe and palm-roof house belonging to Don Pedro and Doña María, who were also his pupils. It was a location only accessible by foot or by horseback. Don Pedro was a patriarch who was obeyed by all of his relatives, his brothers, nephews, cousins, friends, and godchildren, all scattered throughout the village. They never ignored his orders to come every night to classes at his house where Sergio had set up a chalkboard outside near the fire. María taught as well, in Los García, near the town of Santa Lucía in Boaco. Doña Ofelia was the owner of the house and head of another large family. Her husband was also named Don Pedro. Already very advanced in age, he wanted to learn, and he set about sharpening pencils early in the morning and preparing his workbooks so that the fourteen-year-old girl, my daughter, could teach him in front of the chalkboard. However, this Don Pedro was very old, very deaf, and very blind, and he was not able to

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master the letters. For years, María continued to refer to Doña Ofelia as her other ‘‘mom.’’ María brought all of them one day from the mountains to show them the ocean they had never seen, Doña Ofelia and her nine children listening with fear to the sound of the waves breaking on a Pacific Ocean beach, trembling with fear with their feet in the water. Doña Ofelia was her other ‘‘mom’’ in an era when you could speak naturally about new love, an age of innocence that was magical, a spell, an illusion that began to crumble so soon. The news Sergio received during the war from the other Don Pedro became increasingly sporadic. No one would be left in his village, some kidnapped by the Contras, others fighting alongside them, and we never discovered on which side this Don Pedro, the one from Muan, had ended up, he and all his relatives. Later, with the country already at war, all three, Sergio, María, and Dorel, went to pick coffee on the plantations in Matagalpa and Jinotega with the Sandinista Youth Brigades, which they all belonged to. Sergio also worked as a volunteer translator for groups of Germans who came to Nicaragua to help with the harvest. One of those groups was headed by Henning Schörf, the mayor of Bremerhavena, who was so tall that everyone came to their doors just to watch him walk by. Then the Sandinista Youth needed María as an organizer for the night school in the Acahualinca neighborhood, located on the shore of Lake Managua, where people live at the mouths of the sewers and garbage dumps. So she left the German School, and that was a problem for my wife who did not understand how anyone could serve a revolution by renouncing a bilingual education. At age fifteen, María joined the women’s battalion ‘‘Erlinda López’’ that had its barracks in the San Judas neighborhood. She stood guard there many weeknights, furious that I wanted to have one of my bodyguards keep an eye on her, saying ‘‘I’m not a little girl anymore, Dad.’’ It was even worse when she was mobilized for a short time, with the war now escalating, to Planes de Bilán in the Jinotega Mountains. She left me a goodbye note, which I have here in front of me, telling me that she was going to fulfill her duty ‘‘somewhere in Nicaragua,’’ ready to shed her own blood if necessary. I hid letters like those from my wife. In any case, the eps (Sandinista Popular Army) eventually declared that war was for men and that women would be sent to the rear. Even so, she returned with Leishmaniasis on her ankle. It is an illness known as mountain leprosy, which is transmitted by an insect, the sand fly, ulcerating the skin to the point of exposing the bone.

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Tulita even went herself to pick cotton on the Punta Ñata plantation on the Cosigüina Peninsula. She spent two months there as headmistress for a brigade of professors and students from the Jesuit Central American University. She could write a book about that period if she wanted to. They would go into the fields early in the morning with the sun beating down on them all day, and return late in the afternoon, exhausted, to weigh the sacks of cotton on the roman balance scales. She could also tell about keeping a careful watch at night so that the young men would stay out of the women’s quarters. It was, after all, a contingent from a Catholic university. Even so, the couples found ways to meet anyway, in the cotton fields or on the cliffs by the sea with the waves breaking below in dense streaks of foam. From there you can see the lights from the towns in El Salvador on the other side of the gulf. There is also the story of the wedding party one night between two men who wanted to get married, one with a mosquito net veil and a crown of wildflowers. The couple, along with everyone else, refused to eat anything but the same ration consumed by the cotton pickers—steamed plantains, rice glop, and a stale tortilla—because it was time not only to fight for others but to live as others did. Now Sergio goes everyday to Hercules Gym, lifts weights, and subscribes to bodybuilding magazines. He is a big guy, over six feet tall and weighing more than 220 pounds, but at age eighteen, when he decided to give up his studies in his first year of civil engineering to go off to war, he was a weakling with a peach fuzz mustache, beanpole thin, and very similar in appearance to my father who was skinny his whole life. It was entirely his decision. No one could have forced him to serve in military duty with me standing in the way. I also have no doubt that he did it out of respect for me, since I was at the pinnacle of power. That way no one could say that I was preaching a defense of the revolution while I kept my son out of harm’s way. Everyone in my family was involved, although we did not really talk about it since there were few opportunities to sit down and discuss it. We were all deeply committed to a cause that we believed was fundamentally ethical in nature. There is a photo of Daniel Ortega and myself when we were candidates for president and vice-president during the 1984 electoral campaign. It was taken in Managua on July 26 at a ceremony in the ‘‘Roberto Huembes’’ market plaza, which was a send-off for the ‘‘Julio Buitrago’’ Sandinista Youth contingent, where my son was. That photo shows us leaning on the

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platform railing and laughing because one of the recruits, in the commotion below, had a pie thrown in his face, reminiscent of the Buster Keaton gags. The photo turned out so well, the laughter so natural, that it was later used on campaign posters. I am there laughing, and no one who sees that photo, not even now, would guess that, despite the laughter, which does not seem forced, I am overcome by such grief that it is like suffocating, drowning, feeling like being immersed in turbulent water where you cannot swim, where you are unable to move and waiting to see what will come, the inertia of fate that carries you floating adrift. Later that same night, as the recruits were leaving, the truck horn blared. Sergio was already at the door when Tulita and I rushed to say goodbye. He looked skinny, even skinnier in that olive green uniform, the hint of a moustache on his slender face under his tattered cap, lifting his big backpack off the ground where, when he was not looking, his mother had stuffed things to eat, some cough syrup, cream for athlete’s foot, a prayer leaflet, and a scapular sewn in the pockets of a couple of fatigue shirts. Then she said to him, I will not forget: ‘‘You know already, be brave.’’ Maybe it was just to say something to keep herself from crying. Sergio climbed up on the back of the truck where his compañeros were shouting for him, cheering happily as though they were going on an adventure. We stood there in the deserted street until the sound of the motor, fading in the Managua night, could no longer be heard. Then we returned silently to bed, which from then on would become an enemy to sleep. Sergio spoke so little. He went through long melancholic periods. Besides, I was not just any father. I was a father who was always busy, so busy that one time my wife, with grave irony, asked Juanita Bermúdez, my assistant, to put her on my agenda for my meetings for the day. Then she showed up in my office with a list of matters she wanted to discuss with me. A different kind of woman would surely have left me a long time ago. So uninterested was she in power and its pretense, that she was still driving around Managua to the market in her 1975 Volvo. In fact, it was still running until recently, the same car that had transported supplies from San José to the Southern Front on the Nicaraguan border, and that had brought other supplies from Panama. It was the car we used to pick up Idania Fernández in Liberia, Costa Rica, when she was injured. After all those years and so many miles, it was falling apart and always smelled like market produce, especially onions. Well, Sergio, who spoke so little,

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and who was so melancholy, came up to me one afternoon before he left, while I was reading government documents in the hammock in the hallway. Visibly nervous, he asked me why I was not the presidential candidate in those elections. Those were questions to which I had no answers, just evasions or a prepared response: each of us has his role to play in the revolution, etc. Perhaps it was a brusque reply, making it impossible for other questions like that or for more dialogue with my one and only son. He was growing up far removed from my nurturing and, just like his mother, distant from the machinations of power. Then Tulita discovered one day that Sergio was in a training school in Mulukuku, at the edge of the jungle region on the central Caribbean coast, near the source of the Grande de Matagalpa River. She went with other mothers every weekend to visit their sons who were recruits there. Those were remarkable journeys. One time they found the highway closed, because the Contras were close by, or you could hear battles echoing over the treetops, mortar explosions, the rattle of machine guns, the sound of helicopter blades cutting through the wind as they transported the injured. Then, after a great deal of insisting, they let the group through at their own risk. They came back aching to the bone, but happy to see them, to touch them, and to watch them happily eat what they had taken. It was the only war ever fought with mothers on the battlefield. They would chat about the trip with nervous laughter when they returned. That was until the last time when Tulita came back carrying her provisions: Sergio was no longer there. He had finished basic training and was assigned to the Second Company from the ‘‘Santos López’’ Irregular Warfare Battalion (bli), then operating in mid-1985 in Santa Clara in Nueva Segovia, a department near the Honduran border. Similar to all the others fighting in the war, this battalion sustained losses from casualties, injuries, and, most of all, desertions; so it had to be sent constant reinforcements. Of the 110 names on its roster, the Second Company had been reduced to 35, as Sergio reminds me now. At dawn the day after arriving in Santa Clara, the recruits were loaded on the East German ifa (Industrial Association for Vehicle Construction) trucks to go in pursuit of a Contra task force that had just ambushed a contingent from the same ‘‘Santos López’’ Battalion on the road to Susucayan. Sergio remembers seeing the cadaver of one of the truck drivers in the morning light, and a dead Contra, very close by, the metal of his m14 still warm, and fresh blood along the whole stretch of highway, on the crumpled leaves, on the grass.

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From there, he continued working his way down in the following months, battle after battle, through Quilali, Cerro Blanco, El Ojoche, La Rica, toward San Sebastián de Yalí, a territory that was teeming with Contras at the height of the war. His letters, also exhumed out of my boxed-up past, now here in front of me, were more like pieces of the war he was giving me: the 40 pounds of impedimenta he had to carry as he marched; a pkm ammunition belt; an 82mm mortar round, or a pg-7b grenade; or as part of a support squad, when he had to carry the ag-17 grenade launcher, which they called the ‘‘spider’’; the poor quality of the boots; the cows purchased from farmers for slaughter; a diet that was meat all the time, canned sardines, Bulgarian cold rations, and Soviet stew with potatoes warmed up right in the can; the positions assumed when it came time to fight on the side of a mountain; the range of fire; the enemy shouting ‘‘piricuacos’’ from the other side of the ravine; the frequency of shots fired; the duration of the shooting; the radio operator calling armed helicopters for backup; and the names, one by one, of the compañeros in his squadron; officers’ names and nicknames, Captain Frank Luis López, battalion commander; ‘‘Tololate,’’ company commander; and again the march and the battles. One of these nights as we stay up talking in my study, while I still have the computer on, I tell Sergio that I am going to share all of this about his participation in the war in this book, and he tells me that he does not want to be portrayed as a hero or anything, because he was not. There were other friends of his who were braver than he was, such as Álvaro Fiallos, the son of the vice minister of agrarian reform, Álvaro Fiallos. He fought in many more battles. Sergio, on the other hand, was only in the war for a few months. I should remember this because of the problem with his knee. On more than a few occasions, I could feel myself giving in to the temptation to bring him home as I read those letters with such elegant calligraphy, so precise, written on graph paper with diagrams and drawings, where there were no judgments or commentary. I thought about how there may not be a next letter, that they would badly injure him, just like Félix Vigil, the son of Miguel Ernesto Vigil, minister of housing, who survived a gunshot to the head and now has a platinum plate. Or worse, like Roberto Sarria, killed in his first battle. He was the son of the theater actor ‘‘El Pollo’’ Sarria and Silvia Icaza, friends of mine and my wife since way back in León. Roberto, practically a child, arrived along with Sergio from the Mulu-

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kuku training school with the reinforcements for the ‘‘Santos López’’ bli in Santa Clara. They assigned him to the Third Company, which left that very morning to fight, and Sergio did not find out until two days later that Roberto had been killed in El Ojoche. He just froze, standing in the middle of the battlefield, without taking cover while Bernardo Argüello, another of Sergio’s close friends, son of the chief justice of the Supreme Court, Roberto Argüello Hurtado, rushed to save him from the bullets, but he was already dead. They dragged his cadaver out of the line of fire and wrapped him in his rain poncho. Reprimanded by the officer that day for his reckless bravery, Bernardo, years later, would drown at the Poneloya beach trying to rescue some Belgian visitors who had been carried away by the current. He saved them, but this time he perished in his effort, and Bernardo’s death made Sergio even more melancholy. They had already killed Álvaro Avilés, his classmate at the Colegio Centro América, another of his dear friends enlisted in the ‘‘Sócrates Sandino’’ bli. He was the son of a well-known gynecologist, Dr. Álvaro Avilés, and his Peruvian wife, Gracielita Cebasco, from our same neighborhood. They killed Álvaro on April 21, 1986, Sergio’s birthday, and Sergio never celebrated that day again. Then later, when Sergio was no longer in the bli, his compañeros in his platoon were killed in an assault on the barracks of the Contra’s high command in 1986. It was in La Lodosa, on Honduran soil: twenty-seven dead and only one survivor, Leiva Tablada, another student from the Colegio Centro América. It would have been so easy to satisfy that temptation of mine to bring him home. How could a government official calmly go about his business for the revolution if he was always thinking that they could bring his dead son back any day? It was a matter of picking up the phone and asking for him to be sent back. It would not have surprised some at the top who had not allowed their own sons to go to war. Instead, they would see it as a relief. I was always swallowing that temptation like a piece of hard bread that was difficult to chew. Sergio came to visit sometimes while he was on leave, with no notice. I would walk into the house late at night, and the light in his bedroom would already be on, and I would open the door to find him sitting on his bed, with his shirt off, unpacking his backpack resting on the floor in front of his ak-47 rifle. He always looked skinnier and darker from the sun each time, with his dog tags and his soldier’s identification number hanging from his neck. Then, without notice, he would disappear.

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That was until he could not stand the pain from his knee anymore, the swelling, and the aching from marching and carrying the impedimenta. Dr. Álvarez Cambra had operated on him in 1983 in Cuba for Osteochondritis dissecans. He was taken to the Military Hospital in Apanas suffering from joint effusion. His military discharge was surely a miracle, one of the many that Tulita asked for everyday from San Benito de Palermo. Then he was sent to radar stations, first in Peña Blanca in the Cordillera Isabelia mountains, then in Cosigüina, and lastly in El Crucero, now closer to Managua, an assignment that bored him terribly. When his two years of service ended, he went to study in East Germany on a scholarship, first in Zwickau, in Saxony, where he had gone to preparatory school, then in Dresden, where he started again with civil engineering. Finally, he went to Berlin, where he transferred to the Hochschule für Ekonomie, which they used to call the ‘‘red monastery’’ because it prepared technicians for a command economy. He also abandoned his studies there. He never fit in, never stopped feeling like an outsider, strange, despite the fact that he spoke German like a native speaker. Tulita finished her degree in sociology at the Central American University, where she taught for a while. María was elected as a deputy to the National Assembly in 1990, and she graduated in psychology. She is now studying for her master’s in business administration at the incae (Central American Institute for Business Administration) in Managua, which is affiliated with Harvard University. Dorel graduated as an architect from the Universidad Iberoamericana in Mexico City and has her own office in Managua. During the early part of the electoral campaign in 1996, Dorel asked to speak with me alone. This was when I was running as the presidential candidate for the Sandinista Renovation Movement (mrs), the party we founded in 1995 after my definitive break from the fsln (Sandinista National Liberation Front). We went one afternoon to the Casa del Café, located in the Pancasán neighborhood where I live. I listened at length to her passionate list of offenses. The last one was that campaign where I found myself struggling with little support from others, mired in debt, and with no chance of winning. And once again—and here came the bulk of her accusations—I was apart from my family, from her mother, from her brother and sister, from her, and now from the grandchildren. It was as if they had never been able to recover me. Then, as the ceremony to announce my candidacy drew near, which would launch the campaign,

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she warned me that she was not going to appear with me on stage. She had had enough. She wanted us to have a different life, like other normal people who get together on Sundays, where the father doesn’t spend them in other people’s houses, offering—as I was then—a message that no one, or almost no one, wanted to hear. The entire family had always wanted to see me writing literature. Why didn’t I focus, once and for all, on writing? After all, it was a losing battle, fighting on the margin of the ferocious polarization that again devoured the country, and where there would be no votes in favor, only against: votes against Daniel Ortega so that the Sandinistas would not return, and votes against Arnoldo Alemán so that the Somocistas would not return. Moreover, in my case, people did not see much difference between Daniel and me. They still remembered the images from the gigantic campaign in 1990 when we were both running on the same ticket, appearing over and over again on television spots. Hundreds of thousands of T-shirts with our faces were handed out, and we were everywhere, from highway billboards to posters plastering the walls. In addition, people also questioned why I had not taken the step to leave the fsln until after we were no longer in power, something which did not have an easy answer. People who were against the Sandinistas had no reason to choose me, and among the Sandinistas, favor tilted more and more toward Daniel, based on the idea that the vote would count. I did not get bullheaded as I had on other occasions arguing with my wife or children. I always have to be right, even when I am not right. One example is the time I refused to give Sergio permission to study in West Germany with a scholarship he had been given thanks to the high grades he earned in his studies at the German School. Perhaps, more than anything else, it was because I did not want to draw attention to my Social Democrat colors in front of the fsln’s leadership’s party hard-liners. I did not really want to explain to Dorel that I was going to have to run in that campaign, the last one of my life, as if I were going to win, pulling energy and courage from wherever I could. I did just that, walking more than 800 kilometers with Leonel Argüello, a young doctor, my running mate, going from door to door like traveling salesmen. I had to run for office because I had made a promise to myself and to those who believed in our message. They worked all around the country, barely scraping by, paying their own way on country buses to travel throughout rural villages, visiting neighborhoods on bicycles, and painting the campaign banners themselves. These were mostly poor people, underpaid or unemployed,

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who were not in it for personal gain, and who stayed until the end. Of course, there were others who had abandoned us without even saying goodbye. The day of the event in the La Salle School gym when I declared my candidacy, I was not expecting Dorel, having already been forewarned, or Sergio either. Yet Sergio walked up the steps to stand beside me, and beside María and Tulita, my wife, even though she had not given her blessing for this final adventure. Except that we had been through everything together: leaving my university appointment in Costa Rica to take a chance living as a writer in Berlin; returning to get involved in a revolutionary conspiracy, which had few participants at the time; immediately followed by two long years of insurrection and ten years of abandonment that I spent working until midnight every night in the Government House; the defeat in 1990 that she took as her definitive liberation after crying over it with me; my unexpected parliamentary life, which seemed like going back to the tunnel; the bitter break from the fsln, when my friend Roberto Argüello Hurtado visited me at home and remarked, as though he were listing the traditional symptoms of a diagnosed illness: ‘‘Now there will be fewer calls. Now you will have fewer friends.’’ Then the still intact power apparatus treated us as bitter enemies. It was as if Saturn had picked me up off the ground to place me in his jaws, determined to devour me, and not just me, but María as well. They attacked her all day long on Radio Ya, Daniel’s radio station, as the most effective way to get even with me. María had stood beside me when it was time to found a new party, which was her way of showing her affection, just as Dorel’s was shown by denying me her support. Even so, Dorel also arrived, breaking her promise. From a distance I saw her in the stands. Then her children also came to join us on stage, Elianne and Carlos Fer, and Camila, María’s daughter. And there it was again, the photo, a final campaign photo and a family photo under the falling streamers and amidst the orange balloons dropped from above, and the flags, and hurrahs, and the music. It is a story that ends right where it began.

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Saintly Living

E

rnesto Castillo, or Tito, as everyone has always called him, was a few years ahead of me in Law School in León. His family’s social status gave him connections to the world of finance and real estate, then booming in Managua, which guaranteed him an enviable clientele when he graduated. Tito was from one of Granada’s oligarchic families. He was the grandson of the famous physician Juan José Martínez, who had graduated from the Sorbonne at age twenty and who brought the first microscope to Nicaragua. And he was the great-grandson of Jacobo Teufel, a German Jew, who was also the great-grandfather of the poet and liberation theologist Ernesto Cardenal. In 1857, facing execution after being captured as a member of William Walker’s army of filibusterers, this Jacobo Teufel not only asked Captain General Tomás Martínez to spare his life but to be his godfather at his baptism because he wanted to convert to the Catholic faith. Thanks to the fact that both of these requests were granted, and out of gratitude to his benefactor, he adopted the surname Martínez. Tito was a partner at the most important law firm in Managua: Castillo, Carrión, Hueck & Manzanares. He subsequently resigned at the end of the sixties, a consequence of his conversion to a Christianity committed to the poor. From then on he worked in the people’s law firms at the Jesuit-run Central American University, he and his large family committed to an austere life that he has

never abandoned. He was minister of justice after the revolution’s triumph, and he was in charge of confiscating all of the wealth belonging to the Somoza family and its supporters, as well as taking ill-gotten assets from many others. His decision making was unshakeable, and even his own family members could not escape it. There were some who, under their breath, did not call him Tito Castillo, but ‘‘Quito’’ Castillo, from the verb ‘‘quitar,’’ referring to his confiscation of others’ assets. Cuta Castillo, his wife, whose real name is Rosa, was probably around fourteen when she married him. I remember her looking almost like a schoolgirl in knee highs when she accompanied him to his graduation in León after they had been married. They were identical in their discretion and quiet ways, although Tito is more withdrawn, almost to the point of complete silence, which he passed down to all their children. At the end of the sixties, they opened the Club de Lectores bookstore in Managua with what I believe was a truly subversive intent. They ended up closing it when they were harassed by the customs authorities, who seized their book shipments. Afterward, they went into exile in San José, where they opened another. They were living there when Tito joined the Group of Twelve. Their old wooden home in San Rafael de Escazu had hallways with railings decorated with potted geraniums, gloomy living rooms with linoleum floors, and humid bedrooms. In addition to using it to store weapons, they held military exercises in the woods there at night. In the final months of the struggle, the studios for Radio Sandino, transmitted by short wave to Nicaragua, were installed in an adjoining storeroom. Their eldest son was named Ernesto after his father. I remember him sitting on a sofa, petrified from shyness, in the house in San Rafael de Escazu, which was always bustling with exiles and budding combatants. He was trained in Cuba, and he set off in mid-1978 via underground routes to join the Sandinista forces in León. It was almost at the same time when the Group of Twelve members returned to Managua. His father, Tito, received a message from his son, or several, over those days. I cannot remember now how many there were. They were on cassette tapes, used back then during very confusing and hectic times when we had to move from one hiding place to another, and when it was easier to make a recording. I remember Tito, sitting off by himself on a bed in someone’s bedroom they had lent us, recording a reply for his son on another tape, one that probably never reached him because he was killed by a gunshot to the head in the September 1978 insurrection. He came out into the

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open during a street battle, excited because the shot from his rocket launcher had hit a tank, and a sniper spotted him from a rooftop. I have a letter in front of me that my wife Tulita sent me in Managua in the days that followed. The entire letter is dedicated to Cuta Castillo: ‘‘There cannot be one tear in this house. There is no room for tears now.’’ She says that she will cry for her son the day Nicaragua is free. Cuta’s best defense was the last recording that her son had sent her on August 30, which was Saint Rose Day, her birthday. His voice is calm and full of joy, as if he were away at boarding school, happy to be committed to a noble cause and determined to give his life for that cause, but conscious of his destiny: ‘‘I am not afraid. I know that I will have a brush with death, and I am not afraid. You and an entire nation are with me.’’ The young Ernesto was also a poet. His clandestine poetry reminds me of the elegiac tone that Pierre Ronsard wrote in his sonnets to Hélène, except that, in his brush with death, Ernesto can no longer ask his love to gather life’s roses with him. Even though Ernesto told her in the beginning in an epigram: Because I live When I see you Please Don’t let me die. Now all he can do is warn her: Time will turn my bones to dust All will forget me, but you Will feel the urge to cry, at times; A veil of sadness will fall over you And my memory will appear before your eyes. Ernesto, killed at twenty-one years of age, had lived a saintly life, following Leonel Rugama’s ethics. He was buried in a common grave in the yard behind Saint Vincent Hospital in León, along with other anonymous combatants. When there was talk after the triumph of moving his remains to the family mausoleum in Granada, Cuta Castillo refused. It was better for him to stay with his compañeros. Leonel Rugama, with his ethic of saintly living, was a mystic poet and a guerrilla poet, the poet of the catacombs. He had been born in a rural region in Estelí, son of a day laborer and a rural school teacher, and he

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entered the National Seminary at age eleven, determined to become a priest. He left the seminary just before receiving the tonsure and arrived in León to enter the university in 1969, with one foot already in the catacombs. Besides being an avid chess enthusiast and a devout mathematician, he was a fervent reader of everything he could get his hands on, from Jean-Paul Sartre’s Roads to Freedom, Albert Camus’s Sisyphus, Giovanni Papini’s Gog, Victor Hugo’s The Laughing Man, and Romano Guardini’s The End of the Modern World, to Stamp Collecting for All, The Art of Door to Door Sales, Chess in Ten Lessons, and How to Build an Athletic Body. One of his notebooks includes a list of 180 books he had read by 1967, by the time he left the seminary. He was always reading, while he was getting dressed, holding the book in front of his eyes with one hand while he buttoned his cassock with the other, while he marched in formation to the chapel, when he went to the classroom, to the dining hall, to the bathroom. He also had a photographic memory that gave him the ability to remember the license plate numbers on every car that went by, and he was obsessed with plays on words. He was always inventing phrases such as ‘‘proof corruptor’’ and ‘‘sexual contact lenses.’’ My brother Rogelio, who died in 1992, would get into decadent wordplay contests with Leonel, who used to drink rum with him all night, displaying his sense of humor and endless wit until dawn. One afternoon, while I was living in Costa Rica, Rogelio gave me a file of Leonel’s poems when he was visiting the university. They seemed disorganized at the time, as if they were still rough drafts in need of polishing, and I did not think much of them. I only recognized their beauty after he had been killed. I understood then that the meaning that life acquires after death greatly increases the splendor of words. That poor seminarian did not have the characteristic look of a heroic guerrilla. He had coke-bottle glasses that seemed too big for his dark face, and he always wore the same synthetic knit shirt on breaks in Estelí, where he would temporarily take off his robe. There he would have long conversations on the benches in Central Park or teach math to students in need of tutoring, using a chalkboard in his hallway at home. Even so, in January 1970, at age twenty, he died fighting beside two other kids his same age against hundreds of National Guard soldiers who attacked the fsln safe house where they were hiding, which was in the El Edén neighborhood, near Managua’s western cemetery. It was a modest one-story house that had been painted light blue, and it had been a pension at one

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time. It still had the faded sign on the wall that said ‘‘Marriott Inn,’’ as if Leonel’s hand had once again proven ironic. When the shootout began, at twelve o’clock noon, the first contingent of security agents surrounded the house. Later, soldiers began arriving, marching in columns four deep, with Sherman tanks leading the columns; and they parked trucks in the intersections, tires squealing to a stop and more soldiers getting out. Overhead, circling aircraft were swooping down and shooting the roof until their shots sent the zinc plates flying through the air. Then a helicopter appeared, and the tank cannons blew huge holes in the walls with booms that could be heard from way off. Meanwhile, the shots coming from the surrounded house were few and far between. After hours of sustained attack, there was a brief silence. They were calling on a megaphone for them to surrender, and Leonel’s voice answered with a cry that would become legendary: ‘‘Surrender your mother!’’ Then the guns resounded again, more shots from the tripodmounted machine guns spread on the pavement, thundering in a furious rhythm, more cannonballs, until almost four in the afternoon, when there was no further response. Later, when they removed the cadavers from the debris enveloped in smoke, the people who had been watching that attack from afar, standing in the doorways of storefronts, bars, and pool halls, started to come closer. Perplexed, they saw them load the cadavers of those three kids, like packages, onto the flatbed of a truck. Six months before, on July 15, 1969, in the Las Delicias del Volga neighborhood, on the other side of Managua, the National Guard had attacked another safe house. The head of the fsln’s nascent urban resistance, Julio Buitrago, another kid, was holed up there. On that occasion as well, hundreds of soldiers were deployed, and there was shooting from tanks and artillery aircraft. However, that time people were able to see the attack from home because Somoza had it filmed, and his television channel aired it during prime time. It was a mistake he was careful not to repeat. So this time, when the radio stations began transmitting this other mismatched battle live, he ordered them to take it off the air. Days later, Leonel would visit what was left of the home where Julio Buitrago had died fighting. In his poem ‘‘Las casas quedaron llenas de humo’’ (The Houses Were Still Full of Smoke), he describes the holes the Sherman tank fire left in the walls, the bullet marks from the Madsen and Browning machine guns, and the Garand rifles, and the smoke and silence when it was all over, as if he were watching his own death on film.

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‘‘Death is nothing more than life,’’ he had written to his mother in a letter during those last months. In another of his colloquial poems, he also declares that, in the clandestine struggle, it is necessary to live a saintly life, a life like that of the first Christians. That life of the catacombs was a permanent exercise in purification. It entailed not only forsaking one’s family, studies, and romantic relationships, but all material wealth and the very ambition to have it, any at all. It meant living in poverty, humbly, sharing everything, and above all living at risk, living with death. Surviving until the end of the struggle was an undeserved reward, and death was a way of setting an example for those who would someday achieve victory on a very improbable future date. What’s more, victory could not be obtained without evidence of repeated examples, a chain of moral behavior and sacrifice, without a foreseeable end. Death was a practice, a ritual, a task to perform, as Leonel himself explained. In 1933, already approaching his own death, Augusto César Sandino had told the Basque journalist Ramón de Belausteguigoitia that life is not a moment in time but eternity through multiple facets of the transitory; and he had taught his men that it is but a fleeting pain, a transition. Then Leonel transcribes a quotation from Antoine de Saint-Exupéry in his notebook: ‘‘Death ceases to exist when one finds it.’’ He also copies from José Ortega y Gasset: ‘‘Life is the cosmic realization of altruism and exists only as a perpetual emigration of the self towards the other.’’ The entrance to the catacombs was born out of a choice between life and death. It was an unwavering mysticism. One entered under an oath of ‘‘Free homeland or death’’ in the sense of a transition, of impermanence with respect to one’s own life, which required an almost religious conviction. Sacrifice made it possible to open the doors to paradise, but a paradise for others, on Earth. The Promised Land could not be seen, not even in the distance. Yet one had to live a saintly life. In his poem ‘‘Como los santos’’ (Saintly Living), Leonel summons everyone to listen to his message: farmworkers, cowhands, muleteers, day laborers, cart drivers, shoemakers, barbers, fruit sellers, cooks, vegetable sellers, carriage drivers, butchers, the blind, the deaf, tuberculosis sufferers, cripples, acrobats, messengers, beggars, the unemployed, pickpockets, drifters, shoe shiners, convicts, whores, drunkards: in the catacombs late in the afternoon when there is little work

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I paint the walls the walls of the catacombs the images of the saints of the saints who were killed killing hunger and in the morning I imitate the saints now I want to speak to you of the saints Among those saints are Sandino and El Che. It is a new list of saints. Sandino was one who built that tradition of sacrifice, the best foundation for Leonel’s reference. When it was time to organize the resistance to foreign occupation in 1927, in defense of sovereignty, he placed these values of self-sacrifice and dedication above all else. Even more important was the belief that death was a reward, not a punishment, all or nothing. It was what he expressed in his famous saying ‘‘I want a free homeland or death.’’ This is also always explicit throughout all of his writing, convinced he would not survive: ‘‘And if we die, it does not matter; our cause will go on; others will follow us.’’ After the death of El Che in Bolivia in 1967, his effigy would remain on the walls of the catacombs alongside Sandino’s. Later, those entering the fsln’s clandestine ranks would swear a commitment to the death in both of their names for the cause of the oppressed. That definitive commitment was first assumed within the initiate’s own heart. ‘‘You have to exercise force from within toward the outside to break the vessel that holds you, and in this way break free. That is the initial revolution,’’ Leonel would write in those days in El estudiante y la revolución (The Student and the Revolution). The initiates could only see the future that they accepted together with that commitment on the pages of Novedades, when it published the photos of their bullet-ridden compañeros lying in pools of blood in the place where they had been killed, or in the drawers of the morgue. It was such an accepted commitment that I recall the story of two kids who were already living underground. As they were walking along the train tracks, eating oranges, one said: ‘‘If the guard comes and kills us right now, when they do the autopsy, they’ll say: ‘These two were eating oranges.’ ’’ Nor did one seek recognition as a reward. Leonel is remembered now, when the ethical parameters of the revolution have ceased to exist, because he was a poet. His life and his commitment are remembered in conjunction with his poetry. The two other kids his age who died fighting alongside him with extreme heroism, Mauricio Hernández Baldizón and Róger Núñez

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Dávila, have been forgotten. The process of forgetting them had begun long before. As they were forgotten, they joined the never-ending list of heroes, martyrs, and murdered who fertilized the struggle during two decades. Then they joined the list of thousands of murdered in the war of aggression that began after coming to power: recruits in military service, soldiers, brigadistas, reservists, and farmers from the cooperatives. Furthermore, the names of all those kids from different times and stages in the struggle have been being erased from the place they occupied on frontispieces of schools, public buildings, hospitals, clinics, and markets, and they have been removed from neighborhoods, parks, and streets. Today, the forgetting that comes with time, the weakness of memory, and the abandoning of ethics have given free rein to the official and vengeful hand that, in seeking to restore the values of the past, attacks the dead who tried to change that very past. Now, as I write this memoir, I ask myself: Who was Armando Joya, whose name was on the Central Bank’s library until recently? Who was César Augusto Silva, which is what the old Country Club was named one day, that later became the revolutionary government’s ceremonial center, and that is now in ruins? What about Lenín Fonseca, the name given to baptize a hospital in Managua? And Cristian Pérez? The Colonia Cristian Pérez was a neighborhood that used to be called Colonia Salvadorita, for the wife of the elder Somoza, and it has probably returned to its former name. Cristian was murdered in May 1979 in Jiloá during a ferocious attack by the National Guard on the home belonging to the businessman Alfonso González Pasos. They murdered him as well, along with everyone they found there: his son, a nephew, the maid and her son, because at that time Somoza wanted to sow terror among all who gave refuge to the guerrillas. Walking down the streets of Managua, León, Matagalpa, Estelí, you can still see tombs on one corner or another with plaques to remember the names of the insurrection combatants. Others are in parks on a modest cement statue, an unfinished bust, or a photo fading behind glass framed by dried wreaths on a cemetery headstone. If they had survived, they would be around forty years old today; and those who began the struggle and died firing alone from safe houses would have been fifty or more. It is an old story. Others died because the revolution triumphed, heroes who survived life in the catacombs, military geniuses improvised in the insurrection’s

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trenches. They had no useful skill to offer the power they helped win, and the majority found themselves cast aside. Others were named to decorative posts. More than a few became alcoholics, such as Francisco Rivera (‘‘El Zorro,’’ the fox), the commander who, at the head of his guerrilla troops, ever-growing in number, took the city of Estelí three times until it was finally liberated. During the final stage of the struggle against the dictatorship, you lived surrounded by the dead. You had to forcibly open a space for them in everyday life. Each time I learned of a compañero who had fallen, killed in combat or murdered in jail, I was overcome by a sense of fearful angst, demoralized instead of feeling pushed to go forward from the example of the one who fell, as if I had been the one who took the right to live away from someone else. The smell of formaldehyde was in the air. Death was not only about myth, but about ritual, companionship, warning, an unreal state you could enter at any moment, a dream interrupted by a doorbell, a sobbing on the other end of the phone, such as the morning in November 1976 when Gioconda Belli’s call awoke me. She was already living in exile in San José at that time, telling me, unable to stop crying, that they had killed Eduardo Contreras, whose bloodied face I had been seeing just then in my dream. The cult of the dead was never an order anyone gave from the revolutionary chain of command. It was the consequence of an intimate conviction nourished by example, with roots in Catholic and also indigenous traditions, which the rigors of clandestine struggle came to exalt. Christ, who calls to sacrifice, to eat his body, and Mixtanteotl, the Nahuatl god of the dead who demands live sacrifice. Death was forever the pathway to absolute purity, atonement for every sin, above all because it represented deliberate sacrifice, chosen, sought, a scapegoat and a sacrificial lamb. That is the very reason the revolution put the commemoration of death as propitiatory celebration at the center of its fasti calendar. This way, the dead, transformed by sacrifice, together became the list of saints; each saint, each martyr celebrated on the date of his death, the day he was killed. Later, at some point, an empty chair appeared in the ceremonies in the plaza, the one with the highest back, the seat of honor. It was the seat reserved for Carlos Fonseca, the revolutionary leader who was absent yet always present. The fact that no achievement by the living could compare with the actual achievement of death was a whole philosophy that assumed a crushing

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ethical weight at the moment of the revolution’s triumph. The only heroes were the dead, the fallen. We owed everything to them. They had been the best, and everything else, referring to the living, had to be repressed as worldly vanity. The shout of ‘‘present, present, present!’’ referred to the dead, to remembering their sacrifice, but it was also a shout of commitment and victory. The tomb was the altar. The mothers dressed in black filled the first row of any public ceremony, carrying enlarged photos of their sacrificed children on their laps, graduation photos or ones used for their work credentials, or cut out from a group at a party, on an outing. They were all killed in the prime of life to become heroes who are never going to grow old. Survivors were forced to adjust their behavior to that of the dead, to remember that we were in power because they had been sacrificed, because they had assumed death as a duty. As Ernesto Cardenal wrote in a poem, you always had to remember: When they applaud you as you take the stage think of those who died When they arrive to meet you at the airport in the big city, think of those who died. When it is your turn to take the microphone, when the television camera focuses on you, Think of those who died. See them shirtless, dragged, bleeding, with a hood over their heads, broken, so many crushed, with an electric prod, missing an eye, beheaded, riddled with bullets, tossed at the edge of the highway, in holes they dug themselves, in mass graves or simply above ground, fertilizer for wildflowers You represent them, they sent you, those who died. The juncture that occurs in the Sandinista struggle between Marxism and Christianity is best explained by its roots in history and practice, rather than by any theoretical proposal. Leonel Rugama, who had wanted to be a

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priest since he was a boy, came from poverty, just as Francisco Rivera (‘‘El Zorro’’) did, son of a shoemaker and a washerwoman. Influenced by the example of Filemón Rivera, his older brother murdered in the mountains, he wanted to be a guerrilla since he was a boy; and influenced by the union leaders in the shoemaking shops, irreverent and enemies of the priests, he was basically an atheist. Yet neither of the two, the seminarian nor the atheist, strayed from the model of humbleness, commitment, and willingness to sacrifice. Later, when children from very wealthy families, educated in Catholic high schools and North American Universities, began entering the clandestine ranks, it was because they had spent a type of novitiate that brought them closer to life conditions of the poor, and that also introduced them to the idea of temporality in the face of death. ‘‘El Zorro’’ did not have to come down from his soft bed to take on class warfare as those who came from privilege did. Edgard Lang, the son of one of the most prosperous businessmen in Managua, began his novitiate in the ecclesiastic base communities directed by Uriel Molina, a Capuchin priest. These were a school for revolutionary commitment since the beginning of the sixties. The first thing he did, to the astonishment of his parents, was to leave his bed and spend the night sleeping on the floor, testing his toughness every night. A hard bed, a pillow made of stone, silicon, fasting. He would later leave his home. In his goodbye letter to his parents, when he leaves for clandestine life, he tells them: ‘‘I know you will have noticed a somewhat strange behavior in me lately.’’ It was, in all honesty, a strange way of behaving, a radical change in customs, habits, comforts, lifestyles, feelings, and worldview. Before learning how to shoot a weapon, you learned an ethical behavior that emerged out of love for those who had nothing, in Christian terms, and you accepted the commitment to forsake everything to dedicate yourself to a fight to the death destined to substitute the power of those from above with the power of those from below, in Marxist terms. From a Marxist perspective, it was about class struggle and assuming a new class identity; from a Christian perspective, it was about putting solidarity in practice no matter what the consequences. That was the sacrifice Edgard Lang made. He never returned to his parents’ mansion. He died in León in April 1979, together with all his other compañeros, in the Lomas de Veracruz massacre.

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For letting go of life and worldly goods, there was the example of those who had died alone, facing an entire army, and those who had never touched a penny belonging to someone else, the custom of the poor Franciscans in the twelfth century. There was Jorge Navarro, my classmate from the university, who then went to join the guerrilla from Raiti and Bocay, where they killed him in 1963. Yet even before, living underground, he never failed to remember his vow of poverty and integrity with money. One time, carrying a sack of bills he had to put in safekeeping, the product of a bank robbery an fsln squad had executed, he refused to take the two córdobas the taxi ride would have cost him and chose to continue on foot for the entire long road ahead of him. Moreover, in Nicaragua during those years, behavior in the catacombs was the complete opposite of the Somocista way of life, corrupt and obscene in its display of luxury and wealth. An incomparable ethical value was born out of this radical contrast, but very few perceived it. In general, people respected those kids with sadness when they died fighting alone, although that was not any indication of an allegiance to their ideas. In Novedades, Somoza’s newspaper, and even in La Prensa, the paper opposing Somoza, they were called extremists. For the powerful businessmen and Conservative politicians, they were maladapted and antisocial. In the eyes of their own families, they were vagabonds and misguided, dangerous examples for others their age. For the Communist Party’s aging officials, they were petty bourgeois adventurers. The Somoza system’s shameless excesses were easy to measure by their parties. Birthday parties for Dinorah Sampson, Somoza’s lover, were enlivened with mariachis brought in from Mexico. She stood at the door to her mansion receiving hand-kisses adorned with a three-layered hairdo, like a wedding cake. Then there was the more refined kitsch for the official first lady, Hope Portocarrero, skinny like an aged Vogue model. For the inauguration of the international airport terminal, she ordered an express plane from Miami to bring even the tomatoes, heads of lettuce, and celery for the formal buffet served in the waiting area to guests dressed with rigorous etiquette. It was a party that was spoiled by her own husband who, full of rage and vodka, ordered the clock to be yanked from the wall that showed the local time in the Soviet Union, among other places. Upper-class families copied these styles, although with more discretion. Yet it was enough to make them the target of reproach from their own children who, by rejecting the system, also rejected the world in

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which they had been raised, the one they left for the catacombs, having first made their act of contrition. Father Uriel Molina tells that one of those fathers asked to see him, after his son had moved to live among the poor of the parish in the Riguero neighborhood. Uriel received him in the parish house and offered him a glass of cognac, as a compliment to his visitor’s good taste: ‘‘No, Father.’’ he told him ‘‘I am not going to have a drink with you. Let’s not mistake it. You and I are class enemies. What you want is for my son to destroy his own class.’’ With the revolution’s triumph, being a good militant meant being willing to respect the code of conduct established by the dead. However, that code was then interpreted by the living under the party’s authority. That was when holiness was turned into a bureaucracy. Those were the first attempts to turn the guerrilla movement into a revolutionary party, under strict and inflexible behavioral norms that soon proved ineffective. The values existed in their entire splendor when we fought for them and through them. Yet in the very process of living and making them, they were lost in the commotion of life, in the individual search for happiness, in the necessity of freedom after those long years in the catacombs, in laughter and irreverence that reigned behind the scenes, in earthly weaknesses, in the abrupt change in sexual behavior, and above all, in the struggle for power with its millenary rules. Yet there were some, similar to Molière’s hypocritical Tartuffe, who managed to turn the appearance of holiness into an art. Nevertheless, at the very beginning, the philosophy of the catacombs reached its greatest apogee with the National Literacy Crusade, which acted as an instrument to transmit that code of conduct from one generation to another. Leaving a bed to sleep on the ground had become a way to identify with and be inspired by others. The crusade expanded that. Adapting to rural life was a formidable experience for 60,000 youth and adolescents, many of them practically children. They left to teach in the most remote places, where they had never dreamed of being, to share someone else’s country, the other country, one they entered with confusion, as if it were a foreign country, the rural country that the revolution sought to liberate. They had a humanist motivation that was spontaneous, explosive, contagious, and that had very little to do with ideology. Never before, nor any time since, did that ethical energy, which had been accumulating in the soul of just a few during the toughest years of clandestine solitude, become embodied in such a new transformative

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spirit. That energy was also a connection that surpassed any theoretical proposal or class struggle. It resembled a fruit ripened in all its glory, one that everyone could consume. What’s more, those literacy volunteers were the first ones to enlist in the war that followed when the Contras appeared. They were like defenders of a cause that could still receive energy from the heroic past. Nevertheless, paradoxically, this philosophy that drew its energy from death began to lose it due to an excess of death. Then the possibility of defending the revolution finally came to an end when there were no longer any young people available for war or sacrifice. The other great ethical inheritance that the catacombs gave the triumphant revolution was the rule of not having, which also became a reasonable way to not create differences. It also helped maintain balances of power. Many who had inherited something or who were owners of something had to surrender it to the state, just as in religious orders. My brother Rogelio and I convinced my mother to transfer the San Luis estate, an inheritance from my grandfather, Teófilo Mercado, to a Masatepe farming cooperative. All she asked was that the old foreman be among the beneficiaries. Everything in the hands of the leadership belonged to the state: residences, country homes, vehicles, furniture. In addition, the state paid for expenditures for services, family parties, vacations, and nominal salaries that did not cover anything. However, under the pretext of this form of not having, the leadership began breaking Jorge Navarro’s code, which was based on personal sacrifice and living modestly. Power was the enemy of that code, and it created offensive contrasts in an immensely poor country, where even the middle class was hit by the rigors of the war, with income lowered due to inflation, unstable salaries, long lines, and shortages. The leadership’s houses had to be spacious because that was also where you worked and where you received official visitors. They were surrounded by walls for security reasons, and more than a few had pools, saunas, billiard rooms, gyms, and tennis courts, because the leadership could not frequent public places like other people. The size of the military escort, which required facilities and vehicles, was part of the prestige. The leadership’s private vehicles also had to be new and a top model, both for security while traveling and as well as for prestige. Later, diplomatic stores were created where you could only make purchases in U.S. dollars. The top lead-

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ers in the party and government hierarchy had access to these. As a palliative measure, lesser bureaucrats received a gift certificate for Christmas. The Swedish Social Democratic politician Olof Palme visited Nicaragua only once, in 1983, just before his death, and we lavished him with every possible honor. As he exited the plane, dressed in an ivory-colored hemp suit that was much wrinkled from the long hours on the flight, he looked past Daniel at the ceremonial troop, holding the newspaper he had undoubtedly been reading on the way folded under his arm. It always seemed to me as though he rejected protocol as something bothersome and banal. Back in Stockholm, after spending three days with us, he sent us a very brief message: ‘‘Be careful. You are losing touch with the people.’’ Do not lose touch with the people; remain ethical. Bruno Kreisky, Austria’s federal chancellor, would certainly have wanted to offer us more support than what was possible. In 1983, as he was signing a $3 million line of credit for Nicaragua in his austere office in Ballhausplatz, in Vienna, he told me that Lawrence Eagleburger, undersecretary of state for political affairs, Reagan’s special envoy, had been to see him just days before, eager to show him a file of secret documents that proved our alignment with the Soviets: ‘‘I responded that I am not curious to read others’ papers, and that he could take them away,’’ he told me, and he lifted his head to look at me. ‘‘Rest assured that as long as you maintain your moral principles, I will be with you.’’ The last time he met with me was in his apartment in Grinzing, more austere than his office. I am not sure why I now have the feeling that there was little light, or if that feeling comes from the fact that he was going blind, or because it was getting late without us realizing it while he told me stories about the end of the world war and what neutrality had meant for Austria, a gift from heaven in a hell of hegemonic conflicts. I later heard his voice, before his death, when he called me from Mallorca, at the home of our ambassador Iván Mejía, to congratulate me for the Kreisky Award for Human Rights that I had just received in Vienna: ‘‘How difficult it must be for you to be the hope for the rest of us,’’ he said as a goodbye. On the morning of February 26, 1990, when Daniel recognized the electoral defeat in the most memorable speech of his life, he said that we had been born poor and that we were returning to the street poor. Everyone cried at the end of that speech, even the cameramen from the North

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American television stations. Yet the one who was returning to the street without a dime to take a taxi was Jorge Navarro. The move that would undermine that entire code of strict conduct began shortly thereafter, under the auspices of an entirely political justification. It was the first explosive charge placed at the base of the retaining wall: Sandinismo could not leave government without material resources, because that would signal its ultimate demise. The fsln needed goods and income, and it would take them from the state before the three months of the transition were complete. That was when the rushed and chaotic transference took place of buildings, businesses, lands, and stocks into the hands of third parties. They were to remain in control of that wealth in order to later give it to the fsln, which ended up receiving almost nothing. Many new and great fortunes were created, many of them as odious as those whose rejection had inspired the catacombs’ code of conduct. When the agreements for the Economic Concertation were later signed with the new government in August 1991, the fsln made sure that the Sandinista unions would assume ownership of one quarter of those businesses in exchange for consenting to the monetary adjustment plan and the privatization of state businesses. However, the leaders from those unions were the ones who ended up keeping everything, and they too entered the ranks of the new rich. All of this was the piñata, a term we introduced to the world, to our disgrace, together with the term Contra, both of which have survived beyond the Sandinista years. The terms muchachos and compañero, compa or compita, were lost. The piñata did not represent the fair transfer of thousands of state homes and lands, following Laws 85 and 86, to the families who had been living in them for years as tenants. Nor did it transfer farms to the beneficiaries of agrarian reform who did not have their titles in order, even though those laws were so fair that they even provided remuneration for the former owners who had had their lands expropriated. One lonely afternoon in the Government House, during the month of March 1990, while we were busy with the transition, Daniel entered my office on the fourth floor, just as on so many occasions over the course of those ten years, and we had a long conversation about property. In the rough draft of Law 85 that I had sitting on my desk, it was established that homes larger than 100 square meters would also be transferred to their occupants. Those were ours. Former president Jimmy Carter, who was acting as a mediator with Violeta Chamorro’s incoming government, had

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proposed that these homes be sold to us for a modest price, and that was how it read in the rough draft. That afternoon, the two of us agreed that it was better to delete those residences from the law. It was better to leave with nothing; that was the most pure. However, the proposal was defeated shortly thereafter in a meeting of the fsln’s National Directorate. The argument was that it was not just about us; there would be dozens of key officials who would be out on the street without a roof over their heads. Nor was it a good idea politically to create insecurity for them as we were entering a new context concerning political power. Moreover, with the transfer policy left in the law, all of us, without exception, had to respect it. I never knew Daniel to have any kind of desire for material goods. If he accepted the decision and carried it out, it was above all because he was convinced by the argument to protect the officials. Anything that contributed to weakening the fsln officials’ support for the new context essentially had to be thrown out. We also spoke that afternoon about the philosophical meaning that property always had for Sandinismo. Sandino had told Belausteguigoitia in the 1933 conversation: ‘‘They are thinking over there that I’m going to become a large landowner! No, not at all; I will never have properties. I don’t have anything. This house where I live belongs to my wife. Some say that that is stupid, but I have no reason to do anything differently.’’ Then we shared the idea that became a prophecy: establishing haves and havenots within Sandinismo was going to be like putting a dynamite charge at the base of its walls. This was because the ethical proposal was always about not having. That was the true bond for stability. It had united us in spite of the implacable wall the United States built around us, despite all the spending on the war of aggression, the struggles for power, and the changes the revolution’s project suffered along the way. The piñata was a thousand times worse than the electoral defeat. That destructive act, above all else, was what ruined an option for ethical living, and it is not over yet. This is because those who are distant from the catacombs are now defending a share of political power within the system, which is again reconstituting itself to what it was before. They also find it harder than ever to renounce economic power or to stop increasing it. That has been the true loss of sainthood.

