Life in Central America

The US doesn’t have friends or enemies, it only has interests

I read a lot of stuff, and most of it doesn’t affect me me much. But this statement jumped right off of the page. It was one of those things that you know is true immediately, but you can’t quite explain it. But let me try anyway.

The context is this: the La Penca bombing in 1984. You may be asking: so what is La Penca, why should I care about it? I can only answer the first question, and leave the second question up to you.

Back in the 80s the world’s worst enemy (according to the US) was the Sandinistas, and the US went to enormous lengths to eliminate them. Of course, it wasn’t that simple, and all kinds of hanky-panky was going on (including the Iran-Contra affair), which the US has never been eager to disclose.

The situation was complicated, and Edén Pastora was right in the middle of it. Pastora was one one of the original leaders of Sandinstas, who as the charismatic Comandante Cero, led the takeover of Managua’s National Palace during the uprising against Somoza. He later had a falling-out with the Sandanistas, and formed a rebel group to overthrow them.

At the same time, the US was organizing the Contras, which consisted mainly of former Somoza guardsmen. Pastora would have nothing to do with these unsavory types and organized a press conference to make his position clear. The press conference was at La Penca, a remote jungle camp, on the border with Costa Rica. A bomb exploded during the press conference, killing several Tico reporters and injuring many more. Pastora escaped with minor injuries.

It has never been clear what happened, and probably never will be because the US has classified it’s data as secret, and refuses to release it to the Tico courts. But eventually, after 20 years of intense investigation, the overall outline is becoming clear: the US cooperated with the Sandinistas to kill Pastora. The US supplied the technology (the bomb) and the Sandinistas supplied the personnel.

If Pastora had been successful, and turned the Sandinistas into a democratic party, the US would have been in a difficult position. A people’s government in Central American was the last thing it wanted. It had already negotiated the terms of surrender, which allowed that rascal Daniel Ortega to continue in office. Pastora was in the way of both sides, so they decided to get rid of him.

The end of the Sandinista revolution

According to Gioconda Belli, this happened when the Sandinista Revolution was becoming a economic success, but before it became a military success. I overlooked this section when I first read her book Country Under my Skin, because I still idealized the Sandinistas. But after I read Humberto’s book Breaking Faith, about how the Sandinistas betrayed the faith the people had in them, I took another another look at what Belli had said. I remembered how she had been an ardent supporter of the Sandinistas, but I had overlooked her criticism. This is what she said:
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Forging alliances, obtaining the support of prominent figures and of people with economic means, was critical. This, however, not only required us to modify the revolutionary discourse, but to approach people who frequently agreed to collaborate because of their own shady economic or political interests. Humberto Ortega’s tactic to insure their continuing support was to give them a surprising amount of political responsibilities. Often, the Sandinistas were put in the difficult position of having to accept orders from people who were clearly opportunists. This unscrulpulous approach was based on Humberto’s assumption that it was necessary, if we wanted to achieve success, to move ahead and open new avenues in a society where so much had been off-limits to us. But I hadn’t joined a revolution just to play by the very rules we were trying to change. For me, the end did not justify the means. The Revolution sought not only to bring about political change but also to instill ethical values.

My mistrust of the tactics undertaken by the Tercerista leadership only grew as time went by. Humberto Ortega may have been astute, but as far as I could see he was getting himself caught in a web that would be difficult to untangle without losing his humanity and his principles, even if it did bring the Sandinistas to victory. I wore myself ragged writing impassioned letters of protest, venting all my concerns about the kind of revolution we would be making if we kept altering the truth and pretending we were other than what we were in the interests of “selling” the cause. He silenced my criticism, invoking the revolutionary fervor that had taken hold of the country.
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I had lighlighted the following section, however:
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Remembering these events after twenty years, I realize those were the first signs of the unscrupulous political methods that later damaged the ideals and mystique of the Sandinista cause and, in the end, led the Ortega brothers – who usurped the legacy of our brave liberation struggle – not only to political but to moral defeat.
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She evidently did not understand the Marxist-Leninist beliefs of the Sandinistas either. Personally, I don’t think Marxism is all that bad, and Carl Marx did a lot of good by emphasizing the class struggle and the evils of Capitalism. But its economic theory is inadequate, to say the least. And Leninism and all the other Communist isms gave a bad name to an altruistic idea. The early Christians, for example, were probably communists. My home town in Illinois was once settled by a French commune.

But to get back to the subject: the failure of the Sandinista movement. I have to point out something else obvious: their demonization of the US. This was stupid, but inevitable, given their ideology, and resulted in the deaths of a lot of their countrymen. It made the US demonize them, in turn.

But Nicargua finally came to its senses. It didn’t have much choice, really, the country was in shambles, with many of its people dead. The people who were left decided to overlook past atrocities and work together. They were too exhausted to do anything else. Even the US is ashamed of the past, and they are pushing their government towards reform, and even paid them a million dollars to prosecute their last, corrupt president.

None of this would have been necessary if the Sandinistas had been honest in the first place. But they were more interested in power than they were in democracy.

Seeing the Sandinistas in a new light

I am now reading the book Breaking Faith, by Humberto Belli, who was once an Sandinista himself. He now positions himself as a Christian, and this book was published by a Christian press, so I expected to read a lot about how the bad Sandinistas attacked the good Christains. And indeed, much of this book is devoted to this subject. But it is also an excellent history of the Sandinista movement itself.

He is very critical of the Sandinistas, which I was suspicious of at first, but I think he has tried to be objective, and largely succeeded – except on matters of religious faith, and he makes his position on that clear. He is a Catholic convert.

Before I read this book, I was sympathetic to the revolution, I thought the Sandanistas were the heroes of the revolution. Now they seem more like power-crazed lunatics – but clever, idealistic lunatics. They imposed their rule on a broad-based insurrection against the Somozas, and then eliminated all the moderative elements of that insurrection.

He says almost nothing about the Contras, the counter-revolutionaries supported by the US, and the horrors they perpretated. He wrote this book for an American audience, and it has a definite pro-American bias. Nicaragua was indeed a battleground between Communism and Capitalism, where the local people were the loosers.

The entire history of this era is extremely complicated, and it would take a first-class historian to get it under control. It is unlikely such a history will be written, because of the difficulty with the Contra material, and the fact that few people now care about what really happened. Plenty of people have set opinions about how good, or bad, the Sandinistas (or the Contras) were, and they are not eager to have these beliefs challenged.

Many of the Sandinistas were supported and trained by Cuba, and they idealized Russian communism. Before, I thought this was just American propaganda, but he quotes plenty of Sandinista sources to back this up. And another book I have read, by a Sandinista guerilla, also says they were ardent Marxists. Gioconda Belli also says this, in a more muted fashion.

I now agree with the book’s main point: the Sandinistas betrayed the people who supported them - and also some people outside the revolution, like the Miskito Indians. They could have been a turning point for Nicargua, for the better, but Nicaragua is now the poorest country in Central America.

Fire from an old revolutionary

This is from an interview with a liberation theology priest, Jose Alvarez Lobo, in Nicaragua:
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Fr. Jose also criticizes the poor for losing confidence in themselves and in their own capacity to struggle, accepting the "project of the powerful," allowing themselves to be disorganized and "reduced to begging from the heartless First World" which, far from saving them, only guarantees their oppression. These have fallen away from the God who empowers the poor to struggle for their own liberation.

"What are the challenges now for the Nicaraguan people and for the FSLN?" I asked. The challenges "have to do with the people's problems and their causes. There is no use sitting on the side of the road weeping over what has been lost," he said. "We must live according to the basic truth that only the people can save the people' and also according to Paolo Freire