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t noon on July 20, 1979, guerrilla troops entered Managua’s Plaza de la Républica in triumph. In tremendous disarray, the combatants arrived on foot, in military trucks, on requisitioned buses, on top of the hull of dilapidated tanks stolen from the dictatorship’s troops, and they joined the multitude waiting there to celebrate the great party of their lives with them. The puppet president Urcuyo Maliaños had fled, following in the footsteps of the last Somoza, who had taken his father’s and his brother’s remains with him into exile. The National Guard, born from United States military intervention, had vanished. The last officers to flee robbed the Red Cross planes at gunpoint, and the last soldiers remaining in the Presidential Battalion barracks on Tiscapa Hill left a trail of uniforms, cartridge belts, canteens, and rifles. The five of us who were members of the Government Junta taking the place of Somoza entered from a side of the plaza on top of a fire truck tank with its siren blaring, which made everyone dizzy. At the same time, the guerrilla troops that had become our provisional bodyguards were firing shots in the air from truck’s running boards and platforms, with heavy fire from their Galil rifles. They were proud of that conquest since those were the Israeli rifles from Somoza’s Praetorian Guard, and the volleys echoed throughout the entire plaza as if they had to use up all the leftover shots at once. The broken bells were ringing in the old

cathedral that had been damaged by the 1972 earthquake. There were shouts of joy, cascading applause, choruses of slogans, tears that washed faces and laughter lighting up the faces bathed in tears, marimba music coming from speakers on a truck used for making announcements in the streets, and that could not move through the flags, the banners, and the multicolored umbrellas. There were also bunches of people up in the trees in the neighboring Central Park, in the cathedral towers’ cornices, and on the National Palace’s roof. As we made our way through the sea of people, I recalled the silence just minutes before while the fire truck rolled slowly through the deserted streets from Parque Las Piedrecitas on the southern highway. It was an unearthly silence under a luminous sky in the distance. It was as if the world had been forever emptied of sounds and air. The leaves on the laurel trees from India, where the crows were fluttering about, remained motionless, just like the leaves on the dark green mango trees lining the sidewalks. All of the houses were empty as well, with their doors open as if there had been a sudden flight, everyone’s flight toward the plaza. We entered the National Palace following the celebration because William Bowdler, of whom I will speak later, still unwavering in his role as negotiator, was insisting that archbishop of Managua, Monsignor Miguel Obando y Bravo, would have to be the one to transfer power to the Government Junta. Then I found myself at the entrance with Régis Debray, dressed in a light khaki-colored safari suit, with rings of sweat under his armpits. I had never seen him except in photos, and I remembered one where he was sitting between his guards on the bench in the military courtroom in Bolivia. Smiling, he stroked his bushy mustache, just about to tell me something, but I beat him to it. I remembered an article of his from a few months before—I do not remember whether it was in Le Monde—affirming that armed revolutions were no longer possible: ‘‘You see?’’ I told him. We did it. We did it. We had arrived. The world was going to be turned upside down. Sandino’s dream would be achieved. There would be no more submission to the Yankees. Exploitation would end. Somoza’s assets would belong to the people, the land to the farmers. The children would be vaccinated, and everyone would learn to read. The barracks would become schools. The rhetoric fit reality because words were meat and bone with the truth of desire. Nothing could come between them. Later, in a chronicle on the events of that day, Debray wrote that the

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feature that best described the guerrilla leaders was their gauntness, as opposed to the defeated Somocistas’ grotesque corpulence. They were emaciated from the rigors of war, the hardships of daily battles, forced marches, and days without anything to eat. They were skin and bones, with beards and the stench of old sweat stuck to their olive green uniforms, eating little and not sleeping. Even so, despite the weariness, from then on sleep would seem a mortal sin. Staying awake was the only way to avoid missing anything that was happening. There were too many events for the mind to make sense of them, and in the end they remained sensations, anxiety, desire, a vision of the future that was so full that it could not help but keep you from sleeping. What’s more, the revolution’s protagonists were also very young. They were kids, underage youth at the head of hundreds of combatants who were as young as they were. The liberation of León had only been decided after tough fights, street by street, under aerial bombings and with entire city blocks on fire. Dora María Téllez, who was only twenty-two years old, leading a troop of adolescents, had pushed the National Guard out of all its strongholds. She even sent General Gonzalo Everstz, the feared ‘‘Vulcano,’’ fleeing from Regional Headquarters, shielded between women and children he had taken as hostages to reach Fort Acosasco. He would later be forced out of there as well. Commander Francisco Rivera (‘‘El Zorro’’), hero of the liberation of Estelí, was also not even twenty-five. In a photo someone happened to take that day, I appear arm in arm with several guerrilla fighters. Among them is Commander Elías Noguera, El Zorro’s immediate officer, with his Ranger hat tilted over his dark curls, his chinstrap tied under his chin. He looks thin, and I look thin and hairy, since my hair had not been cut for weeks, with a wide leather belt holding up my bluejeans. Along with the group, smiling, also arm in arm with us, is a woman from the town. She is very poor, her thick hair tangled and matted, and on her blouse is a makeshift rosette, two pieces of cloth torn from who knows what old dresses and sewn to make the Sandinista flag. It was the flag Sandino had raised for the first time in the Segovia Mountains as he began his war against foreign intervention in 1927. Seeing it now in the photo’s black-and-white contrast, that woman’s face has the majesty that only history can give faces as they appear more recent the more distant they become. After the swearing-in ceremony in the National Palace’s Blue Room, the five members of the Government Junta and the nine from the fsln’s

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National Directorate had to appear over and over again in the windows to wave to the crowd calling to us from the plaza. The situation never stopped seeming odd because the majority of us were complete unknowns to those who were cheering for us. Besides, there were too many of us in a country where the name of a solitary caudillo had always been the most important: Zelaya, Chamorro, Moncada, Sandino, Somoza. Five members made up the Government Junta: Violeta Chamorro, Alfonso Robelo, Moisés Hassan, Daniel Ortega, and I. Of the five, Violeta was the most well known. She was the widow of Pedro Joaquín Chamorro, murdered in January the previous year on a Managua Street by assassins paid for by the dictatorship. Perhaps I was known somewhat as the leader from the Group of Twelve. Alfonso Robelo was a businessman in the cooking oil industry. Until recently, he was the president of the Superior Council of Private Initiative (cosip), the private enterprise elite. Moisés Hassan had fought in Managua’s western neighborhoods with the guerrilla forces. He was from a family of Palestinian immigrants and had obtained his doctorate in mathematics from the University of North Carolina. He represented the popular organizations grouped under the United People’s Movement (mpu). Daniel Ortega was also a member of the fsln’s nine-member National Directorate, and the only one in the Government Junta who wore olive green. He had spent a great part of his youth incarcerated in Tipitapa’s Modelo prison. In a poem from those years, he remembered that he had never seen the miniskirts in fashion at the time in Managua. His photograph was never printed in any newspaper, except when he was captured in 1968, when they split open his forehead with a rifle butt, leaving a scar. He was accused of taking part in the conspiracy to assassinate Sergeant Gonzalo Lacayo, a torturer from Somoza’s Security Office who was fat and sadistic, similar to the sergeant Ernest Borgnine portrayed in From Here to Eternity. Everyone feared and loathed him. Lacayo was walking to visit his lover in one of Managua’s residential neighborhoods when they called his name from a car. When he turned to look, he was riddled with bullets. A friend of mine, the writer Mario Cajina Vega, sent a letter to me in Costa Rica the following day, saying ‘‘nobody can wipe the smiles off their faces that they woke up with this morning.’’ Not only were people seeing the vast majority of the members of the fsln’s National Directorate for the first time, but it was also the first time they were hearing some of their names. Furthermore, several of them

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were just getting to know each other. This was due in part to clandestine life and a lack of communication, and also because they had belonged to different factions until then, with their own military commands that were hostile to one another. Of all of them, Tomás Borge was without a doubt the most well known, since his prison photo had appeared in La Prensa, where he was shown handcuffed to a bed in the Military Hospital, reduced to skin and bones after a hunger strike that lasted long weeks while he demanded fair treatment in the prison. Daniel, despite the fact that his standing as a member of the Government Junta gave him authority, was not the most noteworthy or decisive figure out of the nine commanders. When he prevailed, it was as a result of the maneuvering and juggling of his brother Humberto. He was later chosen to be leader after a laborious process because he was the safest figure, given that he was the least well known, to oppose Tomás’s aspirations. In the end, Tomás, the most charismatic of the nine, finally yielded and accepted second place. In the days following the triumph, we were all unknown, even to the combatants. In order to cross guerrilla roadblocks under the command of very different leaders, we had to travel around Managua wearing ids with our photograph, which had been produced with a Polaroid camera we found in the Central Bank’s offices. That building in the center of old Managua had been demolished by the earthquake and only its first four floors had been salvaged and restored. That was where the Government Junta was headquartered after someone discovered the location of the set of keys that opened all its doors. The most recognizable hero during those triumphant days was Edén Pastora, ‘‘Commander Zero.’’ He had led the attack on the National Palace barely a year before, an operation that sent people into the streets celebrating, that left the reputation of the dictatorship’s strength in shambles, and that marked the beginning of its end. Eduardo Contreras, the first ‘‘Commander Zero’’ from the attack on Chema Castillo’s house in 1974, had hidden his identity behind a facemask following the golden rule that history is not made by faces but by anonymous people. The other members of the commando also hid their faces. Each one of them was identified by a number, and the leader was the number zero, symbolizing the fact that the leader was unimportant. The introduction of the zero in that military nomenclature simultaneously removed value from any of the consecutive numbers used to refer to the

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commando unit members. They were all equal. The number did not represent any rank. It was simply a way to identify oneself and to be used for reference. Edén Pastora, on the other hand, had not resisted the urge to reveal his uncovered face from the beginning of the National Palace operation, and that is how he appeared boarding the plane to leave with the compañeros from his unit and the freed prisoners. His photo traveled around the world, but he was never forgiven for that mistake. That triumphant day in the plaza, when we left the National Palace to return to the Camino Real Hotel where we were staying, I remember Edén standing in a jeep convertible, followed by the masses like a saint on procession. Despite his charisma, he was not a member of the fsln’s National Directorate, which from then on would build itself up as a mythical instrument for the new power, a paternal deity fed by the slogan for civil obedience: ‘‘National Directorate, give the order!’’ Those were the nine Revolution Commanders, a collective power, new in the country’s history. Very soon they would have their olive green uniforms made by Fidel Castro’s tailor in Havana, all the same style and from the same fabric. The insignias on the lapels were designed by Celia Sánchez, a solitary star in the center of a crown of laurels embroidered in red and black. I did not enter that new collective until after the electoral defeat in 1990, when its power had already weakened. At one time, it represented a defiance of Nicaragua’s traditional style of governing. Despite this fact, in one of the revolution’s many paradoxes, it wound up reconfirming that style. Many of its decisions were critical in the context of war we were experiencing. They were meditated at length and discussed for long hours, representing the fruit of a kind of collective and balanced knowledge. However, that method of profound debate never extended to the rest of the fsln’s structures, nor to the political system we were trying to establish. When all was said and done, and even though it was shared, that authority, sometimes magnanimous and at other times arbitrary, could not escape the old authoritarian fate. The fsln’s National Directorate wound up being a caudillo with nine heads instead of one. For the commanders in the struggle who did not fit in the magic number of the National Directorate’s nine members, a supporting category of guerrilla leaders was created. Edén Pastora was among them. They received an embroidered cobblestone on their lapels as a symbol. Cobblestones pulled up from the streets to build the barricades in the insurgent

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cities also became the logo for Barricada, which developed during that same period, printed on the press that had published Novedades, the Somoza family newspaper. Before we moved to the Government House, we swore in the members of the revolutionary cabinet in a ceremony at the Camino Real Hotel that same night, on July 20. We were all occupying its rooms at the time because the majority of the government had arrived from Costa Rica the day before on Quetzalcoatl II, a plane sent by the Mexican president, José López Portillo. There were provisional offices at the same hotel where decrees were written and revised. There was also a swarm of journalists, diplomats, real guerrilla fighters, and many others who wanted to give that appearance. Then there were family members of the commanders and of the new leadership, arriving to visit them as they would a happy guest. I remember some of those family members dressed in red shirts with black pants, faithful to those new times. That night, we unceremoniously entered a narrow room with windows overlooking the swimming pool. We were dazed by the television lights. I was carrying the text of the Fundamental Statute that the Junta had approved, which I read. Daniel read the decree for the appointment of ministers. It was a plural government as never before seen in Nicaragua, but it would only last a few months because, in December, we opted for Sandinista hegemony. That created a small apparatus that excluded the vast majority of our allies. Those initial days were defined by an id card on your shirt and provisional bodyguards who could leave you alone at any moment because they felt like putting the rifle down and going home. Some were truck drivers, others pharmacy employees, or bus fare collectors, or machinists, or bricklaying apprentices, or simply unemployed people who had picked up a weapon. Those were days of a state of grace that lifted earthly weight from your shoulders and gave you enough strength and lightness to go all day without a bite to eat, holed up in that Government House with its stark offices and bank furniture, cold to the touch, with an elevator big enough for a stretcher, similar to a hospital. It was a real prison. Through the windows, during the scarce respites from the never-ending meetings, you could look out at the distant gray lake and the blue profile of the Chiltepe Peninsula that enters the lake’s waters, well beyond the wastelands and ruins from the earthquake. There were meetings with agendas lacking any coherence and chaotic sessions with the cabinet seated around an enor-

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mous oak table. This was where interviews also took place, and where ambassadors were received who came to present accrediting letters following a ceremony improvised by the chief of protocol. This was Herty Lewites, dressed in olive green and carrying a strange machine gun slung across his chest that looked like something out of a Flash Gordon movie. Herty was a born conspirator who earlier had been convicted of arms trafficking in the United States. He had devoted himself during the final years of the struggle to propaganda, taking his own photos. Given the proper angles, they multiplied the number of guerrilla fighters, which were few at that time, and with even fewer weapons. He was a free thinker, able to make fun of even his own mother, not to mention hierarchies, whose initiatives and behaviors—what were called ‘‘liberal styles’’ in the slang in vogue—differed from the rigid party molds that were starting to develop. His father, Israel Lewites, was a Polish Jew who fled the Holocaust and reached New York, where he chose Nicaragua as his destination, pointing blindly to a place on a globe after spinning it around. He settled in Jinotepe, where he married, and where Herty and his brothers were born. One of them was Israel, who died during the assault on the Masaya barracks in the October 1977 Sandinista Offensive. His father traveled from Jinotepe around to neighboring towns, carrying his merchandise in a suitcase. In Masatepe, in the days of my youth, he advertised his wares on the street proclaiming: ‘‘Magic mattresses! Two go to bed and three come out!’’ He later opened the Bambi chocolate factory. It had just started to prosper when, in November 1960, the attack took place on the barracks in Jinotepe and Diriamba. This act was led by brothers Edmundo and Fernando (‘‘El Negro’’) Chamorro, whose audacity shook the country. Herty participated. His father, who did not get involved in politics, came to the barracks in Jinotepe, which was already in rebel hands, to ask if his son had died, and it was Herty himself who came out to greet him, reproaching him for his cowardice for not having joined the uprising. He stayed to give advice to ensure the barracks’ defense, boasting an experience he did not have. Later, when the National Guard recovered its positions with tank cannons, father and son had to take refuge, dressed as women, with wigs, high heels, and their lips painted bright red, in the Brazilian Embassy in Managua. They spent years exiled in Rio de Janeiro, where Herty earned a living as an agent for emerald traffickers in Copacabana’s tourist hotels. The chocolate factory was auctioned off by the bank-lender.

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One of the ambassadors Herty introduced during those days in July 1979 was from Iraq. He came to the ceremony dressed in a black cape with red fringe. He had to return that same day to Mexico, where he lived, and hours later they informed us that the provisional immigration guards had stopped him at the airport for the simple reason that his cape made him suspicious. Then there was the ambassador from Taiwan. Neither of the Junta members currently present in the Government House, Moisés Hassan and I, wanted to receive the accreditation letter from him. It was ridiculous. Taiwan had supported Somoza until the end. Then Herty cleverly forced us, so we both went. It was a ceremony of few words and great indifference until the ambassador, courteous the entire time, took a check out of his pocket from his government: a donation for reconstruction. I handed it to Moisés so that he could read the amount. It was $100,000. The room was full of smiles, and Herty ran to find the waiters to improvise a toast. I stayed until midnight receiving the new mayors, elected by popular vote, who arrived from the most remote places with lists of requests for electricity, potable water, paved roads, schools, clinics, and sports fields. All summed up together, they represented the end result of centuries of backwardness. There were also delegations that had information about gold veins lost in the mountains and rivers where the nuggets shone under the water like fish scales. Others brought rocks, wrapped in handkerchiefs, that were wet with oil found in places where oil came bubbling up, and they gave me written testimonies of those wonders: ‘‘In the place they call Las Canoas at the head of the mountain stream, an oily product comes out that turns iridescent when it comes into contact with water. Please investigate this. And, a little more toward the east, there is a mountain they call Mesa Galana. This hill is rich and has gold deep inside. Please confirm it.’’ There were also treasures that the Somoza family had left hidden. I happened upon one when I went down into the basement at television station Channel 6, property of the family, next to the Tiscapa Lagoon. There I discovered the avarice loot belonging to Doña Salvadora de Somoza. She was the elderly widow of the senior ‘‘Tacho,’’ founder of the dynasty. There were numerous unopened boxes full of wrapped gifts, surely from birthdays and wedding anniversaries: electroplated platters, picture frames, Chinese vases, porcelain china, and sets of silverware. And there were family photo albums; her files of letters; strict accounts of the purchases of

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fabric and beads for her in Washington by her daughter Lilliam, married to the eternal ambassador from Nicaragua, Guillermo Sevilla Sacasa; and her missal. The pages of her missal for hearing daily mass at the Iglesia de Perpetuo Socorro also contained pious stamps and keepsakes from funeral masses, and it had a collection of vintage postcards with nude fat women with short haircuts in style in the 1920s, alongside brawny men like circus wrestlers, who had bushy moustaches and were equipped with oversized phalluses. Doña Salvadora, daughter of the wise Luis H. Debayle, together with the senior Tacho, were all characters in my novel Margarita, How Beautiful the Sea. She happened to be in Washington on the day of the revolution’s triumph, having gone there for protection alongside her daughter and son-in-law. When a group of Nicaraguan students entered in a big commotion to occupy the residence, she came out to yell at them from the top of the stairway on the second floor: ‘‘Cachurecos, get out of here!’’ Cachurecos was the term Liberals used to refer to Conservatives. After half a century in power, she could not conceive that the Somoza family had any other enemies. When the Government Junta met with President Carter in September 1979, I wanted to visit that mansion on Connecticut Avenue, which would burn down months later. At the time, it reminded me of the Addams family house, with its embossed stairways, its crown molding on the ceilings, its wrapped crystal chandeliers, its humid, moldy rooms, and its velvet curtains pulled closed. The dining room with macabre furniture even had a chalkboard, still propped on an easel, with the seating chart from the last gala dinner that Sevilla Sacasa had given. Many of those mornings I boarded an old Sikorsky helicopter, which landed in between the electric cables in the Government House parking lot, to travel to the most remote places, to municipal authority swearingins, to meetings in markets, assemblies with farmers, tributes to martyrs in baseball stadiums that included endless speeches and that always ended with a rural mass. The helicopter did not have a door because it had been used by the National Guard to discharge 500-pound barrels full of explosives over the insurgent neighborhoods in Managua. In the open hole, which the wind whipped into, they had installed a .50-caliber machine gun, as you could see from the support tube welded to the fuselage. After a few weeks, the rotor stopped in midflight during a military mission on the northern border, and it went down near Somotillo, but all of the crew survived.

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On those trips, it was up to me to solve conflicts, acting as a judge from a central power that had just begun to define itself. Meanwhile, the guerrilla barons, with their own seals and stationery, imposed lower prices on basic necessities; obstructed the transport of products so that their own communities did not have to do without; reduced the hours of a rural workday; carried out nonofficial tribunals; and maintained their own prisons. It was a tremendous irony that it did not take long for the power of the revolutionary government to imitate those measures, which we viewed condescendingly at that time and which caused more than a few guffaws. They were part of that innocent universe where the laws of supply and demand had lost all their power, defeated by a primitive sense of justice. The Government Junta also came to approve a decree to cut the peasant workday in half, and another to put a limit on prices. There was also an order to confiscate agricultural products on the highway en route to Managua if they were not destined for sale to state agencies, all in the name of a common good of impossible structures. There were Panamanian advisers at the Government House helping us organize the administration. One day, Marcel Salamín appeared. He brought me a typewriter as a gift from General Omar Torrijos, along with boxes of pencils, pads of paper, and office supplies purchased in the Turkish markets in Panama. There were also Mexican advisers, among them a representative from the pri (Institutional Revolutionary Party) who was in direct contact with his president Gustavo Carvajal. Early in 1979, during a dinner at the La Hacienda de los Morales Restaurant in Mexico City, I had made an agreement with Carvajal on the pri’s first contribution to the Group of Twelve. It was for $50,000. Separately, however, secretary of the interior, Don Jesús Reyes Heroles, who met with me at his office on Bucareli Street without ever interrupting his numerous telephone calls, was supporting us under President López Portillo’s instructions. In August 1979, Daniel and I were going to attend the Conference of Non-Aligned Countries in Havana, and Carvajal suggested we go to Mexico first to see President López Portillo. It was a visit we organized quickly with his help, without taking into account the foreign affair protocols. When the foreign relations secretary, Don Jorge Castañeda, discovered we were on our way, he asked with justified sarcasm: ‘‘Oh, that’s great, and when are you coming?’’ Even so, Don Jorge met us in the presidential hanger to the song ‘‘La Negra’’ played by a group of Mariachis when we arrived, now in possession

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of Somoza’s private jet recovered from Miami. The list of requests we had with us then was immense: oil, to start, and grains, medicines, construction materials, desks, blackboards, workbooks, helicopters for the Literacy Crusade. However, it would have been even longer if it had been up to the pri’s representative in Managua, because while we were preparing it, he kept repeating: ‘‘That’s very little. Don’t worry about adding more.’’ In all truth, López Portillo’s generosity always allowed us to add more to the lists we always took to his office. The oil debt consisted of emergency loans that the master David Ibarra, his secretary of finance, magically solved. López Portillo took his whole cabinet on his trip to Managua in February 1982. During the flight, one of his ministers asked him how they should treat Nicaragua: ‘‘Just like a Mexican state,’’ he responded. That kind of inclusion did not offend anyone; it was more a compliment. Daniel and I, without homes in Managua, left the Camino Real, which was too far from the Government House, and moved to the Intercontinental Hotel. We took two small rooms on the third floor, opposite each other, which were like monastic cells, and we stayed there until the end of the year. It did not seem odd as a revolutionary rite of passage, since Fidel Castro had also lived and kept his office for months at the Havana Hilton Hotel. When we returned at midnight, the bodyguards would lie down to sleep on the carpet in the hall until morning. The phone could ring at all hours because all the calls coming into the switchboard were transferred to my room. That was how it became up to me to respond to the neverending list of various requests, people who had sought a safe place outside the country and who asked if they could return, family members of prisoners, and demands for homes that had been occupied. We both went down to have breakfast in the cafeteria, and we gave the first morning interviews in the elevator. They were to foreign journalists who were guests at the hotel just as we were. Tomás Borge also moved there, occupying the entire penthouse, where he installed his ministry of the interior. His bodyguards were much more numerous, and his swarm of assistants grew each day. A large crowd constantly followed him, which I believed to be admirers, although I soon discovered that it was made up of family members of National Guard prisoners who were seeking release orders. The hotel, a pyramid of dreadful architectural taste that had survived the 1972 earthquake, had its own story to tell. It had housed the foreign press throughout the war, valued for its proximity to Somoza’s bunker,

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only one street away. From the window of one of the rooms on the third floor, Fernando ‘‘El Negro’’ Chamorro had shot a rocket, hitting the auditorium roof in a barracks commanded by ‘‘El Chigüín,’’ Somoza’s son. The images of the assassination of the abc reporter, Bill Stewart, were broadcast by satellite from that hotel to the world, after he was executed by a shot to the back of the head by an officer from the National Guard in a Managua neighborhood in June 1979. Somoza’s bureaucrats had sought refuge at that hotel before their final escape. The National Congress had convened there to accept Somoza’s resignation and to elect Urcuyo Maliaños, who then no longer wanted to relinquish the presidential sash. Howard Hughes had lived there as well. Howard Hughes, who had escaped the United States’ courts, arrived secretly in Managua in 1972 with his entourage of gamblers. Nixon’s ambassador to Somoza, Turner Shelton, had been a croupier at some of his casinos in Las Vegas and had arranged his asylum in exchange for a promise of aviation business. He locked himself in the penthouse and spent the day watching old movies, sitting in a wheelchair. He never cut his hair or his nails, and would only eat Campbell soups that his servants gave him with surgical gloves. The only time he granted Somoza an interview was on board his Gulfstream jet, parked the entire time on the airport ramp. That precaution served him well the night of the earthquake because, in the midst of the trembling that brought down the city, and with the fires already confirmed, they took him down the service stairway in a stretcher to put him in an ambulance, which also belonged to him, and from there into the plane that was able to take off thanks to a system of emergency lights on the runway. I left the hotel at the end of November when my family arrived from Costa Rica and we found a house in Managua. The morning I came down with my suitcase to leave, there was a reporter at the door to the elevator from El Diario in Caracas, Venezuela. He asked me why I was not wearing a uniform like all the other commanders. I gave him the polite explanation that without a military role in the revolution, wearing olive green would be like putting on a costume. I did not have the title of commander, I told him, but they called me doctor. I also told him an anecdote from the Dominican Republic. Before the triumph, in a support meeting for the Group of Twelve organized by José Francisco Peña Gómez’s prd (Dominican Revolutionary Party), the master of ceremonies had presented me as a commander as I was about to speak. Someone corrected him quietly,

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and he tried to explain. I took the microphone and said: ‘‘Don’t worry. I am not a commander, but they also call me doctor without me being one either. In Nicaragua, lawyers are called doctors just like physicians.’’ At the end of that age of innocence, it would not take long for other commanders to appear, those of the Contra, with less-than-heroic pseudonyms such as ‘‘Snake,’’ ‘‘Scorpion,’’ ‘‘Jackal,’’ ‘‘Iguana,’’ ‘‘Vulture.’’ Their task forces would also be baptized with the conspicuous names of their supporters, among them Jean Kirkpatrick.

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The Swan over the Burning Coals

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hile I was watching the news one night recently, a young woman who is a friend of Sergio’s came in to speak with me from the hall where they had been talking. She said that her name was Claudia and that she was Idania Fernández’s daughter. She asked me if I had really known her, and if I still remembered her, and she asked if I could tell her something about her life someday. I told her that I was writing this book and said that I would like to know how she sees her mother now, someday when we had that conversation. We planned to get together very soon. However, there were different delays, and the interview was left pending. I met Idania, whose military code name was ‘‘Angelita,’’ in February 1979. It was during a visit that the Group of Twelve, which I was heading, made to Panama at General Torrijos’s invitation. She was tall and thin with dark skin, and she raised her eyebrows when she laughed, a laughter that made her black eyes sparkle. She was decisive in her ways, a quick thinker with a sharp wit. Along with the few contents in her handbag, she carried a heavy Magnum pistol. She had been trained as a combat engineer in Cuba and had been wounded in the hand during a battle on the Southern Front at the end of 1978. That was when Tulita, my wife, picked her up in Liberia, Costa Rica, and put her in the care of Jean Coronel, who had practically turned his house in San José into a field hospital. When I saw her in Panama, she was still wearing the bandage on

her hand. She left after a few weeks, via Honduras, to join the clandestine combat fronts in Nicaragua. She had already divorced her Panamanian husband, and her greatest regret was leaving Claudia behind, who would have been four years old then and who lived with her grandparents in the United States. They murdered her on April 16, following the attack on the house in the Lomas de Veracruz neighborhood in León, where Edgard Lang died, as I already mentioned. That house, along with the ones surrounding it, was owned by young businessmen in the cotton industry who were collaborating with the Sandinista Front. With the unleashing of the final insurrection near at hand, the General Staff of the Western Front was holed up in one of the rooms making its plans. Then the guards appeared from every direction with their loaded guns and the security agents armed with machine guns. They broke down the doors and jumped over walls. They closed off the intersections with military jeeps and gave orders by radio, and there was a tank approaching, rolling down the pavement, with the gun in the turret pointing toward the house. The men were executed in cold blood right there in the yard, in front of the maids held at gunpoint: Óscar Pérez Cassar (‘‘Gordo Pín,’’ ), leader of the Western Front, Róger Deshon, Carlos Manuel Jarquín, and Edgard Lang. They did not have time to get their weapons. Idania and Aracelli Pérez Díaz, who was Mexican, were raped and executed later in Fort Acosasco. Ana Isabel Morales managed to survive because she ran unnoticed toward another house that was also being thoroughly searched, where she took a child in her arms, which allowed her to pass for a maid. Someone had betrayed them. When the clandestine combatants in the nearby Indian neighborhood of Subtiava got word, everything was all over before they could retrieve their weapons and organize a rescue squad. Dora María Téllez would have surely been among the dead, but days earlier she began sensing a foreboding tragedy, and she asked ‘‘Gordo Pín’’ several times, the last time finally in tears, not to return to that house. She felt it was surrounded by a bad aura. She told me the story sitting in front of the window to my study while the kiskadees fluttered around the branches of the chokecherry: ‘‘You’re nervous,’’ Gordo Pín laughed. ‘‘Why don’t you go to Managua for a few days, ok?’’ So he sent her along with Joaquín Cuadra Jr. (‘‘Rodrigo’’), who was the Internal Front commander at the time. Aracelli was Joaquín’s companion. She was from Mexico and just as beautiful as Idania.

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I also met Óscar Benavides, a peasant boy from Estelí, while I was in Panama on that occasion. He was quiet with very pure eyes. He would also die, just a few weeks later in Nueva Guinea, during the development of a military front to the north of the San Juan River, toward the highway to the Caribbean coast. It turned into a military disaster with few survivors. I will never forget him for his Franciscan humility. We were staying at the Panama Hilton on General Torrijos’s tab. Dr. Joaquín Cuadra Chamorro, member of the Group of Twelve and father of Joaquín, leader of the Internal Front, always enjoyed good food and wine, even as he collaborated with the guerrilla in those never-ending, chaotic days. One night he invited Idania and Óscar to have dinner with us at the hotel restaurant, which was called Lesseps in honor of the French engineer who failed in the construction of the canal. Óscar hid behind an enormous menu written in flowery calligraphy while he carefully read the list. Fearful perhaps of mispronouncing the names of the dishes, or due to his shyness, he whispered his order to the maitre d’. When they removed the silver domes from the plates, Dr. Cuadra, following his gourmet eye, realized that they had served Óscar the best dish. In Managua’s Terraza Club they had a fillet named in Dr. Cuadra’s honor. He was not going to rest until he solved that vexing enigma, because such precise Sybaritic tastes required great knowledge of French cuisine. So he asked him: ‘‘All I did was order the most expensive dishes,’’ Óscar said, grinning with a beatific smile. We were on the verge of victory by then, although there were still many obstacles ahead, and the Group of Twelve, formed after my return from Berlin, had become a cornerstone of Sandinismo in the fight to overthrow Somoza. The decision to leave Germany was confirmed for me one winter night at the end of 1974 when Tagesschau, the television news we watched before dinner, opened with breaking news. A Sandinista commando had seized a residence in an elegant neighborhood in Managua. There had been a party there, and they were holding Somoza’s family members and ministers hostage. There was a map of Nicaragua behind the newscaster. Then, in the following scenes, you could see the streets in the Los Robles neighborhood, with their royal palms that I knew so well. The streets were guarded by military vehicles, and the residence was shown from a distance. Bystanders were gathered on the sidewalks, and soldiers kept them under control. It all seemed impossible. It was snowing outside in Berlin.

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On December 27, 1974, on one of those peaceful days during Christmas vacation, Dr. José María Castillo, from Somoza’s intimate elite, was offering a reception for Turner B. Shelton, the ambassador from the United States who worked for Howard Hughes. The commando members waited for Shelton to leave, careful not to confront the United States government, and they burst in firing shots, trapping all the guests, the most notable being the ambassador to Washington, Guillermo Sevilla Sacasa, Somoza’s brother-in-law. The owner of the house, who ran to his bedroom for weapons to resist the assault, was the only one killed in the entire operation. The commando’s leader was Eduardo Contreras, ‘‘Commander Zero.’’ It included experienced guerillas, such as Germán Pomares (‘‘El Danto,’’), and others who had recently been recruited, such as Joaquín Cuadra Jr. and Javier Carrión. They had joined the guerrilla from the Christian movement in the Riguero neighborhood, and they knew the house very well to be able to move around it safely. The wife recognized them as her daughters’ friends, even with the silk stockings they wore to cover their faces. Twenty-five years later, Joaquín is now chief of staff of the Nicaraguan Army and Javier will surely succeed him in that role, following the institutional ladder. They had been training on a coffee plantation in the Managua Mountains, not knowing for certain where they would make their hit. They were searching for a party with some big fish, and they were growing desperate to find one when ‘‘El Danto,’’ in charge of monitoring all the radio news programs, heard Coronel Lázsló Pataky announce that he was invited to a reception to honor Ambassador Shelton. Coronel Pataky, a monumental fat man who weighed 300 pounds, with a pear-shaped beard and a bow tie, was an odd character of the Graham Greene type. He was Hungarian by birth and boasted of having belonged to the Foreign Legion in Africa. He wrote a book entitled Los duros (The Tough and Resilient) about his adventures as a legionnaire in El Alamein and Tripolitana. I heard him relate those adventures many times as he sat on a pillow on the floor, unable to stand up without assistance. That was in the sixties during the evening gatherings among intellectuals in the studio of the painter Omar de León. His news program, El Clarín (The Bugle), aired at noon on Radio Uno. That was where he read the invitations he received, with his thick accent and shortness of breath, in between commercials for herbal remedies. Somoza was forced to agree to every demand, which included the

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distribution of an fsln declaration in all the news media; a ransom payment of $5 million, reduced finally to 1 million; and the liberation of numerous Sandinista prisoners, among them Daniel Ortega. The commando members traveled along the streets toward the airport on a school bus, taking the hostages with them, and people gathered to cheer for them all along the route. This was not a case of martyred guerrillas. These were victors leaving after humiliating Somoza without losing a single man. The prisoners were waiting at the airport, and they were exchanged for the hostages. Then they all flew to Cuba accompanied by Monsignor Obando y Bravo. Later, based on accounts from Eduardo Contreras and other participants, Gabriel García Márquez wrote a script, El secuestro, for a film that was never made. The earthquake that destroyed Managua in 1972 had already caused a severe split within the dictatorship because Somoza had completely taken over the reconstruction business, unaware that his greed lost him one of his principle allies, private enterprise. This created opposition where none had previously existed. Now, this unexpected blow from the fsln had negative repercussions on the status of his power, as he was forced to bow before an enemy that he had considered insignificant up to that point. Another dangerous weakness was opening. However, Somoza still had the advantage that the fsln remained irreconcilable with private enterprise. An alliance between the guerrillas and businessmen would only be possible years later. The fsln was gaining international relevance. Public opinion in the world, until then oblivious to what was happening in Nicaragua, discovered that we were living under a dynastic dictatorship protected by the United States. In Nicaragua as well, the overflowing enthusiasm signaled that people were beginning to believe in the real possibility of ousting Somoza through that type of action. Acts of bravery were beginning to be rewarded. The poet Mario Cajina Vega wrote ‘‘Happy New Year!’’ on a card he sent me from Managua. Despite its rhetoric, I noticed that the tone of the fsln declaration that Somoza was forced to publish after the attack differed from the traditional approach. Upon my return, I was able to confirm that this shift in vision was indeed occurring. It would paradoxically divide the fsln into hostile factions, and the person leading it was Eduardo Contreras himself. Identifying the mythical ‘‘Commander Zero’’ became an obsession for Somoza’s security and a pastime in many intellectual and social gather-

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ings. The women who accompanied their husbands to the party the night of the attack—one of them even managing to swallow her diamond ring so that they could not confiscate it, which she later expelled with laxatives—had found him enchanting, even though he hid his face behind a silk stocking. Even today, if you ask them, they remember his impressive size, his natural likeability, and his gentleman’s finesse, which he employed while giving the strictest orders. What’s more, he spoke English, German, and French, quite remarkable for a guerrilla willing to risk his skin in that dangerous act. Eduardo, whose mother was Mexican, studied engineering in Berlin on a scholarship. There were Latin Americans there who still remembered one winter night, either for a lack of money for food or because he was incredibly drunk, when he stole a swan with other students from a pond in Tiergarten. He carried it away kicking under his coat, and it was deplumed and roasted in his impoverished apartment in the Neullköln neighborhood. He surely did not fail to recognize that he had placed his compatriot Rubén Darío’s heraldic bird over the burning coals. During a vacation in Leuven, Belgium, he ended up in a colony of Nicaraguan students and was recruited to the fsln by Jacobo Marcos Frech, a psychiatric intern, son of Palestinian immigrants. He returned secretly to Nicaragua and very quickly ascended to the fsln’s National Directorate in just a few months. His approach then began to conflict with the old theories dominated by guerrilla-centered dogma, which were sacred law since the triumph of the Cuban Revolution. From then on, he defended the ideas that later defined the Third Way Tendency and that finally made victory possible: shift the military offensive to cities, be open to all social sectors, make agreements with business leaders, and propose a government of national unity. Following the commando’s victorious act, he returned underground to Nicaragua. Then in November 1976, the same day that Carlos Fonseca died in Zinica, he was killed by a National Guard patrol at the entrance to the Satelite Asososca neighborhood on the highway to León, which was later named after him in his honor. Somoza triumphantly displayed the photograph of his cadaver in the drawer in the El Retiro Hospital morgue, and only then did everyone who was so eager to know his identity see his face. That was when I decided to return and this time to be fully involved in the struggle. Armand Gatti was a director at an experimental theater

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playhouse in Kurfürstendamm at the time. He had asked me to join him to work as a scriptwriter for film at the Pompidou Center, which was about to open. I rejected the offer, although not without some thought, and I have never stopped telling myself since that it was a crucial decision in my life. I would have missed a revolution, and I would have ended up going down to the kiosk on the corner every day to buy Le Monde to be informed about news from the far tropics, an image I always find terrifying. Before I left, in mid-1975, I thought I should do something that would help keep Nicaragua in the news and hit Somoza hard. Therefore, during my final weeks in Berlin, I spent my time elaborating a list of all of the ruling family’s properties, which had multiplied since the Managua earthquake. In that document, which I titled ‘‘Somoza from a to z,’’ I put everything I could remember under each letter, with the rigor of a novelist who knows how to be faithful to the utmost detail. I began mailing it to Tino Pereira as it grew. He was in exile in Geneva at the time, where he was working with oit (International Labour Organization). Tino had worked for infonac, the development bank where Somoza financed all his enterprises at giveaway prices. He added very valuable details. Even the section under x was not left blank. We wrote ‘‘unknown properties’’ on the page. The next step was to find someone who would publish it. I sent it to Carlos Tünnermann, former president of the University of Nicaragua and my predecessor in the position of general secretary to the Central American University Superior Council (csuca). He was in Washington with a Guggenheim fellowship at the time. Father Miguel d’Escoto, chief of communications of the Maryknoll order in New York, put it in Bill Brown’s hands. He was director of the Washington Office for Latin America (wola). Jack Anderson, the most famous columnist in the United States back then, agreed to publish it. He secretly sent a team of reporters to Nicaragua beforehand to verify that everything written was true. In August 1975, the list began appearing in several parts in the more than 300 newspapers that subscribed to Anderson’s column ‘‘The Washington-Merry-Go-Round,’’ including the Washington Post. The list contained everything from cobblestones to shoes, including alcohol, aviation, banks, candles, casinos, cattle, cement, coastal trading, coffee, cotton, fuel, hotels, leather, matches, mines, motels, newspapers, pawnshops, pigs, radio stations, rental properties, salt, shrimp, soap factories, sugar, tanneries, taxis, television stations, textiles, whorehouses, and wood. Even blood

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under the letter b was not left out because the Plasmaféresis Company, built in Managua, bought it from indigents and alcoholics to make plasma for export. Somoza ordered his brother-in-law Sevilla Sacasa to file a lawsuit against Anderson for $100 million. Anderson very calmly responded that the list was just beginning to be published and that the worst was yet to come. Somoza listened to his brother-in-law’s advice and withdrew his complaint. In his book Nicaragua Betrayed, Somoza boasts that his intelligence investigations led him to discover that the conspiracy had been plotted in the Venezuelan embassy in Washington under guidance from Carlos Andrés Pérez in collusion with Pedro Joaquín Chamorro. I was already living in San José again when, at the end of 1975, Humberto Ortega appeared. He had arrived from Havana, and Costa Rica was the least recommendable of all the countries where he could settle. On December 23, 1969, he had participated in a failed attack on the Alajuela barracks to free Carlos Fonseca, who had been a prisoner for months. He was injured in the lung and a hand during the attempt, which left him maimed for life. The worst, though, was that a civil guard had died in the attack, something that seemed unforgivable in public opinion in a country with a peaceful reputation such as Costa Rica. The following year, another commando managed to hijack a plane to rescue Carlos Fonseca and Humberto himself, and they were all sent to Cuba. Even so, despite such unfavorable circumstances, Humberto was able to live underground in Costa Rica until Somoza was overthrown, and he directed military operations from there. When I joined the fsln in 1975, a tangled web of internal conflicts was already being spun, the product of ideological tension. The small size of the organization’s forces and their social isolation in clandestine conditions, typical of Latin American guerrilla movements back then, made it worse. The successful blow in December the previous year did not seem to have helped unite them or expand their ranks. Two factions developed. One, which proposed building forces in mountain zones, was called the Prolonged Popular War (gpp). The most long-standing Marxists figured there, among them Tomás Borge. The other, the Proletarian Tendency (tp), which argued for the need to first create a workers’ party before developing a military structure, was led by Jaime Wheelock and Luis Carrión. At the end of 1975, following a heated

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clandestine meeting, both of them had been forced at gunpoint to seek asylum at the Venezuelan embassy in Managua. Humberto Ortega, who was a member of the fsln’s former National Directorate, now divided, assumed leadership of the new faction, the Insurrectional Faction. It was known as the ‘‘Third Way’’ for being the third to dissent, and it ended up equally at odds with the previous ones. It was the faction that I joined. In classical argot, those of us in the Third Way wound up being labeled petty bourgeois and adventurers. Yet for a time, the Third Way and the proletarians were able to work together. This was how we delivered another blow to Somoza in 1976 with the testimony that the Jesuit priest Fernando Cardenal presented before the United States Congress. I knew of Fernando from a distance because he was Ernesto Cardenal’s brother and because in 1972 he had participated in the occupations of Managua’s churches demanding freedom for political prisoners. When the earthquake hit, he was inside the cathedral with the university students, among them Luis Carrión. However, I met him for the first time in San José, one night in June 1976. He arrived from Managua dressed as a clergyman because that was what Eduardo Contreras, underground again in Nicaragua, had suggested in honor of the solemnity of the mission that was taking him to Washington. Luis Carrión and I were waiting for him in my office at csuca. They had reelected me as secretary general. He was carrying a folder stuffed full of the documents Eduardo had given him. We spent several nights holed up in the offices of Tito Castillo’s Club de Lectores bookstore preparing the complaint that Fernando took before the Subcommittee on International Organizations in the House of Representatives, presided over by Donald M. Fraser. The complaint contained a detailed report, with names and surnames, of the murdered, disappeared, and tortured in Kilambé, Dudú, Iyas, Sofana, Kuskawas, Waslala, mountain areas where the fsln guerrillas were operating; prisoners thrown in the air from helicopters in flight; mass rape of women; children strung on bayonets; locations of concentration camps where peasants were buried alive in mass graves; homes set ablaze; crops destroyed. Somoza was having lunch in his bunker when his brother-in-law called him from the halls of congress in Washington to report that Fernando,

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dressed as a clergyman, was reading his complaint at that moment before a room filled with an audience and, worst of all, reporters. What’s more, nothing could be done about it. Early in 1977, we began moving forward quickly with the insurrectional plans, and we needed Edén Pastora. I had met Edén in 1972 when he arrived in Costa Rica, having just been expelled from the fsln’s guerrilla ranks, with his nose eaten away by mountain leprosy. We quickly formed a group of conspirators: Edén, Harold Martínez (another former guerrilla), Carlos Coronel (the youngest son of the poet José Coronel Urtecho), Raúl Cordón (a university student from Rivas), and myself. We outlined our plans packed into my car as I drove around La Sabana Park. We enthusiastically decided to create a guerrilla front that would call itself democratic, to make it attractive. We were certain that Fidel Castro, whose support we were going to need, would understand. Ernesto Cardenal, who came to one of these planning sessions one day, was commissioned to travel to Cuba as the spokesman for the request. We were also going to request assistance from Don Pepe Figueres. I sold the car to finance the initial expenses, and the other conspirators contributed as much as they could, but the plans were fading to almost nothing until the following year when I made the decision to accept the writer’s fellowship and left for Berlin. It is always entertaining to listen to Edén. He is a narrator with enviable histrionic virtues, capable of falling on the floor to demonstrate the action in a battle and of inventing the most amusing stories as he goes along, adding a constant touch of satire to each one. While I write this book, he has called me on the phone to ask for my assessment of a painting he has in his possession because he wants to see how much he can get for it. Much to his chagrin, I told him it was by a terrible painter and that the painting is worthless, but that he would be better off consulting Juanita Bermúdez, my former assistant, who is now an art dealer. I then told him about the book and reminded him of the episode of our first conspiracy. ‘‘That was where the ‘Third Way’ was born, brother,’’ he told me, vibrant with enthusiasm. And he is right. We needed him, and during Holy Week in 1977, Carlos Coronel and I went to find him in Barra del Colorado, on Costa Rica’s jungle border with Nicaragua, where he was earning a living off of shark fishing. He sent the fillets by plane to San José packed in boxes with ice to be sold in fish

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markets as mahi-mahi. But the real business was in the fins, which he exported to Miami. Our presence that Holy Week in Barra del Colorado as guests of Edén and his wife, Yolanda, appeared entirely innocent. We arrived on vacation along with our families. That was until one morning when Edén took Carlos and myself to the dunes to show us the place where he was thinking of building a tarpon camp to lodge gringos interested in shark sport fishing. We then informed him of our mission’s real objective. The members of the Third Way wanted him to join them immediately. There was a different Sandinismo. A great insurrection was coming, and he could not miss it. Humberto Ortega was waiting for him in San José to discuss the military plans. He froze with his hand in the air where he had been outlining the tarpon camp’s dimensions, and before it came down he had said yes, unconditionally accepting a proposal that would have seemed audacious to any sensible person. Except that he was made for audacity, and he did not even pause to think of his fishing business that would soon be left abandoned, or of Yolanda, who was waiting for us for lunch. Then we returned to his house on stilts on the riverbank, which also served as a warehouse and production plant where the recently harpooned sharks were carved up on the floor, which was always being washed of the blood that ran through the cracks in the boards. We were returning in high spirits, as though we had just agreed on an excellent business deal. We sat down for lunch and then listened to a National Guard briefing on Nicaragua’s Radio Corporación, which was a local station there. They were reporting the combat death of Carlos Agüero, one of the legendary leaders of the ‘‘Pablo Úbeda’’ Column, an axis of the gpp Tendency in the mountains. It was Good Friday. Daniel Ortega arrived in Honduras the following week, and we met for the first time. I picked him up in the Kentucky Fried Chicken parking lot on the highway to San Pedro de Montes de Oca. His code name was ‘‘Enrique,’’ although those names varied a great deal depending on the time and place. At another time Daniel called himself ‘‘Cleto’’ and Humberto was called ‘‘David,’’ and also Pedro Antonio. My own code name was always ‘‘Baltazar’’ because I was in the middle of reading The Alexandria Quartet by Lawrence Durrell when I had to choose one. We went to Desamparados to have a meeting at Marcos Valle’s house.

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He was a sociology student who would later be our ambassador to Cuba. The two of us spent that long afternoon alone talking until we reached an understanding of what we wanted and how we planned to achieve it. We came from two different worlds, but we were close in age. He had dropped out of law school at the Jesuits’ Central American University to enter the clandestine struggle, and from there he had ended up in prison following the death of the torturer Lacayo. His jury trial marked the opening of the Palace of Justice trimmed in marble, which the earthquake turned into an unusable shell. Daniel seemed calm, collected, and able to listen and smile energetically when he felt inspired, despite his reticence and sullenness. He did not get carried away with rhetoric, unlike Carlos Fonseca, who used to stare intensely, speaking passionately with his eyes fixed on an invisible interlocutor. As I later learned when I got to know him, he could hide his stubbornness. What’s more, he was bold when it came to making political decisions, just as in his youth when he confronted the Guard in the streets of the San Antonio neighborhood where he grew up. His boldness was on the same level as Selim Shible, one of his compañeros who had knocked out a security agent right in the interrogation room. I was able to observe from then on that he also demonstrated very clear habits from when he had been in prison. He was unable to remain seated for long periods and needed to walk around the property, as if he had never left his cell in the Modelo prison. Thanks to his urging, during the years in the Government House, which felt very much like being in prison, as I already mentioned, I made a habit of running cross-country every day. It split the day in the middle of the afternoon, giving me enough energy to work until midnight. The first time we traveled together to Venezuela in 1978, on a conspiracy mission, when we shared the room at the Hilton Caracas Hotel, I realized he could spend hours running in place, also a prisoner’s habit. In May 1977, in the La California neighborhood’s Apartotel San José, we held the first clandestine meeting of those of us who would make up the revolutionary government. It was going to be announced at the very beginning of the military offensive we were preparing. That was when the Group of Twelve was really born, as later events would confirm. For some of those attending, it was a shock to take part in that conspiracy, especially for those who were part of Nicaragua’s high society of private business and finance: Felipe Mántica, a businessman and owner of

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the La Colonia supermarket chain; Dr. Joaquín Cuadra Chamorro, lawyer for Bank of America and Nicaragua Sugar Estate, from one of Granada’s most prominent families; Don Emilio Baltodano, coffee exporter and one of the owners of the Presto Instant Coffee factory; Ricardo Coronel, another of the poet Coronel Urtecho’s sons, who was an agricultural engineer working for the San Antonio Sugar Mill; Father Miguel d’Escoto, who had come from New York; Tito Castillo and myself, both of us living in Costa Rica. Father Fernando Cardenal was leading some spiritual activities at the time, and he was unable to leave Nicaragua. That group would later be joined by Carlos Tünnermann, a former university president; Arturo Cruz, an economist and officer of the Inter-American Development Bank (idb) in Washington; Casimiro Sotelo, an architect residing in California; and Carlos Gutiérrez, a dentist living in Mexico. The next meeting was held at his home in Cuernavaca. Humberto Ortega outlined the military plans, which consisted of simultaneous attacks on a day that year yet to be determined. The attacks would be on the National Guard barracks in Masaya, Rivas, and Granada, to the south of Managua; in Ocotal, in the northern part of the country; Chinandega, to the west; and the port of San Carlos, on the San Juan River, bordering with Costa Rica. With complete aplomb, he guaranteed that there were 1,200 men training under the command of experienced military leaders, and that the barracks would surely succumb. The general population would immediately join us, and the government we were going to be a part of would be installed in power. All we needed were weapons and supplies, and the funds to purchase them. Dr. Cuadra Chamorro listened quietly, his blazer stretched out over his knees: ‘‘That’s all very good,’’ he said, suddenly. ‘‘But it is always necessary to consider the possibility of a defeat. What plans are there in case they defeat us?’’ There was no alternative plan. He was a good gourmet, but also a lawyer hardened from a thousand battles. His most powerful reason for being there was to be in solidarity with his daughters, Marta Lucía, Berta, and Cristina, all committed to underground activities in Managua, and with his son Joaquín, in Honduras at the time where they were organizing the column to attack El Ocotal, which included in its ranks Daniel Ortega, Víctor Tirado, Germán Pomares (‘‘El Danto’’), Dora María Téllez, Francisco Rivera (‘‘El Zorro’’), and Óscar Benavides. Children drew their fathers into the struggle. Don Emilio Baltodano

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was a practicing Catholic, as Felipe Mántica was, and he also had a guerrilla son, Álvaro, who would join in the assault on the Masaya barracks that October. Yet his Christian faith also motivated him to take that step that would seem so unprecedented in the powerful economic circles in which he moved. That day they also agreed to contribute the first $50,000 and to raise at least the same amount in Managua. That money was used to buy the first hunting weapons in San José sports stores: shotguns, rifles with telescopic sights, along with pistols and abundant ammunition. This was in addition to the $10,000 my friend Meme Colom Argueta gave me. I explained the plans to Meme during breakfast at the Balmoral Hotel, on one of his visits to Costa Rica with his Italian wife, and he very enthusiastically promised me support. He was a staunch opponent of Guatemala’s military dictatorships, and he had been mayor of the capital city, elected as a candidate by public subscription. On my final trip to Guatemala as general secretary of csuca, which was possibly in August 1977, I went to see him at his home. The situation was dramatic. Two bodyguards armed with shotguns stood guard at the entrance. The windowpanes were protected with mattresses from empty bedrooms because he had sent his wife and children off to Italy, and all the rooms showed evidence of disorder and abandon. He told me that he would never leave Guatemala, even though you could almost hear the footsteps closing in on him. Given the circumstances, I avoided the topic that led me to see him, the collaboration he had promised, but he was the one who remembered it, and he gave me a note for a friend asking her for a loan of $10,000. A short time later, they intercepted Meme’s vehicle at an intersection and gunned him down. In July 1977, the revolutionary government was constituted during a second meeting in Cuernavaca, Mexico. After a careful discussion, we approved the rough draft of the program that could be summarized in five main points: a democratic regime of public freedoms; the abolition of Somoza’s Guard to make way for a new National Army; the confiscation of all wealth belonging to the Somoza family and its allies; the transformation of property rights, beginning with agrarian reform, under a mixedmarket system; and nonaligned relationships with every country in the world, putting an end to dependence on the United States. This program remained fundamentally unchanged until we came into power. We elected Felipe Mántica president. The stationary for the president’s official communications, when it was time to solicit recognition from

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other governments, was printed during secret sessions on the tiny printer in csuca’s offices. Not everything happened as we had anticipated, beginning with the military offensive. Yet that government team, which seemed so tentative at the time, was the same one that was put in place at the revolution’s triumph, with some losses and modifications. And we always laughed amongst ourselves at the answer a peasant combatant from the Southern Front, one of Father Gaspar García Laviana’s soldiers, had given when they asked him what he thought of us as a group: ‘‘Very good,’’ he replied. ‘‘Just a lot of priests and a lot of rich guys.’’

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omoza could never understand why the United States had abandoned one of its own. He was bitter as he received Ambassador Lawrence Pezzullo’s visits during his final days in the bunker. His list of complaints grew each time, and he resembled a spiteful lover reading worn-out letters from a lost love out loud: ‘‘I would rather that you speak English, being that I am a Manhattan Latino myself,’’ he said to him on the first of those occasions. He spoke in antiquated English, with expressions that had long fallen out of use. It was Deputy Secretary of State Warren Christopher’s phone call on Somoza’s first day in exile at his residence on Miami Beach that threw the last shovelful of dirt on the cadaver of that old love affair. His visa would be cancelled if Urcuyo Maliaños, his successor in the presidency, who was supposed to be temporary, continued refusing to resign. Terrified, he then phoned Urcuyo: ‘‘Chico, I don’t know what to do. I am a prisoner of the State Department. Warren Christopher just called to tell me that if you do not transfer power to the Government Junta, they are going to hand me over to the Sandinista Front.’’ Urcuyo left that very night for Guatemala on a military plane sent by General Romeo Lucas. He took along the presidential sash in his surgical bag. Somoza had obviously misled him. He had asked him to stay, assuring him that the United States would give

him the support they had denied him, and Urcuyo began behaving like a president of a government that did not exist. As late as the morning of July 17, 1979, he read an address to the nation, with nineteenth-century affectation, in which he asked the rebels, who were advancing toward Managua from every direction, to ‘‘lay down their arms before the altar of the Fatherland.’’ Somoza had made a final attempt to change history with a throw of the dice. He thought that if Urcuyo survived, it would facilitate his return from exile, something he always had in mind. In one of his conversations that Somoza taped and transcribed in his book Nicaragua Betrayed, Lawrence Pezzullo suggested to him at one point, in an effort to persuade him to resign, that in time the nation would remember him for the good things. Then he would be able to return, he told him, perhaps within a couple of years. He never forgot that either. The Government Junta was ready to travel to Managua, adhering to the meticulous agreement that I had reached with Ambassador William Bowdler, who represented the United States government in its negotiations for the transition. However, now no one could predict the outcomes or how long they would take, and we decided to leave immediately for León, the second most important city in the country, which was already under the Sandinista forces’ complete control. President Rodrigo Carazo came to bid us farewell in the dark hangar where we boarded two small aircraft that the Costa Rican government had put at our disposal. There was a serious, noncelebratory air. And when I embraced my wife at the door to the plane, I again thought that it could be a final goodbye. I flew with Violeta, Ernesto Cardenal, and Juan Ignacio Gutiérrez (the Government Junta’s doctor) onboard one of the small planes. On the other plane were Alfonso Robelo, Alfredo César (the Government Junta’s secretary), René Núñez (who would become secretary of the fsln’s National Directorate), and José Bárcenas, who was by that time married to Claudia Chamorro, Violeta’s daughter. ‘‘God bless you,’’ President Carazo said as they closed the doors to the aircraft. We took off around ten o’clock at night, and the plane rose above the blanket of fog that often covers San José’s central valley. I sat next to the pilot. The lights were shining below us, and I searched below in vain for my home, where my children were already asleep. Behind us, as we flew in

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procession toward the Rivas Isthmus, the red lights on the tail of the second plane were blinking in the darkness like a burning cigarette. We traveled in silence. We were aware of the risk of being attacked from below by rockets or antiaircraft machine guns, since the National Guard remained strong in Rivas under the command of Major Pablo Emilio Salazar. He was ‘‘Commander Bravo,’’ one of Somoza’s pets. For an entire month, he had defended the line of battle along the hills that border the isthmus between Lake Nicaragua and the Pacific Ocean. This blocked the advance of the Southern Front’s forces and the establishment of the Government Junta in the city of Rivas, as was originally planned. The planes flew along the Pacific coastline. It was a calm night, full of stars, and you could see the lighthouse at the Port of Corinto shining ever more brightly up ahead. Below, on the right, there were scattered lights from the little towns I knew by heart: Nandaime, Diriomo, Niquinohomo, and my hometown, Masatepe. Farther ahead was Managua, the great beacon of light. There were various indecipherable voices through the static on the radio until the pilot tuned it to the little station installed on the runway in León. They were ours. The small plane turned west. We could see the trail of sea foam on Poneloya Beach and the rooftops of the beach houses in the shadows below us. There, on one occasion long before, a group of rebellious students had argued with Pedro Joaquín Chamorro until midnight. That was also where I spent summers during my courtship with Tulita. Now we were going to land, and the rows of lights along the runway were glowing clearly. Ernesto Cardenal also remembers this moment in a poem: And now Poneloya Beach, and the plane approaching land. The thread of sea foam along the coast radiant under the moon. The plane landing. A smell of insecticide. And Sergio says to me: ‘‘The smell of Nicaragua!’’ José (‘‘Chepón’’) Robelo, Alfonso Robelo’s nephew, was the first to approach the plane. He was dressed in olive green, which I would find many of my former acquaintances wearing. His family, one of León’s most prominent, owned a chalk factory. It was a local business that supplied the schools, and he used to deliver the merchandise by bicycle. Years later, he

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would be imprisoned, accused of placing an explosive device under the stage during a ceremony in which the leaders of the revolution were participating. Dora María Téllez, León’s guerrilla commander, then under the code name ‘‘Claudia,’’ took us to a house in the Santa María neighborhood where Daniel was already staying. He had also flown in, along with Tomás Borge, arriving from San José two days before. We made an initial assessment there that night, which would resume the following morning. We ate a late dinner of rice and beans, which was repeated everyday in that provisional presidential home where potable water was rationed and the beds lacked sheets. Very early the next day, as a preventative measure, Juan Ignacio vaccinated all of us against tetanus. During the morning meeting, we sat in rocking chairs on the patio surrounded by dwarf coconut trees, mainly discussing the military situation. Tomás Borge and Jaime Wheelock, who had arrived from Honduras, were also present along with the Government Junta members. Dora María represented the Western Regional Command along with Mauricio Valenzuela, who would be minister of construction until the final years of the Sandinista government. Tomás, using a stick to mark the ground, drew a war map and explained that the only way to approach Managua was by retreating. Given the enigma that the explanation presented, he clarified that it would be necessary to neutralize the pockets of National Guard resistance that remained to the north of León and Chinandega, and it was impossible to know how long that operation would take. It could be months. It would be dangerous to march into Managua without defeating these centers of resistance, because it would leave the rearguard exposed. Dora María, rather than contradicting him, explained how the offensive operations were proceeding. The day before, La Paz Centro, on the highway to Managua, had been taken, and there was a battle in process to capture Puerto Somoza, a strategic point in the same direction. Polo Rivas, who commanded the tanks that had been stolen from the National Guard in combat, had received instructions to proceed along the highway. He was to leave Nagarote, the next town on the route, in an attempt to move as close as possible to Managua. At twenty-two years of age, Dora María still looked like a schoolgirl. She had a sharp nose and short curls under her commando beret, and she did not carry grenades, cartridges, or flamboyant rifles, which had come into

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vogue in those days. She was well spoken, without hesitating, and she had under her command a diverse troop with differences in age and social status, from trained combatants to university students, thirteen-year-old children, women from marginal neighborhoods, and elderly volunteers with no experience. There were also untrained, rebel thugs, such as ‘‘Charrasca,’’ who came from the streets. He was a reckless, intractable kid who turned out to be impossible to control after the triumph, despite graduating from a military training course in Cuba, and he wound up dead. For Dora María, the difficulty did not lie in restraining Charrasca and other petty thieves and potheads like him, but the guerrilla commanders from the other factions. They held different sectors of the city under their command, which remained separated by barricades that did not allow you through without a password. Yet all of them obeyed her, even though she was a woman, and so young. After her fateful premonition had saved her from dying in the Lomas de Veracruz massacre, Joaquín Cuadra (‘‘Rodrigo’’) sent her back to León to replace ‘‘Gordo Pín’’ as commander of the insurrection. She was also responsible for reuniting the whole network that had lost its leader. What’s more, she did it while working from inside the safe haven afforded by the Asunción Convent. The mother superior gave her shelter and a habit. This kept her from being recognized one time when a patrol entered to raid the building during morning prayers while she was singing with the other nuns in the chorus. The fact that Dora María was able to take charge of such a complex situation, with the three factions involved to a greater or lesser extent in the military leadership, was also thanks to the cooperative agreements made between combat commanders, a situation that was replicated in all battle scenarios. Those agreements were reached before the fsln leadership was established in March 1979 because the pressing needs of the war had forced cooperation between the guerrilla fronts. This included sharing ammunition, support with weapons and logistics, and later, solidarity and joining forces in combat. To a large extent, until almost the end of the war, the members of the fsln’s National Directorate remained outside of the country with no real control over those involved in the uprising, and the numbers were growing all the time. That had been precisely one of Daniel’s worries. The Internal Front was insisting that he join the clandestine struggle in Managua to have greater authority. When we discussed it in San José, early in

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1979, I recommended that he not take that step. I told him that I did not believe that his physical presence was a determining factor for the country at that point. His political responsibility outweighed combat realities, and it would likely complicate his work. Besides, there were too many dead commanders already. The fsln’s National Directorate, which had been formed so recently and with such a precarious foundation, only managed to hold on to power immediately following the revolution’s triumph because the circumstances demanded it. It needed to demonstrate unity from the very beginning to assert its power with a solid image because it was faced with irregular troops that had to be molded into an army and a police force. That prospect, which required organizing combatants and their military leaders from all three factions under a single authority, led to a unified political power. Up until then, there had not been a Sandinista Front party, just a guerrilla force. At the same time, a hegemonic party could only be built under an unquestionable command. This meant leaving old debates behind, seeking to set aside rivalries, and concentrating on solidifying all command structures, despite the ongoing struggles for power. This was what was needed. When Urcuyo Maliaños refused to relinquish his provisional command to the Government Junta, as had been agreed, this gave complete authority to the fsln’s National Directorate’s nine commanders. (‘‘The nine,’’ as they came to be known, were still faceless and taking great care not to reveal their identities, in order to avoid a conflict.) Urcuyo’s resistance sparked the guerrilla forces’ final surge to take Managua, which prompted the full disbanding of the National Guard. It also put a definitive end to part of the agreement that had been negotiated with the U.S. ambassador William Bowdler, both in Costa Rica and Panama, during the final two weeks prior to Somoza’s fall, which had allowed for shared military power through a command made up of guerrilla commanders and army officers. When the fsln’s National Directorate obtained absolute military power, and consequently held all political power, the Government Junta was quickly pushed into the background, even though it preserved its formal attributes. This shift did not escape Violeta Chamorro’s and Alfonso Robelo’s attention. They were both members of the Junta who did not belong to the fsln. This led to their resignations before May 1980. The definition of a unified military command without dissent was used, first and foremost, to prevent any guerrilla force from maintaining individ-

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ual power. The Southern Front, which Edén Pastora commanded, had been the first to enter Managua, and it occupied El Retiro, Somoza’s mansion. That front had the best military equipment from Costa Rica, with enough artillery pieces to supply a war of positions that remained deadlocked. It was the front that most resembled an army, well advised and following rules of organization and discipline. It did not take long for it to have its intelligence office in El Retiro and its own military police force. The fsln’s National Directorate’s first move was to disband the Southern Front’s apparatus, sending its leaders to other military units and dismantling its installations, which were assigned to the Ministry of Culture. Ernesto Cardenal had his minister’s office in Somoza’s wife’s marble bathroom. Edén was made a subordinate to Tomás Borge, with the decorative post of vice minister of the interior. He was subsequently named chief of the Sandinista Popular Militias. The Simón Bolívar Brigade, composed mostly of South American Trotskyists, had fought with the Southern Front. They had made it their mission upon arriving in Managua to proclaim world revolution, encouraging the workers to take control of the factories. They were called to a meeting one night in the installations on Tiscapa Hill, where they were detained. The following morning they were put on a plane provided by General Torrijos en route to Panama. I remember that it was around noon on July 21, 1979, when they came for me at the Camino Real Hotel because the fsln’s National Directorate, which was meeting in Somoza’s bunker on Tiscapa Hill, wanted to talk with me, and with Moisés Hassan. I looked for Moisés, but he had left the hotel. I crossed the barricades and went to the bunker alone, where I found a cheerful lack of order. The meeting was already ending when I entered the conference room. Tomás Borge was just leaving, his hand on the visor of his military cap, asking for permission to be dismissed with excessive modesty. He thought he had a cold and wanted to go to bed. It was the first time the nine members of the fsln’s National Directorate had all sat down together. They had decided to declare a state of emergency for thirty days, suspending some of the guarantees established in the recently issued Fundamental Statute, which also served as a Political Constitution. It had been released just the night before. Then they asked me to communicate with the Government Junta regarding the need to make the declaration. Suspending the recently publicized statute was a contradiction. How-

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ever, the measure made sense if there was a need to reestablish public order, or at least prevent it from deteriorating during those first weeks, which were going to be difficult. The National Guard officers and soldiers who had turned themselves in were all being sent to jail. They were going to have to appear before Popular Tribunals at some point, but there were still many of them on the loose, and there was a concern that they would organize into groups. Even though the majority of those who managed to escape had fled across the Honduran border, they could reassemble, which in fact later occurred with the birth of the Contras. Militias from the small leftist groups that had not joined the fsln also remained, and they had to be disarmed. Furthermore, we had to face problems with shortages of gasoline and basic foodstuffs, and normalizing public services. The revolution was proposing to commence with a statute of civil guarantees and laws, and simultaneously with emergency measures, expropriation decrees, and popular trials outside of the framework of ordinary judicial process. This was clearly a contradiction, even though it could be justified in such a chaotic context in which it was impossible to count on solutions of an institutional nature. However, what was being asked of me was the beginning of a troubling practice employed whenever necessary: to go to the Government Junta and present the initiatives as my own. Daniel later assumed that role, guaranteeing approval through the majority that Daniel, Moisés Hassan, and I controlled. That practice wore out quickly. The decision in April the following year was to configure the Council of State in the fsln’s favor. The Council of State was a type of corporate parliament created by the Fundamental Statute, and it had not been installed yet. That was when Violeta Chamorro resigned first, followed by Alfonso Robelo. The Government Junta was meeting at my house. In Daniel Ortega’s absence, since he was outside of the country, Jaime Wheelock’s vote was counted to decide the vote 3 to 2, something that also broke from all legal procedure. One of the topics from that first meeting in the bunker had been precisely the confirmation of that majority in the Government Junta, which we would use to our advantage from that time forward. After everyone had left the meeting room, I found a note under the glass that covered part of the huge table with a map of positions where Somoza had commanded the war. It had been written by one of the nine commanders, doubtful until then regarding my affiliation: ‘‘We have a majority in the Junta. Note that Sergio Ramírez is an fsln militant.’’

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My militancy was a secret kept to the end in the Third Way Tendency because my role as the head of the Group of Twelve demanded an illusion of independence. But Somoza knew it and so did his son, ‘‘El Chigüín.’’ On the night of July 4, 1978, the eve of my return to Nicaragua with the Group of Twelve, the photographer and journalist Perry Kretz, from the magazine Stern, found me at Tito Castillo’s house. He had arrived that day from Nicaragua. He came to talk with me because he was worried. We had built a good friendship, and I later wrote the prologue for his book of photos about the war. After interviewing El Chigüín, El Chigüín had told him in private that there would be no retaliation against the Twelve when we returned, except in my case, because I was a terrorist in disguise. The top-down command structure was based on a political and military hierarchy with the National Directorate at the top. This was where the fsln as a political party was born. Prior to that, however, the power dynamics between its members needed to be clarified, often in subtle ways, and on a stage where surprise blows and cunning were decisive factors. During that same meeting in the bunker on July 21, 1979, or in another one during the following days, Humberto Ortega was able to assert his authority, through spitefulness and nerve, and was named commander in chief of the new Popular Sandinista Army (eps). Theoretically, any one of the nine seated around the table could have occupied the position. They were all revolutionary commanders. They were all equals as political and military leaders. A primus inter pares did not even exist. In fact, the right to speak was chosen through rotating turns, and speakers for public events were selected the same way. One of them nominated Henry Ruiz (‘‘Modesto’’), for his long years as guerrilla commander of the legendary ‘‘Pablo Úbeda’’ column. Its slogan was the one that extolled the prolonged popular war: ‘‘We will bury the heart of the enemy in the mountains.’’ Henry, who is exactly the same age as I am, was born in Jinotepe, the town Israel Lewites came from to sell his magic mattresses in my town of Masatepe. As a boy, he was a street vendor, selling tortillas his mother made. After graduating with the best grades and tremendous sacrifices, he obtained a scholarship to the Patrice Lumumba People’s Friendship University of Russia, where they expelled him for his proclamations in favor of armed struggle, anathema at the time in the cpsu (Communist Party of the Soviet Union). Henry is restrained by nature and not very vocal. Perhaps out of exces-

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sive self-control, or thinking that his candidacy would not be disputed, he remained silent. Then Humberto took advantage of the silence that no one else had broken: ‘‘I will accept,’’ he said, without anyone even suggesting it. That was how he ended up commander in chief of the eps, a powerful position that would be key throughout the revolutionary decade and that would allow him to elevate his brother Daniel first to coordinator of the Government Junta and then to candidate for the presidency. This meant that there was no longer any balance within the fsln’s National Directorate. In any case, Humberto had to his credit the leadership of the war of liberation until the victory in a military sense and also a political one. This was thanks to the radio system installed in the Palo Alto General barracks in the La Uruca neighborhood in Costa Rica, which linked to the guerrilla fronts in Nicaragua. That same strategic cunning served him well in negotiating peace with the Contra Directorate in 1988, and to know intuitively that the eps had to accept the institutional framework and forgo all political affiliation with the fsln if it wanted to survive the electoral defeat in 1990. Yet it failed him when he tried to remain eps commander in chief even after his time was up. Violeta Chamorro gave the final blow announcing his retirement in front of more than 2,000 officers in a commemorative act on Army Day, September 2, 1993. In September 1979, the party still lacked a structure. All of us who had any relevance within the fsln, approximately 400 militants, were called to Somoza’s eebi (Basic Infantry Training School) military installations on Tiscapa Hill. This was to approve a document defining the strategic future of the revolution. The sit-in, like no other I remembered since my student years, lasted for three days, and we slept in military hovels at night. When the document, later known as ‘‘The 72-hour document,’’ started to leak, adversaries on the Right, who were already beginning to organize, and many of our allies both within and outside Nicaragua, hit the roof. In full splendor of Marxist terminology, we declared that our objective was to achieve a Socialist society based on a proletarian dictatorship, after a period of alliances with the bourgeoisie, the shorter the better. And the very existence of the Government Junta was set forth as the first example of those alliances, which would have to end sooner or later according to history’s dialectical destiny. The fsln aspired to consolidate itself into a Marxist-Leninist party. It declared a fight to the death against Yankee imperialism, and it proclaimed adhesion to the Socialist camp, which we

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were supposed to join as soon as possible. There was also a tone of allencompassing zeal throughout the entire text because the fsln would have to achieve hegemony in all aspects of social and economic life. First of all, key modes of production would have to begin to be transferred to state control. Meanwhile, the document underscored the necessity of outwardly maintaining our advocacy for a mixed economy, political pluralism, and international nonalignment, the essence of the Third Way proposal for exercising power, which was now becoming a ‘‘tactical project.’’ However, in the constant interplay of paradoxes, the tactical project eventually replaced the fsln’s strategic one, which was weighed down by the realities of war and the negotiated or imposed concessions. Thus, what we originally intended as a facade achieved fundamental substance. Any voice of moderation was highly suspicious. We earned our certificate of authenticity as we bathed in the luxurious waters of the old ideological orthodoxy. In spite of this, the game consisted of denying the identity of the fsln as a Marxist-Leninist party to both friends and enemies. In reality, it never managed to be moved beyond the realm of intentions because the top-down assertion of authority that characterized its internal structures and its exercising of power was not Leninist in nature but the most archaic form of national political culture inherited from the tradition of caudillismo. In September 1981, Humberto Ortega gave a speech to the militants in the army. It contained a key phrase: ‘‘Sandinismo, without MarxismLeninism, cannot be revolutionary.’’ A short time before, in a press interview, he had said that there would not be enough posts to hang everyone from the bourgeoisie if the United States ever invaded Nicaragua. The speech was published in a pamphlet. After a private reprimand from the fsln’s National Directorate, he ordered another pamphlet printed immediately, substituting the compromising comment. The appearance of the original sentence was attributed to a plot by the enemy. Around that time, the New York Times journalist Flora Lewis interviewed me and asked me about the case. I provided her with a copy of the corrected pamphlet that I had on my desk, and I told her that the other one was false. She gave me a reprimanding look, the same way my third grade teacher used to look at me when she caught me in a flagrant lie, and she said: ‘‘You are an intellectual. Repeating such silly lies does not become you.’’ The fsln’s professing of Marxism-Leninism was usually disguised in

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documents under the name ‘‘scientific doctrine’’ or ‘‘proletarian doctrine.’’ Even so, it was an ideology that fit poorly with our political culture. This was despite the party’s schools that prepared thousands of militants, in Nicaragua and in Cuba, where it was hammered into them with zeal to spread it throughout the party and to extend it to society. There remain few vestiges of its effect today, even within the fsln, which accepts landowners, landlords, and big-time businessmen in its leadership, something that would have been considered the worst sin back then. In addition to top-down authority, part of our legacy, the Leninist model’s most visible effect was reflected in the obsession to have a dual, party-state authority. This masked the constant power struggles. It also hindered our ability to function in the beginning because the party’s commanding militants tried to pressure the government’s ministers. This made their lives miserable, which filled my office with complaints. The hierarchy began with a single supreme commander and extended down from the pinnacle of power to the party’s bureaucracy, the state apparatus, the army, the police and security forces, and citizen organizations. It was strengthened by the needs brought on by the war of aggression against us, which demanded obedient structures. Although that hierarchy was strengthened by the war, it collapsed when the war ended. No matter what the ideological loyalties, the project for a Socialist society was fighting a losing battle against reality from the very beginning. What it left were its experimental traces from throughout the decade, most of all a planned economy, which never worked, though it later caused terrible distortions. It was a constant stretching and shrinking where Marxism as a tool for political interpretation flowed together with Leninist commandments applied to the power apparatus, as well as many other ideas, among them, the continuance of liberation theology. Even so, the ideas always most rooted in everyone’s conscience were those that came from Sandino himself—national sovereignty, authentic democracy, social justice—because they were the most simple and clear. They are also the ones that remained in the end, although obscured now. Ours was a very democratic regime, in a new sense, and very authoritative, in a traditional sense. Over the years, what had been called a ‘‘tactical project’’ wound up taking precedence, as I previously stated. Democracy, now without modifiers, neither bourgeois nor proletarian, then became the revolution’s most visible outcome. The great paradox was that, in the

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end, Sandinismo left a legacy that it had not intended: democracy. It was not able to leave what it had proposed: an end to backwardness, poverty, and marginalization. For many who had come from the struggle in the catacombs, the Cuban Revolution continued to be the political model par excellence, and Cuba never lost its sentimental value. It was an old love that had been put on hold. Yet reality ended up influencing these feelings as well. The conditions were never suitable for the application of the Cuban model in a context that was in flux, full of tensions and distensions. Besides, concessions always became a political weapon of survival. To concede was to survive, and the first concession was loyalty to the model of real Socialism, which for us was the Cuban model. When it came time to approve ‘‘The 72 hour document’’ during the September 1979 sit-in, Cuba was the model that held our greatest hopes. Cuba shared them as well. After twenty years of supporting guerrillas throughout Latin America, Nicaragua was the only country that managed to free itself from imperialism. The Sandinista victory was an example that eased constant frustrations, the greatest of which was Che Guevara’s failure in Bolivia. In addition, the repeated failure of the armed movement in Guatemala following the death of Turcios Lima early in the sixties was also difficult because, if any revolution should have triumphed first in Central America, according to Cuban foco theory, it was not Nicaragua— which was not even in the realm of possibilities—but Guatemala. Nevertheless, this does not mean that Fidel Castro insisted on offering up the Cuban model for imitation in Nicaragua after the Sandinistas suddenly triumphed. He was the first to understand that the development of the Nicaraguan Revolution had to be different. He was also the first to suggest that we respect political pluralism and a mixed economy. In other words, we should respect the realities that we were faced with. When all is said and done, the simple fact that Nicaragua is not an island like Cuba represented crucial differences. Central America continues to be a system of communicating vessels, and the conflict the revolution unleashed on the entire isthmus would prove it once again, just as in so many other times throughout history. It is not that Fidel did not want Socialism in Nicaragua, but he imagined a Socialism that differed from the Cuban type. Moreover, he saw, perhaps, a new field for experiment to avoid repeating the errors that he could neither recognize nor amend in Cuba.

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However, we ourselves were the worst opponents of this idea, reluctant to listen to warnings even though they were coming from the prophet’s mouth. Many wanted to adopt the Cuban model in its entirety, even in the most banal matters. It was a question of blind faith. One of the marks of distinction for someone with government responsibilities, whether in the army, the security forces, or the party, was to show up at meetings accompanied by a Cuban adviser, and they existed for everything. That is not to mention the accent and expressions of the Cuban dialect, which were imitated so much that it seemed like a new language you had to learn. Cuba’s generosity was absolute, to the point of abuse, because we asked for everything and we were never denied anything: teachers; doctors; construction brigades for highways, schools, and homes; scholarships for every level of education and specialization imaginable; irrigation equipment and farming equipment; herds of cattle; insecticides; fertilizers; vaccinations; medicines; book publishing; a turnkey sugar plantation; and even doctors’ visits for the leadership and their families in hospitals in Havana, along with vacations in Varadero. We even asked for oil, which Cuba did not produce. One time I went all the way to Cayito, Fidel’s presidential retreat, to ask him for his assistance because we were not going to be able to meet our needs by the end of the year. We spoke on the pier while the president of Malta, on an official visit, waited on the yacht. He called the Cuban economist and politician Carlos Rafael Rodríguez. They stepped aside for a few minutes, and he returned to tell me that the 10,000 tons of oil I had asked for would be taken from his critical reserves. What’s more, Fidel was the only one who warned us that we were running a serious risk of being defeated in the 1990 elections. He was not trying to advise us not to go forward with them. He himself recognized that we had no other option. Nevertheless, he thought that calling for a vote in the midst of the calamities the war had produced was practically a plebiscite in favor of or against that very war, and the conditions for winning were against us, which is exactly what happened. He always maintained a careful attitude toward us, knowing how to tell the differences between each of us and aware of the effort by some to get close to him to enjoy the prestige of his acquaintance. To be in Cuba and to have Fidel not show up for a midnight visit at the official El Lagito house where he accommodated us signified a defeat. He was also very meticulous in his formalities, even for us to learn the rules of protocol. For

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example, when he welcomed us with official honors at the airport in Havana in August 1979 to celebrate the Non-Aligned Movement Summit, he warned Daniel, in a whisper, not to salute with his hand at his temple when he went by the ceremonial troops, because he was not wearing a military cap. Not only was the Cuban Revolution the model, but Fidel was the model figure. For some, copying his gestures in his speeches, his tone of voice, his way of speaking, his reflexive silences holding his hand in the air near his chin, and even his way of leaning on the podium, became a mimetic habit that bordered on caricature considering the serious differences in physical appearance between him and those who imitated him. I enjoyed his company, seduced by the legend that surrounded him and his paternal care. He decided to come to our house in Managua in July 1980 for the first anniversary of the revolution, as I already mentioned. Moreover, if he ever gave me a great compliment, it was on two of my trips to Havana when I saw him show up at public events carrying my novel Castigo Divino (Divine Punishment). He was reading it in great strides, and he submitted me to intense questioning about its argument and hidden meanings. He used to interrogate me this way over long nights until sunrise in El Lagito, in his Council of State office, or occasionally in his modest apartment, surrounded by family photos. He asked about the most diverse topics that anyone could imagine: from the dimensions of Nicaragua’s Great Lake and its depth; to the life of the guapote, our delicious fish from those shark-infested fresh waters, Eulamia nicaraguensis, sharks that swim against the current up the San Juan River from the Caribbean Sea. Perhaps I was among the few capable of engaging in real dialogue with him, as he was always obsessed by a fatal attraction to the abyss of monologue. I never returned to Cuba, nor did I hear from him, except for occasional greetings he sent my way through Gabriel García Márquez, with whom I faithfully send him all my books. There is also no doubt that my split from the fsln, officially very close to the Cubans, affected our relationship.

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he offensive was set for a day in October 1977, and it was already September. The plans could not be postponed any longer, especially since Somoza had suffered a heart attack at the end of July, which had him convalescing at the Miami Heart Institute. He weighed 300 pounds at the time and drank a bottle of Stolichnaya vodka every day. It was the only thing from Russia he did not despise. His sudden illness stirred great expectations in Nicaragua. There was a fear that if he died or was left incapacitated, help from the United States would lead to the much feared Somocismo without Somoza. This motivated us to act more quickly in anticipation of the events. The economic figures that year point to it as Nicaragua’s best for the entire century. The gdp grew like never before, as did the reserve levels and the prices for traditional export products: coffee, cotton, beef, gold. They all shot up. Industry was at its peak, and commerce was growing throughout Central America as well. Despite all of this, the dictatorship began its ultimate decline because Somocismo’s crisis was essentially defined by politics rather than economics, even with wealth so poorly distributed. The next step was to prepare for the revolutionary government’s diplomatic recognition. We decided to begin with Carlos Andrés Pérez, president of Venezuela. We were not sure how to approach him until it occurred to us that the best way into the Miraflores Palace was through Gabriel García Márquez. I went to

find him in Colombia with a letter from José Benito Escobar, one of the former members of the fsln’s National Directorate. I had met him in Havana. José Benito supported the Third Way for a while, but he later aligned himself with the gpp. Gabo met with me in his office, which was full of monitors and recording equipment from rti Studios, the television station where they were filming In Evil Hour at the time. Jorge Alí Triana was the director. Years later he would direct the series based on my novel Divine Punishment, also for rti. We had never met, though we have reminisced since then about our encounter. I went over the entire plan with him, without leaving out the point about the 1,200 armed men, and he listened to me, hanging on every word. Later, with the reserved enthusiasm with which I have seen him proudly act in life when it is for a good cause, he picked up the phone and asked one of the secretaries, from the swarm buzzing on the other side of the door, to find out what time a plane for Caracas would be departing on Sunday. He wanted a jumbo because he trusted them more. It was Thursday. One day a little while ago, he told me a story about the mayor of Aracataca, Colombia. During the inauguration of a modest obelisk at the site of the massacre of the banana workers, an episode that appeared in the pages of One Hundred Years of Solitude, he mentioned the 3,000 victims from that day in his speech. This is a number that appears only in the novel and that surely never reached that high, as the very dimensions of the plaza suggest. Once again, imagination surpassed reality. As he told me that story later, I reminded him that he had gone to see a president on behalf of a guerrilla army with 1,200 men that actually had no more than 80. We reached enough of an understanding to speak on the phone afterward in a coded language that we had never prearranged. The code names were library, book, pages, author, compiler, editor, manuscript, and proofs. And when he arrived in Caracas, after I was already back in San José, he called me from Miguel Otero Silva’s home, where he was staying, to ask me for some clarifications before going to present the manuscript to the editor. The outcome of his interview with Carlos Andrés exceeded our expectations. As soon as we liberated the first city, Venezuela would recognize the revolutionary government. When he called that night to report on his efforts, he told me that the editor had decided to publish the book and that he would sign the contract just as soon as the first chapter was written. He seemed very pleased with all the authors and he knew the

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compiler very well. Indeed, Carlos Andrés knew that Felipe Mántica, our president, was the nephew of General Carlos Pasos, a combatant against Somoza who was exiled in Costa Rica during the fifties, just as Carlos Andrés was. When it was my turn to work with Carlos Andrés a short time later, I realized that he was a gutsy conspirator, willing to take the risks that come with a good scheme and to let himself be seduced by its attraction. Perhaps one of the things that hurt him most in his life, considering that he is such a skilled politician, is precisely his enthusiasm and his generosity to help others win promising causes, or ones that were lost before they began, without keeping score. By this time, the meetings in the hideouts in San José were multiplying. This was where plans were fine-tuned and weapons were packed in barrels of insecticide that crossed the border on cargo trucks. Edén Pastora was always telling his tales, and José Valdivia (‘‘Marvin’’), stern, quiet, and straight-faced, always laughed at them too late. He had recently arrived from the mountains, also at odds with the gpp, and he would be the commander of the assault on the San Carlos port. I also remember Jim (‘‘El Chato’’) Medrano. He had just undergone intestinal surgery, and he attended conspiratorial meetings while he was convalescing. We all smelled the stench he gave off, although we said nothing, because they had given him an artificial anus and he carried a colostomy bag stuck to the skin on his abdomen, which was how he expelled his stool. That was how he was when he was later killed, with bandages around his belly, in the attack on the San Carlos barracks. Two of the farmer kids from Ernesto Cardenal’s Solentiname community would also die there: Elbis Chavarría and Donald Guevara. I keep a calendar of the month of October, which I drew myself. It has a red circle around the thirteenth, the day of the attack. One side has writing in code with a message to be transmitted by phone for the members of the revolutionary government living in Nicaragua: ‘‘Carlos’s son will have his operation on October 13.’’ It was so that they would move to San José one week prior to that date. We gathered at a house near Alajuela, property of Doña Jilma de Pastora. She was a landowner from Rivas who was supporting us, trusting the wisdom of Tito Castillo, her former lawyer. From there we moved to Hacienda América, belonging to the same Doña Jilma, which spans both sides of the border, reaching across rural districts to Cardenas, a small

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town on the shore of Lake Nicaragua. A column commanded by Edén Pastora was supposed to dominate the defense, and we would wait for the victorious forces to arrive in Cardenas via the lake. We would then march toward the city of Rivas, which had been chosen as the revolutionary government’s headquarters. Each detachment designated to take control of the barracks in the cities in the plan was carrying a cassette tape with a proclamation read by Felipe Mántica. It called on the people to join the insurrection, and it was supposed to be played on radio stations that were already under our control, something that never happened. Ernesto Cardenal flew to Caracas and went to stay at Otero Silva’s house. He was already part of the conspiracy. Gabo was waiting there again, and the three of them were ready to head to Miraflores as soon as they had news that the offensive had begun. On the morning of October 13th, we set out towards the border via the Pan-American Highway. The entire revolutionary government was on a four-wheel-drive traction truck that we rented the night before from a Hertz agency in San José. Ricardo Coronel was driving, while Edén Pastora and his forces were waiting for us at Hacienda América. We never arrived at our destination. The truck, despite all Ricardo Coronel’s warnings, had not been checked beforehand, and it quickly broke down. We found ourselves forced to return to the safety of Alajuela while we tried to find other transportation; but the way the events were being unleashed made installing the government seem unlikely, and we gave up. The columns that had penetrated San Carlos managed to control the situation until morning, keeping the National Guard at bay inside the barracks, a colonial fort that overlooks the town from a hill. However, when the air force arrived, they had to retreat in disarray toward Costa Rican territory. The Masaya attack was not able to take place due to errors in communication. The one in Rivas was nothing more than a fantasy. Father Gaspar García Laviana, the supposed head of the operation, was not even informed. I will return to him later. In Chinandega, Óscar Reyes, a Honduran journalist involved in the plan, had crossed the border with weapons hidden in the floor of a bus, but he found no one there to receive them. He returned with them to Tegucigalpa. There had been no news about the offensive on Ocotal up to that point. Although the columns were not able to approach the city, they managed to successfully lead the Guard to an ambush on the Dipilto Highway on the border with Honduras.

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The attack on Masaya took place a few days later, on October 17. Although it was not a military success either, it had greater repercussions because the fighting was so close to the capital. The barracks, situated on one side of the plaza in front of the church, had been under fire from the bell tower and other nearby buildings. On a narrow stretch of highway, a small support squad ambushed a reinforcement convoy Somoza had sent. That battle, which could be heard in Managua, sowed panic and forced the closing of schools and banks. It was obvious that the attack on San Carlos had come from Costa Rican territory and, under pressure from Somoza, Daniel Oduber’s government went after the clandestine masterminds. Humberto Ortega was the most wanted, given his previously mentioned record, and he had to remain completely hidden. When the members of the government met to decide how to move forward, Humberto sent a message through me saying that, given the failure of the plans, everyone was relieved of any commitment. It was then that the Group of Twelve was born. Felipe Mántica, Dr. Cuadra Chamorro, and Don Emilio Baltodano were the first to announce that their commitment was not temporary; nor was it limited to being part of a government. Nor could they return to their businesses in Nicaragua, because Somoza was going to learn of their participation in the planning sooner or later. The decision then was to issue a manifesto of support for the Sandinista Front. It was published on October 18, the day after the armed conflict in Masaya, and caused confusion and commotion in Nicaragua given the caliber of the signatories. Businessmen, priests, and international officials were supporting guerrillas. Somoza then ordered our prosecution under charges of sedition, terrorism, disturbing the peace, defending criminal activity, and conspiracy. In the days following the October offensive, we went to ask Don Pepe Figueres for the weapons he had buried at Hacienda La Lucha since the end of the Costa Rican Revolution of 1948, which he had led. After he was victorious, he abolished the army, but one of Costa Rican democracy’s secret resources was that the caudillos who were not in power kept war munitions in case of an emergency. Modern Costa Rican history cannot be explained without Don Pepe’s vision. He was mercurial and resourceful, with a clever wit, the son of Catalonian immigrants. His enmity with the elder Somoza was legendary, and they never missed an opportunity to try to topple each other. Somoza

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called him ‘‘Pepe Tacones’’ because Figueres was short in stature and wore shoes with an elevated heel. Figueres was one of the few civilian presidents in attendance at the Summit of the Americas that Eisenhower attended in Panama in 1956, the golden age of Latin American dictatorships, and he refused to shake Somoza’s hand in front of the photographers. However, in 1970, when a plane hijacked in Managua by fsln guerrillas was taken to San José, Figueres, then president for a second time, appeared on the airport ramp with a machine gun in hand prepared to lead the attack to free the hostages. Given this conflicting record, it was difficult to predict what his reaction would be, but Edén persuaded him right off the bat. He gave us his hidden treasure, which included a .50 caliber machine gun taken from a Mustang plane wing long before. It was the same one Herty Lewites would photograph from different angles to make it seem as though we had a lot. Afterward, we installed the radio antenna and transmitter for Radio Sandino. Carlos Andrés Pérez was not at all discouraged, and he met with Felipe Mántica in the Miraflores Palace. From that meeting came his promise to give us $100,000 each month. Chuchú Martínez brought the first payment from Panama, transporting it on his rickety plane with canvas wings, and delivered it to me in a room at the Hotel Cariari in San José. I carried the money just as it was, in unmarked wads of bills packed in an executive suitcase, to show it to the Group of Twelve members who were waiting at Tito Castillo’s house in San Rafael de Escazú. It was quite an event. Later, when I was on my way back in my car with Carlos Tünnermann to put it in safekeeping, a boy suddenly appeared out of a schoolyard chasing after a ball. All I saw was him flying through the air and falling flat on his face. I hit the brakes and Carlos and I, forgetting the suitcase, left the doors open and ran to help him. We picked him up, unconscious, and took him to the hospital. He recovered after many days while Tulita and I watched over him at his bedside. Amidst all the commotion of people running from neighboring houses when they heard about the accident, the suitcase was not lost. When we got in the car with the boy, it was still there on the seat where we had left it. Each month, our shadow finance minister, Dr. Cuadra Chamorro, had to travel to Caracas with a bodyguard to accept the funds that he received in the office of the minister of the interior, Carlos Lepage. To maintain secrecy, he had to stay in a modest little hotel in Sabana Grande, which was chosen by the government and was not in keeping with his personal

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taste. He shared the room with the bodyguard, usually one of the young combatants traveling through San José to some place in Nicaragua. Anyone who knows Venezuelans well knows that time does not exist in Caracas, and you can spend days next to the phone waiting for an expected call. The front desk staff continually commented on the behavior of that seemingly respectable gentleman with refined manners who would shut himself in his room for up to a whole week, each time with a different boy. The best character from Getting to Know the General, the book that Graham Greene wrote about Omar Torrijos, is Chuchú Martínez, aviator, playwright, poet, mathematician, philosophy professor, radical Marxist, and old-style bohemian. I met him in the sixties during one of my visits to the University of Panama in my position as csuca’s general secretary. At the time, for lack of a place to stay, since he was always abandoning some woman, he usually slept in his Volkswagen Beetle on the boardwalk by the sea. Chuchú later became a member of Torrijos’ bodyguards, at the rank of sergeant, and he served as his personal secretary, translator, and confidant. It was also through Chuchú that I met Torrijos in 1976, at his home in Farallón, next to the Río Hacha military base. He invited Tulita and me as his guests for the weekend. We thought we were going to talk about autonomy for the University of Panama, which had been under control since the 1968 military coup, but we barely touched on the topic. The conversation centered instead on his complaints about the canal, which would lead to negotiating the new treaties when Carter assumed the presidency. He entertained us with his reserved graciousness, inviting us to join him on a helicopter tour through different towns that lasted until nightfall. I would see him many more times at that retreat in Farallón, or at the famous house on Fiftieth Street in Panama City, which served as a barracks, office, and temporary residence, with a heliport next to it. Only after his death did I learn that it was never his. Or I met with him wherever Chuchú knew to find him, because he could always get me in the back door. That is how I remember the time we went looking for him after a session of the Assembly of Corregimientos, the ‘‘Power of the People’’ he had created, reminiscent of Cuba. His military top-down Socialist experiment, all the while with North American bases throughout its center, proved to be quite a hybrid, but what he wanted more than anything was to recover sovereign control of the canal. The entire strategy for negotiating the canal was based on his

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ideas, at times accurate and at other times outlandish. Many were suspicious of that process even though, in the end, it was a masterpiece of political engineering; even John Wayne, the great icon of the North American Right, managed to become a staunch defender of the treaties. Torrijos spent most of his time at the oceanfront Farallón house. He took care of matters there, dressed in beachwear and reclining in a Manila hammock, rocking it with his foot pushing the ground, while he smoked Cohiba Cigars they sent him from Cuba with his name inscribed on the cellophane packaging. The only one who enjoyed the privilege of hanging a hammock next to his was Rodrigo ‘‘Rori’’ González, an overweight businessman who smiled a lot and spoke little. The other permanent residents were ‘‘the old woman’’ who was his cook, and a Kuna Indian who was in charge of stocking liquors, ‘‘the chemistry,’’ according to Torrijos’s slang. The bar only opened around noon, when he gave the signal. Unlike Fidel, who is given to obsessive monologues, Torrijos was a man of long silences. You had to listen carefully when he spoke to understand his brusque speech, which was even more difficult later in the day when he had noticed ‘‘the chemistry.’’ Returning once from Farallón, Chuchú, laughing uncontrollably, told me he owed me $200: ‘‘Take Sergio to have some fun. Go with some good women. Choose them well—Torrijos had told him, giving him the money.’’ On another occasion, he gave him a pistol for me, but Chuchú said that since I was not going to use it, he had given it to someone who needed it more than I did. Torrijos was a third world leader who came from the military, similar to Muammar al-Gaddafi, although there were overwhelming differences between the two. First of all, Torrijos had no theatrical virtue. I was in Libya twice seeking economic aid for the revolution. The last time was in 1986. While I waited for an interview with Gaddafi, the time of which you never knew, I was invited to visit the ruins of his home in Tripoli, soon after the rocket attack by United States airplanes. The tour’s main attraction was the bedroom. It was kept just as it had been left, the floor full of gravel, the bed split in half, and at the headboard, the lithograph of a seascape, one of those sold at souvenir shops, shredded by the explosion. Two days later they took me in a Learjet to Bengasi, where the interview would take place. From the airport, we crossed barren fields. Rising up from them were cement and textile factories, turnkey installations given to the government by Italian contractors, and there were luxurious

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neighborhoods where Gaddafi futilely tried to settle the Bedouins in homes equipped with all types of household appliances, and with a Fiat at the door. I saw him from a distance, standing in front of a Bedouin tent, waiting for me under the glaring sun. After the salaam, we sat on cushions on the ground in the open air. Between us was a little folding table adorned with only a Pepsi Cola bottle placed as a kind of vase with one solitary flower in the neck. The translator was a loquacious young man who had studied in Madrid. He kept insisting whenever he could throughout the interview that I was a writer. Gaddafi responded to that with a condescendingly cordial smile. He was insisting on something else, something that would have never occurred to Torrijos. He wanted to know if people in Nicaragua studied The Green Book, which he had written to outline his political philosophy. When I could no longer avoid an answer, I responded that yes, people studied it, and then he tried to get into details that I, obviously, had to invent. He eventually explained how to organize study circles, promising me a good supply of copies of The Green Book in Spanish. He responded favorably to all of my requests and communicated to me that his prime minister, Benjudi, would come to meet with me that very night in Tripoli. Indeed, Benjudi arrived at the hotel with all his ministers, but to charge me for my overdue accounts. And every time I insisted on Gaddafi’s promise, his response was always the same: ‘‘The great leader is not part of the government.’’ Chuchú, faithful to the gpp Tendency, was hostile to those in the Third Way, above all the Group of Twelve. This was an antagonism that we both handled with humor. Just as the peasant from the Southern Front, he was of the opinion that the Twelve included a lot of priests and wealthy members. Torrijos, however, already decidedly against Somoza, wanted to pay the lowest price with the Carter administration, and his best allies wound up being those in the Third Way for the political opening-up and the search for alliances that we represented. It was not easy for him to join the struggle to topple Somoza. In December 1969, when Coronel Amado Sanjur led a coup d’état against him while he was traveling in Mexico and busy with some horse races, Somoza had sent him a plane so that he could land in Chiriquí to join his loyal supporters and recover power. He called Somoza ‘‘Tachito.’’ ‘‘You know,’’ he told me once. Tachito was my guest here in Farallón.

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Every morning an aid kneeled down and tied his shoes. A man who has to have his shoes tied for him isn’t worth a damn. Carlos Andrés Pérez, who was a very experienced conspirator, had insisted on delivering the first payment of his pledged support through Torrijos, although it was up to us to persuade him to accept it. I had been selected to convince him, and on that occasion in Farallón we talked about everything, except the issue that brought me there. There had already been enough ‘‘chemistry’’ consumed, and he stumbled to bed after midnight. Then, at four o’clock in the morning, they came knocking on my door. The general wanted to see me in his room. I found him reading papers in bed. It was fitted with silk sheets like the beds of Hollywood movie stars, and his pajamas, with the sleeves too long, were also made of silk. The room was like a freezer. It lacked decor and smelled like floral air freshener. He looked at me from above his halfframe reading glasses and, with a paternal tone, asked me to have a seat next to him on the bed. When I finished explaining the strategy that we were following with the Group of Twelve, without mentioning the money, he jumped up to get a cigar, bit it, lit it, and started walking barefoot around the estate: ‘‘That’s right. Forget radicalisms,’’ he insisted, enthusiastically. ‘‘Careful with the Yankees. You have to play with the leash, but not the monkey.’’ One afternoon, a few weeks later, Chuchú and I were swimming in front of the Farallón house and he came into the water with us. All of a sudden he started talking to Chuchú about a woman, ‘‘La Negra,’’ attributing every compliment to her that people crazy in love string together, but at the same time complaining about her difficult, elusive personality and her unpredictability, again, just like people crazy in love. His voice faltered, and he jabbered on with puffy, red eyes. Then he would get quiet, put his head underwater, and when he came out again, shaking the water off, he would start with new reflections about La Negra. Chuchú advised him passionately and gave lengthy spiels elaborating philosophies on love. On other occasions, when the sun started to set after several hours of ‘‘chemistry,’’ he gave the order for them to bring La China from Panama City. The operation got under way and, each time he asked, they notified him by radio where the truck was traveling on the highway at that moment. La China would finally arrive and enter through the rear of the house. He would stumble up from the hammock to go find his bedroom, and no one dared to help him. I never met La China, but they pointed out

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La Negra to me. She was dressed in mourning next to the pillar near the high altar of the cathedral, where his casket was lying as people approached in endless lines. On August 1, 1981, I was in Masatepe for my father’s funeral when they called to give me the news about Torrijos’s death. They had located the wreckage of his plane in the Santa Marta Hills, a few minutes flight from Coclecito, the peasant community he had created and that he used to visit often. Then, after I buried my father, I flew the following day to Panama to another funeral. After Torrijos’s death, Graham Greene, an innocent soul, kept returning to Panama each year after his retirement in Antibes, as if nothing had changed. He used to come to Nicaragua as well, accompanied by Chuchú, on missions that had the appearance of a conspiracy because he thought he was bringing us secret messages from General Manuel Antonio Noriega, Torrijos’s successor, who was barely a caricature of him. In November 1988, I was waiting at the Nicaraguan embassy in Panama to take a plane to Buenos Aires where I was going to have an interview with President Raúl Alfonsín. I received a call there from Coronel Díaz Herrera, then head of the g-2, Panama’s military intelligence command. He needed to see me. He arrived a short time later and, after talking around the issue, told me he had to clarify something. Graham Greene’s trips to Nicaragua were a way to keep him entertained, and to entertain Chuchú Martínez, who had been left without a job after Torrijos died. Then he smiled sympathetically. The United States invaded Panama in December 1989. The last time I heard Chuchú Martínez’s voice, he was inciting the masses against the invaders while he watched them from his window as they parachuted down. That was in a telephone interview on Radio Sandino from Managua that no one in Panama could hear. A few days later, he died of a heart attack.

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nti-imperialism was always the most profound expression of the Sandinista movement. Sandino’s philosophy carried more weight than Leninist teachings from manuals. It was not just a question of theoretical convictions, but of lived realities and passions. No other country in Latin America had been the victim of as many abuses and military interventions by the United States as Nicaragua. These had occurred for over a century, ever since William Walker, an adventurer from Tennessee, proclaimed himself president of the country in 1855, supported by an army of filibusters. Walker decreed slavery legal and declared English the official language. The thesis he argued in his memoirs, The War in Nicaragua, was that the white race—the mind—and the black race— muscle—were destined by Providence to complement one another. But the mixed-race mestizos, indolent and vice-ridden, were worthless and absent from that plan. When Sandino took up arms in 1927, he was confronting a history of offenses, and the Somoza dynasty was nothing more than a continuation of the same military intervention. By the time the marines left in 1933, thanks to Sandino’s struggle in the mountains of Las Segovias, the United States had imposed the National Guard, created in the image and likeness of the invading army. They had also chosen the first Somoza, Sandino’s assassin, as the commander in chief. With the revolution’s triumph in 1979, it was

Sandino who returned, and when Somoza fled, he represented the last marine leaving. What’s more, when a revolution desired authenticity, there was no other choice than to confront imperialism. As the revolution continued to strengthen, the possibility of a military intervention was drawing nearer, and the only way to avoid it was to increase the cost for the United States. That was why it was necessary to arm each and every last man. All you had to do was take a look at Cuba to notice the pattern. It was equally imperative to support other revolutionary movements. This was not simply due to a belief in international militancy. It was because as long as there were other revolutionary governments in power in neighboring countries, or while the conflict extended throughout Central America, there was a better chance of avoiding the possibility of an attack. When the revolution triumphed in 1979, we were already destined to disagree with the United States. It was inevitable. They were the source of everything that had gone wrong in our history. They had backed a dictatorship under an obscene patronage, and they had supported the ‘‘sellout’’ politicians. They had plundered our natural resources, our mines, our forests. Declaring our sovereignty could only be possible in opposition to the United States, and our nationalism emerged out of that conflict. The nation had been held hostage and, for Nicaragua, such a small country, its very reason for being was linked to its true independence. This was the real meaning of national liberation. That was what we repeated with the most virulent rhetoric in public plazas, in radio addresses, and in letters to the editor in the newspaper Barricada. This was the starting point from which a strategy could be elaborated and, consequently, linked to the global stage. Nicaragua could not feel secure sharing geopolitical spaces with its enemy, and it would have to find a place not only alongside Cuba, where its sympathies already clearly lay, but with the Soviet block, in military and economic terms. Only in this way, protected under that umbrella, could the revolution survive. This explains why the revolution’s leadership always viewed capitalist countries in general with a hidden distrust, even those that were closely tied to the struggle to depose Somoza. Only a few were excused from that list, such as Mexico and Panama under Torrijos. It also explains the assumption of distance from the Socialist International and the Social

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Democrats who, when push came to shove, always aligned themselves with the United States in the end. They were part of their system. However, Western Europe did represent a crucial counterweight to Reagan’s politics during the war of aggression that spanned the decade of the eighties, even in the case of governments that were far from the Left, such as those of Giulio Andreotti in Italy or Wilfried Martens in Belgium, not to mention the Socialist governments of François Mitterrand, George Papandreou, Bruno Kreisky, Olof Palme, and Felipe González. I understood this because I visited these countries on several occasions on diplomatic business, and also seeking economic aid. There were also Latin American countries that never aligned themselves with the United States, even though they were viewed with the same suspicion, such as those that made up the Contadora Group in 1983 (Mexico, Panama, Colombia, Venezuela) and the Contadora Support Group (Brazil, Argentina, Uruguay, Peru). Chuchú Martínez said that Felipe González, on one of his visits to Panama around 1980, explained his concern about Nicaragua to Torrijos: that everyone in Nicaragua was becoming armed, and in a militarized society, there was no room for truly free elections. Afterward, Torrijos commented to Chuchú: ‘‘They would be idiots to trade what they earned in battle for paper ballots.’’ Torrijos, who had a secret plan to immobilize the Panama Canal with dynamite charges if he was unable to recover it through treaties, was in a certain way complicit with that messianic and fatal vision. Furthermore, Felipe González, now president of his government, was forced to admit that it was unreasonable to demand a normally functioning democracy in the middle of a war, and that the European parliamentary system could not be imposed as a model in Nicaragua. According to Elliot Abrams, assistant secretary of state, the invasion was about to be ordered by Reagan, though it did not occur. Yet the war with the Contras, armed and financed by the United States, hurt Nicaragua not only in terms of the thousands of dead, disabled, and displaced, but also due to the economic weakening and the massive material destruction that it produced, along with the loss of basic foundations of social coexistence. That was because the war, although supported externally, was able to attack the country from within. This was not strictly in terms of class, wealthy ‘‘sellouts’’ against poor Sandinistas. It ripped the nation open from top to bottom, like a knife through the very center,

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cutting each and every social class and dividing it. Moreover, the war also damaged the revolution’s transformational potential. There was a corresponding outcome on the other side: blind faith in manifest destiny ruled once again. The United States, chosen from the beginning to dominate the Americas, could not tolerate another revolution in its abdomen. It was the new heightening of the cold war, the last before it ended. In every televised speech, Reagan repeated that Nicaragua is closer to Florida than Nebraska or Dakota. We were an infectious tumor within its own organism, and they had to eradicate us. Any gesture of compliance or sign of mutual understanding was taken, on principle, as suspect. The war was absolute, and it was to the death. We had to ask for forgiveness, recognize our defeat, disappear, surrender, ‘‘cry uncle,’’ in Reagan’s words. In that way, our prophecy was fulfilled, thanks to Reagan, and Reagan fulfilled his, thanks to us. Carter, on the other hand, had tried to be tolerant of a revolution that had materialized before his eyes in his inherited backyard, and he attempted to take a different approach, both before and after Somoza’s fall. A rigid politics like Reagan’s required an imperial determination and a desire to systematize that determination, which Carter lacked. Looking back years later, I can see Carter as a victim of his own bad fate, as well as his indecisiveness and the clamoring of his conscience. A president of the United States who listens to his conscience, based on applying a religious sense of what is right to power, is ultimately defeated by his own paradox. The improvisations, contradictions, lack of initiatives, Carter’s own and those of his staff, were ultimately beneficial for us. One can get a sense of them in books written by his advisors, Robert Leiken and Bob Pastor, and in the memoirs of then ambassador in Managua, Lawrence Pezzullo. Zbigniew Brzezinski, the poker-faced National Security advisor, was closer to Kissinger’s Central European philosophical vision. He was a rara avis in the White House during those years. On September 24, 1979, Carter welcomed us to the White House. Daniel, Alfonso Robelo, and I were going to attend the opening of the session of the United Nations General Assembly, and it had been decided that we would visit Washington beforehand. There were constant comparisons between the Cuban Revolution and ours. Ambassador William Bowdler later remarked that he had already seen that film of guerrillas entering Managua in triumph and the euphoria of the people as they received them before, but in Havana. Carter’s staff

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advised him not to make the same mistakes as Eisenhower, who, by refusing to meet with Fidel Castro in 1959, had likely pushed him into the enemy camp. They thought that history could be reversed toward the future and that, if we really were incorrigible Marxists, at least no one would be able to say that the president of the United States had failed to make an effort to reach an agreement. The White House in Hollywood studios has always seemed more splendorous to me than the one I entered that one time, without ever having returned. Carter welcomed us in the Rose Garden, before a barrage of journalists, and led us to the Cabinet Room, where others joined the meeting: Vice-President Walter Mondale, Deputy Secretary of State Warren Christopher, Brzezinski, Henry Owen, Viron Vaky, Bob Pastor, and the ambassador in Managua, Pezzullo. While I cannot say that there was tension in the air, there was a mutual skepticism. Carter began touching on topics that his government considered vital in its relations with Nicaragua: nonintervention in the politics of neighboring countries, principally nonalignment with El Salvador, respect for human rights, effective democracy. We had no points of conflict to articulate in this discussion. It was all in writing in our letter of adherence to the resolutions of the Meeting of Consultation of the Organization of American States (oas), which had been convened before Somoza’s fall at the end of June. Daniel, who was the first to respond, ignored these topics and focused instead on a lengthy allegation regarding the policies of intervention and interference by the United States in Nicaragua. After several minutes, Carter raised his hand to interrupt him, and he kept it raised as Daniel continued speaking. Then he said: ‘‘If you do not make me responsible for what my predecessors have done, I will not make you responsible for what yours have done,’’ drawing cordial laughter from both sides. I referred then to the topic of human rights, because one of his advisors had mentioned it. I recalled how we had respected the physical integrity of the members of the National Guard when they surrendered en masse, and the fact that we had not instituted a firing squad. A short while after that, he asked us to excuse him and left us with his staff to discuss economic aid. Carter had announced to us that the United States, as proof of goodwill, would give us $70 million in credit to support national reconstruction, a sum that never materialized. Later, as we were leaving, through the

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window to the oval office overlooking the grounds, I could see him leaning over papers on his desk, his hand on his brow. He remained in my mind a distant figure, and I did not know whether or not I would ever see him again. Although we did see each other again because he continued to be linked to Nicaragua in a way that perhaps he never imagined. We met in Atlanta after his electoral defeat to Reagan, when he was seeking his second presidential term. He was also in Managua on several occasions. The first was to inaugurate a housing project in Chinandega, which was sponsored by a foundation with which he was affiliated. Daniel and I accompanied him on that occasion, and I remember that the visit ended with lunch aboard an old train car set in the yard of an expropriated residence, an eccentric luxury of its previous owner. We also jogged together through the old Country Club’s golf course. He was a better distance runner than I, and he never missed an opportunity to insist that having us establish a real dialogue with the Contra leaders would be a way to assuage our conflict with the Reagan administration, something we then rejected as absurd. He was there for the elections in 1990, supervising the group of observers from the Carter Center. When we lost, he assumed the role of mediator, which was crucial in order to reach an agreement with the new government in a time of perilous uncertainty. He returned later, interested in helping settle problems concerning property rights, and again to monitor the 1996 elections. He also offered once to mediate the conflict between Daniel and myself, before I left the fsln. Carter could not be blamed for everything his predecessors had done; nor could he be for what his successors would do. We knew that Reagan’s rhetoric during his campaign had not been gratuitous and that we had to prepare for the worst. In addition, preparing for the worst meant assuming risks in advance. That was how we began giving all the backing possible to our Salvadoran ‘‘cousins,’’ now that all the guerrilla groups were united under the flag of the Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front (fmln). In January 1981, Ambassador Pezzullo was in Washington and called to request an urgent meeting with the whole Government Junta and the fsln’s entire National Directorate. From the airport he came directly to my house where, to his disappointment, only Jaime Wheelock and I were waiting for him, which was what we had decided beforehand. Aggravated,

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he made it clear to us that things were much more serious than we realized. The cia had discovered a clandestine landing strip in a place called El Papalonal, near Lake Managua, where they had taken an aerial shot of a c-47 plane that was transporting arms to El Salvador. The fact that Carter was about to hand over the presidency did not make it more acceptable. Either we closed the airstrip or we would suffer dire consequences. The airstrip was closed, but the arms shipments necessary for the planned offensive, set to begin in just a few days, were already near completion. That offensive, heralded as the final one, sought to overthrow José Napoleón Duarte’s government, and it ended in a resounding failure. Little did we know that history does not mechanically repeat itself. While there was a powerful military caste in El Salvador, and the oligarchy remained intact, Duarte, a popularly elected Christian Democrat, was not at all Somoza. What’s more, Somoza had been toppled due to a combination of multiple factors that could never be repeated, much less in a different place. It was not a valid Marxist analysis at all. Even so, the Cubans joined in the chimera. The change in policy toward Nicaragua when Reagan assumed the presidency was not as abrupt as it could seem, despite the fact that the White House was full of hawks. Alexander Haig, the new secretary of state, decided to try to first assess the situation. In mid-February 1981, he sent a message for us with Pezzullo proposing normalized relations in exchange for the total suspension of arms traffic to El Salvador. We assured him that there would be no further arms shipments and, as proof of our goodwill, we closed Radio Liberación, the fmln’s dissident radio station operating out of Nicaragua. In the following months, the Reagan administration was able to confirm that the aerial arms shipments had ceased. Even so, in April 1981, they suspended all forms of economic aid to Nicaragua as a preventative measure. In any event, arms continued to flow into El Salvador until the end of the war on a fleet of canoes that crossed the Gulf of Fonseca at night. These were small vessels that went undetected by electronic tracking. On July 19, 1981, the act commemorating the revolution’s second anniversary was celebrated in Masaya. There, the canoeists, all with extensive experience and several recruited from among the smugglers, were seated on the stage, in honor of their bravery. They were sitting one row down from President Luis Herrera Campins from Venezuela.

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Haig’s vision was fundamentally geopolitical. It was of little importance to him what kind of regime a country had as long as it did not constitute a threat to the security of the United States or its allies. That premise left the Conservative military dictatorships in peace, but it also afforded a margin of tolerance toward a revolutionary government such as ours, as long as it was contained within its own space and with a list of forbidden friends. Assistant Secretary of State Thomas Enders arrived in Managua with this message, and I was the one who received it first, on August 12, 1981. His proposal, quite simply, included some ostentatious military maneuvers in the area. Furthermore, while the Contras were already training without interference in the swamps of the Florida Everglades, Nicaragua was supposed to cease all assistance to the Salvadoran guerrillas and reduce the size of its army to 15,000 men. In exchange, the United States promised not to intervene in our internal affairs and to provide economic aid. Enders continued traveling to Nicaragua until October, but no agreement was reached in a climate of mutual suspicion and secret resolutions by both sides. Now the conflict would begin to escalate without pause. Through the cia, the United States officially began backing the Contras, which until then had been in the hands of Argentine military leaders. This collaboration began with the blowing up of two bridges in northern Nicaragua in March 1982, which was carried out by an assault unit from the former National Guard that had been trained in the use of explosives. The United States began a strange, undeclared war against a country with which it maintained diplomatic relations. In spite of this, it never occurred to us to break those relations, which we maintained until the end, just as we never broke ties with El Salvador or Honduras. We reacted to the explosion of the bridges by declaring a state of emergency and arresting Alfonso Robelo, former member of the Government Junta who was now in the opposition, and other political leaders. The opposing camps began perceiving each other as a solid entity, in that Manichean fate that leaves no room for nuance. You were either for or against. Each act of aggression became the responsibility of all of the opposition, labeled by us as conspirators, and many of them acted that way. Once free, Robelo left for Costa Rica to join Edén Pastora, already in exile. The two of them founded the Democratic Revolutionary Alliance (arde), an armed organization that sought to keep its distance from the

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cia but that ultimately fell under its control. Edén had left Nicaragua in July of the previous year, supposedly to fight alongside the guerrilla in Guatemala, leaving Humberto Ortega a goodbye letter that imitated Che’s letter to Fidel. Later, Robelo became a member of the Contra Directorate, which operated out of Miami. Early in 1981 we had created another site of conflict on the Caribbean coast with the forced evacuation of thousands of Miskito Indians from the banks of the Coco River, which marks the border with Honduras. They were relocated to Taspa Pri, a settlement built overnight in the interior. We wanted to avoid the displaced indigenous communities from functioning as a base for the Contras in a turbulent situation that was quickly deteriorating. This fact, which represented one of the revolution’s most tragic errors, sparked the beginning of a new front in the war. The cia came in to finance two armed Miskito organizations: yatama and misurasata. In 1980, during the closing ceremony for the National Literacy Crusade, our invited guest of honor, Rodrigo Carazo, president of Costa Rica, had reminded us in his speech about the promise given before the oas to have free elections. Humberto Ortega answered him in his own speech. He said that we would hold them in 1985, although they would not be to raffle away power, but to confirm that of the revolution, in other words, our own. Even so, we did not hold a plebiscite, as that speech had announced, but genuine elections in 1984, a year ahead of schedule. Daniel was the fsln candidate for president, and I for vice-president. We had somehow begun to move away from the secret project, which was strategic, and to adopt the announced project of political pluralism, which was tactical. We also moved those elections forward in order to weaken Reagan’s political aggression, which had little effect. First, this was because his commitment to the Contras had become the essential piece of his national security policy, and he wanted a military solution, and also because our ties to the conflict in El Salvador were growing by the day. For the United States, as well as for us, the elections in 1984 were part of the war strategy. In carrying them out according to the law, we sought the legitimacy that they wanted to deny us by blocking them. That was why they obligated Arturo Cruz, the Unified Nicaraguan Opposition (uno) candidate, to withdraw. Cruz was a member of the Group of Twelve and the second Government Junta when Alfonso Robelo and Violeta Chamorro resigned in 1980. It was, once again, a fait accompli because Arturo was hospitalized in León, and in Chinandega he was attacked by people

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throwing stones at him as he was just beginning his campaign. These acts did not occur without the fsln’s knowledge. Finally, during a meeting of the Socialist International in Rio de Janeiro, he was granted all the safeguards he was demanding. Yet when Bayardo Arce, a member of the fsln’s National Directorate, made the promise, Arturo refused to accept it, acting under the veto of the United States. After his failed candidacy, he became part of the Contra Directorate in exile alongside Alfonso Robelo, which is where Reagan wanted to place all the leaders from the civil opposition. We won by a margin greater than 60 percent of the vote, with a massive voter turnout at the polls. Nevertheless, even parties not affiliated with the uno won a good number of seats in the National Assembly, including parties that had also withdrawn under pressure from the United States after the ballots had already been printed, such as the Independent Liberal Party (pli). Others, such as the Conservative Party, won in rural municipalities where they had not even campaigned. Even though we were striving for unanimity, we did not stop to examine very closely the fact that, even with the uno party’s withdrawal, 4 in 10 voters had voted against us. We obtained the legitimacy we sought only partially. The governments in Latin America and Europe that had pressured or urged us to hold elections sent small delegations to the inauguration ceremony in 1985. No chief of state wanted to come. The presidents of the Contadora Group countries had agreed in advance to send their ministers of foreign affairs, and our most important guest wound up being Fidel Castro who, in his gesture of solidarity, actually upset the scene. In his letter declining our invitation, Carlos Andrés Pérez informed us that he felt disappointed by the lack of electoral safeguards. On the other hand, we were disappointed because he doubted our genuine desire to provide them. In January 1985, Reagan’s inauguration to his second term coincided with ours. From that moment forward, the aggression broke out to its greatest extent. In his inaugural address, he bestowed the title of freedom fighters on the Contras, and in May he imposed an economic embargo on Nicaragua supported by the argument that we represented a threat to the security of the United States. Then, with the embargo’s ban on wheat supplies, we experienced our greatest moment of national unity since the National Literacy Crusade. As they took away our bread, it sparked the patriotic slogan to return to corn, our roots: ‘‘El maíz: nuestra raíz.’’ The cia’s sappers planted mines in our ports, and the burning of the oil tanks in the Port of Corinto from high-powered missiles, launched from

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piranha speedboats also operated by cia operatives, had forced the evacuation of all the inhabitants. In 1986, in an unprecedented act, the United States Congress approved $100 million to finance the Contra war. Honduras was already a permanent operations base against Nicaragua, the same as Costa Rica and El Salvador. The ruling from The Hague by the International Court of Justice, which condemned the Unites States government, represented a formidable victory for us after our having dedicated tremendous efforts to preparing the case. Even so, Reagan ignored it. The only option remaining was a military invasion, such as the one that had occurred in Grenada in October 1983, and we were constantly referring to its proximity. Those were also the years of the Blackbird, the sr-71 spy plane that flew over Nicaraguan airspace faster that the speed of sound, producing sonic booms as if thunderous Zeus were trying to frighten us. But in early October 1986, it was not a Blackbird that was shot down, but an old c-123 cargo plane that was used to drop military supplies by parachute to the Contra forces. It was part of a fleet operated by the cia from the Ilopango Airport in San Salvador. The plane was shot down in the San Juan River with a direct hit from a missile launched by a seventeen-year-old recruit who could not believe his eyes when he saw it take a nosedive engulfed in flames. All of the members of the crew were Americans. Eugene Hasenfus was captured. He was the only survivor because he always took the precaution of wearing a parachute. The photos of the large-bodied Yankee being led with a rope tied around his neck by the very recruit who had shot him down were reminiscent in Nicaragua of the images of Sandino’s war against the invaders; and in the United States, of Vietnam. The U.S. embassy refused to accept the coffins with the pilots’ bodies, which were ordered to be placed at their front door. They remained committed to the claim that it was a private operation and that they had nothing to do with it. Hasenfus, on the other hand, a veteran of the Indochina war, whose mission it was during the flights to throw the packages out of the plane into thin air, revealed the names of those who had hired him. They were close to Lieutenant Colonel Oliver North, Reagan’s confidant on the National Security Council. The Peoples’ Tribunals, which had been created after the revolution’s triumph to judge Somoza’s National Guard, quickly gave Hasenfus the maximum sentence of thirty years in prison. We knew, though, that he

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could not be held for long due to all the pressures that would be exerted on us and because his freedom would be useful in the battle of perception that we were waging against Reagan within the United States. That same month, I was scheduled to tour the United States starting in Atlanta, where I had been invited to the inauguration of the Carter Center. From there I went to Madison to speak at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. Coincidentally, the Hasenfus family just happened to live in Madison. His wife, Sally, was able to meet with me, and I visited her in her home, a move that drew the attention of the press when it was announced, as they were following me precisely surrounding the Hasenfus case. They were a very modest family from the rural American Midwest, where the world appears to be a distant and inoffensive vision until that world is complicated by some cruel twist of fate. They had been thrust in the middle of events that they were far from understanding. I doubt they even knew which side of the conflict their relative was on. In the opinion polls, average people around the United States, people like the Hasenfus family, did not know whether Reagan was acting for or against the Contras, or whether he wanted to support the government in Nicaragua or overthrow it. Yet they supported Reagan no matter what. It was a war waged in the midst of ignorance, even though we managed to mobilize crucial sectors, churches, unions, human rights groups, scholars, and artists, with influence in Congress and in the media. We shared coffee and cookies in the little living room with vinyl chairs and full with family photographs, surrounded by a stiff cordiality, more full of silence than anything else. All I could assure them repeatedly was that Hasenfus was being treated well, that he had every legal safeguard, and that they could visit him whenever they wanted. His wife, Sally, and his mother and family, were all surprised that visiting him in Nicaragua could be possible. Besides, where on the earth was Nicaragua? Nikua-rragua, as William Casey, head of the cia used to pronounce it when he appeared before the Senate Intelligence Commission. When I left and Sally walked out on the porch with me to say goodbye, there was a throng of photographers, cameramen, and journalists, the largest group I had ever seen in my life, standing behind the yellow caution tape that police use at the scene of an accident. The question was always the same: When will Hasenfus be released? The image of the mercenary being led by the adolescent recruit continued to remind the United States that it was involved in yet another war beyond its borders.

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Beyond the ignorance about what was really happening in Nicaragua, it was a disturbing image. Hasenfus returned to his home in Madison for Christmas that year after he was handed over to a mission of pastors from the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. This was Martin Luther King’s church, one that was very close to us. Negotiating the release of prisoners still gives the United States political prestige. I remember a visit by Reverend Jesse Jackson in Managua during those years. I was the one chosen to accompany him to a session in his honor at the National Assembly, which was the final ceremony on his trip. While the president of the Assembly, Carlos Núñez, was praising him in his speech, Jackson was looking anxiously at his watch and wanting to get up. It was a clear demonstration of rudeness that bothered me, and I told him that. Yet he had to get to Havana to pick up some prisoners being released because of his efforts, and the exchange had to take place at a certain hour that was already set so that he could appear on the television morning news programs. At the end of my United States tour, during which I had also spoken against the policy of aggression at Harvard University, mit, the University of Kansas, and Notre Dame, I arrived in New York for an interview with secretary general of the United Nations, Javier Pérez de Cuéllar. And on November 25, I was invited to an informational conversation at eleven o’clock in the morning with Dan Rather, the anchorman for the cbs news. Rather welcomed me in an office adjacent to the set where they broadcast the news. He already had his make-up on, and he asked me to excuse him because he had to go on the air. There was a news conference that had been called unexpectedly by the White House, and Reagan would appear in a few minutes to make an announcement. He would return shortly. ‘‘That announcement is about Nicaragua,’’ I told him. He looked at me, intrigued. ‘‘If that is the case, would you be willing to appear on my program after the president speaks?’’ It was a golden opportunity, and I told him that of course I would. He left, and I sat in his office in front of a monitor where all you could see was the empty podium in the White House press room. Then Reagan appeared. His brief message was to recognize that the Contras had received funds that had been diverted from the secret sale of weapons to Iran, which he claimed to know nothing about and in which several of his advisers were implicated. Selling arms to Iran, which was categorized as a

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terrorist state in daily White House rhetoric, was scandalous, but supplying economic aid to the Contras violated a ban in the Boland amendment, which had been approved by the U.S. Congress in October 1984. That was when Irangate, or the Iran-Contra Affair, as it was also called, exploded. Attorney General Edwin Meese’s investigation was already in process, and it implicated National Security Advisor John Poindexter and Oliver North, head of the operations in which Hasenfus participated. When Reagan finished his message, they took me into the studio, and I was able to give my opinions instantly in front of a very large audience that was surely surprised that the program director had me right there on hand. I predicted that Reagan would suffer consequences similar to the ones from the Watergate scandal, which had forced Nixon to resign. Full of enthusiasm, I repeated that at a lunch later that same day to guests at the home of art critic Dore Ashton. Among them were Allen Ginsberg and Susan Sontag. Yet nothing on that scale occurred. Those revelations more or less covered up, or were used to silence, another even greater scandal, which was investigated by Senator John Kerry’s Commission that linked the cia and the Contras to drug trafficking. The planes that transported military supplies to the Palmerola Air Base in Honduras returned to the United States full of cocaine. According to a report published later by the San Jose Mercury News, that operation began the crack cocaine market in California. The complicity of the Iranian government in financing the Contras was a complete surprise to us. I had been in Tehran in 1984, invited by Prime Minister Mir-Hossein Mousavi. I was there along with the minister of foreign trade, Alejandro Martínez Cuenca, negotiating credit for the purchase of oil. We were about to leave empty-handed when the then president of the parliament, Ayatollah Hashemi Rafsanjani, intervened. He was the same figure identified later as the mastermind in the secret dealings with Reagan, and we received a credit in the sum of $38 million. The Shah’s sister’s private plane, a Boeing 737 with handles made of pure gold on the lavatory basins, was put at our disposal. We traveled in it to Khorramshahr, on the Iraqi border. We were accompanied by a Tomcat fighter squadron and, just to impress us, the jets refueled in flight from 747 aerial tankers. In Khorramshahr, the shelling continued nonstop. The Iraqi forces had leveled the city block by block with dynamite as they withdrew. The vast expanse of its desolation reminded me of Managua once the debris had been cleared away after the 1972 earthquake.

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On one occasion, an official dinner, with no alcohol and served on mats on the floor, had been interrupted by prayers. This was when our hosts always left us alone. I asked one of the most celebrated heroes of the Iranian Air Force, known as ‘‘the lone star,’’ how they could keep the Tomcats flying, along with the sophisticated fleet of warplanes inherited by the Shah, given the embargo imposed by the United States. He answered me with a straight face that it was thanks to the ingenuity of their aviation mechanics, capable of creating the most complicated replacement parts, and also due to the black market. Only after the scandal erupted was it clear that it was actually all thanks to Oliver North’s ingenuity. Afterward, I also visited Iraq on a similar mission, which failed because we were involved simultaneously in Teheran on another mission led by Carlos Núñez, president of the National Assembly. Attempting to obtain support from two countries at war, courting them both at once, was typical of our foreign policy. It became complicated and sometimes demonstrated a surprising display of audacity and, at other times, cleverness. It depended just as often on strictly outlined strategies as on improvisation. Prime Minister Mousavi had been in Managua to return my visit, and he sent a message to me in 1988 with the delegation that attended the ceremonies commemorating the anniversary of the revolution. He made it clear to me how disappointed he was by my visit to Iraq. We had a good relationship, and there was no better opportunity for me to respond to him to say that I felt even more disappointed that they were assisting the Contras in collusion with the United States, the Great Satan. When the revolution triumphed in 1979, there was absolutely no contact with the Soviet Union, which promoted the democratic participation of Latin American Communist Parties, and was skeptical of armed movements. In October 1977 I was the one who explained the political achievements of the offensive under way to Don Manuel Mora Valverde, Costa Rica’s Communist leader. He gave me a secret rendezvous, just as the Soviet counterespionage manuals instructed. After going around in circles all night long from one vehicle to another, we ended up in Moravia at the home of a university professor who happened to be a friend of mine. He was waiting there in the living room with the lights dimmed. After I finished my explanation, he adjusted the dentures in his mouth and made just one short comment: ‘‘I wish you success in this adventure.’’ On one of those crazy days in July 1979, I received a phone call in the

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Government House from Gabo (Gabriel García Márquez). With his usual conspirator’s tone, he asked me to meet a friend who wanted to visit us in Managua the following day. It turned out to be a bureaucrat from the Soviet embassy in Mexico, who, like all good Russians, was named Vladimir. He stayed and opened the first diplomatic mission, entirely on his own, in the empty rooms of a home that had been confiscated and that we immediately made available to him. It was not until May 1980 that the first official delegation traveled to Moscow, headed by Moisés Hassan, Tomás Borge, and Henry (‘‘Modesto’’) Ruiz. By that time we were seeking the strategic alignment we wanted and which the Soviets viewed with reservations. Our goal to become a member of the Socialist countries Free Trade Agreement (came) was always rejected, although the economic support, based on low-interest credit, was more than generous. Our military agreements never even came close to contemplating alliances, commitments for mutual defense, or the presence of Soviet troops on Nicaraguan soil, although there were supplies of weapons, equipment, and ammunition, and regular troops were trained through their advisers. Even so, their war strategy was of little use against the Contras, just as it did not work for them in Afghanistan. In terms of the relationship between the two superpowers, from the beginning the Soviet Union was less than enthusiastic about creating another area of tension with the United States in Latin America, in addition to Cuba. Even so, that does not mean that they were not choosing a side in the conflict against the United States by giving us their military support, therefore making Nicaragua one of the sites of the cold war. The first Soviet arms shipment to Nicaragua was made through Algeria, adhering to a standard of discretion that they themselves had set. Where that caution was most obvious, however, was in the case of the supply of mig fighter jets, included in the first military aid protocol signed in 1981. The Air Forces of Guatemala, El Salvador, and Honduras had their own squadrons of fighter jets, and we sought a defensive equivalent. Besides that, however, it was eventually necessary to intercept the supply flights to the Contras, which flew under our radar screens, a problem that only the migs could solve. The construction of the airport proposed for the migs began with great enthusiasm. It was located on the west shore of Lake Managua, and it

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consumed vast resources, beyond our actual means, and in spite of assistance from Cuba. It was in large part responsible for our catastrophic inflation. Truck caravans transported thousands of tons of loose cement to the worksite over a period of several months from the San Rafael del Sur production plant to the place where they unloaded their cargo. We often calculated that the resources and materials invested would have been sufficient for a paved highway from Managua to Puerto Cabezas on the Caribbean coast. The runway was in close proximity to Sandino International Airport, and any passenger on a commercial flight could see it out of the airplane windows, not to mention the sr-71 spy planes that flew overhead photographing the area every day. It is still visible now, the long gray strip in the barren grassland at the edge of the lake, crossed by herds of cattle that graze around it, every day in a more deteriorated state. When Secretary of State George Shultz expressed disapproval of the transfer of the migs, the Soviets started to postpone the delivery, which never took place. Sixty pilots were already in Bulgaria training to operate them, and later they started returning to Nicaragua of no use to us at all. Fidel Castro insisted that we abandon the project because he was certain the jets would be destroyed before they ever got off the ground. He recommended that we ask for mi-25 helicopters in exchange. They were the most sophisticated in the Soviet arsenal, and in the end proved decisive for their attack and maneuvering capabilities. Yet there was resistance within our ranks before accepting the exchange. It was evident that the Soviets had their own strategic interests and that we were not one of their priorities, especially after Mikhael Gorbachev’s arrival in 1985. That meant a bitter loss of illusions for us. In December 1981, Jaime Wheelock was on a visit to France, invited by Leonel Jospin, then minister of agriculture. While there, he asked the recently inaugurated Mitterrand government to sell us Mirage fighter jets on credit. That did not happen, of course, but we did obtain Vedette coastal speedboats, Alouette surveillance helicopters, and military trucks. Regis Debray, then advisor to the Socialist government, was involved in the deal. He pointed out that their gesture was an attempt to reduce our dependence on the Soviets. Even so, it was just that, a gesture, and it did not involve enough essential supplies for a war such as the one we were beginning to face at that moment, supplies that only the Soviets or Cuba were going to provide us.

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Greece’s recently elected Prime Minister Papandreou and I had a meeting in Athens in 1984. After going through my usual list of requests, he asked me, much to my surprise, if we did not also need weapons. I quickly responded that we did, and he then offered me 10,000 g3 assault rifles, which was the standard issue weapon for nato troops. These were made in Greece, and they arrived at the Port of Corinth without a glitch. The Socialists in Greece, with insufficient support, also wanted to remove us from the cold war battlefield. In 1986, Margaret Thatcher agreed to a meeting with me on Downing Street under the norms of a strict and discrete protocol. She waited for me at the bottom of the stairway that led to her office, her pocketbook under her arm and styled with hairspray, just like the great ladies in my hometown at weddings and funerals. She shook my hand with a perfunctory and indifferent grip as many times as the photographers requested. As we sat down for the interview, she took a file from her desk that she was forced to consult every time she thought she had confused her arguments. That was where she kept the list of evidence of our alignment with the Soviets, starting with the mi-25 helicopters, which she repeatedly called ‘‘tremendous.’’ Norita Astorga, who was then vice-chancellor, had accompanied me. Norita leaned over to whisper something to me, and that infuriated her. She did not tolerate distractions. To counter her allegations, I noted the French military assistance, and it was as if she had not heard me. But when I mentioned the rifles that Papandreou had given us, she was furious. ‘‘Papandreou!’’ she said, in disbelief. ‘‘And to think what we pay him in the European Community in agricultural subsidies!’’ Afterward, however, she offered me tea that she herself served, like a good housewife, and the conversation became cordial and relaxed. We never suspected the magnitude of the events that would eventually dissolve the Soviet Bloc, our revered shield of strategic protection. When Boris Yeltsin, then mayor of Moscow and nonvoting member of the Politburo of the Communist Party (cpsu), visited Nicaragua early in 1988, he brought a reassuring message: Perestroika would serve to strengthen Soviet power and its role in the world. Never imagining the role he would play in the future, he gave me the impression of being one of the hardnosed members of the old guard, someone who would tolerate the experiment as long as it did not imply too many risks. During one of the lengthy meetings that we held with him, I asked Yeltsin, among other things, about the true impact of Glasnost and the

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real freedom for writers and artists. ‘‘We have opened the official galleries to all the bad painters who had become famous for being dissidents. Now that they are no longer censured, no one will listen to them, and they will cease being a nuisance,’’ he said, satisfied by his own cleverness. He was surly and ill-mannered, and he made a bad impression on everyone. Nevertheless, he was the highest-ranking politician who had ever visited us. So when he decided to swim in Lake Jiloá stark naked, there were some of us who ran to take our clothes off too and join him. Besides, he had assured us that Soviet backing for the revolution would remain consistent. However, when the Esquipulas peace negotiations were already well under way to seek a diplomatic end to the military conflicts in Central America, there was the appearance of Vladimir Kazimirov, the Soviet Union Foreign Ministry’s new head of the Latin American Department, under Eduard Shevernadze. His message, communicated under the guise of friendship, was the complete opposite. We needed to come to a rapid agreement with the United States, put an end to the war, and find support from Western countries. They could no longer carry such a heavy burden. Furthermore, we needed to work within a mixed-market economy to establish confidence. The Soviet Union had also initiated a secret dialogue with the United States within a concrete agenda pertaining to the case of Nicaragua and negotiating an end to the Central American conflict. Kazimirov himself was in charge of this dialogue, which began toward the end of Reagan’s second term, and then continued during the Bush administration. His counterparts were Elliot Abrams and Bernie Aronson, successive U.S. assistant secretaries of state. The conflict in Nicaragua was nearing its end. Yet the end was also drawing closer for our far-off comrades, as well as for us.

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ust a few days before they murdered Pedro Joaquín Chamorro, I received a note from him, signed with his initials. In it, he gave me the name of Leonardo Jerez, owner of the Búfalo pants factory in Rivas, a friend he trusted completely. He asked me to ‘‘please take care of him unconditionally,’’ and it ended with ‘‘hugs for all.’’ Unconditionally meant that I could conspire with the factory owner. All referred to the members of the Group of Twelve. Pedro Joaquín was assassinated on January 10, 1978. Mundo Jarquín, a close friend of his and his chief associate in the udel (Democratic Union of Liberation), had met with the Twelve three days before in San José. We were looking for a way to forge an alliance, and we had to work as quickly as possible on a path sown with mutual distrust, which had not made the meeting any easier. Pedro Joaquín was aware that the Twelve were part of the Third Way Tendency, and he wanted to reach an agreement with us. However, some members of the group, the ones least expected, among them Dr. Cuadra Chamorro, were intractable. They mistrusted the udel and Pedro Joaquín himself. The udel brought together a diverse membership, from Somoza supporters to Socialists with Soviet fanaticism. Its positions also differed from traditional parties on the Right. Even the word liberation was a point of contention, and not strictly for reasons of semantics, since it was shared by both the fsln and the udel. For the fsln’s tradition of armed struggle, there was only class liberation;

and from the udel’s perspective, unchallenged by its Socialist members, democratic liberation implied preventing the totalitarianism implicit in the first definition. Although there was mutual distrust, Mundo Jarquín remembers that in mid-December 1977, a group of gpp sympathizers came and interrupted a meeting of the udel in Matagalpa shouting ‘‘udel, the Twelve and Somoza are all one in the same!’’ That slogan convinced Pedro Joaquín that the Third Way Tendency was guided by the same mainstream perspective and that they could work together. Mundo was returning to Managua on Sunday, January 8 on the 6 a.m. flight. He called me that morning from the hotel to tell me how worried he was leaving after the meeting’s poor results. I asked him to wait for me, that I would take him to the airport, and I tried to reassure him on the way. I told him that the suspicions would be forgotten when we had to face everything ahead, which would be, without a doubt, much more challenging. I also told him to assure Pedro Joaquín that this would all be settled in the next meeting with him. In February, in Cancún, the Inter American Press Association (iapa) was going to celebrate their annual general assembly. Pedro Joaquín was planning to travel to Mexico under that pretext to join Daniel and myself. However, that meeting never took place. That Sunday he went to meet Mundo at the airport, eager to hear the news he was bringing. All the while, the contracted assassins were already following him. A photo from the airport showing him hugging Mundo was the last one they took of him. When he had sent his book of short stories, El enigma de las alemanas (The Enigma of German Women), to me some weeks before, he wrote in the inscription: ‘‘To Sergio, from the likely number thirteen. With a hug, PJCh.’’ He was not saying that he wanted to join the Group of Twelve. That type of suggestion would have been out of character for him, as proud as he was. It was that Somoza had already issued an order for our arrest, and he felt that he too could be imprisoned at any moment, just as so many times before. Honest and frank, and often rude for his frankness, Pedro Joaquín was a lost sheep for the oligarchy, guilty of the sin of never affiliating himself with the Conservative Party, the party of pacts with the dictatorship. A dissident among his peers, hated by Somoza, and seen as untrustworthy by ambassadors from the United States and the armed Left, he was a free thinker in every way. Carlos Fonseca, in jail at the old military prison in

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San José, had not wanted to receive a visit from him in August 1969. He was never on good terms with anyone, despite the fact that La Prensa was the most widely sold newspaper. I had met him in 1963, during my student years. In the interest of generating a dialogue, the president of the National University, Mariano Fiallos Gil, offered to arrange a meeting at his home on Poneloya beach with student leaders from the Revolutionary Student Front (fer) as the only guests. We accepted reluctantly. We were suspicious of Pedro Joaquín, even though he had taken up arms against Somoza in 1959. We were suspicious of his anticommunism, his surname, La Prensa, and the iapa. The bickering carried on until midnight. By then, everyone was emboldened with rum, and the argument had been getting louder since he was not an easy man to defeat or convince. At one point, under attack, he tried to make himself heard above the yelling to respond to the accusations that he did not want comprehensive change. He said that it was clear that the problem was not only Somoza, but to put a definite end to corruption, to fully educate the poor, and to bring about agrarian reform. Danilo Rosales, who was later killed after finishing medical school when he joined the guerrilla in Pancasán in 1967, asked him sarcastically just how he thought he was going make all those changes: Would he have the guts to make them himself? Furious, he responded: ‘‘Well, of course! Hell yeah, damn it!’’ Then we applauded him, amid shouts of joy. During those years, he had become head of public relations for Dr. Fernando Agüero. He was an optometrist with a booming voice, with the charisma Pedro Joaquín lacked, and capable of drawing great audiences everywhere he appeared. For us, though, Agüero, leader of the Conservative Party, was not to be trusted either. Several of us present at the Poneloya meeting went to watch one of those rallies one Sunday from the roof of the La Merced Convent. We spotted Pedro Joaquín up on top of the tiled roof of the house where Agüero was delivering his speech from the balcony. He was giving instructions to the photographer from La Prensa about the angles to focus on the crowd. When Agüero eventually made a pact with Somoza, Pedro Joaquín banished him from La Prensa. It never mentioned him except to mock his phony power, a member of a triumvirate where Somoza had two clever lackeys. Agüero used to turn on the siren in the car when he was on his way to the Presidential Palace. That was essentially the whole show.

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We did not become friends at that time, but later, thanks to literature. He started reading my short stories. Then Pedro Joaquín would join us when I went on occasion to La Prensa, where we would sit and talk in Pablo Antonio Cuadra’s office. He was a bit shy, becoming a third voice in our conversation, although he was already an outstanding narrator, as he later demonstrated. He was forced to become a writer during the long empty periods when Somoza left him with the paper shut down. After the earthquake in Managua, I wrote him a letter, sending him an offer from journalist Julio Suñol for La Prensa to be printed in La República’s shops in San José for as long as it took to get the broken rotary presses running again. He answered me with another letter, full of discouragement and irony: if Somoza’s guards were robbing donations for the victims at the airport, they were going to rob the newspaper bundles too, which, according to the proposal, would be arriving in Managua by plane. Even so, when I returned from Germany in 1975, we managed to do something similar. He entrusted me with the direction of La Prensa Literaria Centroamericana, a monthly magazine that had its central office in San José, where the layout was prepared as well, and then printed on La Prensa’s press in Managua. It was an ambitious and costly project that did not last very long. We met for the last time in October 1976, when he invited me to lunch at the Los Ranchos Restaurant in Managua to inform me that the project was over. No one could have told me then that just a few years later, in June 1979, it would be up to me to send his wife, Violeta, the proposal for her membership in the Government Junta that would substitute Somoza. Violeta had abandoned Nicaragua in view of the imminent worsening of the war. She was living in San José at her daughter Claudia’s home in the Los Yoses barrio. We were neighbors. Claudia and her husband, José Bárcenas, exiled at the time, collaborated with the fsln in Managua. In the days while we were preparing the September 1978 offensive, I used to meet Joaquín Cuadra (‘‘Rodrigo’’) and ‘‘Gordo Pín’’ at their house on the highway to León. I remember one time when they had to go out very late at night looking for a hospital for their baby, Fadrique. He was just a few months old and crying incessantly. They did not return that night because their son had an emergency operation for a blocked intestine. Violeta initially rejected the proposal with indications of fear, but she consulted with her children. Contrary to her expectations, they all sup-

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ported her. I spoke with Pedro Joaquín, the eldest, by phone from Claudia’s house. He was still in Managua. He was supportive, with the caveat that his mother lacked any political experience, something we knew very well. Later, Claudia became Violeta’s personal assistant in the Government House. She warned us every day that her mother felt useless and isolated because she was handling so few tasks, and that she would end up refusing to continue in a diminished capacity, but it fell on deaf ears. Nor did we bother to recognize that the reiterated imposition of an automatic majority in the Government Junta’s votes likewise guaranteed her resignation. Furthermore, no one could have told me that she would defeat us in the elections years later, and that her presidency would be a memorable one. Throughout her period in office, she managed to lead under a banner of inexperience and obvious naïveté. She hid an enviable shrewdness in her often puerile attitudes, and she gave common-sense lessons in simple language. Pedro Joaquín’s assassination in 1978 energized Nicaragua as he had never managed to do in life. It also pointed to another shift in the struggle. Incensed, people set fire that night to Plasmaféresis, Somoza’s company that bought blood from indigents, and they burned other family businesses along the north highway in the vicinity of La Prensa. On January 21, following a mass celebrated in his honor at the Magdalena church in Monimbo, Masaya’s indigenous neighborhood, early street skirmishes signaled the beginning of a rebellion by its residents, which was to last for over a month. Masks from folkloric celebrations covered combatant’s faces behind the barricades, and the contact bombs, which were invented during that time of unequal conflict, were to resonate all over the world. I happened to be in Cuba with Ernesto Cardenal at the time, both of us judging the Casa de Las Americas competition. We were seeking assistance for the Third Way under that facade. When the Monimbo insurrection began, our plan until then had been to eventually capture the cities of Granada and Rivas. The preparations for this were still in progress under the leadership of Camilo Ortega, Humberto’s and Daniel’s younger brother, but the unexpected uprising in Monimbo was going to force us to hasten that plan. What’s more, under pressure from young business owners, leaders of cosip (Superior Council of Private Initiative) were calling for an unprecedented national strike against Somoza. According to constant reports from Havana’s Radio Reloj, protests and shootouts in Managua and other cities were increasing, even as the Na-

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tional Guard tightened its hold on Masaya. I also knew that there would not be enough rifles to arm the hundreds of young men in the uprising, even if we decided to divert the ones to Monimbo that were on their way from Costa Rica for the attack on Granada and Rivas. Most had been craftsmen up until then; they produced fireworks, hammocks, rope, furniture, and wooden toys in their backyard workshops. Now they were fighting back with worn-out pistols, hunting rifles, homemade grenades, and contact bombs. Camilo Ortega would die in Los Sabogales, near Monimbo, trying to organize support for them. The judges had been sequestered until then in the Hanabanilla Hotel, in the Escambray Mountains. When the director of Casa de las Américas, Haydée Santamaría, arrived that same night, I urged Ernesto Cardenal to explain our urgent need to return. Our trip’s political business in Havana had already concluded, without much success. ‘‘Somoza is falling!’’ Ernesto told her, in a really dramatic way, waving his arms. The entire country is rebelling, even the capitalists. Sergio and I have to return. ‘‘If I let all the judges go, there will be no prize,’’ she answered, with polite resolve. She was really hooked on gambling though, and it helped that she had escaped her bodyguards in Cienfuegos and had arrived at the hotel on her own. She knew that they would catch up to her soon, and she proposed that we help her lock herself in her room. We stayed there until midnight, along with Chico Buarque, Ignacio de Loyola Brandao, Tito Monterroso, and Manuel Mejía Vallejo, who were also on the panel of judges. Gambling facilitated the negotiation, and in the end we agreed that Ernesto would stay until the deliberations were finished, while I could go. The judges gave me a going away party. In light of the news coming out of Nicaragua, and the eagerness they all had for Somoza to fall, Manuel Mejía Vallejo, neither knowing nor even suspecting my real role in the conspiracy, proclaimed me president of the future government. It was a speech with typical Colombian grandiloquence. He was not far off the mark. When I returned to San José, I found myself designated president of the shadow government by the Third Way leaders and the Twelve, since Felipe Mántica had withdrawn from the conspiracy. So until the Government Junta was formed in June the following year, I was president of that government that never existed. While we were in Havana, Ernesto Cardenal had asked Haydée Santa-

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maría for a meeting with Fidel Castro to explain the Third Way’s plan and to ask for his support. They knew each other from a previous visit when they sustained a lengthy conversation about Socialism and religion, which Ernesto recounts in his book En Cuba. Even so, the interview was not granted. Up until then, Cuba only recognized the gpp, which had an office in Havana. However, before the judges were sequestered in Escambray, I had managed to meet with Manuel Piñeiro, chief of the American Department of the Communist Party. During our meeting, he insisted on the need for cooperation, although I sensed in his words that Cuban backing for the Third Way was very limited because we clashed with guerrilla foco theory and because they did not understand our policy of alliances. Even though I received a session in rifle shooting at one of the training camps near Havana as a courtesy from him, it had no other effect than the recoilinduced bruise from the rifle butt on my shoulder. It was not possible to obtain any promise of support. Fidel, on the other hand, remained a figure far too distant for the Sandinista guerrilla commanders, and the more distant, the more mythical. Carlos Fonseca never managed to meet with him while he was living in Havana, nor did any of the other leaders. They were content to see him from a distance, high up on the stage during ceremonies at the Revolution Square. Germán Pomares (‘‘El Danto’’) recounts in his memoirs that in 1961 he stood in line to wait for Fidel to pass by shaking hands. ‘‘If I say that I shook his hand, a lot of people in Nicaragua are not going to believe me,’’ he said. Everything was about to change very quickly, however. A year following those days of the Monimbo uprising, Fidel was already personally involved in the outcome of the revolution in Nicaragua. His mythical prestige would become crucial so that the commanders from the three Sandinista tendencies would accept a compromise for unity. His role in defeating Somoza would be crucial as well, providing abundant military supplies by way of Panama and Costa Rica. I returned to Havana at the beginning of February 1978, on the eve before the attacks on Granada and Rivas. In Granada, the guerrillas, their faces half-covered with black and red scarves, came out of hiding at midnight, many emerging from the wealthy homes on Atravesada Street. Although they managed to confine the National Guard to the Pólvora barracks, they had to retreat at dawn when the military reinforcements arrived from Managua. In Rivas, the fighting was more intense because

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the attackers had heavy weaponry at their disposal, including the .50 caliber machine gun that belonged to Don Pepe Figueres. Francisco (‘‘Panchito’’) Gutiérrez fired it during the entire siege on the barracks until they killed him, just as the retreat was also beginning there. Pedro Joaquín’s death had convinced everyone of the need for cooperation, and armed struggle was beginning to be accepted as the only way to put an end to Somocismo. A group of young businessmen headed by Alfonso Robelo, the same one who had pressured cosip to call a strike, formed the Democratic Nicaraguan Movement (mdn), which later became a breeding ground for fsln collaborators. That continued to pave the way for alliances, along with the fact that the udel would be under the presidency of Dr. Rafael Córdoba Rivas, an upright Conservative lawyer committed to the struggle against Somoza since his youth. He and Arturo Cruz would replace Robelo and Violeta de Chamorro following their resignations from the Government Junta in 1980. In addition, new populist organizations were emerging among neighbors in different areas, women, youth, students, Christian revolutionaries. The majority of these were aligned with the fsln’s factions. Together with unions and small parties on the Left, they formed the United People’s Movement (mpu), which produced many of the leaders of the armed struggle. The role of the Group of Twelve was now within the nation’s borders. It became necessary to give the insurrection political influence in order to support its continued growth, and to seek cooperation between all the forces against the dictatorship. We decided then to move to Nicaragua, defying Somoza’s orders for our arrest, which was how we made the announcement. It took several attempts because the airlines had been forbidden to allow us to board. We finally arrived in Managua on July 5, 1978. Everything seemed calm at the airport terminal. A particular immigration officer I knew well, since he was the one who checked my passport every time I entered Nicaragua, came to wait for us at the foot of the stairway to the Electra plane operated by copa airlines, which had provided us with transportation. With icy courtesy, he asked me for everyone’s passport. He assured me that he was not there to detain us, that it was just a formality. Although when we entered customs, we realized that Somoza’s real welcome was waiting for us there: Nicolasa Sevilla and her shock troops. Nicolasa Sevilla was a famous madam from Managua. She became a

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leader of Somoza’s Popular Fronts, a pack of thugs taken from street markets and slums. They were used to break up opposition protests with beatings, or to settle accounts. One of them, ‘‘Cara de Piedra’’ (Stonefaced) had fired the hunting rifle that left Pedro Joaquín Chamorro’s body riddled with buckshot. They were there to frighten us, and Nicolasa, with an enormous patent leather purse on her arm, was inspecting us with her little rat eyes, grinning and defiant. But that was when we began to hear a commotion outside, without imagining the magnitude of the reception that awaited us. The crowd had taken over the terminal since early that morning, and the guards had been unable to stop them. The marble walls in the main concourse had been painted with all kinds of subversive signs. The most famous of all was the one that said Augusto César Sandino Airport, as it has remained since that date. When we walked out to the parking area, temporarily blinded by the sun, they lifted us up onto the platform of a transport truck that had a speaker installed above the cabin. They gave me the microphone, and I started speaking in front of the multitude there holding up big welcome signs, and Nicaraguan and Sandinista flags. All I remember saying was that the dictatorship was a cadaver not yet in the ground, and that we were coming to bury it. The truck pulled away, making its way slowly through the crowd. Up there with us were Dr. Rafael Córdoba Rivas, president of the udel, and Reinaldo Téfel, integrated later into the Group of Twelve. They had organized the welcome reception. Then, as we started traveling on the north highway toward the capital, a song from Quilapayún played over and over on the loudspeaker: ‘‘The people united will never be defeated.’’ Just as love songs bring back memories of an evening, that song always reminds me of that day and those that followed, when we traveled in other rallies throughout all of Nicaragua: And you will come marching together with me, and so you’ll see your song and your flag blossom. The light of a new dawn already announces the life to come.

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People were following us on the north highway in an endless stream, and more people were joining them up ahead the whole way. They came on foot, on bicycles, on scooters. They came down the hills in a cloud of dust. They came out of factories. They stood in doorways. They came flowing onto corners. There were entire classes of schoolchildren who abandoned their homerooms, delivery truck drivers with their uniforms, office workers, white-collar bankers, nurses in white. Passengers on public buses started coming out as the march went by, or they waved from the windows. The drivers caught in their cars on the highway raised their hands with joy. It took five hours to cross the city on the beltway toward the Masaya Highway, toward Monimbo, where the residents had been waiting for us since midday, also filling the streets. The first blasts sounded as we were approaching Camino de Oriente, past Colonia Centroamérica. The National Guard’s patrols were shooting in the air and using tear gas to try to scatter the young men who were painting slogans on the walls. People had already started monitoring the guard’s transmissions on scanners, which would become something of an indoor sport when the war broke out. You could hear Coronel Alesio Gutiérrez, Managua’s chief of police. Furious, he was ordering the troops not to shoot near the truck with the ‘‘twelve apostles,’’ as they referred to us in police slang. He had orders to be careful not to let anything happen to us. Only later did we find out why, and it also explained why we had finally been allowed to enter the country. On June 23, Somoza had received a letter from President Carter urging him to respect human rights. In a separate paragraph, he expressed his hope that the members of the Group of Twelve would receive every legal right and protection when they returned to Nicaragua. For Somoza, the letter read like a warning not to lay a hand on us, and he complied, at least until the taking of the National Palace, just weeks away. We set out toward the Masaya Highway, leaving behind the smoke from the tear gas bombs and passing through rows of guards stationed with all their gear at the last intersections. Even so, the celebration continued the whole way. At the farms and country homes all along the highway, people had taken their tables and coolers with beer out on their porches and patios. Welcome banners decorated the fences and hills, and the Nicaraguan flag was waving from the treetops. It was very late in the evening when we arrived in Monimbo, where we were welcomed with

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firecrackers popping and contact bombs exploding. We ended with a multitudinous rally in the plaza, which had already been baptized with the name Pedro Joaquín Chamorro. When the protest march had ended and we had to return to Managua, I suddenly realized that I had nowhere to stay the night. The Group of Twelve’s Ricardo Coronel did not want to sleep at home, just to be safe. He invited me to go with him to his cousin’s house. Edgar Chamorro Coronel had been a Jesuit priest and was directing an advertising agency at the time. It was profitable because he managed the Pellas family account, owners of the Flor de Caña rum company. They were also his relatives. He lived in Las Colinas, a very exclusive, quiet neighborhood preferred by diplomats. In spite of the fact we had never met before, he and his wife, Linda González, from another of the country’s influential families, welcomed me with so much affection that I stayed with them for nearly a month, even after Ricardo Coronel had already gone home. After the revolution’s triumph, we passed a confiscatory law against all the business owners who left the country for more than six months. It was known as the ‘‘Absentee Law.’’ As I later discovered, it was the same as another dictated by the Directory during the French Revolution against all the nobles who fled to England. It was initially applied to Juan Ignacio González, Linda’s father, the main owner of the Victoria beer company. Edgard and Linda went into exile in Miami, and he became part of the Contra Directorate. He later resigned and denounced the cia as the real power behind the Contras. Up until the taking of the National Palace, which occurred on August 22, 1978, we traveled through León, Chinandega, Granada, Boaco, Jinotega, Yalí, Palacagüina, Totogalpa, San Rafael del Norte, Somoto, and Estelí, where we entered the day after José Benito Escobar had been gunned down. He was the guerrilla commander who had given me the letter of presentation for García Márquez. The tension was growing throughout Nicaragua, and you could feel the impending war in the air while Sandinista flags were already waving, more freely all the time. There was fear in Somoto, a city on the northern border, which was renowned for being a National Guard breeding ground. Apart from the local organizers, no one came to welcome us. We entered alone under the military helicopters flying above, while in the plaza, in front of the church, there was a counterdemonstration taking place against us. It had been organized by the National Guard commander, with farmers transported

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in from the surrounding region. Yet as we advanced, people came out of the houses to join us, hesitatingly at first, then resolutely, until soon there were more than 500 people. We even stole protesters away from the commander. With the quiet infighting that was occurring within the fsln, the other tendencies opposed to the Third Way and hostile to the Group of Twelve ordered a boycott of our mobilizations. Then, to top it off, that boycott was joined by Third Way supporters from the Internal Front. ‘‘Gordo Pín,’’ no less radical, opposed the alliances, and therefore the Twelve. ‘‘Gordo Pín’’ had come from the student ranks, and from there he joined the Christian groups. His best clandestine disguise was his physical appearance. He was nearsighted and somewhat obese, and anyone would have thought he looked like a dedicated student, nonchalantly carrying his backpack, where he always kept a hand grenade. He was always puffing on a cigarette with his hand trembling, as if his only goal was to smoke one after another, and his excitable temperament did not match his cool courage, terrifyingly unconcerned as he was in the face of danger. He awakened a magnetic attraction in those who followed him, faithful to his obfuscate discourse that he propounded as if he were following the flight of a horsefly with his myopic eyes hidden behind his tortoiseshell-framed glasses. Even after his death, some of his disciples remained under his spell, to the point of copying his gestures and even the way he held the cigarette butt, just about to burn out, between his fingers, contemplating it over and over again. One of the points of contention with him was that we had joined the Broad Opposition Front (fao) with the udel and the traditional parties, a decision we made with the opinion that we needed to broaden our alliances to support the armed struggle, without exceptions. On the other hand, if we had gone with the United People’s Movement (mpu), where the entire radical Left was located, as ‘‘Gordo Pín’’ wanted, it would have ended there. We made the right choice because we managed to gain leadership very quickly within the fao. Of course, everyone knew who we really were. I was soon elected to the three-member Political Commission, whose responsibility it was to later negotiate with the oas’s International Commission in the wake of the September insurrection. The other two members chosen were Alfonso Robelo and Rafael Córdoba Rivas. In addition, from within the fao, we helped convince even the most conservative parties to

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commit to the national call to strike, which was scheduled to explode at the same time as the insurrection. This posturing within the fsln, and within our own faction, provoked tensions, weakening, and disagreements, though it also made for some humor. In Granada, the Twelve entered the city marching down Atravesada Street, the center of the Conservative oligarchy. The signs read: ‘‘welcome the‘‘ because at the last minute the word twelve had been cut off with a knife by the Third Way activists. They had also been instructed to hurl insults at the bourgeoisie, which the Twelve paradoxically represented. When three spinster sisters came out on their balcony as the march went by, they heard the recurring chorus of ‘‘Down with the bourgeoisie!’’ coming from the street. Then one of them said to the others: ‘‘Let’s go down; they’re calling us!’’

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aspar García Laviana exemplified a committed priest in the Sandinista revolutionary struggle. He was a missionary from the Sacred Heart order and a parish priest for the small town of Tola. He died in combat in the Southern Front in 1978. Gaspar was from Asturias, Spain, born in San Martín del Rey Aurelio in 1941. With the strength of a miner, he had graying hair and bushy eyebrows, and a wild beard that was always unkempt even though he used a razor to shave it. He was also a poet and adept at the most irreverent swearing. In one of the offices in Somoza’s bunker, after the revolution’s triumph, we found color photographs of Laviana’s cadaver lying on the grass. Taken from different angles, they show him dressed in olive green, his red and black kerchief on his neck, with the entire half of his face an enormous hole torn open by a highcaliber bullet. I looked at those photos again not too long ago, with the same anguish, when they requested some of his belongings for a display in his honor in Gijón, Spain, to celebrate Black Week. We called Gaspar ‘‘the Buddha.’’ He arrived in San José toward the end of 1977. He had already bid farewell to the parishioners of his church, and he was going to send a public letter that Christmas explaining his allegiance to the armed struggle. Humberto Ortega asked me to prepare it. I carefully wrote it in religious language because it had to sound like a letter from a real priest. As we both sat on a cot at Humberto’s safe house, I read it to him, and he got

quiet, his head in his hands. Then, timidly, he took some tightly written pages from his bag, hesitated, and put them away again: ‘‘It’s not important,’’ he said finally. I had written one too. I’m also a writer. Surprised, I asked him to forget my proposed letter. His was the one that mattered, but he flatly refused, and mine was published. He was a writer though, a poet: In my concrete future, men will live like geraniums with strong perfume and red blooms; and women fertile like poppies. Poppies and geraniums will offer their seeds where the common wind cares to take them. Gaspar was an icon for the dozens of priests, missionaries, nuns, deacons, and representatives of the Word who preached revolution, who worked to support the Sandinista guerrillas in slums and rural areas, who transported weapons, who secured clandestine safe houses, and who were at times themselves combatants. He was a symbol that multiplied to thousands of laymen, Catholics and Evangelicals, eager at the time of the triumph to work for the advent of a new society and a new man, in an interpretation of history made by both Christians and Marxists together. The Capuchin friar Uriel Molina had been introducing the doctrine of Christian base communities to children from wealthy families since 1972. This was the preferential option for the poor proclaimed by the Eucharistic Congress of Medellín in 1974 under the Second Vatican Council, which was initiated by Pope John XXIII. It is true that as the young people started to join the armed struggle, almost all of them gave up being practicing Catholics to become Marxists and atheists or, at minimum, agnostics. Yet what never occurred was for all committed Christians to become Marxists. The vast majority continued participating in the revolution in accordance with their own faith, and they encouraged an understanding

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of Marxism from that faith. In the greatest of paradoxes, this was the Marxism that the leaders of the revolution kept hidden. There would remain a seed of what was called the popular church in Uriel’s work in the base communities; in Gaspar’s political work in his parish, and in the example of his death; in the example of Father Francisco Luis Mejía, assassinated by the National Guard in Condega; in the lay apostolate of Felipe and Mary Barreda, kidnapped and assassinated years later by the Contras in San Juan de Limay. Furthermore, since priests and practicing Catholics had joined the Group of Twelve, there was no longer any doubt that Christians and Marxists shared the same commitment for social change. Nicaragua became a living laboratory for liberation theologians when Sandinismo came to power. At the same time, however, with the arrival of Pope John Paul I, the period of the church’s openness to revolutionary change came to an end. This was already demonstrated by the outcomes from the Eucharistic Congress in Pueblo early in 1979. Throughout the eighties, Nicaragua would also become a battleground between opposing definitions of the church, with the traditional hierarchy supported by Rome on one side and rebel priests supported by the revolutionary government on the other. The conflict with the Catholic Church hierarchy was the last thing the revolutionary leadership wanted. Even so, it was just as inevitable as the conflict with the United States and business owners, and the Archbishop of Managua, Miguel Obando y Bravo, was the central figure in the permanent conflict with the church. Obando was from a peasant family in La Libertad, Chontales, the cattle and mining town where Daniel Ortega was also born. His birthplace and his training as a Silesian priest in San Salvador made him less prestigious than the Jesuits in the eyes of the nation’s powerful elite. However, at the end of the sixties, he was called to fill the vacant seat after the death of Archbishop González y Robleto, a faithful Somoza supporter. At the time, Obando was auxiliary bishop of Matagalpa. In his first photo in La Prensa, when the surprise news of his appointment was published, he was shown astride a burro, dedicated to pastoral work in the mountains in his diocese. It was a different image from that of the bishops seated at the table during presidential banquets, and from then on, his charisma never ceased to grow. Somoza had a misguided impression about him in the beginning. Following the consecration ceremony, he sent him a new model Mercedes

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Benz, which Obando politely rejected. After that, he developed a particular hatred toward him. On the two occasions when he found himself having to call on him as a mediator, during the taking of Chema Castillo’s house in 1974 and in the taking of the National Palace in 1978, he did it because he was forced to, insulting him behind his back. The only person Somoza came to despise more was Pedro Joaquín Chamorro, perhaps because that was a hatred that had been evolving since childhood when they were both classmates at the Christian Brothers Pedagogic Institute. They used to fight about political issues on the schoolyard there. Pedro Joaquín had already declared himself an enemy of the old Somoza, founder of the dynasty. I began working with Obando in October 1978. That was when he made the archbishop’s curia office available for meetings between the fao’s Political Commission and the oas’s mediator mission. The winds of renovation that were guiding the Latin American church at the time were also blowing in Nicaragua. Next door to the curia office, I bought my copy of the Latin American Bible, bound in red, in the small bookstore run by a Silesian nun. It offered a reading of reality throughout the sacred texts that did not conflict at all with our own Sandinista doctrine. I worked even more closely with Obando in 1987, after the Central American presidents had signed the Esquipulas II Accords. These created national reconciliation commissions in each country, which were selected by each government. We named him president of the Nicaraguan commission where I was a member representing the government, and we met each week in the curia office. I learned then how to gauge his cautious character, something unique to peasant culture, which is always highly mistrustful and careful not to be taken advantage of. When you ask him for an opinion, he always responds with another question. Moreover, he maintains an accurate memory of offenses and a playful sense of humor hidden under the seriousness of his position. Obando presided over the Episcopal Conference in León in June 1979. It issued a pastoral letter justifying the insurrection, and another welcoming the Sandinista triumph the following month. However, its support for the concept of Socialism, the essence of the revolutionary project, came from the bishops in their Pastoral Letter on November 17, 1979: ‘‘Christian Commitment for a New Nicaragua.’’ The rough draft was written by Peruvian priest Gustavo Gutiérrez, one of the champions of liberation theology. The bishops, who would never again refer to Socialism, began by rec-

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ognizing the place in history that the Sandinista Front had achieved. They acknowledged class conflict as a dynamic occurrence that should lead to the fair transformation of structures, as opposed to class warfare. Then they affirmed: ‘‘Today, in our country, we are experiencing an exceptional opportunity to witness and announce the kingdom of God. It would be a serious betrayal to the Gospel to allow this challenging moment of implementing the preferential option for the poor to pass us by, whether due to fear or mistrust, or due to the anxiety that any radical process of social change generates for some who are concerned with defending individual interests, whether large or small.’’ The bishops also said that there was nothing to object to if Socialism meant the power of the majority; a rationally planned economy; a social project that would guarantee the shared destiny of the country’s goods and resources to benefit national interests; the participation of workers in the fruits of their labor to overcome economic alienation; and the increasing elimination of injustices and inequalities between the city and the countryside. At the same time, they warned against naïveté and unquestioned enthusiasm that would favor the creation of a new idol to prostrate themselves before. In that way, Socialism would be spurious and false if used to blindly subjugate the masses to the manipulations and dictates of those who hold arbitrary or illegal power. Much later, following the electoral defeat in 1990, some of the theologians and priests who were the most enthusiastic about their militant commitment recognized that they had not managed to keep the necessary critical distance from revolutionary power. They ended up aligning themselves with it, even in favor of its abuses. Yet those sins were recognized too late, far from the passionate scene during those early years of unquestioned faith. The division between political and religious influence worked both ways. The church began to zealously defend its sphere of spiritual influence, which was essentially political, and the revolution started to challenge it. The revolutionary leadership insisted on appearing at important public events under the pretext that we should be wherever the masses were, such as the men’s procession in Managua on January 1; or the Santo Domingo processions in Managua; or San Jerónimo in Masaya, which were more like festivals. This initially caused concern for the church authority in the beginning.

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The matter of official support for a parallel church then became the most sensitive accusation against the fsln. Despite the fact that such a project never existed, radical revolutionary discourse gave the claim credibility because people were always talking about a popular church, even though never as a separate entity. That was why, in October 1980, the fsln’s National Directorate issued a conciliatory communiqué on religion that denied any intention of interfering in matters of the Catholic Church, or trying to divide it. The bishops responded in an aggressive manner, warning that totalitarian regimes always tried to exploit the church. The language had changed, and the communiqué had actually infuriated them, above all because it defended the permanence of Catholic priests who held posts as ministers in the revolutionary government. There was ever-increasing pressure from the bishops for the resignations of Miguel d’Escoto, foreign minister; Ernesto Cardenal, minister of culture; and Fernando Cardenal, director of the National Literacy Crusade. In June the following year, they explicitly ordered them to leave their posts, and since none of them complied, they were suspended ad divinis from priestly ministry. Everything would quickly careen down a slippery slope. In August 1982, the ministry of the interior’s General Directorate of State Security (dgse) framed Father Bismark Carballo, Obando’s assistant in the curia office, in a sexual scandal. A husband who was supposedly being cheated on beat him and forced him out into the street where he was shown naked in front of television cameras. This was a story of unprecedented idiocy that astonished even Sandinista Catholics. By then, the country was divided into only two sides, and you could only be for or against revolutionary power. Obando was already outspokenly against, and he fell quickly under the weight of the official rhetoric in a climate of mutual hostility and each side’s growing mistrust of the other’s intentions. Yet the division into sides was not just ideological. It was determined above all by the war, present every day in the mobilization toward the front lines, ambushes, attacks on cooperatives, funerals of the fallen, growing shortages, and the first signs of inflation. It was also during those increasingly tense circumstances that Pope John Paul II’s visit was announced at the end of 1982. At the time, we thought that the pope’s visit meant that there was a renewed opportunity to mend the deteriorating relationship with the church. Above all else, though, we thought that if we managed to have

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him call for peace during his time in Nicaragua, something that would be hard for him to refuse, it would automatically be a call to cease the war of aggression. From our perspective, the war was still the product of United States policy, and not an internal conflict; stopping that policy meant bringing peace. So during the weeks prior to his visit, laypeople and priests in the conflict zones, popular leaders, peasants who had been victims of Contra attacks, and mothers of the fallen, made repeated public announcements on Sandinista media that they hoped the pope would make that appeal. Among the many ironies we experienced, when it seemed as though the revolution’s opponents were plotting to block the visit, we did everything in our power for the pope to come. That was why, as a preemptive move in mid-February 1983, we leaked to the press that Obando, who was then visiting the Vatican, had gone to dissuade him. The pope’s trip was to all of Central America, and Nicaragua’s exclusion would represent a step backward in our constant struggle to not be isolated. We considered it a victory when our ambassador to the Vatican, Ricardo Peters, longtime priest and Radio Vaticana reporter for years, informed us that the pope had ordered the removal of all obstacles to his visit to Nicaragua. The Vatican insisted that it was a pastoral visit on the invitation of the Episcopal Conference. For us, it was a state visit. It was not just a simple misunderstanding. In a pastoral visit, the revolutionary authorities would be distanced from the stages where the pope would appear in public, and part of the plan was for Daniel to accompany him in the Popemobile during his procession through the streets from the airport. In the end, we agreed that it would be a pastoral visit, but we would welcome the pope as a head of state, and the Government Junta and the fsln’s National Directorate would have a place on the stage during the open-air mass in the plaza on July 19. The stage had been built to accommodate the crowds celebrating the revolution’s anniversary. Our presence at the mass was a point in our favor; and that Daniel would not ride in the Popemobile, a point against us. We eliminated the greeting of the ministers so that the pope would not have to face Ernesto Cardenal in the reception at the airport. Even though it was not part of the agreement, we also informed the Vatican that Father Miguel d’Escoto would be away from Nicaragua participating in the chancellors’ meeting that was taking place before the summit of nonaligned countries in New Delhi.

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A special commission was organized for the reception. René Núñez presided over it. He was secretary for the fsln’s National Directorate and in charge of the office of religious matters in the party apparatus. The bishops were also included in that commission. There were similar commissions at the top level of each department with the participation of parish priests. This was to facilitate transportation of the parishioners to Managua and León, the cities where the pope would celebrate open-air masses. We were experienced at managing large crowds and mobilizing people from all over the country ever since the celebration of the first anniversary of the revolution in 1980. Congregating 300,000 people, the estimate for attendance of the pope’s mass in Managua, depended on the efficient coordination of fsln structures, the government, the army, the police, and public organizations. It required the use of buses for public transportation, cargo trucks that belonged to state businesses, cooperatives and ministries, and the rental of all private transportation available. That was how we made it happen. Obando was still in Rome when a mission led by Monsignor Achille Silvestrini, the Vatican’s secretary of the Counsel for Public Affairs, arrived in Managua on February 20. We met with him at Daniel’s home and reached agreements on the final details. There was one last point of conflict: the presence of a mural behind the stage in the July 19 Plaza. It had the effigies of the fsln’s founders, and the church was insisting on its removal, but that night we agreed that it would stay. Everything seemed to be moving forward without additional obstacles when, on February 28, an event occurred that would end up exacerbating tensions. A group of sixteen members from the Sandinista Youth, mobilized since before Christmas in the 30–62 Reserve Battalion, were ambushed by numerous Contra forces in San José de las Mulas, in the Matagalpa Department, while they were there camping. The boys, many of them high school students, with great dedication but lacking military experience, had not even set up guard posts, and they were all massacred. One of them, Carlos Lacayo Manzanares, had written to his coworkers at the Manolo Morales Hospital just days before: ‘‘It rains every day. You have to sleep on the wet ground. There isn’t much food, your soles cracked from so much walking, with a fungus from the humidity, mud everywhere, even in your teeth.’’ But it was the only way to see the birth of the new man, he said, and to have a new country. Defeating the Contras meant preparing

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the path for Socialism. A brother to one of the other fallen soldiers told the newspaper Barricada: ‘‘Miguelito suffered seeing the helpless children in the street. That is why he went to fight. That is why he died.’’ The army withheld the news until it could appear in a weekly section on the war that included enemy losses in other battles, because seventeen dead without even one Contra was too much to bear. The cadavers were taken to the July 19 Plaza where the preparations were already under way for the pope’s mass. There was a ceremony to honor them there, led by the Government Junta and the fsln’s National Directorate. Now it definitely seemed impossible for the pope not to at least mention the blood of those boys. John Paul II’s visit to Central America began amid events that reflected the extremes of the existing reality. Despite his pleas for clemency, the president of Guatemala, General Efraín Ríos Montt, a member of a bornagain fundamentalist sect, was not able to prevent the execution of six guerrillas who had been convicted of terrorism under martial law. Then in El Salvador, the announcement of his visit to the tomb of Monsignor Romero, assassinated in 1981 in a plot led by Colonel Roberto D’Aubisson and with the participation of Somoza’s National Guard soldiers, drew furious complaints from the extreme Right. On March 3, 1983, we were gathered in a vip room at the airport waiting for the pope’s plane to arrive from San José, where he returned to spend the night following the one-day visits to each country. Our sources had obtained the two homilies he was giving in Nicaragua, and Daniel handed them to me in an envelope. I managed to take a quick look at them. The one for León was about laypeople and education, a topic that the persons attending the mass would understand little since they were mostly coming from rural areas. The one for Managua was about the unity of the church around its pastors, following the familiar lines of the pope’s speech at the Eucharistic Congress in Puebla. It condemned the dissociating tendencies, beginning with the popular church. Even though it was an unpleasant topic for us, it did not seem very disturbing. However, there was nothing about the aggression, or about peace. Despite this, we thought that he could still improvise about it during the mass, or that he may be bringing it in his opening remarks, a text we did not have access to. In any case, it did not matter. The plane’s engines were off, and the pope was kneeling down to kiss the ground. In the silence you could hear the motors of the police jeeps on the north highway, which had been closed to traffic. Even at that point, we thought we had won. He had

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arrived. On the other hand, we had not realized that we had lost because he had arrived, as subsequent events would demonstrate. Daniel, Dr. Córdoba Rivas, and I waited for him at the foot of the stairway. We were the members of the Government Junta that had been reduced to three the previous year after Arturo Cruz resigned and Moisés Hassan left. Daniel then led him to greet the members of the fsln’s National Directorate, standing to one side, all in uniform. He returned, and we walked up with him onto a ceremonial stage to listen to hymns. At that moment, when the troop commander called them to attention, he turned slightly to me: ‘‘You are all young,’’ he said to me. ‘‘But you will learn, you will learn.’’ It seemed like a fatherly word of warning. Except that we heard him begin his opening remarks with a greeting to everyone who wanted to come see him and who had been prevented from doing so. That offended us because the effort to help people come from every part of Nicaragua, as we were doing that very moment, had been sincere, besides being expensive. A feeling of resentment also started to rise up among us. Today, as I read the pope’s words in an old issue of the Barricada newspaper, I interpret that greeting, which awakened such an outburst of sensitivities, as directed more at the infirm and those who were working in essential occupations, even security duties. During those same opening remarks, he also spoke of those who suffered due to the violence, no matter what its origin, and he called for dialogue, brotherhood, and reconciliation. He also referred to ‘‘those who from within or outside this region who foment in one way or another ideological, economic, or military tensions that impede the free development of these peoples who love peace,’’ and he urged them to contribute to an understanding. This was in reference to both the United States and the Soviet Union. In the context of the end of the cold war, the pope was a key element in the strategy destined to dissolve the Soviet Bloc. This is quite apparent in the formidable book by Carl Bernstein and Marco Politi: His Holiness: John Paul II and the Hidden History of Our Time. It was his mission on Earth. Even so, it is difficult now, far removed from the emotions of those days, to find any comparison between Nicaragua and Eastern Europe, where he was from, in his words that morning. His words seemed hostile to us at the time because we had stated that we were opposed to opening any negotiations. Yet when the context later

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changed, when the Esquipulas peace process was evolving, we would have welcomed those words with enthusiastic applause. By then we were finally seeking an end to the conflict, and we were prepared to sit down and hold talks with the Contras. Although at the time, at the height of the conflict, as long as we defined peace as the military defeat of the Contras, those words appeared to be a provocation and we had to remain silent in the face of it. Daniel did not deviate from the speech he had planned and that focused, just as the one at the White House in 1979, on the history of aggression by the United States against Nicaragua. However, now he read lengthy paragraphs from a beautiful letter from the bishop of León, Monsignor Pereira y Castellón, written in 1912 for Cardinal Gibbons, bishop of Baltimore. The letter cried out against the North American occupation. One of the paragraphs was particularly meaningful: ‘‘Let there be an understanding between our homeland and the nation of the United States; but let it always be based on equity and mutual interests; let it not in any way affect our religion, our freedom, our sovereignty, our language; let it not try to oppress our race, noble and brave from its Iberian ancestry, invincible and vigorous from its Indigenous atavism, prepared for every effort, for every act of bravery.’’ The pope listened with his head bowed and with a stern frown. Then, after examining the troops, something unforeseen occurred. He asked to acknowledge the ministers, knowing that Ernesto Cardenal was among them. It even seemed to be a conciliatory gesture, despite the tensions that were already growing under the surface. His intention, however, was to come face to face with Ernesto to reprimand him, just as he reprimanded him in front of the cameras. As he approached with greetings, he must have caught his unmistakable image out of the corner of his eye, with his beret, his blue jeans, and cotton peasant shirt. When Ernesto found him standing before him, he genuflected and removed his beret, waiting for the pope’s blessing: ‘‘You need to resolve your matters with the church,’’ was what he said to him, the pope wagging his finger at Ernesto. By that time, we were already expecting nothing good. We were convinced that the pope had come to confront us. We were young. We had to learn. And the worst was yet to come. The crowd assembled since the early morning hours in the July 19 Plaza was greater than on any other occasion, and unlike the revolutionary celebrations, there was a bit of everything. There was a Catholic fac-

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tion faithful to their bishops, above all Obando. There was the Sandinista faction, much more numerous, that also included the sympathizers with the popular church. There were also the Catholics who had nothing to do with either side and who had come from every corner anxious to see the pope, for many a supernatural vision. The conflict over who would occupy the front of the plaza had been solved very early in favor of the Sandinista supporters, through clashes in which the police had helped displace the opposition. Besides, as a rule, in every public gathering, State Security placed the ‘‘local forces’’ in the first rows to prevent assassination attempts. These were made up of supporters from the local area. He began the mass under the red and black mural portraits of fsln founders, including Tomás Borge. On the stage, the heat at two o’clock in the afternoon was suffocating. There were over a hundred priests in vestments, with albs and cinctures, seated only a few meters from the Government Junta. They were behind a wooden railing, and I sensed hostility as they participated in the ceremony. There was already bias on our part, but the other side had taken on a confrontational air. Obando spoke first during that mass that seemed never ending. He told an anecdote about John XXIII during a visit to a Roman prison in Regina Coeli. It was about a prisoner who, upon seeing the pope enter his cell, felt himself set free by his gaze. A pope’s visit to a prison. In the distance, they let loose with their applause at the allegory. Afterward, Obando read the parable of the Good Sheppard. The sheep will never follow a thief, a robber; they will run away from him because they do not recognize the voice of strangers. Again, there was applause and the first shouts of ‘‘Long Live the Pope!’’ Later, when the pope finally spoke, I knew what he was going to say, but not how it would sound when he said it: ‘‘Unacceptable temporary options should not be chosen, including models of the church that replace the true one; no ideology can take the place of faith.’’ They were the same words I had read, but pronounced with an aggressive, striking emphasis, and they sounded like stones raining down through the powerful loudspeaker system we were using for the first time that day in his honor. The people situated in the front rows began shouting: ‘‘We want peace! We want peace!’’ At the same time, mothers in mourning who were carrying posters with photos of their dead children were also shouting, asking for a prayer. The pope stepped forward, irate: ‘‘Silence! Silence!’’ he demanded.

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Then, right away, trying to be more conciliatory, he said: ‘‘The Pope also wants peace.’’ Then the shouts ‘‘We want peace! We want peace!’’ continued to multiply in what by then was a direct challenge. Meanwhile, those on the other side, fighting to be heard, answered with their shouts of ‘‘Long live the Pope!’’ Then, in the midst of the uproar, the voices of the Sandinistas started to stand out since they were connected to the loudspeaker system. The situation got out of hand and had the makings of a genuine rally against the pope. I looked over at the platform with the journalists, where hundreds of cameramen and photographers were crowded together. The signal from the Sandinista Television System was being transmitted by satellite all over the world, and I knew that it was a battle we were losing right then on television, with immense costs for us. In effect, according to the report later that day, our image would suffer severe damage. When the mass finally ended, the pope left in the midst of the giant brawl that was still occurring. The members of the Government Junta, along with the fsln’s National Directorate, approached the railing in front of the altar to address the impassioned Sandinista crowd while the other attendees were leaving, many of them looking for the vehicles that would take them back to their distant towns. Then it turned into a rally with red and black flags waving under the lights of the cameras as night fell. The rally, which seemed celebratory, would also contribute to the huge damage to our image that day. All the pope had to do was come. Upon arriving at the airport to see him off, we found him still inside the Mercedes Benz that had taken him to the runway. He stayed there until the beginning of the ceremony, terrified, according to the driver’s testimony. Daniel tried to explain to him in his short speech what it meant when a poor and long-suffering nation asked for peace. He listened, once again with a stern frown, his hand on his chin. His own words were also brief and simply a formality. Cardinal Agostino Casaroli had a distressed look on his face as he walked up the stairway to the plane. He had always sought to cultivate good relations for us with the Vatican in his role as secretary of state. ‘‘I hope we can rectify this,’’ I told him as I shook his hand, and he smiled at me with a somber look. The tensions flared after the pope’s visit. At the end of August that same year in 1983, the Episcopal Conference issued a statement against the establishment of the Patriotic Military Service (smp), which was crucial for the defense plans in light of the worsening of the war. It was a

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sensitive topic, and the response included the harassment of Catholic centers and the expulsion of two Silesian priests. There was a new response for every hostile action from the Catholic hierarchy: the suspension of television airtime for Obando for his Sunday masses; intervening in coprosa (Archdiocesan Social Promotion Commission); and finally the expulsion of more priests. This included Pablo Antonio Vega, bishop of Chontales, accused of subversive activities for aiding the Contras in his diocese. After being taken by helicopter to the El Espino border post, Vega was forced to cross into Honduran territory in the cabin of a delivery truck. To add to the ironies, he was the only bishop who had defied Obando by agreeing to offer an invocation during the inaugural ceremony for the presidency in January 1985. The bishops’ invitation to dialogue with the Contras during Holy Week in 1984 was viewed as the worst of the offenses. It amounted to treason. We would never speak with the Contras. In a speech, Tomás Borge said that all the stars would have to fall from the sky first. In another, in León, I said that we would only speak with our rifles. When Obando was promoted to the rank of cardinal in April 1985, there could have been no better indication of the political importance that John Paul II continued to give the church in Nicaragua. It was also the worst point in the war. I went to see him off as he left for Rome to receive his cardinal’s hat. He was traveling with Father Bismark Carballo. Since the scandal had dissipated, he now bore the title of monsignor and could dress in a robe with purple trim. My gesture did not fail to surprise him since relations were practically broken. In a reproachful sarcastic tone, he told me that it was the first time in many years that he had set foot in the vip room at the airport. During the following years, and in large part thanks to Cardinal Casaroli’s mediation, Daniel and I were welcomed by the pope on separate occasions, despite the fact that the conflicts with the church were far from over. I visited him twice, and he never alluded to that unpleasant event during his trip to Nicaragua. The last time, in November 1988, I informed him of the progress toward a cease-fire. The Esquipulas Accords were already signed and it would not be long before the definitive dialogue with the Contra Directorate. I asked him to make a plea in his message the following Sunday for the victims of Hurricane Joan, which had recently decimated the Caribbean coast, and he did. He returned in February 1995 and celebrated his open-air mass in the

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plaza next to Lake Managua. It had been built for the first armed forces parade in 1985, when we displayed all our military strength, troops, cannons, and tanks, as part of the game plan of posturing during the war. We had also ended the 1990 electoral campaign there standing before the largest crowd ever assembled in Nicaragua. This was when Daniel and I were again candidates for the fsln, and we assumed that our victory was guaranteed. I saw that other mass on television. It seemed to me that there were fewer people than in 1983, surely due to the orderly silence in which the event took place, without shouting or flags. The pope obviously looked older and less energetic as he officiated, adorned in green vestments under an enormous dome of braided palms, reminiscent of the rooftops of Nicaraguan ranches. As he closed his homily though, he proved that he had not forgotten the offenses. As if it were an attack he had planned during his solitary strolls through the Vatican gardens over the years, he said, with emphasis on every word, that he hoped that the dark night of the past would never return. With that, he gave Arnoldo Alemán an excellent campaign slogan against Daniel Ortega, once again candidate for the fsln. Obando would not forget the offences either, faithful to the tenacity of his peasant memory. After the end of the 1996 electoral campaign, just one week before the elections, when proselytizing was prohibited, he organized a televised mass in Managua’s new cathedral, which had been donated by the Domino’s Pizza magnate. Arnoldo Alemán was his parishioner guest of honor, and he bestowed on him the reading of one of the gospels. In his homily, Obando told the parable of the snake, surely his own invention because it is not in any part of the New Testament. According to this apocryphal text, a traveler encountered a snake stiff with cold by the side of a road. Moved to pity by its pleading, he picked it up and put it under his robe to warm it, ignoring the warning from his fellow travelers about the treacherous character snakes have. They continued walking. The snake, true to its nature, eventually bit the unhappy traveler and killed him. The moral was that you should never believe the word of snakes, even if they look tame. Throughout that 1996 electoral campaign, Daniel appeared wearing a white suit, just as Violeta Chamorro had in the previous election, when she defeated us. In addition, the old fsln war hymn calling to fight against

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the Yankee, humanity’s enemy, was replaced by Beethoven’s ‘‘Ode to Joy.’’ Then Daniel visited Somoza’s short-lived successor, the now senile Urcuyo Maliaños, at his home in Rivas and photographed himself with him, hoping to snatch Liberal votes from Arnoldo Alemán. The fsln’s massive final campaign rally in November 1996, again in the same plaza next to Lake Managua, now baptized with the name John Paul II, had alarmed Alemán’s supporters. They were gathered in their own closing rally in the neighboring Plaza de la Revolución, which was smaller, and the fsln had spread throughout both at the same time. The televised mass and the parable of the snake cost Daniel votes. Even so, he would not have been able to win the election anyway. The fsln continued to demonstrate that it was capable of mobilizing large numbers of protesters to the plazas, but not enough voters to the polls. What’s more, Obando got his revenge at the risk of forfeiting the most important role of his whole life, which was that of mediator. Nevertheless, Daniel has sought him out again. For the first time last year, he requested a blessing together with his entire family in front of the cameras. In August 1995, at the height of the electoral campaign, Barricada reproduced an interview on the front page that Obando had given to an international magazine, one that was not well known in Nicaragua. Tomás Borge was the director at the time following the firing of Carlos Fernando Chamorro and his team of reporters. In that interview, Obando spoke, among other things, about a plot organized by State Security to interrupt the pope’s mass in 1983 using task forces situated throughout the plaza. He also spoke of an assassination attempt against his own life, also orchestrated by State Security. Liberation theologian Giulio Girardi, a priest who remained one of the fsln’s most loyal defenders, demanded an explanation from Tomás Borge in an angry letter. If he himself, having been minister of the interior and therefore responsible for State Security, had allowed those statements to be printed so openly on the front page, was he then admitting that there had been a deliberate persecution of the church, to the point of authorizing a boycott of the pope’s visit and ordering an attempt on Obando’s life? Girardi never received a reply. However, the footnote signed by Tomás Borge at the end of the interview seemed to point to the innocence of his intentions. In it, he expressed his hope that Obando ‘‘would have the good sense’’ to be impartial in those elections. It was flattery. Nevertheless, in any case, those were useless labors of love.

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n the morning of August 22, 1978, we were beginning a meeting of the Broad Opposition Front (fao) in the Santa Marta Church’s sacristy. It was in preparation for the general strike, which would be announced as soon as the first shots were fired in the latest insurrectional offensive. I remember that two old Communist leaders who were deadly enemies, Elí Altamirano and Domingo Sánchez (‘‘Chagüitillo’’), had finally just shook hands after much hemming and hawing. At that moment, Father Edgard Parrales, the parish priest, poked his head in and motioned to me that they were calling me on the phone. I recognized the voice of Rodrigo, the younger brother of Ernesto and Fernando Cardenal, on the other end of the line: ‘‘We bought the pigs,’’ he told me, ‘‘and they are on their way to the pig pen right now to pick them up.’’ The ‘‘pig pen’’ was how Edén Pastora had always referred to the National Congress. It had been a longtime obsession of his to take control of it with all the legislators inside, Somocistas and ‘‘mosquitoes’’ (as the Conservatives who collaborated with Somoza were called since it was their job to suck the blood from public funds). The notification in code meant that the attack was already under way and, consequently, I had to go into hiding. Rodrigo would come right away to pick me up himself. I only had time to return to the sacristy to excuse myself under the pretext of an unforeseen family matter.

There was no way to hold all of the legislators hostage without taking control of the entire National Palace, a tropical neoclassic building covering an entire city block. The elder Somoza had built it after the first earthquake in 1931, facing the Plaza de la Républica, where we would later celebrate the triumph of the revolution. At the time set for the attack, eleven o’clock in the morning, the inner halls leading to the numerous offices, as well as the offices themselves, were always bursting with applicants, litigants, and people paying their taxes since the Ministry of the Interior and the Treasury Department were also housed there. There were lottery ticket sellers, peddlers with all types of odds and ends, and merchants offering food and drinks for sale just as if it were a town fair. There were also dozens of unemployed people and beggars. Meanwhile, at the foot of the stairway leading to the ‘‘pig pen,’’ there were market stalls where traveling booksellers would offer handbooks, textbooks, and secondhand novels. Of course there was also no lack of security agents, with their Uzi submachine guns across their chests, and bodyguards with pistols, not to mention the military security guarding the entrances to all four sides of the building, armed with rifles and shotguns. That type of operation would have seemed preposterous to anyone else but Edén, and he did not give up until he had convinced the Third Way command to carry it out, with him as the leader, of course. Finally, on that August morning, when it had been perfectly executed, it signified the taking of more than 3,000 hostages. Those hostages included some big fish. Just as in December 1974, Luis Pallais Debayle, no less, president of the Congress and Somoza’s first cousin, was caught right in midsession along with all the legislators. Antonio Mora Rostrán, minister of the interior and legal substitute to the president, was captured in his office. The commando members arrived in military trucks wearing uniforms to resemble soldiers from the eebi, the National Guard elite corps led by Somoza’s own son, ‘‘El Chigüín.’’ They ran into the building yelling for everyone to clear the way because the chief was coming, which meant Somoza himself, in person. That way the guards were so surprised that they were able to disarm the legislators without resistance. After shooting at an Antiterrorist Brigade (becat) patrol that was making a routine check of the area and wanted to know what was happening, they bolted the doors, securing them with chains. With the swiftness of the action, no one managed to notice that the

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trucks, which were not military vehicles, had been painted a shade of green that was too bright, what we call ‘‘parrot green’’ in Nicaragua. Nor did they notice that the uniforms did not match, or that there were various types of weapons brought from different guerrilla fronts throughout the country since they were the ones in the best condition. Nor did anyone see that the combatants, quickly shaven to look like eebi recruits, included a woman, Dora María Téllez. She was second in command and the operation’s political representative. Edén was number zero and Hugo Torres, veteran of the attack on Chema Castillo’s house, was number one. The eebi was a feared corps even within the National Guard itself, enough to intimidate military security. In the training exercises, which could be heard from the neighboring Intercontinental Hotel, a North American mercenary with the last name Chaney used to ask the recruits: ‘‘What do you drink?’’ and they responded together in chorus: ‘‘Blood, blood, blood!’’ Humberto Ortega had sent Edén from Costa Rica to lead the operation, but the Third Way members from Managua’s Internal Front, with all of their conflicts, were not very enthusiastic about accepting the decision. Besides, it had been made from outside of the country. After several arguments, they agreed to give Edén the key role, but not the power to negotiate, which they entrusted to Dora María Téllez. When Obando, once again as mediator, first entered the building and spoke to Edén to ask him for their demands to send to Somoza, Edén had to respond that he should speak with Dora María. Edén entered the palace with his face uncovered, and he was photographed with his face uncovered as he boarded the plane, a photo that traveled around the world. This contrasted with the other members in the commando, who hid their faces behind their red and black scarves. It would be an attempt to counterbalance his wounded pride. When all was said and done, it was personal. For the entire nation, he was the hero. The commando released the majority of the hostages right away: public employees, visitors, and merchants. It kept those who were worth their weight in gold. After two nights without rest, while Obando came and went, the many sleepless hours started causing havoc in the guerrilla troop. They lost sense of time and forgot where they were. Hugo Torres thought that he was hearing trains thundering through the plaza at midnight. Dora María realized that she had to negotiate quickly and agreed to reduce the amount of money demanded, $5 million.

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Somoza ordered the dissemination of the declaration that Dora María had given Obando, paid a ransom, and freed all the Sandinista prisoners. Among them were members from other factions, such as Tomás Borge. Others did not belong to any of the factions. Fernando (‘‘El Negro’’) Chamorro, for example, had been imprisoned for aiming rocket fire at the eebi from the Intercontinental Hotel. There were others as well, such as Leopoldo Rivas, who had been abandoned by his own compañeros at the prison around the time of the 1974 operation as punishment for who knows what revolutionary offense. Just as in December 1974, a crowd, though now much larger, gathered along the route the bus took that was carrying the commando members and their most important hostages to the airport. This time people were also running behind it, waving flags, pounding the sides of the bus with their fists, and blocking it at the intersections. Meanwhile, a long caravan of motorcycles and cars followed behind, happily sounding their horns. In a novel twist, symbolic of the new alliances, the commando members and the liberated prisoners flew toward Panama and Venezuela, not to Cuba. Nevertheless, at the last minute, the Hercules plane that Carlos Andrés Pérez had sent from Venezuela had to return to Caracas empty. Ideology still weighed heavily, and Tomás Borge refused to accept support from a social-democrat president. To cover up the insult, those of us in the Third Way sent Edén Pastora with the flag taken from the National Congress assembly hall to place in safekeeping with Carlos Andrés. It would be returned to its rightful place when we had a democratic parliament. The taking of the National Palace was just the beginning of the new insurrectional plans already under way, which were anticipated for the month of September. Yet the enthusiastic climate, along with the tension it created, generated reactions that no one could stop. On August 25, boys armed with pistols and hunting rifles, mostly coming out of high school classes, set up barricades in the city of Matagalpa. Their spontaneous insurrection provoked the mobilization of powerful National Guard contingents. It would be a rehearsal for the brutal clean-up operations the following month. After the occupation of the streets in Matagalpa, we had to speed up preparations for the offensive before similar events starting to occur in other parts of the country. That was why we also moved up the plans for the national strike. I kept the leaders from the Internal Front informed of this: ‘‘Gordo Pín’’ and Joaquín Cuadra Jr. (‘‘Rodrigo’’).

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On September 8, on the eve of the day chosen for the offensive, I was meeting with both of them at the home of Dr. Eduardo Conrado Vado, in the Colonial Los Robles neighborhood in Managua. It was lunchtime and Doña Mariíta, his wife, had just served us a plate of cannelloni. Dr. Conrado Vado, a longtime Conservative lawyer and shrewd conspirator, had gone out to circle the block and investigate the situation: ‘‘Gentlemen,’’ he said when he returned. ‘‘I don’t want to alarm you, but the neighborhood has been surrounded for quite some time.’’ My bite of food got stuck on my epiglottis, but they kept eating calmly.’’It must not have anything to do with us,’’ said ‘‘Pín.’’ ‘‘Otherwise, they would have already come in.’’ At Joaquín’s request, Dr. Conrado Vado went to take another look while Doña Mariíta prayed in front of her saints. He returned after a while. The situation had not changed. The Nissan jeeps from the Office of National Security (osn) were blocking the intersections, and the civil service agents, carrying machine guns, were still on the sidewalks. To my dismay, they remained calm, and were even joking, even more convinced that whatever it was had nothing to do with us. It was after two o’clock in the afternoon. I was going to have to be the first to leave. The car that was taking me to the strike committee meeting, again driven by Rodrigo Cardenal, was coming by at exactly two-thirty in front of the house, where it was going to stop long enough for me to get in it. He would go around the block once more if he did not see me, and that second opportunity was the last. What’s more, since the location of the next meeting was set only at the end of each session, I would lose all contact and remain isolated from the strike planning if I did not attend. I never carried a weapon back then because it was not going to do me much good in the event that they wanted to kill me or capture me. So, under their knowing gaze, I went out to wait for the car, which arrived right on time. I got in, we approached the barricade of agents at the intersection, and they let us through after coming to look in the windows. I attended the meeting and was taken back to the safe house in the same neighborhood. By that time, all the police presence was gone. I was living at the time with a very young couple, excellent people to have taken risks with me without knowing me, only because someone had asked them to do it. She worked for Lanica, Somoza’s airline, and he was a civil engineer. They were parents to a boy who wore big glasses, who looked at me with affection and curiosity, and whose room I was sharing. I learned

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later that they had abandoned Nicaragua forever after the revolution’s triumph. Fernando Cardenal was also hiding very close by at the home of Dr. Rafael Chamorro Mora. His brother-in-law was Alfonso González Pasos, assassinated with part of his family at his home in Jiloá, as I already mentioned. Right after I arrived, Fernando sent me a message on a little note: they had captured Gustavo Argüello Hurtado in the neighborhood. The security operation at noon that day had been to detain him at the offices of the Monterrosa Sugar Company, property belonging to his father-in-law’s family. Gustavo, who suffered from asthma, died at the hands of the torturers that very night, which was the same night they assassinated César Amador, who had the same name as his father, the most prominent neurosurgeon in the country. Both of them were from the Third Way, and they were on the list to join the squads the following day to attack the Managua police barracks, a conflict meant to be a distraction while the majority of the guerrilla forces were attacking the barracks in Masaya, León, Chinandega, and Estelí. The synchronized offensive began at sunset on Saturday, September 9, 1978, between six and seven o’clock. Dr. Cuadra Chamorro had been hiding at the home of Dr. Conrado Vado, his neighbor on Bolívar Avenue before the earthquake, and we met there. When we heard the sound of gunfire in the distance, they both started drinking a bottle of whiskey. It was empty in no time at all. Dr. Cuadra Chamorro was determined to lose consciousness as soon as possible because he knew his son was outside fighting. All of a sudden there was a hurried buzz of voices coming from the street, and then shouting. Boys were walking past carrying their wounded compañeros, while others were banging on doors demanding hunting ammunition. Somoza’s reaction to the offensive was ferocious. The guerrilla forces had met their objective of controlling the cities and holding the army in the barracks, with people rebelling in the streets. Now combatants from all three fsln factions were participating in the conflict. Despite this, the dictatorship had superior firepower, and Somoza chose the method of concentrating all his forces, armored vehicles, aviation and infantry, on just one city at a time. First was Masaya. After the clean-up operation was finished there, which entailed bombings, fires, a massive exodus, and thousands of victims, they went to León, Chinandega, and finally Estelí,

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until all of them had been recovered. In each reconquered city, the infantry went street by street, house by house, and if they found a boy with gunpowder residue on his hands, they executed him right there. Somoza decreed martial law. He shut down the La Prensa newspaper and censored the radio stations. The persecution did not discriminate politically, and many of the leaders from the fao, including those from parties on the Right, were imprisoned, accused of promoting the general strike that had paralyzed the nation’s economy. The embassies were also filling up with asylum seekers, including my brother Rogelio, who belonged to the gpp. When the September offensive began, Novedades accused us both of being part of the conspiracy. An osn patrol under the command of Captain Lázaro García arrived looking for us in Masatepe. They had seen Rogelio enter my parents’ house, where they assumed I was too, and they prepared the attack stationing a sharpshooter beforehand in one of the parish church’s towers. Francisco Ramírez Beteta, my first cousin, the son of my uncle Alberto, the violinist, had enlisted as a paramilitary. He was later executed at the cemetery wall along with other collaborators from the National Guard during the final days of the insurrection while Masatepe was in the hands of the popular militias that had banded together from the local population. They had charged him in connection with the murder of many youths captured in their homes. Francisco was nicknamed ‘‘Mordelón.’’ In his role as a paramilitary, that reference to biting in his name sounds sinister, but that was what my uncle Alberto had called him ever since he was a boy. On that occasion, he crossed the central square under the pretext that he was going to buy cigarettes from the corner market that my father ran from the same house. He warned him of the imminent attack with the patrol already on its way from Managua. That was how Rogelio managed to escape through the property to take refuge that same day at the Panamanian embassy. He owed his life to Mordelón, for whom we could do nothing later to save his. Lázaro García raided the house, opening bedroom doors with the butt of his rifle. Furious at not finding us, he took my father to the San Luis ranch, inherited from my mother’s father. After they searched it, they forced him to kneel down on the trail through the coffee. With an automatic pistol to his head, they threatened to kill him if he did not reveal our whereabouts. My father had been mayor, representing Somoza’s Liberal

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Party during the fifties, but that meant nothing at that point. ‘‘Kill me,’’ he said with complete humbleness. I don’t know where my sons are. And even if I did know, do you think I was going to tell you? He finally released him, and he had to make the trip back on foot. Calm, polite, obsequious with strangers to the point of exasperating my mother, he was a natural comedian, the type of person who throws a rock and then hides his hands. He never lost his sense of humor or his integrity. ‘‘I had never heard such vulgar language,’’ he told me later, full of sadness, more humiliated from the insults than worried because they had held a pistol to his head. During the final uprising in 1979, the Sandinista columns were advancing from Jinotepe while the remaining National Guard troops, displaced from all of the towns in the South, were entrenched in Masatepe. Even then, he refused to abandon the house, even though the entire perimeter surrounding the central square and the church had been enclosed in barbed wire. They also set mines with dynamite charges to prevent an attack on the National Guard command. The helicopters that were dropping supplies over the church’s vestibule flew right over the house. They hovered there, shining spotlights on it from the air, trying to intimidate him and my mother as well. On that occasion, when they went looking for me in Masatepe, I was living at the home of José Ramiro Reyes in El Mirador de Santo Domingo, an exclusive neighborhood in Managua. It was not very populated, and the sounds of the war sounded far off from behind the walls. All you could hear, crystal clear, was the splashing of the pool hidden in the shadows of the trees. José Ramiro was a shareholder in Victoria Beer and the Pepsi Cola bottling plant. He was an heir from León’s most affluent family. His wife, Ruth Lacayo, came from another very wealthy family, her father being Managua’s most prominent import wholesaler. The owner of a beauty salon, a supporter, even came out there to give me a hairdo that was supposed to disguise my appearance. The Reyes family was very Catholic and very committed to the struggle. They both spent their mornings in that incredibly peaceful paradise stapling subversive pamphlets that included manuals on how to make explosives and to load and unload rifles. Raúl Venerio (‘‘Willy’’) also slept in the room I shared with Miguel d’Escoto. He was one of the leaders from the Third Way’s Internal Front and was later commander of the Sandi-

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nista Air Force. We were uncles to José Ramiro’s and Ruth’s children, and I was Uncle Baltazar. Afterward, they too all left Nicaragua. Against all safety regulations, we shared the same shelters with the guerrillas. This was because the network of available homes was shrinking from the fear caused by the insurrection that irrupted in September. One example was the home of Miguel Ángel and Titina Maltez, a happy couple who threw a lot of parties. They were very brave. Don Emilio Baltodano was living underground at their home in the Colonial Los Robles neighborhood. He shared the same room where Joaquín Caudra Jr. (‘‘Rodrigo’’) sometimes slept, and underneath Don Emilio’s bed was an arsenal of rifles, magazines with ammunition, and hand grenades, which he laughed about nervously. Miguel Ángel was later captured and savagely tortured along with his children in the osn’s prisons. I was always able to take shelter at Dr. Gonzalo Ramírez’s house. He was a radiologist whose eldest son had been assassinated by the National Guard, and he lived in the Belmonte neighborhood, which was full of doctors. I did not know that he and his wife, Violeta, members of the gpp Tendency, were broad collaborators with the Sandinista Front. While I was in my room with members from the strike committee, there could be another meeting going on in the doctor’s office with the gpp or the Proletariat factions. They always managed to keep their own conspiracy a secret as well, which they did not confess to me until after the triumph. It was during that month of September that the Carter administration now became directly involved in the events in Nicaragua. Very early on in the offensive, the ambassador, Mauricio Solaún, requested an interview with the Group of Twelve. We met at a home in the Bolonia neighborhood, which was near the Ministry of Defense, where some soldiers kept watch behind sandbags, appearing more worried than alert. The interview had been arranged through the home’s owner, a longtime employee of the U.S. consulate. He was Don Emilio Baltodano’s relative. Father Miguel d’Escoto, Don Emilio, and I were present. Solaún appeared along with his political advisor, Jack Martins, who fit the arrogant image of the ugly American. Solaún, on the other hand, resembled a university professor on sabbatical, a bit artificially dressed like a peasant in his guayabera and moccasins, skilled in his handling of his cigar, but without imperial style on account of his Cuban accent. He told us that the United States was concerned about the bloodshed,

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and he wanted to clarify our position regarding a cease-fire. Miguel d’Escoto interrupted him to ask him when the United States had discovered that Nicaraguans have blood. Martins frowned, and Solaún seemed more puzzled than annoyed. In a manner fitting his look as a professor on sabbatical, Solaún explained that political hegemony had died when Kissinger disappeared from the scene. Martins tried to get even and said that it was not entirely their fault that Somoza was still in power. It was also because Nicaraguans, instead of fighting him, were always knocking on the doors to the embassy asking the United States to intervene. For once, I told him, we concurred. If we had agreed to have that conversation, it was to ask them for the opposite, not to intervene. That also meant cutting all military and financial support to Somoza. Moreover, I shared his opinion of the politicians who usually knocked on his embassy’s doors. It was a bad habit, difficult to eradicate, and only a true change in Nicaragua would put an end to it. Solaún recognized the role of the United States in Somoza’s permanence in power, but he insisted on the desire they had to rectify it. Somoza now saw the United States as an enemy, and the atmosphere in their meetings with him was getting worse all the time. He concluded by asking us if we were willing to accept a proposal from the president of Costa Rica, Rodrigo Carazo, for a commission of Latin American countries to act immediately in order to achieve a cease-fire. I said that we were, and the sooner the better. It was urgent to put an end to the bombing of defenseless cities and the massive assassination of the civil population. The next time I saw Solaún was on September 15, as part of the fao’s Political Commission, which, as I stated previously, was composed of Alfonso Robelo, Rafael Córdoba Rivas, and me. We met in his office at the embassy in Las Piedrecitas. The situation had changed since the previous meeting when the Sandinista Front was trying to infiltrate a guerrilla contingent in the Rivas Department to distract National Guard forces, a failed operation. Now, after mercilessly dominating the situation in Masaya, Somoza was preparing to reconquer León. We again spoke about an international commission and the urgency of stopping the bombings. To our surprise, the following day the State Department released a statement condemning the atrocities committed by Somoza and calling for a cease-fire. Even so, the ‘‘Commission of Friendly Cooperation and Conciliation’’ would not be formed until a month later with a resolution from the oas

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Meeting of Consultation celebrated on September 23, 1978, in Washington, under Venezuela’s initiative. Somoza’s condemnation, which Mexico had proposed, lost by just one vote. In addition, Deputy Secretary of State Warren Christopher, in what appeared to be a sign of the new politics that Solaún announced to us, had urged an investigation of the allegations of mass arrests and detentions, tortures, and indiscriminate killings of civilians as violations of the Geneva Conventions. The oas resolution came late, when the killings totaled more than 3,000 dead. The same day it was issued, the National Guard occupied the city of Estelí, the last one to resist. The streets were strewn with cadavers. The commercial zone was destroyed by the bombings. The tobacco factories were burned by rockets. Faced with the imminence of the crackdown announced by tanks rolling and rifle butts at the doors, the local inhabitants were fleeing to the border with Honduras, and to ranches and towns nearby. Dr. Alejandro Dávila Bolaños, a humanist and one of the most knowledgeable people about aboriginal languages, was taken from the hospital surgery room where he was operating on one of the victims hit by flying shrapnel. He was then assassinated in the middle of the street. Ambassador William Jordan was dispatched from the White House on an air force plane to convince Somoza to accept the mediation, which he achieved after multiple trips. The task of discussions with the fao’s Political Commission rested in the hands of another special envoy, Malcolm Barnaby. I tend to confuse his name in my memory with that of Barnaby Jones, a character from a very popular television series at the time. When we saw Barnaby for the first time, Somoza was still not accepting the oas’s commission on the grounds that it was interventionist, a laughable argument considering the source. I asked him what would happen if Somoza persisted in refusing to accept the commission: ‘‘We are going to exercise methods of pressure on him that will surprise even you,’’ he said, adjusting his bow tie and without losing his confident smile. After a few days, the U.S. Congress suspended $8 million in credit, which was a surprise. Then President Carter sent a navy boat equipped with sophisticated electronic surveillance instruments to Nicaragua’s Pacific coast, which was also a surprise since it was a strange and innocuous measure that was supposed to be seen as a demonstration of force. Somoza finally accepted the commission on September 25, 1978, the same day the general strike was ending. However, he simultaneously announced a list of countries that would integrate it: El Salvador, Guate-

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mala, Argentina, Brazil, all under military governments, as if it had already been arranged. The fao’s Political Commission protested. Barnaby met with us the following day to agree and to say that they would not allow any further manipulation from Somoza. Upon Jordan’s return from Washington, where he was at the time, Somoza would be notified that the United States had decided to play an ‘‘active and leading’’ role in the commission. That meant that it was including itself, and it also intended to notify us of that fact. Nor would they accept preconditions for the negotiation. Somoza would not be able to demand his continuance in power until 1981, as he had been insisting; nor could we demand the end to martial law and the reestablishing of freedom of the press, which we considered necessary to open the discussions. In the end, I asked Barnaby what the United States intended with that negotiation, now that there was no humanitarian cause involved. He answered me with an academic circumlocution: the United States did not have a preconceived plan; we Nicaraguans were the ones who should seek a solution that the negotiators would merely guide. I then told him that the solution was Somoza’s exit and the dismantling of his power structure. If the commission was coming to seek the opposite, we were wasting our time. Jordan did Somoza the favor of allowing him to announce the final list of countries that made up the commission: the United States, the Dominican Republic, and Guatemala. As a reward for his flexibility, Congress immediately returned the suspended credits. In response, the fao’s Political Commission declared the negotiations broken before they had even begun, accusing the United States of being up to its old tricks again. We were gathered in Dr. Gonzalo Ramírez’s office, and it was Alfonso Robelo who took the phone to notify Solaún of the breakdown. What’s more, he did it with such vehemence that we gave him a round of applause when he hung up. Days later, Solaún gave us a letter with his signature stating that the U.S. government would retain the funds as long as a process of democratization in Nicaragua was not being advanced. The commission finally arrived in Managua, formally presided over by Admiral Ramón Emilio Jiménez, a minister of foreign affairs from the Dominican Republic. A decade later, he would act as an adviser to the Contras in the peace negotiations. The two other members were Alfredo Obiols Gómez, a deputy minister of foreign relations from Guatemala, who never opened his mouth, and William Bowdler, ambassador from the

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United States. He was the real head of the commission. It would be up to me to negotiate with him not only then but also half a year later, at the dawn of the revolutionary triumph. Bowdler was tall and already balding, with a baby face and an almost imperceptible smile. He had been born in Buenos Aires and spoke excellent Castilian with an Argentine accent, which, coming from a Yankee, was rather humorous. The majority of his diplomatic experience was in Cuba, where he had served for five years until the embassy was closed in 1961. Consequently, he already knew about revolutions, as I mentioned before. His mission from that point on was to find an exit for Somoza while salvaging everything he could of the system and limiting the Sandinista influence in a future government. The United States knew that even though Somoza had survived the September offensive, it would not be the last, and they needed to seek a negotiation that facilitated his resignation while preserving the National Guard as an institution. For us, the agenda was the same, just viewed from the opposite perspective: the system should not outlast Somoza. We wanted all possible influence in a future government, and the National Guard had to go to make way for a new army. In a statement on October 5, 1978, the three members of the fao’s Political Commission rejected any mediating role for the oas commission, something that was going to be impossible to avoid anyway. In the statement, we warned that mediation meant political intervention, as in the case of the Dominican Republic following the invasion by the United States in 1964. It is also worth remembering now that Somoza had cooperated on that occasion, sending a contingent from the National Guard under the command of Colonel Enrique Bermúdez, who was later commander of the Contras. We also demanded the suspension of all military aid to Somoza prior to the conversations, something that did not occur at the time, but that Carter wound up deciding soon the following year. Nor did we agree to meet face to face with the delegation of three ministers Somoza had designated, which was chaired by Dr. Julio Quintana, minister of foreign relations. We maintained that demand, and the mediating commission met with us in the archbishop of Managua’s curia office. It was then going to meet later with the representatives from the government in the chancellery. Those indirect talks could not lead anywhere because both of the real actors in the confrontation were only trying to buy time to garner strength.

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Somoza had announced his intent to double the number of National Guard forces, bringing it to 15,000, to face a new offensive. The fsln was also determined to organize that offensive, the final one, collecting the greatest possible number of weapons for the combatants who continued to join their ranks in massive numbers. From that point forward, the negotiation was going to depend on military capacities. Bowdler was able to approach his objectives because there was a growing belief within the fao that the fsln’s capacity for combat had been eliminated following the September offensive. He presented us with a four-point plan that included Somoza’s resignation and exit from the country along with his entire family; the naming of a three-member Provisional Government Junta; the restructuring of the National Guard; and elections for a constitutional assembly. It seemed so attractive to my compañeros in the fao’s Political Commission that they accepted Bowdler’s suggestion to submit it to the other side as if it had been our own initiative. Somoza, who was again feeling strong, would never accept that type of a plan but the longer the negotiation lasted, the more political ground he regained, making him the sole beneficiary. Everything was becoming unacceptable. On October 24, the Group of Twelve chose to abandon the fao, condemn the negotiations, and seek asylum. A Mexican business attaché, Gustavo Iruegas, notified Somoza’s government of our asylum the same night we entered his residence in Las Colinas. Chancellor Julio Quintana’s reaction on the telephone was one of confusion and discouragement, the same as Bowdler when he found out. The plot was unraveled because without the Twelve, the fsln was no longer represented, and any agreement signed between the fao and Somoza would not put an end to the war. President López Portillo, who in May the following year would sever ties with Somoza to further isolate him, had already left the ambassadorial post in Managua vacant. Gustavo and his wife, Susy, took great care in fulfilling their interim mission, so delicate that it could have been too much for them, as young as they were. Intelligent, responsive, and tenacious, they identified with our cause and more than once surpassed the bounds of their diplomatic duty. One night I had to secretly abandon their residence because it was essential for me to meet with Joaquín Cuadra Jr. (‘‘Rodrigo’’), something unheard of in terms of asylum. If they captured or killed me, Gustavo would not have been able to explain what I was doing outside. Hidden

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down in a car, I went to the meeting taking place in the Los Robles neighborhood. It was at the office of the dentist Óscar Cortés, who later became our ambassador to Sweden. I returned around twelve o’clock at night, jumping over the garden hedge. I am sure that both Gustavo and Suzy knew about it and did not say anything. At a neighboring house, which also belonged to the embassy, there were no less than 200 young men living in political asylum. I went over every day to give them classes on Nicaraguan history in groups. The daily fare for breakfast, lunch, and dinner was canned sardines that were flown in from Mexico, and more than once you heard shouting among them of ‘‘Long Live the ‘Sardinista’ Front!’’ Our asylum lasted more than a month. I began writing a book about Somoza’s atrocities during the September repression. For material, I used the record of the National Guard’s radio transmissions and the testimonies collected by the Permanent Commission on Human Rights. The book, which Siglo XXI in Mexico was supposed to publish, also included the negotiation process in which I had participated. But it was left unfinished. Somoza refused to assure our safe transit to Mexico. It was clear that it was in his best interest now, according to the terms the Anglophones generally used, to keep us under lock and key, far from the negotiations that were beginning to go his way, as could be expected. With that, on November 6, 1978, he made a counterproposal for a plebiscite that he would organize under his electoral law. If he won, he stayed; if he lost, he went. Nothing could have been more duplicitous, but Bowdler did not think it was a bad idea and brought it to the discussion table. Now things were on the playing field that Somoza wanted. Faced with resistance from the fao, he agreed for the plebiscite to be held with international observers, and it was accepted. As a reward for the fao’s good faith, he ended martial law on December 7 and repealed the ‘‘black code,’’ which was what the law that censured the press was called. On the eve of December 8, a marine guard assigned to protect the United States embassy handed the journalists a communiqué from the mediating commission. It announced that that day, for the first time, representatives of Somoza and the fao had sat face to face at the same negotiating table. Since Somoza was not willing to guarantee our safe transit, we abandoned the political asylum. On December 18, we returned to the streets to denounce the plebiscite and the Somocismo without Somoza that was

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brewing once again. In political terms, ours was also a guerrilla war. Yet it was Somoza himself who chose to do away with the plebiscite. He felt that there was no longer any risk of reprisal. On January 12, 1979, he refused to recognize anything that had been agreed. Carter’s response was the suspension of military aid and the withdrawal of half of the personnel from the embassy in Managua. My role in Managua had ended for the moment. Tulita came from Costa Rica, and we left the country together in the midst of developments that suggested, albeit slightly, that Somoza’s boat was sinking. Since it was forbidden to give me an exit visa, I paid a bribe to the head of the Migration Office himself, a high-ranking military officer who had to be close to Somoza. We then took the plane back to San José without delay.

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fter we had already been defeated in the 1990 elections, Dr. Emilio Álvarez Montalván, Nicaragua’s most respected Conservative ideologue, once commented that Sandinismo had brought compassion for the poor to Nicaraguan political culture for the first time. This is truly one of the revolution’s enduring legacies, beyond the ideological illusions that bedazzled us then, the bureaucratic excesses and the inadequacy of applied Marxism, inexperience and improvising, posing, imitations, and rhetoric. The poor continue to be the vestige of humanism from the project that collapsed along the way, on its journey from the catacombs to its loss of power and ethical catastrophe. It is an obscured or delayed compassion, yet somehow still alive. Through its identification with the poor, the revolution was radical in the purest sense. In the spirit of justice, it was capable of repeated naïveté and arbitrariness, often losing sight of what was truly possible and what could only be desirable or fair. Moreover, what was desirable and fair was at odds with reality. The economic system, as it existed in reality, was obsolete. It needed to be abolished. Yet there was also the social fabric marked by centuries of cultural tradition, which was precisely where the most resistance to desired changes originated. It was a resistance whose influence we did not entirely appreciate because we believed our determination to put an end to poverty would be sufficient for the old beliefs to be abandoned.

The image we were faced with was that of the miserably destitute with nothing, the poorest of the poor evoked by Leonel Rugama in his poems: Siuna miners dying of silicosis; farmers deep in the Jinotega mountains, where they had no salt, or in the lost valleys of Matagalpa, where vitamin deficiency caused night blindness; workers in Chinandega’s banana plantation camps who slept in crates the size of a dog kennel; or the legions of rag pickers in the Acahualinca garbage dumps adjacent to the sewage channels on the shore of Lake Managua; mothers with their children, grandchildren with their grandmothers, fighting the vultures for something to eat. The Arcadia of the first months was marked by immeasurable innocence. The collective excitement swayed consciousness between delirium and dreaming, anxiousness and hope. It was an excitement that took on political weight and that would never be repeated, the excitement of feeling committed to a cause for change, to the very end. Furthermore, to the very end meant all or nothing. No one would have picked up a rifle to wage a revolution halfway. Revolution, not the peaceful transition sought by other sectors of society, was an inevitable corollary to Somoza’s overthrow. A proposal for radical change needed radical power, capable of defending itself and freeing itself of risks. It was also an infinite power. You do not win an armed struggle to conquer power shortterm, not when it involves sweeping history aside. What’s more, in that context, moderates start to seem suspicious. Besides cutting the workday in the fields in half and doubling the minimum wage, large landowners were forced to introduce meat, milk, and eggs into the workers’ diet, something that labor inspectors were never able to enforce. The cost of public transportation remained frozen until the subsidies became unsustainable. We increased pensions for retired workers, we opened hundreds of day-care centers, children were vaccinated against polio in massive campaigns, the National Literacy Crusade got under way, and agrarian reform began from day one. However, when it was time to distribute lands expropriated from the Somoza family and their supporters, as well as property later confiscated from large landowners, we distanced ourselves from the emotions that urged us to transfer individual property titles to landless peasants, history’s most neglected subjects. Instead, ideological precautions prevailed, which led to the birth of the Agricultural Production Units (upe). According to the theory, farmers would live and work with good salaries, and

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they would have clinics, schools, and day care for their children. Yet the land would be state property, similar to the land allocated to the cooperatives. In that way, it would not lead to the eventual creation of a new rural petty bourgeois class. It was a mistake that would cost lives because the revolution, by violating the most sacred of its promises, produced the first of its great disappointments. The cooperatives fell under attacks from the Contras, who were determined to destroy them, but many landless peasants joined them in combat or became their support base, reluctant to take refuge in the upe. Many other owners of small and mid-sized farms did the same. They were concerned in the beginning as they saw the expropriations affecting the large landowners. Then they found themselves at risk of losing their property because the next level of landowners was starting to be affected, especially in distant regions. In an attempt to take away the Contras’ support base, we changed course and decided to transfer individual property titles to the peasants. However, that measure was also insufficient because the ideological experts intervened once again, and those titles could neither be sold nor inherited. The Contras’ ranks continued to grow. In addition, by that time, their military leaders on the ground were modest farmers, many with no previous ties to Somocismo. They were the same ones who had driven out the former National Guard officers. I was in Jinotega in 1984 at a meeting being held in a high school when some farmers from the Pantasma region appeared at the door looking for me. They were accompanied by the regional representative to the Government Junta, Carlos Zamora, and the representative for Agrarian Reform, Daniel Núñez. Following the meeting, we met in one of the classrooms, and they started to give me a list of complaints about the mistreatment and abuses they were experiencing as victims along with dozens of rural families in the region. One of them took off his shirt and showed me the lesions caused by the barbed wire they had used to tie him to a cot for several days. They accused him of being a Somocista, along with the others, and he cried just remembering it because he felt it was more humiliating and unfair than the torture. Carlos Zamora supports his allegations, as does Daniel Núñez, both of them unable to do anything because the repression was coming from the incipient party apparatus in the region. When I returned to Managua, I conducted an investigation, and the

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facts that were uncovered proved even worse. The fsln’s political secretary in Pantasma was very young, besides being unfamiliar with peasant life, and he had ordered not only tortures but executions. In the end, he was sentenced to prison together with several of his subordinates, in one of the trials that were supposed to set an example at the time. However, by then it was already too late, because the repression in Pantasma would push hundreds of peasants to join the Contras. It was like entering the pages of William Golding’s novel Lord of the Flies. Boys trained in the rudiments of Marxist ideas had assumed positions of party responsibility in rural areas, which they knew nothing about because they came from cities on the Pacific, and they measured the behavior of simple people by ideology learned in manuals. Popular terms such as rich farmer, bourgeois, petty bourgeois, and exploiter confused and inspired fear. In the distant mountains, the ‘‘exploiters’’ came to be everyone who owned anything: a truck, a store, a farm; and they were on the list of enemies to neutralize. The revolutionary message, when it was transmitted with insufficient persuasion, through threats, or with too much rhetoric, imposed promises, parameters for political behavior, and ways of organizing that were very disconnected from the peasants’ day-to-day reality. They wanted a change for the better in their lives, land, schools, clinics, good prices for their crops, but they did not accept the attack on their traditions, their way of life, and their beliefs. Poor or not, the collective vision clashed with their way of seeing the world. The revolution understood peasant life in relation to armed struggle, but not power. There were entire families who had collaborated with the Sandinistas in guerrilla sanctuaries, families that Somoza had brutally repressed, from Kilambé to Iyas, from Sofana to Dudu, from Kuskawas to Waslala, just as Father Fernando Cardenal had explained in his testimony before the United States Congress in 1976. Now they were giving protection and assistance to the Contras. What’s more, the Contras’ message, far removed from theoretical complexity, was insidious but simple: they want to take away your freedom; they want to take away your children; they want to take away your religion; you are going to have to sell your crops only to them; and the little land you have, they are going to take it from you; and if you don’t have any, they are never going to give it to you to own. I have told before how, during the 1984 electoral campaign, the highlight of a rally one Sunday at the port of San Carlos, on the San Juan River,

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was a peasant symbolically surrendering his rifle to me. He was from the Jesús María district, up until recently fighting with the Contras, and he had either surrendered or been captured. When they made the announcement, I saw him walk up the platform toward me under the blazing sun, dressed in rags and barefoot, the old rifle secured by a piece of rope instead of a strap. I realized at that moment that there was an immense chasm between us, difficult to overcome. The reasons he had for rising up against the revolution, leaving his family even more destitute, were different and far removed from the ones that had driven me to join that same revolution, which intended to solve the problems in his life for him. It was not just being a novelist that made me an intellectual. I was like the others who wore commander uniforms, made speeches, and theorized. All of us, from above, thought of the revolution in terms of theory and principle, and we would attempt to apply or impose that intellectual conception on society, on people of flesh and blood, just like the humble and fearful peasant who was offering me the rifle. We offered him the inconceivable journey from the primitive to modernity, but he refused, and he had taken up arms in opposition. Yet another chasm opened when we were faced with the Miskitos, Sumos, and Ramas, indigenous groups from the Caribbean coast, which is so foreign to those of us who live on Nicaragua’s Pacific side that we do not call it the Caribbean, as we should, but the Atlantic. We expected to integrate them overnight into the revolution, its values, modern life, wellbeing. It was an ideological paternalism, different from Somoza’s, which had never created well-intentioned programs, but we knew nothing of their culture or their languages, to the point of communicating with them via interpreters, and we had no knowledge of their religious beliefs or their forms of social organization. Likewise, we knew very little about the black population, also situated on the Caribbean coast. Later, the Autonomy Law was passed, which finally established the rights of the ethnic groups to benefit from their natural resources and be educated in their own languages. It also recognized their cultural identity and their communal property structures. To this day though, the law has never been regulated, and the Caribbean region has again fallen off the radar, exposed to drug trafficking and chronic armed uprisings. Our hearts told us that the largest slice of the pie should go to those who had always been left with the crumbs, and we held the vindictive

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power to confiscate property right there in our hands. To the extent that the public sector grew, there would also be growth in surpluses to be transformed into housing, schools, and heath centers. The entire economy would grow that way. For the gdp to increase by 20 percent in 1981, all that was necessary was the expropriation of 20 percent of private businesses. That was what the Jesuit Father Javier Xorostiaga, adviser to the Ministry of Planning, said in one of those never-ending meetings. On each anniversary of the revolution, during those first years, we chose a list of businesses whose confiscation was announced in the public plaza. Even so, out of prudence, or hoping for alliances that were always latent and never reciprocated, some of the most powerful families never went under the expropriation guillotine. In July 1979, morning dawned with us in the Government House arguing about confiscating the San Antonio sugar mill, the country’s emblematic business, property of the Pellas family. Meanwhile, the guerrilla leader who exercised authority in the municipality of Chichigalpa, where the mill was located, was awaiting instructions outside. In the end, we decided against it because the move seemed too audacious, despite the fever of the moment. It would not be carried out until 1988. For the same reasons, a cooking oil factory in Granada owned by the Chamorro family was substituted at the last minute on one of those lists by one owned by the Prego family. Being less conspicuous made it more vulnerable. With the triumph of the revolution, the state had in its power a collection of businesses of every size and type. These had been taken from those who fell under Decree 3, issued to confiscate assets from the Somoza family, its accomplices, and supporters, under the principle that these were ill-gotten goods. In this way, the National Trust, and, later, the Area of People’s Property (app), began managing everything included on the Somoza list from a to z, and more: from cattle ranches, sugar mills, coffee plantations, farms, salt flats, and an airline; to factories producing shoes, textiles, and cement; movie theaters, hardware stores, bakeries, travel agencies, mortuaries, motels for secret lovers, taxis, and even a barbershop confiscated from a spy from Managua’s Monseñor Lezcano neighborhood. At that time, the expropriations were political in nature. Besides, since there were Somocistas of every size on the list of accomplices and supporters, properties of every size were affected. This eventually caused a contradiction between the revolution’s ideological profile, destined to lift

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up the poor and bring down the rich, and the vengeance it exercised against the Somoza system from top to bottom, even though there were people at the bottom who had nothing more than a small farm, a bus, a store, a property lot, or their home. Later, the confiscation list included not only Somoza supporters but the bourgeoisie, now categorically labeled as a class, although it was not always clearly defined. There was also the Absentee Law for those who left the country for more than six months, and select takeovers were practiced on every anniversary of the revolution. However, just as what was occurring with the peasants, these measures created uncertainty, generated more conflicts, and stifled production. They were not always fair either. Some business owners were guilty of misappropriating funds they received that had been budgeted for purchasing supplies, or of inflating transport costs for raw materials in order to keep what was left, but they were never prosecuted for fear of the political costs, the same ones we were already provoking by confiscating from others who were not so fortunate. Then there were foreign companies as well. On October 13, 1979, the mines were nationalized. Daniel and I attended the ceremony where it was declared, which was celebrated in Siuna, one of the oldest enclaves of North American mining companies. I invited Julio Cortázar and Carol Dunlop to join us, and we flew in an old Sandinista Air Force dc-3 plane. On the return trip, Julio wrote me a note in pencil on an airsickness bag, which I have framed in my study: ‘‘Sergio: I will never be able to thank you enough for the opportunity you gave me to fly with a broom on a plane. If you don’t believe me, the broom is a few steps from where Carol is sitting.’’ Not everything was so surreal. Mines were always synonymous with tuberculosis, as in César Vallejo’s forgotten novel Tungsteno. The Miskitos and Sumos, and migrants from the Pacific, had left their lungs in the shafts for years. They earned starvation wages and were paid in coupons valid only at the company store. They were fired when they became unable to work and, although it seems implausible, also when they died. ‘‘Cause of termination: death of the worker’’ was what was stated on the receipt attached to the end of the file. In addition, the mining company paid the Somoza family a ten-dollar royalty for every kilogram of gold exported. Three days after returning from Siuna, a representative from the Rosario Mining Company, one of the expropriated businesses, came to see me

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in the Government House. He had arrived that very day from New York, and he entered my office with an urgent and bothered air about him, as someone who has been dragged away from his business. He had a catlike face and his thinning hair was dyed dishwater blonde. His lawyers were watching behind him, looking more like bodyguards. ‘‘You are making a mistake,’’ he told me. ‘‘You are never going to be able to run the mines without us.’’ What they left us to run were decrepit facilities with mills from the nineteenth century, machinery that belonged in a museum, and shafts as hot as a crematory oven, which we set out to modernize. Later, at the height of the war, dozens of boys returned from Poland and Bulgaria having graduated as mining engineers, but by then the plans for mining development had collapsed. They ended up as vendors in Managua’s Eastern Market, or taxi drivers, unable to exercise their professions, just as the mig pilots for the planes that never arrived. Economic development was a recurring dream that was difficult to fit into norms that would give it coherence, and the war always wound up interrupting everything, or postponing everything. Plans were obsolete before they were put into practice, and the model for the centralized economy turned out to be nothing more than an idea. Between disturbances and setbacks, cruel tricks and rebelliousness, Socialist planning for the state and state-owned enterprises was never possible. It was even less possible for private businesses. We clung to dogma, but remained far removed from reality. Later, faced with failures, we also began thinking about a no-less-implausible hybrid between central planning and a market economy. It was based on the theories of the famed Polish professor, Michal Kalecki, which a follower of his, the British economist Valpy Fitzgerald, presented to us in the Government House. He had come from the Institute of Social Studies in The Hague sponsored by Dutch support. After the breaking of the alliances formed at the time of the revolution’s triumph, the December 1979 state reform created a hefty bureaucracy on our books to direct central planning. However, the greatest consequence was that decision-making power over the economy would be divided up between members of the fsln’s National Directorate, appointed to key ministries under which others would be created. They were fiefdoms where power for one was defended at the cost of the others and, what was worse, at the cost of the government as a whole.

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Everyone was engaged in a hidden war to monopolize power, resources, and political prestige. It was a war also entered into by those who only generated expenditures: the Ministry of the Interior and the Ministry of Defense. After the 1984 elections, the president was better able to consolidate institutional power. Interestingly, the fsln’s National Directorate welcomed this power for its institutional legitimacy. After all, in the Government House we had the stamps, the power to issue decrees and endorse laws, and the key to the financial resources. Later, in the final years, the new minister of planning, Alejandro Martínez Cuenca, a graduate of McGill University, tried to teach us the advantages of fiscal responsibility and the need to combat inflation, but the weight of the war, political rationalizations, and improvisations were always present to upset any plan. That is just what happened with the 1987 change in currency, an absurd venture deserving mention in the Guinness World Records. Before being carried out in a single day, it was somehow prepared in secret despite having involved thousands of people. According to the plans outlined, it should have been followed by a severe fiscal adjustment, the restructuring of the banking system, and a strict austerity in public spending, objectives which were never achieved. By then we were being advised by Dr. Lance Taylor, an American economist from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. We were clearly persuaded by the benefits of the fiscal adjustment. It paralleled the International Monetary Fund (imf), whose assistance we were not eligible for given our insolvency, but who watched us closely and encouraged us. Nevertheless, an adjustment plan was not feasible in those final days. This was not due to ideological resistance to the toughness of the measures but because the measures themselves clashed with the reality of the war. The dictate that broke the economy’s back was to put everything into the war effort. We had to supply equipment, mobilize and feed the popular army that reached a 120,000 men, not including the rearguard. And we had to build and maintain roads and military installations, the costliest project being the airport for the migs. Defense ate up half of the National Budget. The salaries for those fighting and for those who replaced them in their jobs were paid in full, in each case at the expense of public entities or the employers. David’s slingshot ran out of stones shooting at Goliath’s head, and we began printing bills in ever greater quantities without backing. They were filthy and worn in the hands of people who called them chancheros. Fol-

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lowing the currency devaluation, we replaced the bills with others printed in East Germany, but they soon suffered the same fate. Also for the Guinness World Records: by the end of the decade, Nicaragua had the highest inflation rate in the world. Jaime Wheelock was minister of agriculture and agrarian reform, and he was also responsible for the forest industry and fishing resources. Out of all of us, Wheelock was the one with the wildest imagination, the opposite of the minister of planning, Henry Ruiz (‘‘Modesto’’), known for his austerity and methodical caution. They were both members of the fsln’s National Directorate. Jaime’s vision was for radical modernization, under the syndrome of instantaneous transformation that we all suffered. His projects were always ambitious, without forethought for costs or profitability. There were Canadian cows kept in corrals equipped with automatic milking machines to produce twenty liters of milk a day; 30,000 hectares of Burley tobacco that required wood from entire forests to build the drying sheds; 4,000 Soviet tractors for the cooperatives and state production centers; and a dam in Malacatoya to send water several kilometers away for the sugar-cane plantations at the Cuban-built Victoria de Julio Sugar Mill, along with sophisticated pivot irrigation systems purchased on credit from Brazil and Austria. There was also a forest industry complex in the middle of the jungle that was left half-finished, with hundreds of crates of Italian equipment shipped to the site via the Prinzapolka River in between bullets because it was a war zone. Following the electoral defeat, these crates were looted with hatchets, the motors stripped, and the parts sold for scrap on Managua’s black market. Cathedrals in the jungle, just like Fitzcarraldo, the character in Werner Herzog’s film who planned to build an opera house in Iquitos. A list of excesses, and I must not leave out my own project for a broad-gauge railway from the Pacific coast to the Caribbean, announced with great ceremony. Barely seven kilometers were built because it could not secure any funding. On the other hand, Nueva Nicaragua Publishing, which I sheltered against every storm, survived and left a legacy of more than 300 titles. The revolution never managed to advance in stages. It had to make rapid progress and fulfill its plan for modernization. It was heresy to suggest that 30,000 hectares of tobacco represented an unmanageable scale; that 4,000 tractors required logistical support that exceeded our capacities; or that one liter of milk out of every twenty produced by the

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thoroughbred cows would be ten times more expensive than one produced by one of our own cows. No one dared suggest that the country should first transition from the use of a hand hoe, the pre-Hispanic system of planting corn seed by seed, to plowing with oxen, and that this would be enough to produce more than double the bushels of grain; nor could anyone say that the energy cost to operate the irrigation pivots was prohibitive. Following the electoral defeat, those pivots were given away to the landowners reclaiming their expropriated estates. The pivots, the equipment, fencing, storage sheds, tractors, trucks, the entire investment during the revolutionary years was divided among the same families and others who equaled them in their greed. It was a daily struggle to survive, faced with the economic embargo by the United States, with monetary reserves barely sufficient for a week’s worth of imports, without reliable sources for oil or raw materials, and having suspended foreign debt payments. There was such a shortage of foreign reserves that the state assumed responsibility for their administration. Each week the president of the Central Bank and I reviewed which expenditures could be authorized, even those designated for medical expenses abroad, student support, and film rentals. That was how I met Álvaro Mutis. He used to come to Nicaragua on behalf of Columbia Pictures to collect fees from the Sandinista Television System, which it could only pay in devalued Nicaraguan currency, as well as old debts from movie theaters that, also strapped for funds, only showed antediluvian films. Someone informed him that I was the only one who could authorize payment, and every time he came we spent long afternoons talking in my office in the Government House and laughing so hard you could probably hear us in Managua’s outermost ruins. He never got a single dollar out of me. Instead, as he admitted himself, he became the only Sandinista monarchist in the world. Foreign assistance became crucial for our survival. We always received support in the form of soft credits and supplies from the European Economic Community, from the majority of Western Europe, from Canada, Mexico, Argentina, Brazil, Venezuela, and, of course, from Cuba. The heaviest burden, however, fell on the Soviet Union, East Germany, and Bulgaria: oil, lubricants, fertilizers, raw materials, automobiles, agricultural equipment, spare parts, canned foods, grains, mostly wheat. In addition, if we asked for rice, which they did not produce, they went and

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purchased it from world markets. However, assistance of that magnitude could not continue under the new circumstances created by Gorbachev’s rise to power in 1985. In 1987, before Kazimirov appeared with his termination notice, an expert from gosplan, the Soviet Ministry of Planning, came to Managua leading a team of economists to prepare a document with recommendations that could help us deal with the setback. Very much reminiscent of the prudent and reserved bureaucrat in Anton Chekhov’s short stories, he refused to say anything until his work had concluded. Then, in his closing meeting with the entire National Planning Commission, presided over by Daniel, he made only two recommendations. First, he told us it was necessary to deregulate the economy and control government spending, being precise in our economic calculations. Second, he said that the commanders should immediately give up control of the government and leave it in the hands of competent experts. ‘‘Are you asking us to step down to a role of mere formality?’’ Daniel said, astonished. ‘‘I’m not made for that.’’ Whenever you respond to a hypothetical question, you inevitably run the risk of giving hypothetical answers. Would we have created prosperity without a war of aggression? The war destroyed the nation’s wealth and its potential, costing no less than $18 billion according to the reparations estimate we submitted to the International Court of Justice in The Hague. I do think that even without the war, the philosophical essence of the model we sought to apply still would have led to an economic collapse, at least not without a peaceful evolution of the system toward a truly mixed economy, which would have also required greater political opening. Yet in the end, under the weight of the circumstances, that evolution was already under way. All of the concessions the war forced on us generated that opening and left much of the project from the early years to rhetoric. We had the strategic instruments for the economy in our hands: control of arable land, key businesses in the industrial and agroindustrial sectors, mining, fishing, forestry, banking and foreign trade, communications, energy, and a good portion of public transportation. Yet the model of wealth accumulation, based on the idea of state ownership, was not viable from the start. Very few businesses in that great conglomerate’s public sector ever became profitable. Furthermore, the investments in factories and equipment, which totaled hundreds of millions of dollars in foreign credit, lacked real equivalence in terms of productivity. Nor did they manage to

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function in competitive terms. For example, a cardboard box factory in León, a turnkey installation built by the French, never managed to make its boxes for packing bananas, seafood, and meat at the same price as the competition in El Salvador, despite the fact that other state businesses were forced to be its clients. In addition, businesspeople in the private sector, which never lost its value, were always at risk, which meant that they always felt threatened. At the same time, they received government protections, which meant that they never managed to be efficient. Their bad debts were forgiven for political rather than economic reasons in order to gain their support, which was never won. Consequently, as I already stated, that was what caused the commercial banks to fail. The traditional rules of the game had been broken. Without a reliable alternative, businesspeople were not interested, for the most part, in a game of loyalties. They wanted to make their capital secure outside of Nicaragua, but they wanted to obtain as many advantages from us as possible, such as an exchange rate that allowed them to purchase machinery and materials at ridiculously low prices. They also wanted to borrow all they could in credit from the banks, knowing that their debts would be forgiven. The greatest source of insecurity, however, came from the management of private property. The national consensus supported the confiscation of assets belonging to the Somoza family, but that support was lacking in the case of all of the others who followed. Moreover, the process occurred on such a weak legal basis that, even today, country estates and lands registered to the Somoza family show up on the public Land Registry’s old documents. That insecurity grew exponentially following the exchange of power in 1990. Laws 85 and 86, passed during the transition period, transferred homes, acreage, and lots to thousands of beneficiaries. However, it took a long time for them to be recognized by the new government. This unleashed a conflict over the titles that went on for years. There were factors that all came together to cause this unsuspected point of contention. First, there were fraudulent appropriations, referred to as the piñata, which involved taking possession of country estates and agricultural, commercial, and industrial businesses. Then there was the devolution of land to its original owners, which was often ordered for lands that had already been divided into lots. The second piñata involved privatization of public enterprises, which caused workers to protest against the union

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leaders who were taking part in the divvying up of assets. There were also complaints from former landowners demanding their farms, which had been given to the demobilized members of the army and the Contras, now allied to defend their rights. Since 1990, thousands of peasants have received titles to the property that the revolution finally decided to give them now without limitations for sale or transfer of ownership through inheritance. Yet their situation is increasingly precarious in an economic reality that tends toward the accumulation of land, since without a state policy to assure credits and markets, they find themselves obligated to sell their titles at ridiculously low prices to old and new landlords. More than half of the farms are already in the hands of their former owners, and the agricultural production cooperatives now own only 2 percent of the arable land. The revolution’s most long-held dream, agrarian reform, is being destroyed as an unmistakable sign that wealth is again being accumulated in the hands of the few, similar in structural terms to the reality of the years prior to 1979. The difference is that many of those who encouraged that dream are now the ones amassing this wealth. They arrive, then, dressed up as characters in Honoré de Balzac’s The Human Comedy. Some who had led the people from behind the barricades later became wine production tycoons. Others who had been coopers for the wine producers have now become owners of timber forests and tillable lands.

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fter reaching a general agreement in Havana, the unification of the three Sandinista factions was signed on March 7, 1979, in Panama City at the apartment of William and Mercedes Graham in the El Cangrejo neighborhood. The circumstances surrounding the armed struggle made collaboration necessary, but Fidel Castro’s mere presence as the agreement’s sponsor made it irresistible. The weight of his influence was also a key factor in the acceptance by the Third Way Tendency of a balanced combination in the fsln’s National Directorate—three members from each of the three factions, independent from the influence of each. The Third Way already had to negotiate its own unification in January that same year. It was in a meeting we called the ‘‘Little Congress,’’ which took place on the Río Hacha Military Base in Panama under Torrijos’s watchful eye. Delegates from all of the fronts arrived from Nicaragua. Most of the differences between Edén Pastora’s Southern Front and the Internal Front led by ‘‘Gordo Pín’’ had been aired out after they had been shut in together for days. Under pressure from the Costa Rican government, Edén had been named leader of the Sandinista Army. It was a position that did not actually exist; nevertheless, the leaders of the Internal Front rejected it, even as just a title. The day that the agreements between the three factions were signed, Humberto asked me to have a talk with Henry Ruiz (‘‘Modesto’’). I did not know him at the time. We met at William’s and

Mercedes’s apartment in Panama. I was supposed to quell Henry’s concerns about the Group of Twelve, and about me in particular, but the truth is that I did not find any. From the outset, I learned to accept him as enigmatic and reserved, veils that mask his great frankness. He also said something on that occasion. I do not know if it was improvised or if he had planned to say it ahead of time: ‘‘The bad thing about alliances is not with whom they are made but behind whose back you make them.’’ Years later, he would join the list of villains, just as I had, after he dared defy Daniel in the elections for fsln general secretary in the Extraordinary Congress in 1994. That was also when I was blacklisted, for, among other things, supporting his candidacy. I visit him occasionally at his home in the Los Robles neighborhood, which always looks darker and emptier, with no bodyguards at the door anymore, and in the hands of one solitary maid. I cannot stop asking myself what he does to survive, distanced from the businesses run by so many of his former comrades in arms. More than anyone else, he symbolizes the revolution that did not happen. Just a few days after the unification agreement had been reached, the members of the fsln’s National Directorate moved to San José. We later reenacted the signing in the offices of Istmo Films. The photo where they are shown with their hands raised was taken there, and everyone appears dressed from the period with mustaches, berets, and dark glasses. It includes Humberto Ortega, Daniel Ortega, Víctor Tirado, Tomás Borge, Jaime Wheelock, and Henry Ruiz. A group of friends, writers, and filmmakers, among them Carmen Naranjo, Antonio Iglesias, Samuel Rovinski, and Óscar Castillo, had founded Istmo Films with a loan from the Bank of Costa Rica. The last film made was ¡Viva Sandino!, a feature-length documentary about the Southern Front that had to be corrected several times in the editing process because Humberto and Daniel thought that Edén Pastora appeared too frequently. After an agreement had been reached, unification still remained subject to conflicts. Once the fsln’s National Directorate had been created, the members of the Government Junta had to be chosen. I still remember a radio conversation between Jaime Wheelock (‘‘Trópico’’), who was in Tegucigalpa at the time, and Humberto Ortega (‘‘Palo Alto’’), who was speaking there beside me. Jaime was complaining about the unilateral decision of including Daniel in the Government Junta since, in their pre-

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vious agreement, all the members of the National Directorate were supposed to be separate from the government. The fsln, in its entirety, was to be represented by ‘‘Baltazar’’ (myself). He alleged that Daniel’s presence tilted the scale in favor of the Third Way and would spark ‘‘anticommunist hysteria’’ from the fsln’s enemies. The way the Government Junta had been organized, it seemed more an alliance between one of the fsln’s factions and a new bourgeois sector. It was a spur-of-the-moment objection with little possible effect, and Humberto knew it. He also knew that the alignment between forces was still important. He finally said that he agreed, although he sounded like someone showing sympathy for a misfortune. By May, as the rainy season was beginning, the insurrection could no longer be stopped. The last runga was coming, to use the term invented for the struggle in the youthful slang from the slums. Somoza was still killing boys just for being boys. Their cadavers appeared each morning on the Cuesta del Plomo Hill near the banks of Lake Managua. Or the patrols would enter churches shooting to kill the student protesters, as had occurred in the El Calvario Church in León. For the young, being armed was now a matter of survival. In April, during Holy Week, the forces that had withdrawn in September from Estelí under the command of ‘‘El Zorro’’, and that had remained in the nearby mountains, came down into the city to show off their weapons for a few hours. Then the people, encouraged by their presence, would not allow them to leave. Full of enthusiasm, they erected barricades, which again sparked intense battles. It would not be long before they all came down again. Skirmishes broke out in every city every night. Paramilitaries, security agents, and spies were executed in their homes, and in broad daylight the guerrilla squads ambushed the Special AntiTerrorist Brigades (becat) patrolling the streets, taking rifles and impedimenta from the dead soldiers. Now the number of combatants was truly no longer a chimera. There were more than 6,000. The planes landed on the highways even in the middle of the night, guided by candlelight, to bring supplies. There is still a bar on the stretch of highway bordering the city of Masaya called Airport 79 in honor of the bravery of the pilots. They landed under fire from the machine guns from Fort Coyotepe, unloaded, and took off again unscathed. One of those pilots, after later joining the ranks of arde (Demo-

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cratic Revolutionary Alliance) under Edén Pastora’s command, would die in 1983 after his plane was downed by antiaerial defense when he tried to bomb the Augusto C. Sandino International Airport in Managua. The radio network connected the ‘‘Palo Alto’’ Central Command with all the fronts, even with the flying columns, and the fronts with each other. It was the work of genius by a technician we knew by the name of ‘‘El Topo.’’ The network facilitated every detail of the strategic command for that entire final phase of the war. It also made it possible to connect military advances and political negotiations. You could hear the distant voices of the guerrilla leaders through the transmitter’s speakers. They reported to ‘‘Palo Alto’’ requesting supplies, sometimes with enough time to talk amongst themselves and joke around. I can still hear them through bursts of static in my memory: ‘‘Oficina’’ calling ‘‘Taller,’’ ‘‘Rocío’’ calling ‘‘Palo Alto.’’ ‘‘Oficina’’ was Managua. ‘‘Taller’’ referred to León, Miramar, Estelí, Rocío, Matagalpa, Buenavista, Jinotega, Trópico, Tegucigalpa. It was also through that network that everyone voted to confirm the definitive integration of the Government Junta. When Radio Sandino called for the final insurrection on May 29, 1979, in a statement written by Jaime Wheelock, the White House underestimated the magnitude of the offensive and never imagined it would be the last. President Carter was busy with more important issues, as his adviser Bob Pastor admitted. These included the consequences from the Shah’s fall in Iran and the new power of the Ayatollah; the summit with Brezhnev in Vienna, where Nicaragua was absent from the agenda; the relationship with China; and the energy crisis in the United States, with long lines at the gas pumps. Besides, cia reports stated that Somoza would be able to resist again. Yet the whole world was now watching Nicaragua, and anything could happen. One day in San José, some mysterious and very well-dressed Arabs appeared with the offer to supply us with a planeload of weapons. We selected them from a catalogue full of photographs they put in front of us without putting much faith in their arrival. There were four-barrel anti-aircraft guns, multiple missile launchers (the famous Stalin’s organs), submachine guns, bazookas, and automatic rifles. We agreed on a code word for each type of weapon: silk, taffeta, linen, brocade, lace, as if we were ordering fabrics from a bazaar. We had forgotten all about it until we received a telex in the advertising office located in Istmo Films. It con-

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firmed the arrival of merchandise in a Boeing 707 that had been loaded in the Near East and that was supposed to land in San José’s Juan Santamaría International Airport three days later. It was coming from Beirut. We obtained permission for the landing and organized the forces to unload the plane, but before long we read the cables stating that it had been forced to land at the airport in Cairo, Egypt, where the cargo was seized. It was not difficult to imagine that the cia had managed to abort the operation. As we later learned, the artillery pieces and rocket launchers belonged to the defense structure in the Palestinian Liberation Organization (plo) camps in Lebanon, which were left severely depleted. We would have been able to unload that plane because Costa Rica was our center for political and conspiratorial operations, for supplies, and for propaganda. It was also the Southern Front’s rearguard base. Planes with military supplies from Cuba and Venezuela came from Panama and landed at the Juan Santamaría International Airport or in Llano Grande in the Guanacaste Province. One of Torrijos’ planes, nicknamed ‘‘La Cajeta’’ (Little Box) for its odd square form, performed that mission regularly. That international alliance between very diverse governments, all determined to topple Somoza, may never be repeated. With all the pressure, improvisations, and conspiratorial meetings all day, something out of the ordinary was not going to surprise anyone. On one occasion, a crossbowman arrived from Spain to offer his services. He convinced Ernesto Cardenal that his crossbow was the most silent weapon of all and that it would therefore be unparalleled in ambushes. Then there were volunteers who came from every corner of the world to join the Southern Front, just as in the years of the Spanish Civil War. Germans, Spaniards, Mexicans, Costa Ricans, Panamanians, Colombians, Chileans, Argentines, Peruvians, Dominicans, Uruguayans, Venezuelans, and Cubans all fought there. Doctors also came to join the health brigades. One of these was Dr. Ernest Karl Fuchs, a famous neurosurgeon who left his office on the Kurfürstendamm in Berlin to join the armed struggle in Nicaragua. He stayed at our home in Managua’s Los Yoses neighborhood before leaving for the Southern Front. When he heard that they called guerrilla commander Richard Lugo ‘‘Saco’’ because he was a real ‘‘sack’’ of nerves before each battle, he chose the code name ‘‘Vanzetti.’’ It was from the historic Sacco and Vanzetti murder trial in Massachusetts in the 1920s. He kept

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the name Vanzetti and spent the rest of his life in Managua operating on poor patients at the Lenin Fonseca Hospital, often without instruments or even suture thread. I stored the revolution’s treasury at my home in Los Yoses high up in a closet in an old suitcase that no one guarded. Funds came out of there for all types of emergency expenses, to buy weapons on sale, medicines and supplies, fuel, and airplane tickets. I suppose that suitcase had close to a million dollars in it at some point. On June 18, 1979, the Government Junta’s members were announced. The offensive was already under way and the guerrilla troops were advancing, taking control of lands and local populations. Everyone in Nicaragua acknowledged our authority: the fao’s traditional parties, those who were part of the udel, private businesses, groups from the Left in the mpu, and the armed combatants from the fsln’s three factions, which were now united. It was the first time in the country’s history that a government had emerged with the support of a national consensus. Even so, it did not have approval from the United States. That was when William Bowdler reappeared. He was pleasant, as always, and he acted as though nothing had occurred previously to put us at odds with each other. He came to stay in San José. That was where the Government Junta was and where the Carter administration knew that the majority of the fsln’s National Directorate members were located. It was also the General Headquarters for commanding the war. In Managua, the recently appointed ambassador, Lawrence Pezzullo, would deal with Somoza. We were again able to face each other as two diehard chess players who discovered the pieces on the board in the same exact place as they had been in November 1978. They knew that Somoza’s days were limited, but they were insisting on preserving the National Guard and salvaging what they could of the system. We, on the other hand, wanted to do away with the system, which meant that the National Guard had to go and that properties belonging to the Somoza family and all their supporters would have to be confiscated. Those were points that had always been part of the fsln’s plan. Despite the internal divisions, they had remained the same for all of the factions. They were in the Group of Twelve’s proposal, and they were now part of the Government Junta’s demands, which had been revealed in San José. Despite this, as we sat down again together, the context had changed

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radically, and the movements on the chessboard had changed as well. The National Guard now found itself on the defensive on a stage that was too fragmented and extensive. This time Somoza would not be able to employ the method of taking over one embattled city after another. His critical problem was a lack of supplies, which was also our problem as well. They would determine the length of the war. The Carter administration could not interfere with the group of Latin American governments that were providing the Sandinista forces with weapons and ammunition, even with Cuba included. Nor could Carter dare resume aggressive support for Somoza, who was forced to seek it from Guatemala and countries that were too far away, such as Argentina, under military rule at the time, and Israel. In the case of Israel, they had not forgotten that the elder Somoza had supported David Ben-Gurion with weapons when the Jewish state was created. Even so, on June 14, 1979, an Israeli ship in international waters loaded with weapons destined for Nicaragua was forced to return under pressure from the United States. For the first time, the United States could not argue for national security interests without having Carter’s entire human rights policy crumble to pieces. Having all the power in the world, they were not able to use it and had to improvise their strategy with each new day. It was our turn to advance. The new meeting of consultation with the oas opened on June 21, 1979, in Washington D.C., one day following North American journalist Bill Stewart’s assassination by the National Guard in Managua. The execution scene was played every ten minutes on television, and there was now an immense feeling of repudiation against Somoza in the United States. Despite that fact, Secretary of State Cyrus Vance, who spoke first at the meeting, proposed sending an Inter-American peace force to Nicaragua to guarantee the transition. It was a paragraph from the speech that Carter himself had given him, and it did little more than evoke the memory of the history of the United States’ repeated military interventions. We were already present at the meeting to voice our opposition. The Government Junta’s chancellor, Father Miguel d’Escoto, had been registered as a member from Panama’s delegation. The proposal was doomed from the outset. It did not even go to a vote. Mexico and Ecuador had already broken diplomatic relations with Somoza, and the Andean Pact countries recognized the fsln as a force of resistance. The resolution that was adopted, with only two votes against, from Paraguay

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and Nicaragua, established that the Somoza regime, and not only Somoza himself, was the fundamental cause of the crisis. This was precisely what we were arguing. The resolution also called for the immediate installation of a democratic government that would hold elections as soon as possible. Before the meetings with Bowdler, which generally took place at the home of Claudia Chamorro, where Violeta was staying, I used to get together with Humberto Ortega in the ‘‘Palo Alto’’ General Headquarters to discuss the military situation. My negotiation strategy depended on this up-to-date knowledge of how the war was advancing. I could be flexible if we were blocked, or I could toughen my position if we were advancing or if we had conquered a new town. I had drawn a map of Nicaragua on a page in my notebook where I was marking each step as we moved our positions forward. We had another meeting with Bowdler on June 28, 1979. It was during an official visit of the Government Junta to Panama on President Arístides Royo’s invitation. It took place at the home of Gabriel Lewis, a close friend of Torrijos and his ambassador to Washington. The United States’ ambassador to Panama, Ambler Moss, was also present. The following day a spokesman from the State Department announced that we had been given a four-point plan that had been developed in Washington. This was false and we denied it. The plan, which was later leaked to the New York Times, contained the essence of the Carter administration’s strategy: 1. Somoza’s resignation (which they already had in the bag). 2. Formation of a Junta of National Reconciliation (which was not the one we had created). 3. Naming of a broad cabinet (with the majority not Sandinistas). 4. Dialogue between the new government and the fsln Junta (which was ours). ‘‘I have Somoza’s resignation right here,’’ Bowdler would later tell us, patting the pocket of his suit jacket. ‘‘All you have to do is date it.’’ That was true. He did have it. Pezzullo had been ambassador to Uruguay before being rushed off to Managua. He went straight from the airport to Somoza’s bunker escorted by an armored tank. There was no time for formalities to present credentials. He remembers that his mission seemed very unusual at the time. He landed in a country he did not know with the task of forcing the resignation of a dictator who was defending himself with fire and sword. Moreover, he was the head of diplomatic

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personnel who could barely advise him since they had retreated inside the walls of the embassy. To his surprise, at the following meeting, Somoza announced that he was willing to resign, but it had to be right away because he was afraid of being assassinated by his own National Guard officers. Pezzullo asked him not to be hasty and argued that the transition had to follow a step-bystep process. ‘‘Be patient,’’ Pezzullo told Somoza. ‘‘And when it comes to your survival, I know that you know how to take care of yourself.’’ Although the truth is that Pezzullo did not have any idea what the next steps should be since those depended on negotiations with us in San José. Bowdler was insisting on expanding the Government Junta. In addition, he wanted us to accept an ‘‘untarnished’’ officer to command a recycled National Guard, or at least to serve as a counterpart in the formation of a new military force. On one of those occasions when we were alone together at Claudia’s house, he asked me if I would be willing to meet Colonel Inocente Mojica. He was living at the time in Guatemala and serving as director of the Central American Corporation for Air Navigation Services (cocesna), the organization in charge of air traffic control in Central America. I answered that I would, without giving the proposal much thought, but Bowdler brought Mojica to my home that afternoon. Colonel Mojica seemed a bit dimwitted to me and rather intimidated by the role that he would be given. In the end, we agreed that there would be a Joint Chiefs of Staff made up of ‘‘untarnished’’ officers from the National Guard and an equal number of guerrilla commanders. Colonel Bernardino Larios, who had deserted the army, would be minister of defense. Pezzullo then presented Somoza with a list of high-ranking officers for him to select the new National Guard commander from. He would then have to negotiate with us for the formation of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Somoza chose Colonel Federico Mejía and promoted him to general. Bowdler proposed expanding the Government Junta’s membership to seven in order to diminish the Sandinista influence. Washington was so confused that they included Dr. Mariano Fiallos Oyanguren on their proposed list of new names. He was rector of the National University at the time and secretly aligned with one of the fsln’s factions. He would later serve for many years as president of the Supreme Electoral Council. The question of the number of members in the Junta was not important to us, as long as we managed to conserve a favorable majority with

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the expansion. We ended up accepting a list of new candidates, which included Mariano, as already mentioned; Don Emilio Baltodano, from the Group of Twelve; and the president of the Red Cross, Don Ismael Reyes. However, Violeta was vehemently opposed and threatened to resign with the magnificent argument that she would not accept foreign intervention. Since Bowdler had failed, Carter called on Torrijos for a secret meeting at the White House, which took place on July 3, 1979. He proposed supporting the Government Junta’s expansion with names chosen in agreement between the United States, Panama, and Costa Rica. The discussions also included the topic of the new army. Chuchú Martínez remembers that Torrijos had retired to Bob Pastor’s office to rest during one of the recesses when Marcel Salamín appeared. He had come from San José and was one of Torrijos’ closest collaborators. Marcel informed him that he had met with me and that our position was set in support of Violeta, which meant that expanding the Government Junta would be impossible. Torrijos left to return to Panama committed to supporting Carter’s proposal but alerted to our rejection of it. I imagine that he did not put much faith or enthusiasm in carrying out a mission that he did not like either. Even so, faithful to his word, he sent his star negotiator from the canal treaties, Rómulo Escobar Betancourt, with the task of persuading us. Rómulo had come from the ranks of the Communist Party. He was a ñángara, the term Panamanians used to refer to Communists, while they called rich aristocrats rabiblancos. I had known him from the time he served as rector of the University of Panama. Back then at one of the lively parties at his home, he told me the story of his friendship during his younger days with Che Guevara. Che did not have anywhere to stay in Panama during his legendary trip from Argentina to Mexico, and from there on the Granma, disembarking in Cuba, so Rómulo took Che to stay at his house. Rómulo’s mother, who took a liking to Che from the start, warned him every morning behind Rómulo’s back: ‘‘Listen, be careful with my son because he’s a Communist.’’ Then the day Che continued his trip, en route to Costa Rica, Rómulo went to say goodbye at the bus station early in the morning. The city was decorated with flags to welcome Queen Elizabeth II from England that morning. That afternoon, when he came home from the university, he was astonished to find Che there: ‘‘Seeing a queen is a once in a lifetime event. I was not going to miss it’’ was the only thing Che said to Rómulo. Very early in the morning on July 8, 1979, we began our discussion

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with Rómulo at the home of Emilio Baltodano. He lived there with his family in the La Nunciatura neighborhood. The Government Junta’s members were there, plus the Group of Twelve, with the deliberations lasting well into the afternoon. Faced with the solid inflexibility we now all demonstrated because of Violeta’s staunch position, Rómulo, exasperated, beat a retreat. ‘‘Well, I will inform General Torrijos that you are so ungrateful that you are not willing to make this small concession for him, after all that he has done for you,’’ he said, taking his last shot. Since there was no response, he bid us farewell, troubled by his failure as a negotiator, but appearing relieved at seeing a mission end that was just as unpleasant for him as it was for Torrijos. Even so, the final push was yet to come. On July 11, President Carazo called me very early and told me that he wanted to see us urgently that same morning at his beach home in Puntarenas. Through different sources, we learned that Torrijos, Don Pepe Figueres, and Carlos Andrés Pérez would also be there. The Government Junta’s members attended, along with Humberto Ortega and Tomás Borge. The chairs had been arranged in a large circle on the patio facing the sea. Waiting along with Carazo were Vice-President José Miguel Alfaro and the minister of the interior, Johnny Echeverría, who had been a key player in the weapons transfer. Don Pepe Figueres and Carlos Andrés Pérez were indeed there, but Torrijos was not. He had sent his adviser, Jorge Ritter. And Bowdler. Carazo set the agenda regarding the Government Junta’s expansion, although his arguments remained formal. Carlos Andrés argued in favor of pragmatism, but he quickly clashed with Violeta’s position and ran out of steam. We then presented our plan for peace: 1. Somoza’s resignation. 2. Formation of a Government for National Reconstruction built from all of the sectors of opposition to Somoza. 3. oas member countries formally acknowledge our new government. 4. The new government repeals the Constitution and decrees the Fundamental Statute. 5. The new government orders the National Guard to cease hostilities and its immediate confinement to barracks. 6. The Sandinista Army will respect the cease-fire, maintaining its positions.

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7. Representatives from both armies are designated to supervise the cease-fire. 8. Officers, noncommissioned officers, and soldiers may choose to join the new National Army, to return to civilian life, or to leave the country if they do not have criminal charges against them. Carazo recognized that the plan was based on the oas resolution and recommended sending it to General Secretary Alejandro Orfila with a letter signed by the members of the Government Junta. Leaning on the bar counter, I composed the rough draft of the letter based on the notes Carazo had taken. I read it, and we left it at that. The following day, Bowdler appeared with a bottle of wine and a gift for Fadrique, Claudia’s son. For the first time, he acknowledged us as the leadership of a new government: ‘‘Gentlemen, members of the Junta,’’ he said smiling, shaking our hands. To repay his courtesy, I tore a page from my notebook where I had written the list of ministers, and I gave it to him. The list already included Colonel Bernardino Larios as minister of defense and Tomás Borge as minister of the interior. The only name change at the moment of the triumph was that of Pablo Antonio Cuadra, who appeared as minister of culture, to Ernesto Cardenal. Bowdler called that same afternoon to tell me that they were pleased with the cabinet. In reality, there has never been a more pluralistic one in Nicaraguan history, even though it would only last until the end of the year, when the fsln’s National Directorate decided to stick its nose in the government, sending the alliances by the wayside. Following the Puntarenas meeting, I worked with Bowdler on the transition plan. By July 17, 1979, when Somoza made his exit from Nicaragua, it was already prepared and approved by both sides. It read like a detailed script to be staged: 1. General Federico Mejía for the National Guard, and Commander Humberto Ortega for the fsln, meet in Puntarenas to agree on the plan for the military transition and to organize a joint command. 2. Somoza resigns before Congress and leaves Nicaragua. 3. The National Congress moves to appoint an interim president who will remain until the Government Junta arrives in Managua, accompanied by the oas’s Andean Pact country ambassadors. 4. The interim president waits at the airport in Managua, and he

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presents the presidential sash to Monsignor Obando y Bravo as soon as the Government Junta’s plane touches down. 5. The interim president leaves in another airplane, and Monsignor Obando y Bravo presents the presidential sash to the Government Junta. 6. The Government Junta decrees the cease-fire and integrates the joint military command. 7. The Government Junta proceeds with the rest of the plan presented in its letter to the oas. No one had thought to tell Obando about the role he was supposed to play, and when it came time to find him, he was in Caracas. He had traveled there on July 15 with a group of party leaders from the fao on board a military plan that President Luis Herrera Campins had sent to Managua. That trip was part of an attempt, already too late, to create a political force that would counterbalance the fsln in the future government. It was what remained of the North American plans that had fallen through with the negotiations. Venezuela’s Social Christian government sought to revive those plans, possibly with some encouragement from Washington. Obando had just arrived in Caracas when President Herrera Campins, informed of the series of events, urged him to go to Costa Rica, where we needed him to carry out the transition program. He arrived in San José the following day, just hours after Somoza’s resignation was read before Congress. They were at the Intercontinental Hotel, where they were almost forced to meet because the legislators were afraid that there would not be transportation available to Miami. Rather than traveling to the Venezuelan embassy, where the members of the Government Junta and the Andean Pact country ambassadors were waiting for him, Obando stayed at the Cariari Hotel. He sent Father Bismark Carballo and his assistant, Roberto Rivas, to replace him with the message that he was feeling very tired from all the airplane travel. It was already morning on July 17, 1979. We finished explaining to Obando’s delegates the extent of their role, when we heard Radio Monumental’s siren in the distance. It only sounded for momentous events. Somoza was leaving Nicaragua. Our host, the Venezuelan ambassador, popped champagne corks, and it was reminiscent of a New Year’s celebration with all the toasts and hugs.

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The Government Junta’s departure ceremony at the Juan Santamaría International Airport was scheduled for ten o’clock in the morning. I was at home at the time packing my suitcase when President Carazo, who kept a surveillance truck parked outside, called to give me the news that Urcuyo was refusing to resign. He then strongly suggested that we leave immediately for Managua anyway. I asked him for some time to consult with the Junta’s other members. Violeta and Robelo came to my house. Daniel had gone to León two days before. We located Bowdler by phone and he expressed surprise at Urcuyo’s stance. I told him that everything seemed like a plan orchestrated by the United States government, and that the best proof of all was that he pretended not to know anything about it. He denied it completely and asked me to wait until Pezzullo could ask Urcuyo for an explanation in Managua. Humberto Ortega, on his end, already knew that General Mejía was not going to show for the planned meeting in Puntarenas. On the contrary, he had issued a proclamation calling the National Guard to continue fighting until the end. The uncertainty grew as the day went on. Early that afternoon, President Carazo appeared at my house to insist that we leave. That was when Violeta, Robelo, and I decided to go to León that very night, in light of the fact that we could not travel to Managua. As Carazo and I discussed years later, he was of the opinion that that Junta should do whatever necessary to be in Managua right away if it wanted to consolidate political authority and lead to civilian rule for the nation. The fact that we were going to León did not exactly fit his criteria, but it eased his worries to an extent. The members of the National Directorate agreed, although they saw it from a different perspective. They had all arrived in Nicaragua with the exception of Humberto Ortega, who was busy commanding the war from San José. Late that same afternoon, Bowdler again contacted me to ask for a little more time until the pressures they were exerting on Urcuyo took effect, but we did not listen to him. We told him that we considered the transition agreement broken. That night we flew to León. The morning of July 18, 1979, the Government Junta had an official meeting in the university’s assembly hall along with the rector, Dr. Mariano Fiallos Oyanguren, and the bishop, Monsignor Manuel Salazar. From there, we declared León the capital of Nicaragua. We sat in arched, high-backed chairs usually reserved for academic authorities, and Tomás

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Borge, sounding defensive, introduced us one by one. The audience was mostly made up of journalists from the international press who had come from Managua, across combat lines, as soon as they heard that we had arrived in León. The assembly hall, with its large glass windows and its wrought-iron balcony, had always been part of my life. That was where we had begun our student protest on the afternoon of July 23, 1959. We left there, waving our flags, and then we were massacred by the National Guard. That was where we established the command post during the sit-in the following month demanding the expulsion of the soldiers studying at the university. That was when Manolo Morales put his 300 pounds to the test in a hunger strike along with Francisco Buitrago, who would later die in guerrilla fighting in Bocay in 1963. That was where we celebrated the radio dramas where Jorge Navarro sang and played the accordion. He also died in Bocay, never breaking his vow of poverty. That was where I was teaching a course in October 1967 on the ‘‘boom’’ of the Latin American novel, when the news of Che’s death in Bolivia rose up from the street on radio broadcasts. That was where I had received my law degree in 1964, dressed in a rented cap and gown, standing alongside my mother. The streets were packed with people who had come out to greet us. It was a huge celebration mixed with the mourning for Fanor Urroz, one of Dora María’s lieutenants. He had been killed the day before fighting for the liberation of Nagarote on the route to Managua, and his vigil was held in the Ruiz Ayestas auditorium. They told me that he was the son-in-law of Raúl Elvir, a poet friend from the long nights we spent at the bars in León during my student years. I remember that he knew more about Nicaraguan birds than anyone else. I saw him among the mourners, dressed in white as always, and I went over to give him a hug. That afternoon we went to Chichigalpa to take part in the first outdoor rally. Before we even arrived, Daniel had already handed over the first title deed for agrarian reform, giving Hacienda La Máquina, near León, to the peasants from a recently organized cooperative. In Chichigalpa, we found everyone marching toward the baseball stadium where the event was celebrated. We all took turns speaking during a long rally that included various musical numbers. It ended at nightfall when everyone returned to León, and I continued on with Jaime Wheelock to meet a guerrilla column that was arriving from Somotillo. The troop of peasant boys lined up in the parking lot at the Hotel

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Cosigüina, which had been closed because of the war. We addressed them, trying to make out their faces in the dark. We then sent for the hotel manager for him to give them the keys so that they could sleep on sheets and in air-conditioned rooms. For the moment, imaginary power worked for actions such as that one. On the morning of July 19, 1979, while we were having breakfast in the kitchen, someone yelled for us to come to the television that was on in the hall. On the screen, General Sandino was putting on his hat and taking it off, the only footage of him taken from an old Movietone newsreel. In the background, Carlos Mejía Godoy’s song La tumba del guerrillero (Tomb of the Guerrilla) was playing, and then you could see shots of the trucks filled with boys dressed in olive green on the Masaya Highway waving flags and hoisting their rifles, with people rushing out to greet them in a great uproar. And you could hear the shouting, the truck horns blowing, and numerous shots fired in the air. In the midst of all the commotion, Henry Ruiz radioed us from the airport in Managua where the Northern Front had set up camp. Bowdler, who had now arrived, wanted his transition ceremony. I laughed because it was ridiculous. There was nothing to transfer, but we agreed at Henry’s insistence. Daniel was first, and then we were both laughing because it was Henry Ruiz, out of everybody, who was worried about complying with the Yankees. With that mission, Violeta and I traveled that afternoon to Managua aboard a small plane piloted by Modesto Rojas. He had made many of the nighttime flights carrying supplies from San José. The sky was changing shades with the setting sun, from violet to saffron, until it dissolved in that opaline translucence that Rubén Darío called lamplight. The Momotombo Volcano rose above the lake waters while the lights of Managua started to appear in the foggy distance and the outline of the sierra was disappearing. All of that also resembled a fantasy. The Quetzalcóatl II, the plane President López Portillo had sent from Mexico to transport the government cabinet from San José, had already landed. I met my wife in the lobby at the Hotel Camino Real. She had just disembarked with the passengers. There was an ambiance of a dance just about to begin. There was no sign of Bowdler or of Obando, even though he had been back since the night before. Nevertheless, we decided, in agreement with Henry, to leave the ceremony until after the rally in the plaza. On the

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morning of July 20, 1979, Violeta and I flew back to León, together with Moisés Hassan, so that all five of us could arrive in Managua together. The caravan in which we would make our triumphant journey on the highway was already waiting for us at Jerez Park. The bishop, Monsignor Salazar, had arrived with it. Later, after the rally in the plaza to celebrate the victory, was when I saw Regis Debray at the National Palace, dressed in his safari clothing. Then I walked up the stairs and entered the room where Monsignor Obando was waiting to begin the transfer ceremony, which in the end was rushed. Bowdler came up to me afterward, always stylish and smiling, and said in his Argentine accent that I always found amusing: ‘‘The palace at last!’’

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ooner or later, it would be time to sit down and hold talks with the Contra Directorate. Our political strategy previously centered on intransigence as we sought a military victory. Now everything was leading us to try to negotiate. After a decade of armed conflict, we were exhausted. The economy was in turmoil. With inflation in a continuous upward spiral, we had increasingly less foreign currency for imports. Agriculture continued to decline due to the lack of soft credits and supplies, and there was a growing scarcity of the basic commodities on the ration card. The national political sphere was always critical, and we were approaching upcoming elections in 1990, which would again have limited credibility. Most importantly, however, was that there was practically no one left who was eligible for military service, and we could no longer send new recruits to replace those who had completed their mandatory two years. What’s more, the constant desertions were taking their toll. Patriotic Military Service (smp) became that decade’s most traumatic element, and it ultimately led to the fsln’s electoral defeat in 1990. There had already been too many deaths. During that campaign, I attended a rally in Malpaisillo that was held in the town plaza in front of the church. While I was there, I received a note asking me to mention a boy from the area who had died in combat the day before. I asked for a minute of silence during my speech, and when I walked off the stage, I told the local activists

that I wanted to visit his mother at her home. They were surprised and advised me against it, but I insisted. The naïve idea that every mother viewed the death of her child in the war as a necessary sacrifice had been disappearing. The activists certainly knew it. They had to do the recruiting and take responsibility for the impact that the deaths were causing in their region, besides trying to win votes. Those were irreconcilable extremes, as the election results would end up demonstrating. The entrance to the humble home was through a yard with a barbed wire fence. It was full of neighbors who stopped talking when they saw me arrive. I found the mother in the kitchen. She was not an elderly woman, but the years of hardship had taken a toll on her, and thin and hunched over, she seemed old. Her reaction was bitter, a strong, painful bitterness. Her other son was studying to be an agricultural technician in Cuba. Without interrupting her work, stoking the fire, moving something from one place to another, she told me that she needed her son to come for the funeral. I tried to explain to her that it was not so easy with so little time, but she would not budge. ‘‘You can do anything,’’ she told me. So I made a promise, and I kept it. The boy came to the funeral, and he stopped by the Government House to thank me before returning to Cuba. That was just one case out of thousands, though. The war itself would prove to be the great electoral adversary, and we could not defeat it with its absences, its separations, its misery, its death, and the inability to imagine its end for the people who suffered under its fatal weight. The first attempts at talks with the Contra Directorate took place in the Dominican Republic in December 1987, and then early in 1988 in Costa Rica and Guatemala. Cardinal Obando acted as the intermediary each time, carrying messages between the two representatives because we still refused to meet face to face. Then again, the Contra Directorate, based in Miami, was not an easy counterpart. Its infighting made its positions less coherent, despite the significant weight that the cia exercised over its members, and the members did not have real influence over the military forces on the ground. Early in March 1988, the Sandinista Popular Army (eps) carried out a massive operation baptized ‘‘Danto 88.’’ It aimed to destroy Contra Headquarters on Honduran soil. Tensions worsened and the United States mobilized the Eighty-Second Airborne Division. With that, we convened

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the un Security Council. Yet it was precisely in that tense climate when the first direct negotiation with the Contra Directorate began on March 22. It was in Sapoa, the border post with Costa Rica, and the witnesses were Cardinal Obando and oas general secretary, João Baena Soares. The meeting concluded with a last-minute agreement. It included a sixty-day cease-fire, amnesty for the Contra insurgents, and government guarantees for their reintegration into civilian life and national politics. In turn, the Directorate promised to accept only humanitarian aid from the United States throughout the entire process, which was supposed to lead to the Contras’ complete disarmament. Those talks continued in the month of April that same year in Managua’s Hotel Camino Real. There was an attempt to map security zones for the Contra forces’ eventual disarmament, but the talks collapsed after several setbacks and interruptions. As minister of defense, Humberto Ortega represented the government in all the talks with the authority to negotiate. On the other hand, the Contra military commander, Colonel Enrique Bermúdez, never attended. Encouraged by the United States, he later refused to recognize the agreements. We were negotiating with the conviction that we had no chance of achieving a military victory. Yet the Contras could not win the war either, and their situation was more precarious than ever. The U.S. Congress had again suspended their military and financial support, which had been massive up until that point. And the Esquipulas II Accord, signed by the Central American presidents, basically robbed them of all political legitimacy. For the governments of Guatemala and El Salvador, facing their own guerrilla wars, disarming the Contras would set a beneficial precedent. In addition, we were also winning the war of public opinion in the United States as Reagan’s era was nearing its end. Under the circumstances, with the level of exhaustion we had reached, and with warnings from the Soviet camp regarding future prospects for economic aid, the 1990 elections were again the key element in hastening negotiations to end to the war. Although we were willing to accept increasingly deeper political concessions, peace for us was defined by the Contras’ disarmament and the ceasing of hostilities on the part of the United States. In this sense, we saw the elections as the best way to achieve a stable situation that would finally allow us to start rebuilding the country. We

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thought that the signs of discontent, the increasing resistance to military service and the economic disaster, were temporary situations that would be remedied, specifically, by the end of the war. Since early 1989, we had been thinking a great deal about the growing importance of the elections. One January afternoon, as Daniel drove his jeep and I rode along beside him on our way to a rally in a Managua neighborhood, we concurred on the advisability of moving the elections up to February 1990, even if that meant reforming the Political Constitution, which set elections for November. The best setting for that announcement was the Central American Presidential Summit that took place in San Salvador in February 1989. The call to support representative democracy had become a constant in the statements at the summits. It was a tactic for the presidents from the other countries who wanted to goad Sandinismo, but it was also because the majority of those presidents were products of electoral systems that remained fragile after many years of military rule. They were trying to cure themselves while they were healthy. In an additional paradox, they were holding democratic elections to expressly avoid the success of revolutions following the Nicaraguan one, but these same elections had succeeded in bringing about civilian governments in Guatemala, El Salvador, and Honduras. By that time, the peace process had acquired its own dynamic, which was not the same one that the United States sought to impose. The presidents had face-to-face discussions in informal closed meetings, and they found themselves forced to be frank to seek real solutions to a conflict that destabilized all of the countries equally. During one of those closed meetings, when the argument escalated, Daniel admitted to the Salvadoran president, José Napoleón Duarte, that the arms supply from Nicaragua to the Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front (fmln) existed. Furthermore, precisely because it existed, he told him, it should be considered a factor in the overall negotiation. A negotiation between five countries inevitably called for mutual concessions that affected each one individually and all of them together. In this context, the revolution’s original project was modified, as it would be affected by other factors as well. Being part of Central America gave our own reality an unavoidable twist; Central America continued to be an interconnected region, as it had been throughout its history, and Nicaragua was part of that region.

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In that sense, the peace process was strengthened as a regional negotiation, and Nicaragua was the central component. This was the case even though Costa Rican president Óscar Arias’s original proposal, which led to the Esquipulas II Accord that earned him the Nobel Peace Prize, excluded precisely Nicaragua, absent from the first summit he had convened in San José. President Vinicio Cerezo from Guatemala would correct that mistake. On August 3, 1989, there was an all-night meeting with leaders from all of the opposition parties. It was held at the Olof Palme Convention Center, where we signed an agreement in which they received from us a long list of guarantees to participate in the 1990 elections. In exchange, we received their unanimous support for the Contras’ disarmament. With that agreement in hand, Daniel attended the Central American Presidential Summit in Tela, Honduras, where a plan to disband the Contras was approved. Intended to be carried out with monitoring from the oas, it was not well received in Washington. For its part, the fmln commanders saw the plan as a bad precedent and feared that Nicaragua would begin to support something similar in El Salvador. On the contrary, despite all the implicit risks for the Sandinista government’s credibility, they were given massive support for their offensive in late 1989. Once again, it was supposed to be the last and it led fmln commanders to occupy important sectors of the capital of San Salvador. The Central American governments were willing to live with a Sandinista government that had been elected and acknowledged by the opposition. However, the George H. W. Bush administration, which began in January 1989, rejected such coexistence, even though it knew that a Contra military victory would be impossible. It financed the uno parties and, at the same time, kept the Contra military threat alive to the very end as a way for the United States to influence the 1990 election results. Whether or not the Bush administration would have tolerated an understanding with the Sandinista government if we had won the elections is debatable. Until then, however, it was going to do everything in its power so that we did not win. It was a context defined by extreme tension where even acts of force that the United States had undertaken for other reasons had consequences in Nicaragua. That was what occurred at the end of December 1989, with the invasion of Panama, a country that was too close for comfort. The Sandinista Popular Army surrounded the United States embassy

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with Soviet tanks because our embassy in Panama had been surrounded by North American tanks. That was how one provocation led to another. Taking crises to an extreme, bordering on disaster, in order to negotiate with an advantage was one of the golden rules of Sandinista diplomacy. Yet we were now in the middle of an electoral campaign, and the voters’ perceptions became decisive. In the poll taken two weeks later, in mid-January 1990, we were down ten points, and the number of undecided voters had grown. The worst electoral message was that of an imminent war with the United States, which the invasion of Panama was already suggesting on its own. Even so, we did not take that sign seriously since we recovered a bit in the next poll. Our biggest political problem continued to be that of inconsistency. The open confrontation did not match the electoral framework, much less our campaign message, which was based on the possibility of peace. The polls told us that peace was what the people wanted more than anything else, and that was what we were offering them, but the fsln was an antiimperialist party. It could not avoid revealing the vulnerability of its conflict with the United States or consequently reacting to that conflict. Besides, although our principal offer was peace, we were broadcasting an aggressive image of Daniel Ortega. He was welcomed in every plaza by the war song ‘‘El gallo ennavajado’’ (The Fighting Gamecock), which became the campaign’s theme song. There could not have been a worse symbol than that of a gamecock with knives. The exit polls clearly reflected the dominant feeling at the ballot box: 96 percent of the voters were convinced that we would never be able to stop the war, a belief shared by 56 percent of the fsln’s own supporters. We knew from the polls how important peace was for the elections, but it was outweighed by the old messianic sense of power that linked the idea of popular revolution, with all its ideological baggage, to unconditional support from the poor. When all was said and done, the poor would never be capable of stabbing themselves in the back. As a result, when the polls told us the opposite, that we were also losing support in the poorest sectors, we tried to correct the polls. Stan Greenberg, later the star pollster for the Bill Clinton campaigns, came to work with us during the final weeks. The polls continued to reveal trends that were not solidly in our favor, and the growing number of undecided voters was becoming a mystery. Then we started examining the opinions of the undecided regarding the qualities of both candidates:

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Which of the two, Daniel or Violeta, was more qualified? Which of the two had more experience, knowledge of the economy and international issues? Then we asked Greenberg to extrapolate the positive opinions for Daniel, where he was always in the majority, and to add those to the intended votes in his favor. This showed him surging ahead. The truth was that, in the end, almost all of the undecided voters cast their ballots against us, not based on value judgments about the candidates, but on the sole factor of which of the two would be capable of putting an end to the war: either Violeta dressed in white or Daniel in the image of a fighting gamecock. Toward the end of January 1990, we discussed the polls with fsln regional political secretaries who also served as campaign chiefs in their territories. In Masaya, for example, we were losing, just as in Diriamba and in Matagalpa, well-known Sandinista strongholds. None of them gave the polls any credit, and they all defended their proselytizing with the argument that they knew the voters house by house. On February 21, 1990, on the anniversary of Sandino’s murder, we held the closing campaign rally in the plaza on Lake Managua. Never before in the nation’s history had such a large number of people gathered, and that show of strength ended up convincing us of our victory. Just as it appeared in the script, Daniel and I walked to the end of the runway that extended from the stage into the crowd. There, amidst shouts and applause as far as the eye could see, we shook hands as an unmistakable sign that victory was guaranteed. The uno’s leaders, seeing the images of the event on television, had no doubt either that they were going to lose. In the end, the weight of the war was what determined our defeat in 1990. Surely we began losing that election as soon as we called it. There was a lot of talk afterward that Daniel was prepared to announce the repeal of the law of Patriotic Military Service in his speech that day, and that he changed his mind at the last minute when he saw the overwhelming crowd in the plaza. That was never the case. Within the war strategy, the smp was not a political variable but a military one. The point Humberto Ortega made when the topic was discussed had been that an announcement of that nature could provoke massive desertions while simultaneously encouraging the Contras to try to gain ground. Again, it was a paradox because the smp necessarily became a political variable in the electoral process, and that was how the people saw it. They were waiting for the announcement as a sign that it was possible to trust

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the fsln’s desire for peace, and they went home feeling that the war would continue. The U.S. government, through its spokespersons, also made it clear that the war would indeed continue if the fsln won. Just as the revolutionary victory in 1979 created an unreal atmosphere that we entered overcome by surprise and uncontrollable apprehension about the future, so too the defeat in 1990 created an equally unreal atmosphere. Before, we did not want to believe that we had won. We were afraid of waking, as if it were a dream. Now we did not want to believe that we had lost, and we wanted to wake up. The night of the election, that unreal atmosphere began to loom over Campaign Headquarters. We had created a mathematical system that would give us a random sample of the results based on reports from our officials at the polls. Shortly after eight o’clock, I asked Paul Oquist, the system designer, for an estimate. He wanted to finish the sample with a base of 5 percent of the votes, and he still did not have sufficient data. Right then President Carter and his wife, Rosalyn, arrived with the Carter Center’s team of observers. They were coming from visiting the polls in several Managua neighborhoods, and their faces showed consternation. Jennifer McCoy told me that we were losing by a landslide in the Monseñor Lezcano neighborhood. Carter just asked a few questions unrelated to the topic of the results, and they left. I could not rest from then on. The reports from our officials were still not in yet, and around nine o’clock I pressured Paul to prepare a sample from at least 3 percent. It was ready right away. When I read the initial results on the monitor, that the uno party was ahead with 53 percent of the vote, I asked him if we could consider that irreversible. He nodded solemnly. Then I phoned Daniel at the Government House. ‘‘You sound worried, Doctor,’’ he said in a teasing tone. ‘‘It would be better if you came right away,’’ I told him. When the final results were clear to both of us, we called an urgent meeting of the fsln’s National Directorate at Casa L on Tiscapa Hill. It had been the home of Somoza and his lover, Dinorah Sampson, until his last day. Now Humberto Ortega was using it as a personal office. There was a general sense of confusion and, for some, disbelief.’’Those are very few votes. We have to wait,’’ said the president of the National Assembly, Carlos Núñez, skeptically. ‘‘We have to accept defeat,’’ I told him. This trend is not going to stop.

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I called Campaign Headquarters anyway. Paul now had the 5 percent sample, and the projection had not changed. Despite everything that the uses of power had taught us, electoral fraud was not among our lessons learned. It had not occurred to anyone to distort the results, nor to refuse to acknowledge them. The consensus was to accept defeat and to immediately begin preparing the transition in an orderly manner. The tactical game turned into a fair game. Carter was the best emissary to approach Violeta and the representatives from the uno because there was no connection between the two groups after an extremely rude and polarized campaign. We asked for an urgent meeting. Meanwhile, the decision was made to reinforce the barracks with Sandinista militants who were given weapons, in case the Contras, encouraged by the results, attempted an offensive to seize the fronts in the departments in conflict zones. The meeting took place at approximately eleven o’clock that night at Campaign Headquarters. Again, as in September of 1979 when we arrived triumphant at the White House, Daniel and I stood before Carter who now wanted to console us: ‘‘When I lost the election, I thought that it was the end of the world,’’ he told Daniel. ‘‘But it was not the end of the world.’’ Outside, in a building where we had installed a sound system and lights for the victory celebration, people continued to arrive and the song ‘‘The Fighting Gamecock’’ was playing full blast. The Supreme Electoral Council would soon begin announcing the first partial results, which coincided with our polls and with those done by the uno’s team. Carter was on his way home before midnight. He had passed on our message to Violeta at her home. From that moment on, the transition process began that would be negotiated under her leadership. The lights were off now, and our supporters were leaving the building. They were returning to their homes full of uncertainty, still wearing their campaign t-shirts and hats. The Transition Protocol was signed weeks later. It laid the foundation for stability during a period of great explosive potential for Nicaragua. It established the orderly transfer of the government, the institutionalization of the army and security forces, and the systematic disarmament of the Contras. It also regulated property transfers, which would later be the greatest source of conflict. However, the Protocol divided the uno. The most radical members

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within the winning alliance would accuse Antonio Lacayo, Violeta’s sonin-law and her prime minister, of acquiescing to the fsln. An understanding of that nature, which was difficult to achieve within the existing tensions, clashed with the desires of those who wanted Sandinismo to disappear. Sandinismo had not won the elections, but the Contras had not won the war either. Only coexistence had prevailed. During my long conversations with Daniel, surrounded by that empty feeling that was starting to permeate the Government House, we spoke about the issue of property, as I previously related, and about power itself. One afternoon, he entered my office overwhelmed by a great unease: ‘‘We are going to lose power,’’ he told me. ‘‘We are already losing it, and we do not even realize it.’’ It was as if he had managed to reflect on the consequences of the electoral defeat for the first time. Yet I believe that that was but a moment of doubt in his obsessive determination to conserve a power that, deep down, and following an archaic way of thinking, he did not really think was lost. The Sandinista power apparatus, as it had been consolidated over time, was composed of diverse, interconnected elements: the government, the party, the army, security forces, and popular organizations. It was a hegemonic framework that the war had helped solidify, and the party aspired to take the leading role. Perhaps as a way to satisfy himself, Daniel argued that the electoral defeat only signified the loss of one of the elements of power, that of the government. Meanwhile, the other elements could continue revolving around the party. In addition, it would be sufficient to begin to govern from below, applying pressure from the masses. It did not matter how violent it was as long as it imposed our interests. That was how, just a few weeks after Violeta’s government was in place, there were calls to strike, barricades were set up in the streets, and street riots erupted. Union demands were achieved that way, but it was a method that never elicited mass support, and it quickly lost its effectiveness. Furthermore, Daniel acted with the conviction that every demand by the workers was fair, without the need to stop to consider the viability of the effort that had been undertaken and its political consequences. This approach was based on old revolutionary intransigence, when everything was acceptable against Somoza, except that Violeta’s government did not even have a repressive force in its power. When all was said and done, its fragility became its strength.

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I held a different view and thought that the government was a key element of power because it represented legitimacy. Without it, all of the other elements would collapse. The first to suffer the consequences would be the party itself, which was financed by the government. It would not be able to sustain its bureaucracy, which was useless anyway, from the opposition. On the other hand, Humberto Ortega managed to remain in his position after a dramatic struggle that ended up dividing the uno, but he was the first to understand the necessity of placing the army under the umbrella of institutionality. It was the only way it could survive. He resigned from the fsln’s National Directorate because no one would understand, under the new circumstances, that he could simultaneously be both commander in chief of the army and a party leader, much less in the Sandinista Party. In his zeal to prove his independence, he clashed with Daniel on several occasions, and he became enemies with fsln militants when he eventually accused them of being terrorists for causing the street riots. Tomás Borge was not so lucky. A civilian, Carlos Hurtado, was named in his place as minister of the interior. Hurtado was very close to Antonio Lacayo. In addition, the Sandinista Police Force, which was born out of the revolution just as the army was, bore the burden of defending the institutionality threatened by the fsln’s shock troops. Even policemen who had once been guerrilla commanders, were killed in those confrontations, the greatest contradiction from that drama that was playing itself out behind the same barricades, albeit now without heroism. Furthermore, mass organizations, also born out of the revolution, such as union federations, associations of agricultural producers, professionals and technicians, farmers, women, and youth groups, also sought their independence as a way to achieve legitimacy. They began to elect their leaders rather than to continue allowing them to be appointed from above. The first weeks following the transfer of power were crucial for determining what kind of future awaited us. The fsln was not prepared, as a whole, to assume its role as an opposition party within a democratic system, because it had not been designed for that. Its top-down hierarchy was inspired by Leninist manuals, by the exigencies of war, as well as by caudillismo, our oldest cultural heritage. Around that time, an Assembly of Militants was held in El Crucero, in the mountains of Managua, precisely to discuss the fsln’s future as a political party. Henry Ruiz (‘‘Modesto’’) and Luis Carrión, members of the

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National Directorate, along with Dora María Téllez and I, among others, led a position that achieved majority support: to distance ourselves from the piñata and to demand an explanation from those responsible for the embezzlements; to assure the functioning of the fsln as a democratic political party; and to stop all use of violence. However, those resolutions were never carried out. The insistence on violence profoundly affected the fsln. The end of the war had awakened a new way of thinking in society that was completely devoted to achieving reconciliation. As I stated previously, the war had torn the country down the middle, dividing every social class and the family, which in Nicaragua continues to be the foundation of society. Thousands of refugees returned, crossing the borders of Honduras and Costa Rica. The expatriates from Miami returned. The demobilized soldiers from both sides returned home. Moreover, from the peasant communities to the cities, military commanders from both the Contras and the army sat down at the same table. Two sisters, Rosa and Marta Pasos, daughters of Dr. Luis Pasos Argüello, one of the most eminent jurists in the country, exemplify this division. One had been the spokeswoman for the army in Managua while the other was the spokeswoman for the Contra Directorate in Miami. Now they too were meeting. Tolerance and reconciling with family was something that the nation was enjoying. In that atmosphere, the calls to street violence seemed out of place, except for the most faithful to orthodoxy. After accepting the trauma of the defeat, I began to feel relieved. I was leaving the government, and I did not hold any position within the party, so I made plans to resume my life as a writer. I began by accepting an invitation from the University of Oviedo, in Spain, to participate in a conference on creative writing. However, according to the Constitution, as the losing vice-presidential candidate, I had been elected as Daniel’s replacement delegate to the National Assembly. As the losing presidential candidate, he had received the full rights to that seat. The fsln’s National Directorate decided that Daniel should remain as the head of the party while I would take his seat and lead the Sandinistas in the legislature. The roles assigned to us through that process helped shape our differences of opinion, and later our divided positions. It was a new and complicated experience for me. Among the elected deputies were guerrilla commanders and longtime Sandinista militants

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who referred to themselves as ‘‘historic.’’ Many of them were difficult to lead. There were others with prominent roles in the government who had never imagined occupying their seats before the electoral defeat and who lacked legislative experience, just as I did. Still others were from the previous legislature, faithful to Commander Carlos Núñez, a member of the fsln’s National Directorate. He was president of the Assembly until I suddenly appeared above him. Luckily, my brother Rogelio was among those elected. He was a better politician than I was and managed to get along with everyone. First of all, we had to establish democratic rules for decision making, beginning with my own position, which was submitted to a vote. Then we elected an executive committee with Dora María Téllez as second-incommand. We discussed topics on the legislative agenda ad nauseam before voting on the position the Sandinistas would take in the plenary session. Every association, agreement, and alliance was also discussed and submitted to a vote. It was a new procedure within the fsln because its only previous experience was with the top-down hierarchy. For the first time in the nation’s history, the National Assembly became the political center, which gave the Sandinista bloc, and its decisions, a separate authority. This distanced it from the party apparatus that, under Daniel’s leadership, had rushed into the streets to defy the system that we were simultaneously cultivating in the parliament building. We suddenly found ourselves in the assembly hall, on the other side of the aisle from Contra leaders who had arrived from Miami and who were now deputies, and from recalcitrant opponents of Sandinismo who just wanted to see us disappear. Yet we opened the dialogue, and that coexistence gave birth to a different political climate for Nicaragua. The government lacked a legislative majority from the outset. Violeta Chamorro did not belong to any party, and her candidacy had been the subject of many debates within the uno coalition, whose members again ranged from diehard Communists to staunch Conservatives. That coalition, which was fragile itself, collapsed following the signing of the Transition Protocol. From the very first day, we formed a majority alliance with those deputies who continued to support the government. Although at midterm, we had to enter into a different alliance with the other sector of deputies from the uno. This was in order to reform the Political Constitution, a move that defied the will of the government as

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well as the fsln. It was also in the midst of a severe institutional crisis that involved every branch of government. The constitutional reforms, enacted at the end of 1995, prohibited successive presidential reelection, the succession of the president by his or her closest relatives, or for a relative of the president to be army chief of staff. In this way, they eliminated the long-standing authoritarian tradition in the country based on governing families, which the Constitution of 1987, our Constitution, had left intact. The debate over the reforms put an end to the alliance that had formed between Antonio Lacayo, Humberto Ortega and myself, representing the government, the army, and the National Assembly respectively. That alliance went beyond the fsln’s structure and acted against the opinions of the National Directorate on more than a few occasions, and it was productive while the three of us managed to remain united in the search for democratization, stability, and the strengthening of institutions. It facilitated the disarmament of the Contras and the transformation of the army, which developed a national character, without party affiliation. It also gave the National Police an institutional framework. Finally, it worked to seek a solution to the problems with private property, which continued to be abundant, and to organize the process of privatization, despite all the abuses that were committed in both cases. The alliance collapsed in part from Antonio Lacayo’s unyielding opposition to the constitutional reforms, which blocked his own presidential candidacy for being Violeta’s son-in-law. It also had to do with Humberto Ortega’s insistence on continuing indefinitely as army chief of staff, before he clashed with Violeta, which finally forced his exit. It was also related to the rupture within the fsln, in which I was a participant. I had joined the fsln’s National Directorate immediately following the First Congress that was held in July 1991. There was an intense debate then about the election process. Those of us who then sought internal reform proposed that it should be individual, and not with all candidates together on a plancha (plate). An electoral plancha meant that the fsln’s old National Directorate could be reelected as a bloc without the need to vote for each member separately, and that was what prevailed. In the end, I was included, after a great deal of wrangling, along with René Núñez, faithful to the old guard and secretary for the National Directorate the entire time. He replaced his brother Carlos, who had died

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a short time before. Between the two of us, we made nine, the sacred number, because Humberto Ortega did not put his name forward. The greatest opposition to my inclusion came from Daniel’s side. It was not only because we were in opposing camps, but because he still considered ideology to be the decisive factor. For him, the National Directorate should continue to be made up exclusively of survivors of the catacombs, and I was not among them. Ideological faithfulness to a world that no longer existed remained an obsession with the old guard. At that time, a renovating faction emerged within the fsln, which I led, rivaled by the orthodox faction, led by Daniel. He worked to convene an Extraordinary Congress to settle the dispute, and at that Congress, which took place in May 1994, we were defeated by a bureaucratic machine and I was removed from the National Directorate. It would not be long before I lost my position as head of the Sandinistas in the legislature, which Daniel claimed for himself. I soon found myself under the barrage of criticism that the party reserved for its worst enemies. Father Miguel d’Escoto, now a flaming orthodox, appeared five days in a row on Radio Ya to hurl choice insults at me. Then, on the same radio station, they started attacking my daughter María like a vicious gang, as I mentioned at the beginning of this book. It was a conspiracy that had been plotted in the shadows by my very own lifelong compañeros. The time had come to say goodbye. The same day that Radio Ya was repeatedly attacking María, I called a press conference at my offices in the Las Palmas neighborhood. In the presence of Tulita and my three children, who had come to stand beside me once again, I announced my resignation from the fsln. All of that seemed unreal as well. I was seated in front of a host of microphones at the conference table where the Sandinistas in the legislature had held all of their debates. Behind me was Sandino’s portrait painted by master artist Arnoldo Guillén. In that painting, Sandino is clutching a whip with a silver handle, leaning slightly, his sharp face under the rim of a Stetson hat. The tips of a fountain pen and pencil set are showing under his jacket lapel. It was as if he was there once again to bid me farewell, or to welcome me. I cannot deny it. My emotions were stirred by memories of the past, by everything that lay behind me, and by the insults, now that Saturn had picked me up off the ground to place me in his jaws.

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Epilogue

I

recently went to Indianapolis to give a talk at Butler University on being a creative writer. Before my presentation, I had a telephone interview with a reporter from the Indianapolis Star, Diana Penner. She opened with a question about how I felt now that I am a visiting professor at the University of Maryland, College Park, and Oliver North has a radio program in Virginia. We were both on opposite sides of the same history, and now we were neighbors. She told me: ‘‘You, who lost the presidential elections in 1996, and North, who failed as a senatorial candidate in 1994.’’ She laughed as she asked me the question, and I responded in the same manner. Life, I told her, is like a stage. The actors enter and exit, sometimes wearing different costumes. And in politics, the audience assigns the roles. They did not give one to me in the last election, and I hope it stays that way forever. She also asked me if, at this point, I believed that the revolution had been worthwhile, and I responded with my reflection at the beginning of this book: I am troubled by the very idea that I could have been born a bit sooner or a bit later so that I would have missed it because it continues giving me satisfaction despite all the disillusion. I remember one afternoon in 1998 when I had a book signing for my novel Margarita, How Beautiful the Sea. It was at the Cálamo Bookstore in Zaragoza, part of a promotional tour throughout Spain. As my fellow authors know, those formalities are always

awkward, and there is no worse torture than sitting at the table the bookseller has prepared beforehand, waiting for readers who sometimes fail to show up in the large numbers one would hope to have. Quite a few came on that occasion, as if it were a pilgrimage. The front door kept opening to the sound of those bells that announce the presence of customers, and they continued to enter. Most of them were couples who had made plans to meet at the bookstore, both coming from different directions, from work or home. They came with children holding their hands, children with a skin tone and a smile that I knew well, darkskinned, with Indian features, a black-haired little boy, a little girl with pigtails, and where else could they be from but Nicaragua? They were children orphaned by war or abandoned, from León, Estelí, Matagalpa, and they looked at me and smiled. Their adoptive parents had answered the revolution’s call to vaccinate, to teach, to build schools, to help harvest crops. They have continued to come after the electoral defeat, new waves of younger volunteers. It is a culture of solidarity nurtured over many years. It took root and has withstood every wind, outlasting Sandinismo in the government, and it easily sprouts again, in Spain and in other areas, when there are hurricanes or disasters. During these final days of winter in Washington, D.C., I finally had my meeting with Claudia, Idania Fernández’s daughter. Idania had left Claudia at four years of age when the mother went to Nicaragua to join the clandestine struggle, which she did not survive. Claudia came to visit some friends, and she had to return the following day to Managua because classes are starting at the National Autonomous University, which she attends. We met to have lunch at the Wall Street Deli on Wilson Boulevard, very close to my apartment in Arlington. It was one of those cold, nondescript places where they serve unappetizing fast food to bank tellers, data entry clerks, and office staff who swarm down at that time of day on elevators in office buildings of glass and chrome. Now, I tell Claudia, as we carry our trays to the table, we can finally talk about your mother. By the time the customers are emptying out of the restaurant to return to their cubicles, I have finished telling her what I know about Idania, the wound on her hand that she received in the Southern Front, when I saw her in Panama, dinner at the Panama Hilton Hotel, and when she died in León. Then she starts with what she remembers, which is not much.

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Toward the end of 1978, Claudia was already living in Dallas with her mother’s parents. Her grandfather had been transferred there from Quito by the commercial firm where he worked, and she remembers that they took her to Costa Rica to see Idania. A hazy image is all that remains in her memory. It mostly resembles a voice that speaks to her and a hand that touches her, but without a face or a body. She then tells me that after she saw her that time, she had a dream where she saw bloodshed, blood everywhere. She has always lived with her grandparents. There are no photos of Idania at their home in Managua, except one that her grandfather hides in a folder, the photograph of Idania riddled with bullets in a pool of blood that he cut from the newspaper Novedades. Then she asks me what she was like, and I describe her. I also tell her that they look alike, both dark skinned, the same sparkling eyes, the same smile. Claudia has held onto the cassette tapes that Idania used to send her with messages. (It was the custom back then, I explain to her, to communicate by cassette tape.) Idania also recorded songs there that she sang herself accompanied by a guitar. Claudia tells me that she has a couple of letters from her mother too that she is going to send me from Nicaragua. My son Sergio came a week ago and brought me those letters, both from 1979. She sent the first, dated March 8, to Claudia from Panama, before she left. The last one is dated March 18, a little less than a month before they killed her. She must have sent it from León. Clandestine letters obviously never mentioned the place where they had been written, and sometimes they did not have a date either. In the first letter, she tries to explain the reason for her decision to join the struggle. Then, at the end, she adds: ‘‘I am telling you this in case they never get around to saying it or in case I cannot be the one to tell you, and this is possible because I am and we are aware of what is ahead and who the enemy is; I do not want to leave you with words, promises, or morality lessons. I am leaving you a way of life, nothing more.’’ Then in the final letter, now from the catacombs and when she knows that she is taking every risk, because she knows who the enemy is, Idania, strangely, no longer speaks of death. Her message is full of hope, and she tries to reach her daughter’s ear with maternal affection: When it is all over and we are at peace, I am going to send for you so that we can be together and play a lot. I am going to buy a rag doll in

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Masaya, and we are going to take her for a walk in the park. We are going to sit outside with other children in Monimbo and in Subtiava, and we are going to play the guitar and sing beautiful children’s songs, Nicaraguan songs, and revolutionary songs. When we are together in Nicaragua, everything is going to be different, and we are going to be happy, and you are going to go to school so that you know more things. When I met Claudia that time, when we were already on the street ready to say goodbye, I asked her, rather hesitantly, if she thought that her mother’s sacrifice had been worthwhile. ‘‘I would have done the same thing,’’ she answered without thinking twice, her hands in the pockets of her wool coat. And I copy the rest of her words, which I note when I return to my apartment: she did not give her life in vain. She did it from her heart, for her unselfish love, and she put the well-being of others above her own life. The outcomes are not important. What matters is her idealism. ‘‘Above all,’’ she added ‘‘in this age without ideals,’’ and she smiled at me, very calm. She walked away toward the subway entrance, and she turned to wave goodbye to me, smiling again. Then I thought: how fortunate that the revolution still lives on in a child who walks through a bookstore aisle holding a hand, who comes up to you and smiles at you with Claudia’s smile, who has the same smile as Idania. managua, december 1998–january 1999 arlington, february–april 1999

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Chronology, 1979–1990

1979 MAY 24

The fsln begins its final offensive against Anastasio Somoza Debayle’s regime.

JUNE 4

The fsln convenes a general revolutionary strike and business shutdown.

JUNE 16

The Government Junta for National Reconstruction (jgrn) is announced. It includes Violeta Chamorro, Moisés Hassan, Daniel Ortega, Sergio Ramírez, and Alfonso Robelo.

JULY 17

Somoza resigns as president of the Republic and flees to the United States.

JULY 19

The fsln’s guerrilla troops enter Managua in triumph and occupy the capital.

JULY 20

The Government Junta arrives in Managua from León. The Fundamental Statute of the Republic repeals the Constitution, disbands the National Guard and intelligence organizations, and defines the powers of the state. With the promulgation of Decree 3, all the wealth belonging to the Somoza family is confiscated.

JULY 22

The Law of National Emergency is declared.

JULY 26

The Sandinista Workers’ Federation (cst) is organized. The financial system is nationalized.

AUG. 6

International commerce is nationalized.

AUG. 8

Decree 3 is broadened to include Somoza family members, as well as civilian and military supporters.

AUG. 21

The Statute of Rights and Guarantees of Nicaraguan Citizens is issued. The death penalty is abolished.

AUG. 22

The Sandinista Popular Army (eps) is created.

AUG. 25

The state takes control of natural resources.

SEPT. 30

Higher education is declared free of charge.

OCT. 31

The National Financial System is created to direct the nationalized economy

NOV. 29

The National Fund to Fight Unemployment is created.

DEC. 20

The Lease Law reduces rents and outlines the rights of tenants.

1980 FEB. 5

A list of maximum prices for eleven essential consumer commodities is approved.

FEB. 22

The Consumer Defense Law is enacted.

MARCH 22

The National Literacy Crusade begins.

APRIL 18

Violeta Chamorro resigns from the Government Junta for National Reconstruction (jgrn)

APRIL 22

Alfonso Robelo resigns from the jgrn.

MAY 13

The U.S. government makes the jgrn’s reconstitution a condition for a $70 million loan.

MAY 18

The fsln names Conservatives Rafael Córdoba Rivas and Arturo Cruz as new members of the jgrn.

AUG. 18

The National Literacy Crusade concludes with more than 400,000 literate. The illiteracy rate is reduced from 50 percent to 12 percent.

AUG. 18

Elections are announced for 1985.

SEPT. 12

President Carter approves $75 million in economic aid to Nicaragua.

SEPT. 17

Anastasio Somoza Debayle is murdered in Asunción, Paraguay.

NOV. 4

Ronald Reagan is elected president of the United States.

NOV. 11–12

cosep (The Superior Council of Private Enterprise) declares that the government no longer represents plural interests and has become a single-party government run by the fsln. It withdraws from the Council of State.

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1981 JAN. 20

Ronald Reagan is inaugurated as president of the United States.

JAN. 21

Reagan cancels the final payment of $15 million of the $75 million approved by the Carter administration.

FEB. 23

The U.S. State Department publishes the ‘‘White Paper’’ about El Salvador, in which Nicaragua is accused of weapons transfer to the Salvadoran guerrillas.

MARCH 4

The jgrn is reduced to three members: Daniel Ortega, Sergio Ramírez, and Rafael Córdoba Rivas.

MARCH 8

The United States announces that it will not give Nicaragua a $9.6 million loan to purchase wheat.

MARCH 19

The North American press reports on the existence of Nicaraguan counterrevolutionary training camps in Florida.

APRIL 25

The National Union of Farmers and Ranchers (unag) is established. It is composed of small and midsized agricultural producers.

MAY 26

The first shipment of wheat from the Soviet Union arrives in Nicaragua.

AUG. 19

The revolutionary government decrees state appropriation of abandoned property (Absentee Law). The Agrarian Reform Law is approved, which expropriates abandoned, idle, or underused lands.

SEPT. 9

A State of Economic and Social Emergency is declared for one year.

SEPT. 12

The Agricultural Cooperative Law is enacted.

NOV. 6

The United States exerts pressure to block loans from the idb (Inter-American Development Bank) to Nicaragua.

1982 JAN. 19

The United States vetoes an idb loan for $500,000 to Nicaragua.

FEB. 7

Seventy thousand health brigade volunteers participate in the massive campaign against poliomyelitis.

FEB. 11

The Social Security Law is enacted.

FEB. 14

The United States press media reveal that President Reagan has approved a plan for covert operations against Nicaragua, which includes $19 million that will be administered by the cia.

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FEB. 14

Resettlement is complete of more than 8,000 Miskito Indians from the shores of the Coco River on the Honduran Border to lands in the interior.

FEB. 18

The Nicaraguan Episcopal Conference (cen) denounces the resettlement of the Miskito Indians.

MAY 25

Reagan launches the ‘‘mini Marshall Plan’’ for Central America and the Caribbean. Nicaragua is excluded from it.

JUNE 7

The Trade Regulation and Consumer Protection Law gives the Ministry of Internal Commerce complete control of commerce in Nicaragua, including imported products.

JULY 28

Nicaragua calls on the United States to sustain direct negotiations.

JULY 31

The jgrn announces a series of measures to rationalize the consumption of petroleum products.

SEPT. 16

The idb approves a loan for $34.4 million to Nicaragua, but the United States vetoes it.

OCT. 19

Nicaragua is elected to the un Security Council despite United States opposition.

DEC. 8

The House of Representatives votes unanimously to prohibit the Pentagon and the cia from training or arming anti-Sandinistas.

1983 JAN. 9

Mexico, Colombia, Venezuela, and Panama constitute the Contadora Group.

MARCH 4

Pope John Paul II visits Nicaragua.

APRIL 6

The World Health Organization (who) and The United Nations Children’s Fund (unicef) declare Nicaragua a ‘‘model country for health.’’

MAY 9

The Reagan administration reduces Nicaragua’s sugar export quota to the United States by 90 percent.

MAY 19

The un Security Council approves a resolution that calls an end to interventionism in Central America and supports the Contadora Group.

MAY 29

The jgrn undertakes measures to halt the monetary destabilization and to neutralize sources of the Contra’s financing.

JUNE 5

Three North American diplomats are accused of espionage and expelled from Nicaragua. In retaliation, the United States closes six Nicaraguan consulates.

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JUNE 29

The United States vetoes an idb loan to Nicaragua for $1.7 million.

JULY 17

The Council of State approves the Political Parties Law.

AUG. 29

The bishops speak out against the initiative for the Patriotic Military Service (smp) Law that the jgrn presents before the Council of State.

SEPT. 22

The U.S. Senate Intelligence Committee approves Reagan’s $19 million plan to continue financing the Contras.

OCT. 1

General Paul Gorman, Southern Command leader, convenes military commanders from Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador to discuss the possibility of reviving the Central American Defense Council (condeca).

OCT. 6

The Patriotic Military Service (smp) Law is promulgated.

OCT. 10

Terrorists trained by the cia attack the Port of Corinto on Nicaragua’s Pacific and destroy fuel storage tanks.

OCT. 14

The jgrn announces severe military, economic, and political measures to halt the Contra’s escalating aggressions.

NOV. 17

The U.S. Congress approves an additional $24 million to aid the Contras.

DEC. 24

The opposition parties caution that they will not participate in the 1984 elections if their conditions are not met, which include banning the military from voting and permitting Nicaraguan residents living outside the country to vote.

1984 FEB. 21

The jgrn announces that elections will be moved up to November 4, 1984.

FEB. 24

Commandos from the cia mine principal Nicaraguan ports.

MARCH 12

The United States decides to send a naval fleet to Nicaragua’s Caribbean coast.

MARCH 15

The Council of State approves the Electoral Law.

APRIL 4

The United States vetoes the un Security Council resolution that condemns the mining of the ports.

APRIL 9

Nicaragua presents a complaint before the International Court of Justice (icj) at The Hague for the mining of the ports and United States aid to the Contras.

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MAY 10

The icj orders the United States to suspend the mining of the ports and aid to the Contras.

JUNE 9

The Contadora Act on Peace and Co-operation in Central America is created.

JUNE 25

The United States and Nicaragua begin talks in Manzanillo, Mexico, which end the following year on January 18, when the United States withdraws from them.

AUG. 1

Nicaragua’s electoral campaign officially begins.

SEPT. 21

Nicaragua announces that it will endorse in its entirety the revision of the Contadora Act.

OCT. 4

The U.S. Senate approves $28 million requested by Reagan for the counterrevolution.

NOV. 4

Daniel Ortega and Sergio Ramírez win the general elections, in which six opposition parties participate. However, the uno and its presidential candidate, Arturo Cruz, had withdrawn.

NOV. 6

Ronald Reagan is reelected in the United States, and that same day threatens Nicaragua with direct military intervention.

NOV. 12

Blackbird sr-71 spy planes fly over Nicaragua.

NOV. 30

Political parties and organizations representing the opposition decide to withdraw from the National Dialogue that had been convened by the fsln.

DEC. 13

Honduras announces an agreement with the United States for the establishment of permanent military bases in its territory.

1985 JAN. 10

Daniel Ortega and Sergio Ramírez become president and vicepresident, respectively. The National Assembly is officially installed.

FEB. 8

Severe measures for economic adjustment are announced. These include currency devaluation, the elimination of subsidies for essential consumer commodities, the reduction in public investment, a free market based on the dollar, and salary increases to compensate for the devaluation.

APRIL 18

The Socialist International (si) condemns the Peace Plan that President Reagan had made public in early April.

APRIL 24

The U.S. Congress votes against Reagan’s Peace Plan; Monsignor Miguel Obando is promoted to cardinal by Pope John Paul II.

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MAY 1

The Reagan administration decrees a trade embargo against Nicaragua.

MAY 10

New measures are announced that deepen the economic adjustment begun three months before.

MAY 17

Nicaragua proposes to the United States to resume the Manzanillo talks.

JUNE 19

Honduras, El Salvador, and Costa Rica break up the Contadora Group meeting by refusing to give priority to a discussion of the embargo and U.S. military aggression against Nicaragua.

JULY 25

The U.S. Congress ratifies the approval of $20 million for the Contras.

SEPT. 9

There is a North American diplomatic offensive in Latin America to boycott the next meeting of the Contadora Group.

OCT. 8

The Contadora Group meeting fails when the chancellors from Central America refuse to endorse the Act on Peace and Co-operation in Central America approved in 1984.

OCT. 24

The European Parliament declares that United States policy toward Nicaragua is a conscious attempt to push the country toward a dictatorship.

1986 JAN. 11

José Azcona Hoyo, president elect of Honduras, admits to the presence of Contra camps in its territory.

FEB. 25

Reagan requests the approval for $100 million from the U.S. Congress for the Contras. Sixty million are destined for military assistance.

MARCH 9

The government announces a new package of economic measures that affect the cost of fuel, public services, and transportation. There is also a new salary adjustment.

APRIL 11

Nicaragua officially notifies the Contadora Group that it will endorse the Peace Act on June 6, provided that North American aggression has ceased by that date.

JUNE 20

West Germany announces that it will not resume its aid to Nicaragua, discontinued since 1984.

JUNE 25

The U.S. House of Representatives approves the $100 million for the Contras and authorizes the cia to direct operations against Nicaragua.

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JUNE 27

The icj condemns the United States as the aggressor nation against Nicaragua, which it should compensate for the damage caused. The United States ignores the court ruling.

AUG. 14

The U.S. Senate approves the transfer of the $100 million to the Nicaraguan counterrevolutionaries.

SEPT. 19

The U.S. House of Representatives prohibits the use of secret cia funds in the campaign against Nicaragua.

OCT. 7

A United States plane transporting supplies to the Contras to the south of Nicaragua is shot down. Eugene Hasenfus is captured. He is the only survivor.

NOV. 19

The National Assembly approves the new Political Constitution, which should take effect beginning on January 10, 1987.

NOV. 26

The Iran-Contra scandal explodes.

1987 FEB. 26

The U.S. government considers imposing a naval blockade against Nicaragua to prevent the flow of Soviet aid.

APRIL 9

The application of taxes on the private sector is announced, and the rates increase on rum, beer, cigarettes, and carbonated beverages.

APRIL 10

There is a deficit in sugar production.

MAY 3

The meeting of the Inter-Parliamentary Union (ipu) concludes in Managua with strong support for Nicaragua and the Contadora Group, and a condemnation of aggression by the United States.

MAY 5

With the increasing scarcity of sugar, cooking oil, rice, and powdered milk, the government takes measures to ensure that employees receive the basic supply.

JUNE 7

The government announces new fiscal adjustments and the reinforcement of military defense.

JULY 8

There is an increase in prices for milk, beef, eggs, and rice.

AUG. 3

There is a plan established to reduce fuel consumption, and the Saturday workday is suspended.

AUG. 5

The United States proposes a direct dialogue between the Nicaraguan government and the Contras, in exchange for postponing a request to the U.S. Congress for an additional $105 million in aid for the counterrevolutionaries.

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AUG. 7

Nicaragua, on the other hand, proposes resuming talks with the United States, which Secretary of State George Shultz rejects.

AUG. 7

In Guatemala, the Central American presidents sign the ‘‘Procedure to Establish a Firm and Lasting Peace in Central America,’’ known as Esquipulas II Accords.

AUG. 12

The Nicaraguan government invites the Catholic Church and political parties to join the National Commission on Reconciliation.

AUG. 30

Strong fiscal measures are announced along with greater restrictions on fuel consumption.

SEPT. 3

The National Assembly approves the Statute of Autonomy for the regions of Nicaragua’s Atlantic coast.

SEPT. 8

The ussr announces the transfer of 100 metric tons of oil to Nicaragua, besides the 300 agreed to previously.

SEPT. 27

The government decrees partial amnesty that benefits those who have not committed atrocities.

NOV. 8

Prices for fuels increase.

NOV. 25

The government and political parties in the opposition sign the first accords for National Dialogue.

NOV. 26

The icj considers Nicaragua’s claim against the United States and authorizes Nicaragua to demand compensation from that country.

DEC. 22

The Contras attack villages in the mining region on the Atlantic coast, causing numerous casualties. The U.S. Congress approves $8.1 million for the counterrevolution.

1988 JAN. 15

There is a plan to ration energy throughout the country due to the sabotage of high-tension towers.

FEB. 14

The national currency is changed abruptly, and currency reform begins.

FEB. 27

New austerity measures are announced, among them compression of the state.

MARCH 3

The government appoints General Humberto Ortega to negotiate the cease-fire with the Contra Directorate.

MARCH 3–15

The eps’s Operation ‘‘Danto 88’’ attempts to destroy Contra training camps in Honduras. The United States mobilizes military forces to Honduras. Nicaragua calls an emergency meeting of the un Security Council. CHRONOLOGY, 1979 – 1990

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MARCH 23

The Sapoa Accords are signed between the government and the Contras.

JUNE 29

The National Assembly approves the Municipalities Law.

JULY 12

The Nicaraguan government expels U.S. ambassador, Richard Melton, and seven other diplomats accused of intervening in the nation’s internal affairs.

JULY 13

The U.S. government expels the ambassador from Nicaragua, Carlos Tünnermann, and seven Nicaraguan diplomats.

JULY 31

The U.S. Senate approves $27 million for the Contras: $11 million in humanitarian aid and $16 million in military aid.

AUG. 25

The National Assembly approves the Electoral Law.

OCT. 21

As it passes through Nicaragua, Hurricane Joan leaves more than 180,000 victims, destroys 500,000 hectares of forest, and causes $840 million in losses.

1989 JAN. 25

The national currency is again devalued.

FEB. 6

Tax measures are created to reduce the fiscal deficit.

FEB. 14

There is an announcement to move up elections to the first trimester in 1990.

FEB. 15

The Central American Presidential Summit in Costa del Sol, El Salvador, concludes with the agreement to elaborate a plan for the demobilization, the repatriation, or the relocation of the Contras within ninety days.

APRIL 13

The currency is again devalued.

APRIL 14

The U.S. House of Representatives approves $47 million in humanitarian aid to the Nicaraguan counterrevolution and defense spending to political groups within Nicaragua, for a total of $60 million.

MAY 26

The Nicaraguan government decides to expel two bureaucrats from the U.S. embassy in Managua for meddling in the nation’s internal affairs.

JUNE 1

The United States gives the minister and advisers at the Nicaraguan embassy in Washington, D.C., seventy-two hours to leave the country.

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JUNE 30

The U.S. House of Representatives approves a measure that allows the government to provide covert aid to political parties that support North American policy.

AUG. 3

The National Dialogue begins in Managua in the presence of twenty-one political parties that issue a statement supporting the disarmament of the Contras.

AUG. 8

The first un elections-monitoring mission arrives in Managua to observe the electoral process.

AUG. 8

The Central American Presidential Summit ends in Tela, Honduras, where a period of three months is established to disarm the Contras and to dismantle their bases in Honduras, following the creation of a Commission for Support and Verification (ciav) through the oas.

AUG. 24

The currency is again devalued; the exchange rate between the córdoba and the U.S. dollar rises to 21.300 to 1.

SEPT. 17

Former U.S. President Jimmy Carter arrives in Nicaragua to observe the electoral process as coordinator for the Council of Freely Elected Heads of Government.

SEPT. 21

Daniel Ortega and Sergio Ramírez are selected as the fsln’s candidates for president and vice-president of Nicaragua.

SEPT. 21

President George H. W. Bush asks the U.S. Congress for $9 million in direct and indirect aid to finance the uno party’s electoral campaign.

SEPT. 23

The Nicaraguan government announces a salary readjustment of 30 percent.

DEC. 13

The Central American Presidential Summit ends in San Isidro de Coronado, Costa Rica.

DEC. 20

North American troops invade Panama.

DEC. 22

The Nicaraguan Embassy in Panama is surrounded by North American forces. The eps surrounds the U.S. embassy in Managua with tanks.

1990 JAN. 22

The currency is again devalued, making the exchange rate between the córdoba and the U.S. dollar 46.380 to 1.

FEB. 21

More than half a million people participate in the fsln’s final campaign rally in Managua.

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FEB. 22

The Southern Command orders that the Nicaraguan government’s bank assets in Panama be frozen.

FEB. 24

Top-level officials from the Bush administration acknowledge that a fair victory of Daniel Ortega over Violeta Chamorro would force the United States to normalize relations with the Nicaraguan government.

FEB. 25

Against all predictions, the Unified Nicaraguan Opposition (uno) defeats the fsln in the general elections.

FEB. 26

Daniel Ortega acknowledges Violeta Chamorro’s victory and assures that he will respect the will of the people.

MARCH 13

President George H. W. Bush offers to end the embargo against Nicaragua and presents the U.S. Congress with a request for $500 million dollars.

MARCH 27

The transition teams for the incoming government, chaired by Antonio Lacayo, and the outgoing government, led by Humberto Ortega, sign the Protocol for the Transfer of Executive Power for the Republic of Nicaragua, also known as the Transition Protocol.

APRIL 10

The official exchange rate for the córdoba to the U.S. dollar reaches 51.200 to 1.

APRIL 21

The new National Assembly is installed and the uno coalition splits.

APRIL 25

Violeta Chamorro assumes the presidency of the Republic.

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Glossary

ARDE (Democratic Revolutionary Alliance): This was an armed organization founded

in 1982 by Edén Pastora and Alfonso Robelo in Costa Rica. It was outside the umbrella of the rn (Nicaraguan Resistance), but it was also eventually financed by the cia. BLI (Irregular Warfare Battalion): The eps (Popular Sandinista Army) organized

these battalions to fight the war with the Contras. They were made up of conscripts from the smp (Patriotic Military Service). Each one had approximately 600 combatants. The Contras, on the other hand, had been organized in task forces. Brigadista: The Spanish term brigadista is used in Nicaragua to refer to the thou-

sands of national and international volunteers who served in the 1980 National Literacy Crusade and subsequent local projects for education, health, and other social programs. It has a military origin both in its etymological connection to a military ‘‘brigade’’ and as a historical reference to the International Brigades during the Spanish Civil War (1936–39), which consisted of battalions made up of antifascist international volunteers. Caudillo: The Spanish term caudillo indicates a military-political leader in Spain

and Latin America. Historically, it refers to strongmen who have achieved or maintained power through violence and personal relationships. It is often used in reference to a dictator. CIA (Central Intelligence Agency): The United States Central Intelligence Agency was

directed by William Casey during the Reagan years. It organized different factions of the Contras that were part of the rn (Nicaraguan Resistance) and was in charge of their financing, their logistical support, and their training. Compañero: The Spanish term compañero (also compa or compita) literally refers to

a companion or partner. In the political revolutionary context, it is a comrade and friend. Contadora (Contadora Group): Panama, Colombia, Venezuela, and Mexico were

members. It put forward an important peace initiative to solve the Central American conflict during the 1980s. Its name comes from Contadora Island in Panama where the foreign ministers from those countries held their first meeting. Later a Contadora Support Group was formed, which included Argentina, Brazil, Peru, and Uruguay. Contra, Contras (From Counterrevolution, Counterrevolutionaries): This is what the Nica-

raguan Resistance (rn) was called. It was an umbrella for all the armed organizations that emerged following the triumph of the Sandinista Revolution, which the cia managed to consolidate with logistical, material, and financial support. Its most important bases were in Honduran territory. COSIP (Superior Council of Private Initiative): This business organization from the

private sector existed during the struggle against Somoza. It was later called cosep (Superior Council of Private Enterprise). CPSU (Communist Party of the Soviet Union): Created according to Leninist doctrine, it

was the only party under the Soviet regime and the model for Communist Parties throughout the world. At the time of the fsln’s struggle against Somoza, the cpsu officially opposed armed insurgencies and favored the peaceful insertion of Communist Parties into each country’s political system. CSUCA (Central American University Superior Council): Founded in 1948, its headquar-

ters was in San José, Costa Rica. Its members include national universities in the region. The author was elected secretary general on two occasions: 1968 and 1976. DGSE (General Directorate of State Security): This was the Sandinista government’s

intelligence organization under the Ministry of the Interior. After 1990 it became the Directorate of Defense Information (did) and was transferred to the National Army. EPS (Sandinista Popular Army): It was created following the triumph of the revolution

and it led the ten-year war against the Nicaraguan Resistance (rn) forces. After the fsln’s electoral defeat in 1990, in began a process of institutionalization and was eventually called the Nicaraguan Army in the 1995 constitutional reform. Divested of all party affiliations, it is now a professional institution. FAO (Broad Opposition Front): It was formed in 1978 by various parties in opposition

to Somoza. Most of them were from the Right, and it was dissolved following the revolution’s triumph. FMLN (Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front): This organization grouped together

all the guerrilla forces in El Salvador, in a guerrilla struggle for many years. It

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became a political party after the signing of the peace accords with the government of President Alfredo Cristiani in 1992. Mauricio Funes won the presidential elections in 2009 representing the fmln. FSLN (Sandinista National Liberation Front): Founded in 1963 under the command of

Carlos Fonseca Amador, it waged a lengthy armed struggle against the Somoza dictatorship, it led the 1979 Revolution, and it was the dominant political power in Nicaragua during the 1980s. After the electoral defeat in 1990, Daniel Ortega was again unsuccessful as the fsln’s presidential candidate in 1996 and 2001. Following the electoral reforms that resulted from the pact between the fsln and Arnoldo Alemán’s Liberal Constitutionalist Party (plc), Ortega won the presidential election in 2006. This time, former Contra Jaime Morales Carazo was his vice-presidential running mate. German Democratic Republic: It was created in 1948 after the fall of Nazism and as a

consequence of Europe’s division, when Germany was divided into East Germany and West Germany. It remained under Soviet control until it disappeared in 1989 when it was absorbed by the gfa (German Federal Republic) at the beginning of the debacle of the Soviet bloc countries. GPP (Prolonged Popular War): This was one of the three fsln factions. It proposed

armed struggle in the mountains in keeping with guerrilla foco theory. Its most well-known commander at the time of the triumph was Henry Ruiz (‘‘Modesto’’), commander of the ‘‘Pablo Úbeda’’ column. Group of Twelve: It was originally composed of the following twelve members:

1. Emilio Baltodano Cantarero (businessman, comptroller general of the Republic); 2. Fernando Cardenal Martínez (Jesuit priest, director of the National Literacy Crusade, and minister of education); 3. Ernesto Castillo Martínez (lawyer, minister of justice, and ambassador to the ussr); 4. Ricardo Coronel Kautz (agricultural engineer, vice-minister of agrarian reform); 5. Arturo Cruz (economist, president of the Central Bank of Nicaragua, member of the Government Junta for National Reconstruction, presidential candidate in 1984 for the uno, National Opposition Union, and member of the Contra’s Directorate of Nicaraguan Resistance); 6. Joaquín Cuadra Chamorro (lawyer, minister of finance, president of the Central Bank of Nicaragua); 7. Miguel d’Escoto (Maryknoll priest, foreign minister, president of the SixtyThird Session of the United Nations General Assembly); 8. Carlos Gutiérrez (dental surgeon, ambassador to Mexico); 9. Felipe Mántica Abaunza (businessman who left the group in 1977); 10. Sergio Ramírez Mercado (lawyer, writer, member of the Government Junta

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225

for National Reconstruction, vice-president, head of the Sandinistas in the National Assembly following the 1990 elections, founder of the mrs (Sandinista Renovation Movement) after his definitive break from the fsln, presidential candidate in 1996); 11. Casimiro Sotelo (architect, ambassador to Canada); 12. Carlos Tünnermann Bernheim (lawyer, educator, minister of education, ambassador to the United States). Two members later joined the group: Reinaldo Antonio Téfel (politician, director of the Social Security and Welfare Institute) and Edgard Parrales (priest, minister of social welfare, ambassador to the oas). IAPA (Inter American Press Association): This international press association is made

up of publishers and editors from print media in the United States and Latin America. JGRN (Government Junta for National Reconstruction): At the moment of the revolu-

tion’s triumph in 1979, it was made up of Violeta Barrios de Chamorro, Moisés Hassan Morales, Daniel Ortega Saavedra, Sergio Ramírez Mercado, and Alfonso Robelo Callejas. In 1980, when Violeta Chamorro and Alfonso Robelo resigned, they were replaced by Rafael Córdoba Rivas and Arturo Cruz. In 1982, it was reduced to three members: Rafael Córdoba Rivas, Daniel Ortega Saavedra, and Sergio Ramírez Mercado. MPU (United People’s Movement): It emerged in 1978 as the resistance to Somoza’s

dictatorship grew. It assembled forces on the Left that supported armed struggle: trade unions, professional and popular organizations, most of which were under the fsln’s influence, in addition to smaller political parties. MRS (Sandinista Renovation Movement): It was founded in 1995 by fsln dissidents led

by Sergio Ramírez and Dora María Téllez, both of whom served as presidents of the party. Enrique Sáenz was elected president of the mrs from 2007 to 2011. National Directorate (The FSLN’s National Directorate): The fsln’s three factions came

together in March 1979 with a total of nine members: Daniel Ortega Saavedra, Humberto Ortega Saavedra, and Víctor Tirado López (Third Way Tendency); Tomás Borge Martínez, Henry Ruiz Hernández (‘‘Modesto’’), and Bayardo Arce Castaño (gpp Tendency); Jaime Wheelock Román, Luis Carrión Cruz, and Carlos Núñez Téllez (Proletarian Tendency). Each one held the title of commander of the revolution. They were also known as ‘‘the Nine.’’ National Guard: This army was organized under occupation by the Unites States in

1927. When the Marine troops left in 1933, it was placed under the command of Anastasio Somoza García, founder of the Somoza dynasty. It disappeared after the revolution’s triumph in 1979. OAS (Organization of American States): It was founded in 1948 in Bogotá, Colombia.

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All of the countries in the hemisphere are members and it has its headquarters in Washington. OSN (Office of National Security): This was a National Guard intelligence organiza-

tion (g-2) under the Somoza family regime. Piñata: The Spanish term piñata traditionally refers to papier-mâché dolls filled

with toys and candy. These are suspended in the air for blindfolded children to break open with sticks at parties to take the contents. In Nicaragua, the piñata occurred following the fsln’s electoral defeat in 1990. It involved the transfer of expropriated homes, land, businesses, vehicles, and other state-owned assets to fsln members. Top-level fsln officials were particular beneficiaries of the piñata, which generated resentment from others who were not direct recipients of this wealth. The piñata also underscored a deep division in the public ethics that formed the foundation of revolutionary identity and the personal greed that characterized the fsln’s actions following the 1990 electoral defeat. Piricuaco: The term piricuaco (rabid dog) was a derogatory term originally used to

refer to members of Somoza’s National Guard. During the war in the 1980s the Contras used piricuaco (or ‘‘piri’’) to refer to the Sandinista Army and fsln supporters. SI (Socialist International): This is a worldwide organization of social democratic

parties. SMP (Patriotic Military Service): This law under the Sandinista government estab-

lished mandatory military service for a period of two years for all youth able to be mobilized. Third Way (Third Way Tendency, Terceristas): It was officially called the Insurrectional

Tendency. Its members were Sandinistas who believed in overthrowing the dictatorship through mass insurrection and that this would lead to a government of alliances. It was the theory that made victory possible. Its leaders within the fsln were Daniel and Humberto Ortega and Víctor Tirado López. TP (Proletarian Tendency, Proletarians): This was one of the three fsln factions in the

struggle against the Somoza dictatorship. It declared the need to mobilize the working class in order to then support the armed struggle, counting on a solid party. Jaime Wheelock Román was its main leader. UDEL (Democratic Union for Liberation): Pedro Joaquín Chamorro founded the udel

in 1976. It brought together parties in the center. UNO (Unified Nicaraguan Opposition): This coalition of parties was formed to face the

fsln in the 1990 elections, and it won. It received political and material support from the Bush administration during the campaign. Following its own political victory, it faced a crisis and disbanded. USSR (Union of Soviet Socialist Republics): This federation emerged after the triumph

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227

of the Socialist Revolution in October of 1917. It fell apart in 1991 due to the debacle in Eastern Europe’s Socialist camp, which was controlled by the ussr and also included the German Democratic Republic, Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Poland, and Romania.

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Index

Abrams, Elliot, 95, 111 Acevedo Chavarría, Domingo (pseud. Cara de Piedra), 121 Agrarian reform, 12, 32, 62, 115, 160–61, 168, 172, 187, 213, 225. See also fsln; Government Junta for National Reconstruction; Sandinista Revolution Agüero, Carlos, 59 Agüero, Fernando, 115 Alemán, Arnoldo, xi–xiii, xvi, 15, 141–42, 225 Alfaro, José Miguel, 183 Alfonsín, Raúl, 91 Allende, Salvador, 3 Altamirano, Elí, 143 Álvarez Cambra, Rodrigo, 14 Álvarez Montalván, Emilio, 159 Amador, César, 148 Anderson, Jack, The Washington MerryGo-Round, 55–56 Andreotti, Giulio, 95 app (Area of People’s Property), 164 Arce, Bayardo Castaño, 102, 226. See also gpp; National Directorate arde (Democratic Revolutionary Alliance), 100–101, 175–76, 223. See also Contra(s); Pastora, Edén; Robelo, Alfonso Argüello, Bernardo, 13 Argüello, Leonel, 15 Argüello, Luis Pasos, 202

Argüello Hurtado, Gustavo, 148 Argüello Hurtado, Roberto, 13, 16 Arias, Óscar, 195 Aronson, Bernie, 111 Ashton, Dore, 106 Astorga, Norita, 110 Authoritarianism, xv, xviii. See also Dictatorship Avilés, Álvaro (father), 13 Avilés, Álvaro (son), 13 Azcona Hoyo, José, 217 Baena Soares, João, 193 Baltodano Cantarero, Emilio, 61–62, 85, 151, 182–83. See also Group of Twelve Balzac, Honoré de, The Human Comedy, 172 Bárcenas, José, 66, 116 Barnaby, Malcolm, 153–54 Barreda, Felipe, 129 Barreda, Mary, 129 Barricada (newspaper), 41, 94, 135–36, 142 Belausteguigoitia, Ramón de, 22, 33 Belli, Gioconda, 25 Benavides, Óscar, 51, 61 Ben Bella, Ahmed, 2 Ben-Gurion, David, 179 Bermúdez, Enrique, 155, 193 Bermúdez, Juanita, 10, 58

Bernstein, Carl, His Holiness: John Paul II and the Hidden History of Our Time, 136. See also John Paul II (pope) bli (Irregular Warfare Battalion), 11–13, 223 Bolaños, Enrique, xi Borge Martínez, Tomás, 39, 46, 56, 68–69, 71, 108, 138, 140, 142, 146, 174, 183–84, 186–87, 201, 226. See also gpp; National Directorate Bowdler, William, 36, 66, 70, 96, 154–57, 178–84, 186, 188–89 Brecht, Bertolt, 5 Brigadista, 7, 24, 223 Brown, Bill, 55 Brzezinski, Zbigniew, 96–97 Buarque, Chico, 118 Buitrago, Francisco, 187 Buitrago, Julio, 21 Bush, George H. W., 111, 195, 221–22, 227 cafta-dr (Central America–Dominican Republic–United States Free Trade Agreement), xv Cajina Vega, Mario, 38, 53 Carazo Odio, Rodrigo, 66, 101, 152, 183– 84, 186 Carballo, Bismark, 132, 140, 185 Cardenal Martínez, Ernesto, 17, 58, 66–67, 71, 84, 117–18, 177, 184; En Cuba/In Cuba, 119; poetry of, 26, 67; Solentiname, 83; suspension of, from Catholic ministry, 132–33, 137 Cardenal Martínez, Fernando, 61, 148, 225; suspension of, from Catholic ministry, 132; testimony of, before U.S. House of Representatives, 57–58, 162. See also Group of Twelve; National Literacy Crusade Cardenal Martínez, Rodrigo, 143, 147 Carnation Revolution in Portugal, 5 Carrión Cruz, Javier, 52 Carrión Cruz, Luis, 56–57, 201, 226. See also National Directorate; tp Carter, Jimmy, 32, 44, 96–99, 122, 151, 153, 155, 158, 176, 178–82, 198–99, 212–13; as coordinator of Council of Freely Elected Heads of Government, 221; Panama

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Canal Treaty and, 87, 89. See also Carter Center Carter Center, 98, 104, 198 Carvajal, Gustavo, 45 Casa de las Américas, 117–18 Casaroli, Agostino, 139–40 Casey, William, 104 Castañeda, Jorge, 45 Castillo, José María (pseud. Chema), 39, 51–52, 130, 145 Castillo, Ernesto, 18–19 Castillo, Ernesto (pseud. Tito), 17–19, 57, 61, 73, 83, 86, 225. See also Group of Twelve Castillo, Óscar, 174 Castillo, Rosa (pseud. Cuta), 18–19 Castro, Fidel, 2, 7, 40, 46, 58, 77–79, 88, 97, 101–2, 109, 119, 173. See also Cuba Catacombs, 31–33, 77, 159, 205, 209; Christian sacrifice and, 22–23, 25, 27– 29; death and, 19–30; indigenous roots and, 25. See also Ethics; Liberation theology; Marxism; Rugama, Leonel Catholicism, xiii, 25, 27, 62, 127–42, 219. See also Liberation theology Caudillo(s)/Caudillismo, xi–xii, xvi–xviii, 38, 40, 75, 85, 201, 223 Cebasco, Gracielita, 13 Central American Defense Council (condeca), 215 Central American Presidential Summit, 194–95, 220–21 Central American University, 9, 14, 17, 60 Cerezo, Vinicio, 195 César, Alfredo, 66 Chamorro, Carlos Fernando, 142 Chamorro, Claudia, 66, 116–17, 180–81, 184 Chamorro, Edmundo, 42 Chamorro, Emiliano, xii, 38 Chamorro, Fernando (pseud. El Negro), 42, 47, 146 Chamorro, Pedro Joaquín, 38, 56, 67, 113, 115–17, 120–21, 123, 130; El enigma de las alemanas/The Enigma of German Women, 114 Chamorro, Violeta, 32, 38, 66, 116, 180, 182–83, 186, 188–89, 211, 226; as candi-

date for president, xi, 141, 197, 199, 222; as president, 74, 117, 200, 203–4; resignation of, from Government Junta for National Reconstruction, 70, 72, 101, 117, 120, 212. See also Government Junta for National Reconstruction Chamorro Coronel, Edgar, 123 Chamorro Mora, Rafael, 148 Chavarría, Elbis, 83 Chávez, Hugo, xv–xvi Che. See Guevara, Ernesto Chekhov, Anton, 170 Chigüín, El. See Somoza Portocarrero, Anastasio Christian base communities, 27, 52, 128. See also Liberation theology; Molina, Uriel Christopher, Warren, 65, 97, 153 cia (Central Intelligence Agency), xiii, 99– 101, 103–4, 106, 123, 176–77, 192, 213– 15, 218, 223–24. See also Contra(s) Citizen Power Councils, xvi–xvii Cold War, xi, xv, 2, 96, 108, 110, 136 Colegio Centro América, 13 Colom Argueta, Manuel (pseud. Meme), 62 Communist Party, 28, 73, 107, 110, 119, 143, 182, 203, 224 Compañero, 25, 32, 223–24 Conrado Vado, Eduardo, 147–48 Conservative Party of Nicaragua, xii, 28, 102, 114–15, 120, 124–25, 147, 159, 203, 212; cachurecos, 44; mosquitoes, 143 Contadora Group, 95, 102, 214, 218, 224; Contadora Act on Peace and Cooperation in Central America, 216–17; Contadora Support Group, 95 Contra(s), xiii, 2, 8, 11–13, 30, 32, 48, 72, 95– 96, 98–100, 103–8, 129, 133–35, 137, 154–55, 161–63, 172, 197, 200, 203, 214– 18, 223–24; Directorate, 74, 101–2, 123, 140, 191–93, 202, 219; disarmament, 193, 195, 199, 202, 204, 221; Sapoa Accords, 220; training camps in Florida, 213. See also cia; Iran-Contra Affair; United States of America; War with Contra(s) Contreras, Eduardo, 25, 39, 52–54, 57 coprosa (Archdiocesan Social Promotion Commission), 140

Córdoba Rivas, Rafael, 120–21, 124, 136, 152, 212–13, 226. See also Government Junta for National Reconstruction Cordón, Raúl, 58 Coronel, Carlos, 58–59 Coronel, Jean, 49 Coronel Kautz, Ricardo, 61, 84, 123, 225. See also Group of Twelve Coronel Urtecho, José, 58, 61 Cortázar, Julio, 165 Cortés, Óscar, 157 cosep (Superior Council of Private Enterprise), 212, 224 cosip (Superior Council of Private Initiative), 38, 117, 120, 224 Council of State, 212; Electoral Law, 215. See also fsln; Government Junta for National Reconstruction cpsu (Communist Party of the Soviet Union). See Communist Party Cranach, Lucas, 5 Cruz, Arturo, 61, 101–2, 120, 212, 225; as presidential candidate, uno, 216; resignation of, from Government Junta for National Reconstruction, 136. See also Government Junta for National Reconstruction; Group of Twelve; uno csuca (Central American University Superior Council), 55, 57, 62–63, 224. See also Ramírez Mercado, Sergio Cuadra, Pablo Antonio, 116, 184 Cuadra Chamorro, Joaquín, 51, 61, 85–86, 113, 148. See also Group of Twelve Cuadra Lacayo, Joaquín (pseud. Rodrigo), 50, 52, 61, 69, 116, 146–47, 151, 156 Cuba: xvi, 155, 182, 192; Cuban Revolution, 2, 54; fsln militants, 18, 49, 53, 56, 60, 69, 76, 87, 88, 117, 119; model for Nicaragua, xvi, 77–79, 94, 96–97, 108; support for fsln, 58, 108–9, 146, 169, 177, 179. See also Casa de las Américas; Castro, Fidel Cuban foco theory, 77, 119, 225 D’Aubisson, Roberto, 135 Dávila Bolaños, Alejandro, 153 Debray, Régis, 36–37, 189 Democracy, xv–xviii; in Central America,

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Democracy (cont.) 194; political pacts in Nicaragua, xii; in Sandinista Revolution, role of, 3–4, 62, 76–77, 95, 97, 114, 146, 180, 191, 193, 201–4. See also Elections D’Escoto Brockmann, Miguel, 55, 61, 150– 51, 179, 205, 225; suspension of, from Catholic ministry, 132–33. See also Group of Twelve Deshon, Róger, 50 dgse (General Directorate of State Security), 132, 138, 142, 224 Diario, El (Caracas), 47 Díaz del Castillo, Bernal, True History of the Conquest of New Spain, 1 Díaz Herrera, Roberto, 91 Dickens, Charles, A Tale of Two Cities, 4 Dictatorship: in Chile, 5; in Greece, 5; in Guatemala, 62, 77; in Latin America, 85, 89; in Nicaragua, 5–6, 25, 35, 38–39, 53, 81, 94, 114, 120, 121, 148, 217, 225–27; proletarian, 74. See also Authoritarianism Duarte, José Napoleón, 99, 194 Dunlop, Carol, 165 Eagleburger, Lawrence, 31 Ecclesiastic base communities. See Christian base communities Echeverría, Johnny, 183 Economic Concertation, 32. See also fsln Eisenhower, Dwight D., 86, 97 Elections: in 1984, 95, 101–2, 167, 212, 215–16; in 1990, 3, 11, 78, 98, 117, 159, 191–200, 208, 220–22, 225, 227; in 1996, 98, 141–42, 225; in 2006, xi–xii, xiv, 225; Transition Protocol (1990), 199, 203, 222. See also Democracy El Salvador. See fmln (Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front) Elvir, Raúl, 187 Enders, Thomas, 100 eps. See Sandinista Popular Army Escobar, José Benito, 82, 123 Escobar Betancourt, Rómulo, 182 Esquipulas II Accords, 111, 130, 137, 140, 193, 195, 219 Ethics, xxiii–xiv, 3–4, 9, 19, 23–31, 33, 159, 227. See also Catacombs

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Eucharistic Congress, 128–29 European Parliament, 217; model for Nicaragua, 95 Fanon, Frantz, The Wretched of the Earth, 3 fao (Broad Opposition Front), 124, 130, 143, 149, 152–57, 178, 185, 224 fer (Revolutionary Student Front), 115. See also fsln Fernández, Idania, 10, 49–51, 208–10 Fiallos, Alvaro (father), 12 Fiallos, Alvaro (son), 12 Fiallos Gil, Mariano, 115 Fiallos Oyanguren, Mariano, 181, 186 Figueres Ferrer, José María (pseud. Pepe), 58, 85–86, 120, 183 Fitzgerald, Valpy, 166 fmln (Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front), 97–99, 101, 193–95, 213, 224–25 Fonseca, Carlos, 25, 54, 56, 60, 114, 119, 225 Fonseca, Lenín, 24, 178 Fraser, Donald M., 57 fsln (Sandinista National Liberation Front), xiv, 23, 65–66, 85, 93, 113, 116, 162, 211, 216, 225; Assembly of Militants, 201–2; attack by, on José María Castillo’s house, 52–53; attack by, on National Palace, 122–23, 143–46; Autonomy Law, 163; Extraordinary Congress (1994), 205; factions of, 53, 56, 69, 119–20, 124–25, 148, 163, 178; as guerrillas, 37, 70, 86; health brigades of, 177, 213; hegemony and, 31, 41, 70, 200; leadership of, 30–32, 40, 69, 131; as party, 32, 70, 73–76, 196, 200–205, 222; People’s Tribunals, 103; Property Laws 85 and 86 and, 32–33, 171–72, 200, 204; as shock troops, 201; ‘‘Zero Hunger’’ program of, xvi; ‘‘Zero Usury’’ program of, xvi. See also gpp; National Directorate; Northern Front; Sandinista Revolution; Southern Front; Third Way Tendency; tp; Western Front Fuchs, Ernest Karl (pseud. Vanzetti), 177–78 Al-Gaddafi, Muammar, 88; The Green Book, 89 García, Lázaro, 149–50

García Laviana, Gaspar, 63, 84, 127–29 García Márquez, Gabriel, 79, 81, 84, 107–8, 123; Cien años de soledad/One Hundred Years of Solitude, 82; El secuestro/The kidnapping, 53 Gatti, Armand, 54–55 German Democratic Republic, 5, 14, 51, 177, 225, 228 Gibbons, James, 137 Ginsberg, Allen, 106 Girardi, Giulio, 142 Golding, William, Lord of the Flies, 162 González, Felipe, 95 González, Juan Ignacio, 123 González, Linda, 123 González, Rodrigo (pseud. Rori), 88 González Pasos, Alfonso, 24, 148 González y Robleto, Vicente Alejandro, 129 Gorbachev, Mikhael, 109, 170 Gordo Pín. See Pérez Cassar, Óscar Gorman, Paul, 215 Government Junta for National Reconstruction (jgrn), 35–37, 65–68, 70, 73– 74, 98, 101, 116–18, 120, 133–39, 174– 82, 184–89, 226; Absentee Law, 123, 165, 213; Agrarian Reform Law, 213; Agricultural Cooperative Law, 213; Consumer Defense Law, 212; Decree 3, 211; death penalty abolished by, 212; Fundamental Statute, 41, 71–72, 183, 211; Law of National Emergency, 211; Lease Law, 212; members of, announced, 211; Patriotic Military Service Law, 215; Social Security Law, 213; Statute of Rights and Guarantees of Nicaraguan Citizens, 212; Trade Regulation and Consumer Protection Law, 214. See also Chamorro, Violeta; Córdoba Rivas, Rafael; Cruz, Arturo; Hassan, Moisés; Ortega Saavedra, Daniel; Ramírez Mercado, Sergio; Robelo, Alfonso gpp (Prolonged Popular War), 56, 59, 73, 82–83, 89, 151, 225–26. See also fsln Graham, Mercedes, 173–74 Graham, William, 173–74 Greenberg, Stan, 196–97 Greene, Graham, 52, 91; Getting to Know the General, 87

Group of Twelve, 18, 38, 45, 47, 49, 51, 60, 73, 85–86, 89–90, 101, 113–14, 118, 120–25, 129; 143–158, 174, 178, 182–83, 225. See also Baltodano Cantarero, Emilio; Cardenal Martínez, Fernando; Castillo, Ernesto (pseud. Tito); Coronel Kautz, Ricardo; Cruz, Arturo; Cuadra Chamorro, Joaquín; D’Escoto, Miguel; fao; fsln; Gutiérrez, Carlos; Mántica Abaunza, Felipe; Parrales, Edgard; Ramírez Mercado, Sergio; Sotelo, Casimiro; Téfel, Reinaldo Antonio; Third Way Tendency; Tünnerman Bernheim, Carlos Guevara, Donald, 83 Guevara, Ernesto (‘‘Che’’), 2, 101, 182; in Bolivia, 23, 77, 187 Guillén, Arnoldo, 205 Gutiérrez, Alesio, 122 Gutiérrez, Carlos, 61. See also Group of Twelve Gutiérrez, Francisco (pseud. Panchito), 120 Gutiérrez, Gustavo, Christian Commitment for a New Nicaragua, 130 Gutiérrez, Juan Ignacio, 66 Haig, Alexander, 99–100 Hasenfus, Eugene, 103–5, 218 Hashemi Rafsanjani, Ayatollah, 106 Hassan, Moisés, 38, 43, 71–72, 108, 189, 211, 226; resignation of, from Government Junta for National Reconstruction, 136. See also Government Junta for National Reconstruction Hernández Baldizón, Mauricio, 23–24. See also Rugama, Leonel Herrera Campins, Luis, 99, 185 Herzog, Werner, Fitzcarraldo, 168 Ho Chi Minh, 2 Huezo-Maltez, Titina, 151 Hughes, Howard, 47, 52 iapa (Inter American Press Association), 114–15, 226 Ibarra, David, 46 Icaza, Silvia, 12 idb (Inter-American Development Bank), 61, 213–15 Iglesias, Antonio, 174

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233

imf (International Monetary Fund), xv, 167 Independent Liberal Party (pli), 102 Indianapolis Star, 207 Insurrectional Faction. See Third Way Tendency Internal Front, 50, 69, 124, 145–46, 150, 173. See also fsln International Court of Justice (The Hague), 103, 170, 215–16, 218–19 ipu (Inter-Parliamentary Union), 218 Iran, 106–7 Iran-Contra Affair, 105–6, 218 Iraq, 43, 107 Iruegas, Gustavo, 156 Istmo Films, ¡Viva Sandino!/Long Live Sandino!, 174, 176 Jackson, Jesse, 105 Jara, Víctor, 3 Jarquín, Carlos Manuel, 50 Jarquín, Mundo, 113–14 Jerez, Leonardo, 113 jgrn. See Government Junta for National Reconstruction Jiménez, Ramón Emilio, 154 John XXIII (pope), 128, 138 John Paul I (pope), 129 John Paul II (pope), 132–42, 214 Jordan, William, 153–54 Jospin, Leonel, 109 Joya, Armando, 24 Kalecki, Michal, 166 Kazimirov, Vladimir, 111, 170 Kerry, John, 106 Kirkpatrick, Jean, 48 Kreisky, Bruno, 31, 95 Kretz, Perry, 73 Lacayo, Antonio, 200–201, 204, 222 Lacayo, Gonzalo, 38, 60 Lacayo, Ruth, 150 Lacayo Manzanares, Carlos, 134 Lang, Edgard, 27, 50 Larios, Bernardino, 181, 184 Leiken, Robert, 96 León, Omar de, 52 Lepage, Carlos, 86

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Lewis, Flora, 75 Lewis, Gabriel, 180 Lewites, Herty, 42–43, 86 Lewites, Israel (father), 42, 73 Lewites, Israel (son), 42 Liberal Party, xii, 44, 149–50 Liberal Constitutionalist Party, xi, 142, 225. See also Alemán, Arnoldo Liberal Revolution in Nicaragua (1893), xiii Liberation theology, xiii, 17, 76, 128–29, 131, 142; Latin American Bible, 130 López, Frank Luis, 12 López de Gómara, Francisco, General History of the Indies, 1 López Pérez, Rigoberto, xii López Portillo, José, 41, 45–46, 156, 188 Loyola Brandao, Ignacio de, 118 Lucas García, Romeo, 65 Lugo, Richard (pseud. Saco), 177 Lumumba, Patrice, 2 Maltez, Miguel Angel, 151 Mántica Abaunza, Felipe, 60–62, 83–86, 118, 225. See also Group of Twelve Marcos Frech, Jacobo, 54 Martens, Wilfried, 95 Martínez, Harold, 58 Martínez, José de Jesús (pseud. Chuchú), 86–91, 95, 182 Martínez, Juan José, 17 Martínez Cuenca, Alejandro, 106, 167 Martins, Jack, 151–52 Martyrs, 24–25, 44, 53. See also Catacombs Marxism, 26–27, 56, 74–76, 87, 97, 99, 159, 162; and liberation theology, 128–29 McCoy, Jennifer, 198 mdn (Democratic Nicaraguan Movement), 120 Medrano, Jim (pseud. El Chato), 83 Meese, Edwin, 106 Mejía, Federico, 181, 184, 186 Mejía, Francisco Luis, 129 Mejía, Iván, 31 Mejía Godoy, Carlos, 4; La tumba del guerrillero/Tomb of the Guerrilla, 188 Mejía Vallejo, Manuel, 118 Melton, Richard, 220 Mining, 165–66

Ministry of Culture, 71 Ministry of Defense, 167 Ministry of Internal Commerce, 214 Ministry of Planning, 164 Ministry of the Interior, 46, 132, 144, 167, 224. See also dgse (General Directorate of State Security) Miranda, Claudia, 49–50, 208–10 Miskito Indians, 101, 163, 165, 214 Mitterrand, François, 95, 109 Mojica, Inocente, 181 Molina, Uriel, 27, 29, 128–29. See also Christian base communities Moncada Tapia, José María, 38 Mondale, Walter, 97 Monterroso, Augusto (pseud. Tito), 118 Morales, Ana Isabel, 50 Morales, Manolo, 134, 187 Morales Carazo, Jaime, xiii, 225 Mora Rostrán, Antonio, 144 Mora Valverde, Manuel, 107 Moss, Ambler, 180 Mousavi, Mir-Hossein, 106–7 mpu (United People’s Movement), 38, 120, 124, 178, 226 mrs (Sandinista Renovation Movement), 14, 226. See also Ramírez Mercado, Sergio; Téllez, Dora María Murillo, Rosario, xiv, xvi–xvii Mutis, Álvaro, 169 Naranjo, Carmen, 174 National Army, xviii, 62, 184, 201–2 National Assembly, 14, 102, 105, 107, 198, 202–4, 216, 222; Electoral Law, 220; Municipalities Law, 220; Statute of Autonomy for the Regions of Nicaragua’s Atlantic National Assembly, 219. See also Political Constitution National Autonomous University, 55, 208 National Commission on Reconciliation, 130, 219 National Directorate (The fsln’s National Directorate), 33, 37–40, 54, 57, 66, 69– 75, 82, 98, 102, 132–36, 139, 166–68, 173–75, 178, 184, 186, 198, 201–5, 226. See also Arce Bayardo, Castaño; Borge Martínez, Tomás; Carrión Cruz, Luis;

fsln; Nuñez Téllez, Carlos; Ortega Saavedra, Daniel; Ortega Saavedra, Humberto; Ruiz Hernández, Henry; Tirado López, Víctor; Wheelock Román, Jaime National Financial System, 212 National Fund to Fight Unemployment, 212 National Guard, 20, 23–24, 37, 42, 44, 46– 47, 50, 54, 59–62, 67–68, 70–72, 84, 93, 97, 100, 103, 117–19, 122–23, 129, 135, 149–57, 161, 178–79, 181, 183–84, 186– 87, 211, 226–27; becat (Special AntiTerrorist Brigades), 144, 175; eebi (Infantry Basic Training School), 144–46; Praetorian Guard, 35. See also Lacayo, Gonzalo; osn National Literacy Crusade, 7–8, 29–30, 46, 101–2, 132, 160, 212, 223. See also Cardenal Martínez, Fernando National Police, xviii National Sovereignty, 23, 36, 76, 94, 137 National Union of Farmers and Ranchers (unag), 213 National University, 115, 181 Navarro, Jorge, 28, 30, 32, 187 Neoliberalism, xi New Left, xi New York Times, 75, 180 Nicaraguan Episcopal Conference (cen), 130, 133, 139, 214 Nicaraguan Resistance (rn). See Contra(s) Noguera, Elías, 37 Non-Aligned Movement, xv, 45, 62, 75, 79, 97, 133 Noriega, Manuel Antonio, 91 North, Oliver, 103, 106–7, 207 Northern Front, 188. See also fsln Novedades, 23, 28, 41, 149, 209 Núñez, Daniel, 161 Núñez, René, 66, 134, 204 Núñez Dávila, Róger, 23–24 Núñez Téllez, Carlos, 105, 107, 198, 203–4, 226. See also National Directorate; tp oas (Organization of American States), 97, 101, 124, 130, 152–55, 179–80, 183–85, 193, 195, 226–27; Commission for Support and Verification (ciav), 221 Obando y Bravo, Miguel, xiii, 129, 133–34,

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235

Obando y Bravo, Miguel (cont.) 138, 140–42; as mediator at attack on José María Castillo’s house (1974), 53, 130; as mediator at attack on National Palace (1978), 130, 145–46; as mediator in peace process (1990), 192–93; as mediator in political transition (1979), 36, 185, 188–89; promotion of, to cardinal, 216 Obiols Gómez, Alfredo, 154 Oduber Quirós, Daniel, 85 Oquist, Paul, 198–99 Orfila, Alejandro, 184 Ortega Saavedra, Camilo, 117–18 Ortega Saavedra, Daniel, 59–60, 79, 114, 129, 165, 170, 174; Catholicism and, xiii; El gallo ennavajado/The Fighting Gamecock, 196, 199; as head of fsln party, 202–3, 205; as member of fsln’s National Directorate, 38–41, 45–46; as member of Government Junta for National Reconstruction, 38, 68–69, 72, 96– 98, 133–40, 186–88, 211; as political prisoner, 38, 53; as president, presidential candidate, fsln, xi–xvii, 15, 31, 74, 101, 141–42, 194–200, 216, 221–22; Property Law 85 and, 32–33. See also fsln; Government Junta for National Reconstruction; National Directorate; Third Way Tendency Ortega Saavedra, Humberto, 39, 56–57, 59, 61, 73–75, 85, 101, 127, 145, 173–75, 180, 183–84, 186, 193, 197–98, 201, 204–205, 219, 222, 226–27. See also fsln; National Directorate; Third Way Tendency Ortega y Gasset, José, 22 osn (Office of National Security), 147, 149, 151, 227. See also National Guard Otero Silva, Miguel, 82, 84 Owen, Henry, 97 Pallais Debayle, Luis, 144 Palme, Olof, 31, 95, 195 Papandreou, George, 95, 109–10 Parrales, Edgard, 143, 226. See also Group of Twelve

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Pasos, Carlos, 83 Pasos, Marta, 202 Pasos, Rosa, 202 Pasos Argüello, Luis, 202 Pastor, Robert, 96–97, 176, 182 Pastora, Edén, 58–59, 71, 83–84, 86, 100– 101, 173–74; attack at National Palace and, 39–40, 143–46; as founder of arde (Democratic Revolutionary Alliance), 175–76, 224 Pastora, Jilma de, 83 Pataky, Lázsló, El Clarín/The Bugle; Los duros/The Tough and Resilient, 52 Patriotic Military Service (smp), 139, 191, 197, 215, 223, 227 Peña Gómez, José Francisco, 47 Penner, Diana, 207 Pereira, Tino, 55 Pereira y Castellón, Simeón, 137 Pérez, Carlos Andrés, 56, 81–83, 86, 102, 146, 183 Pérez, Christián, 24 Pérez Cassar, Óscar (pseud. Gordo Pín), 50, 69, 116, 124, 146–47, 173 Pérez de Cuéllar, Javier, 105 Pérez Díaz, Aracelli, 50 Peters, Ricardo, 133 Pezzullo, Lawrence, 65–66, 96–98, 178–81, 186 Piñata, 32, 171, 202, 227 Piñeiro, Manuel, 119 Piricuaco, 12, 227 pli (Independent Liberal Party), 102 plo (Palestinian Liberation Organization), 177 Poindexter, John, 106 Politi, Marco, His Holiness: John Paul II and the Hidden History of Our Time, 136. See also John Paul II (pope) Political Constitution, xii, xviii, 194, 203–4, 218. See also National Assembly Pomares, Germán (pseud. El Danto), 52, 61, 119 Portocarrero, Hope, 28 prd (Dominican Revolutionary Party), 47 Prensa, La (Managua), 28, 39, 115–17, 129, 149

pri (Institutional Revolutionary Party), 45– 46. See also López Portillo, José Proletarian Tendency. See tp Quilapayún, El pueblo unido jamás será vencido/The people united will never be defeated, 121 Quintana, Julio, 155–56 Radio Corporación, 59 Radio Liberación, 99. See also fmln Radio Monumental, 185 Radio Reloj, 117 Radio Sandino, 18, 86, 91, 176 Radio Uno, 52 Radio Vaticana, 133 Radio Ya, 16, 205 Rama Indians, 163 Ramírez, Gonzalo, 151, 154 Ramírez Beteta, Francisco (pseud. Mordelón), 149 Ramírez Mercado, Rogelio, 20, 149, 203 Ramírez Mercado, Sergio, 1–2, 4, 73, 113– 25; Castigo Divino/Divine Punishment, 79, 82; in Costa Rica, 5–6, 56–63, 82–91; as director of La Prensa Literaria Centroamericana, 116; family and, 5–16, 30, 49, 205; fsln and, 14–15, 40, 56, 72, 79, 98, 159–72, 205; as general secretary of csuca, 55, 57, 62–63, 87, 224; in German Democratic Republic, 5–6, 51, 54–55; Kreisky Award for Human Rights, 31; Margarita, está linda la mar/Margarita, How Beautiful the Sea, 44, 207; as member of fsln’s National Directorate, 204– 5; as member of Government Junta for National Reconstruction (jgrn), 37–48, 66–71, 96–111, 132–40, 211, 213; as member of Group of Twelve, 143, 146– 58, 225–26; National Assembly legislator, 202–5; as presidential candidate, mrs, 14–16, 207, 226; as vice-presidential candidate, fsln, xi, 9–11, 15, 101, 141, 191– 200, 216, 221; as visiting professor at University of Maryland, College Park, 207; as writer, 5, 16, 55, 58, 89, 202, 207– 8. See also fsln; Government Junta for

National Reconstruction; Group of Twelve; mrs; Third Way Tendency Rather, Dan, 105 Reagan, Ronald, 2, 31, 95–96, 98–99, 101– 6, 193, 212–13, 215, 217, 223; mini Marshall Plan and, 214; Peace Plan and, 216 Red Cross, 35, 182 República, La (San José), 116 Revolution. See Sandinista Revolution Reyes, José Ramiro, 150 Reyes, Ismael, 182 Reyes, Óscar, 84 Reyes Heroles, Don Jesús, 45 Ríos Montt, Efraín, 135 Ritter, Jorge, 183 Rivas, Leopoldo, 146 Rivas, Polo, 68 Rivas, Roberto, 185 Rivera, Francisco (pseud. El Zorro), 25, 27, 37, 61, 175 Robelo, Alfonso, 38, 66, 96, 186, 211, 226; as founder of arde (Democratic Revolutionary Alliance), 100–101, 223; as member of Contra Directorate, 101–2; as member of fao (Broad Opposition Front) 124, 152, 154; resignation of, from jgrn, 70, 72, 120, 212. See also arde; Contra Directorate; fao; Government Junta for National Reconstruction; mdn Robelo, José (pseud. Chepón), 67 Rodríguez, Carlos Rafael, 78 Romero, Óscar, 135 Ronsard, Pierre, 19 Rosales, Danilo, 115 Rovinski, Samuel, 174 Royo, Arístides, 180 rti Studios, 82. See also García Márquez, Gabriel Rugama, Leonel, 19–20, 160; Las casas se llenaron de humo/The Houses Were Still Full of Smoke, 21; Como los santos/Saintly Living, 22; El estudiante y la revolución/ The Student and the Revolution, 23. See also Catacombs; Hernández Baldizón, Mauricio; Núñez Dávila, Róger Ruiz Hernández, Henry (pseud. Modesto), 73, 108, 168, 173–74, 188, 201. See also gpp; National Directorate

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237

Saint-Exupéry, Antoine de, 22 Salamín, Marcel, 45, 182 Salazar, Manuel, 186, 189 Salazar, Pablo Emilio (pseud. Commander Bravo), 67 Sampson, Dinorah, 28, 198 Sánchez, Celia, 40 Sánchez, Domingo (pseud. Chagüitillo), 143 Sandinismo, xiii, 51, 59, 75, 93, 129, 194, 200, 203, 208; democracy, 76–77; property, 33; values, 29, 32, 159. See also fsln; Sandinista Revolution; Sandino, Augusto César Sandinista National Liberation Front. See fsln Sandinista Popular Army (eps), 8, 73–74, 183, 195, 201, 212, 224; Danto 88, 192, 219 Sandinista Popular Militias, 71, 149 Sandinista Revolution, xi, xiii–xiv, xvii, 1– 4, 77, 94, 159–72, 210. See also Democracy; fsln; Sandinismo Sandinista Television System, 139, 169 Sandinista Workers’ Federation (cst), 211 Sandinista Youth Brigades, 8–9, 134 Sandino, Augusto César, 22–23, 33, 37–38, 76, 93, 103, 197, 205. See also Sandinismo San José Mercury News, 106 Sanjur, Amado, 89 Santamaría, Haydée, 118 Sarria, Roberto, 12 Sarria Zamora, Edgard (pseud. El Pollo), 12 Schörf, Henning, 8 Second Vatican Council, 128. See also John XXIII (pope) Sevilla, Nicolasa, 120–21 Sevilla Sacasa, Guillermo, 44, 52, 56 Shelton, Turner, 47, 52 Shevernadze, Eduard, 111 Shible, Selim, 60 Shultz, George, 109, 219 si (Socialist International), 94, 102, 216, 227 Silva, César Augusto, 24 Silvestrini, Achille, 134 Simón Bolívar Brigade, 71 smp. See Patriotic Military Service Socialism, 2, 77, 119, 130–31, 135 Solaún, Mauricio, 151–54

238

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Somocismo, 28, 81, 120, 161 Somoza, Salvadora de, 24, 43–44. See also Somoza García, Anastasio Somoza Debayle, Anastasio, 5, 21, 24, 28, 35, 38, 52, 81, 85, 89, 114–15, 122, 129– 30, 144–58, 175–76, 178; assassination of, 212; assets of, 36, 43, 46, 55–56, 62, 117, 160, 179, 211; bunker of, 46, 57, 65, 71–73, 127, 180; earthquake (1972) and, 53; El Retiro mansion, 71; Nicaragua Betrayed, 56, 66; Popular Fronts, 121; resignation of, 47, 180–81, 183–85, 211; supporters of, 37, 160, 179, 211. See also National Guard; Portocarrero, Hope; Sampson, Dinorah Somoza García, Anastasio, xii, 38, 85, 93, 130, 144, 179. See also Somoza, Salvadora de Somoza Portocarrero, Anastasio (pseud. El Chigüín), 6, 47, 73, 144 Sontag, Susan, 106 Sotelo, Casimmiro, 61, 226. See also Group of Twelve Southern Christian Leadership Conference, 105 Southern Front, 10, 49, 67, 71, 127, 173–74, 177, 208. See also fsln Soviet Union (ussr), xiv, 12, 28, 31, 73, 94, 107–11, 113, 136, 168–70, 193, 196, 213, 218, 224–25, 227–28 Spanish Civil War, 2–3, 177 Stewart, Bill, 47, 179 Sumo Indians, 163, 165 Suñol, Julio, 116 Supreme Court, xii Supreme Electoral Council (cse), 181, 199 Tagesschau, 51 Taiwan, 43 Taylor, Lance, 167 Téfel, Reinaldo, 121, 226. See also Group of Twelve Téllez, Dora María, 37, 50, 61, 68–69, 145– 46, 187, 202–3, 226 Teufel, Jacobo, 17 Thatcher, Margaret, 110 Third Way Tendency, 54, 57–59, 75, 89, 113–14, 117–19, 124, 144, 146, 148, 150, 173, 175, 227; Government Junta for Na-

tional Reconstruction (jgrn), 62–63. See also fsln; Group of Twelve Tirado López, Víctor, 61, 174, 226–27. See also National Directorate; Third Way Tendency Torres, Hugo, 146 Torrijos Herrera, Omar Efraín, 45, 49, 51, 71, 88, 90–91, 94, 173, 177, 180, 182–83; Panama Canal Treaty, 87, 89, 95 tp (Proletarian Tendency), 56, 151, 227. See also fsln Triana, Jorge Alí, La mala hora/In Evil Hour, 82 Tünnermann Bernheim, Carlos, 55, 61, 86, 220, 226. See also Group of Twelve Turcios Lima, Luis Augusto, 77 udel (Democratic Union for Liberation), 113–14, 120–21, 124, 178, 227 United Nations, 96, 105, 193, 215, 219; elections-monitoring mission, 221; unicef, 214 United States of America, 33, 35, 62, 81, 194–95; congress, 57, 103–4, 106, 153– 54, 193, 215–22; economic embargo of, on Nicaragua, 102, 169, 217, 222; invasion by, of Dominican Republic, 155; invasion by, of Grenada, 103; invasion by, of Panama, 91, 196, 221; manifest destiny and, 96; military intervention by, of Nicaragua, 37, 53, 93–95, 97, 133, 136–37, 179, 192–93, 198, 214–18; Panama Canal Treaty, 87–88; Senate Intelligence Commission, 104; Somoza’s resignation and political transition, role of (1979), 65–66, 70, 151–58, 176, 178–89, 212; Southern Command, 215, 222; Subcommittee on International Organizations in the House of Representatives, 57; ‘‘White Paper’’ on El Salvador, 213. See also Bush, George H.W.; Carter, Jimmy; Eisenhower, Dwight D.; Reagan, Ronald uno (Unified Nicaraguan Opposition), 101–2, 195, 199, 201, 203, 216, 222, 227

upe (Agricultural Production Units), 160– 61 Urcuyo Maliaños, Francisco, 35, 47, 65–66, 70, 142, 186 Urroz, Fanor, 187 ussr (Union of Soviet Socialist Republics). See Soviet Union Vaky, Viron, 97 Valdivia, José (pseud. Marvin), 83 Valenzuela, Mauricio, 68 Valle, Marcos, 59–60 Vallejo, César, Tungsteno, 165 Vance, Cyrus, 179 Vega, Pablo Antonio, 140 Venerio, Raúl (pseud. Willy), 150 Vietnam War, 3, 103 Vigil, Félix, 12 Vigil, Miguel Ernesto, 12 Von Karajan, Herbert, 5 Walker, William, The War in Nicaragua, 17, 93 War with Contra(s), 30, 33, 40, 76, 78, 95– 96, 104, 132–41, 166–70, 192–93, 198, 200, 202. See also Contra(s) Washington Office for Latin America (wola), 55 Wayne, John, 88 Western Front, 50, 68. See also fsln Wheelock Román, Jaime, 56–57, 68, 72, 98, 109, 168, 174, 176, 187, 226–27. See also National Directorate; tp World Health Organization, 214 Wright Mills, Charles, Listen, Yankee, 3 Yeltsin, Boris, 110 Zamora, Carlos, 161 Zelaya, José Santos, 38 Zorro, El. See Rivera, Francisco

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sergio ramírez is a former vice president of Nicaragua (1985–90). He is the author of El cielo llora por mí (Spain: Alfaguara, 2008); Cuando todos hablamos (Mexico: Alfaguara, 2008); Tambor olvidado (Spain: Aguilar, 2007); Juego perfecto (Guatemala: Piedra Santa, 2008); El reino animal (Mexico: Alfaguara, 2006); Señor de los tristes (Universidad de Puerto Rico, 2006); Mil y una muertes (Mexico: Alfaguara, 2004); El viejo oficio de mentir (Mexico: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 2004); Sombras nada más (Mexico: Alfaguara, 2002); Catalina y Catalina (Mexico: Alfaguara, 2001); Mentiras verdaderas (Mexico: Alfaguara, 2001); Adiós Muchachos: Una memoria de la Revolución Sandinista (Spain: El País/Aguilar, 1999); Margarita, está linda la mar (Spain: Alfaguara, 1998); Un baile de máscaras (Spain: Alfaguara, 1995); Oficios compartidos (Mexico: Siglo XXI, 1994); Confesión de amor (Nicaragua: Ediciones Nicarao, 1991); Castigo divino (Spain: Mondadori, 1988); Las armas del futuro (Cuba: Ciencias Sociales, 1987); Balcanes y volcanes (Nicaragua: Editorial Nueva, 1985); Estás en Nicaragua (testimonio) (Spain: Muchnik, 1985); El alba de oro: La historia viva de Nicaragua (Mexico: Siglo XXI Editores, 1983); Sandino siempre (Nicaragua: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de Nicaragua, 1980); ¿Te dio miedo la sangre? (Venezuela: Monte Ávila, 1977); Charles Atlas también muere (Mexico: J. Mortiz, 1976); El pensamiento vivo de Sandino (Costa Rica: educa, 1975); De tropeles y tropelías (El Salvador: Universitaria de El Salvador, 1972); Tiempo de fulgor (Guatemala: Universitaria, 1970); La narrativa centroamericana (El Salvador: Universitaria, 1969); and Cuentos (Nicaragua: Nicaragüense, 1963). He is the editor of Augusto César Sandino (Costa Rica: Ministerio de Cultura, 1978); El cuento nicaragüense (Nicaragua: El Pez y la Serpiente, 1976); El pensamiento vivo de Sandino (Costa Rica: Universitaria Centroamericana, 1976); and Antología del cuento centroamericano (Costa Rica: Universitaria Centroamericana, 1970).

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Ramírez, Sergio, 1942– [Adiós muchachos. English] Adiós muchachos : a memoir of the Sandinista Revolution / Sergio Ramírez ; translated by Stacey Alba D. Skar. p. cm. — (American encounters/global interactions) Includes bibliographical references and index. isbn 978-0-8223-5069-9 (cloth : alk. paper) isbn 978-0-8223-5087-3 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Nicaragua—History—1979–1990. 2. Ramírez, Sergio, 1942– I. Title. II. Series: American encounters/global interactions. f1528.r3413 2012 972.8505%3—dc23 2011021961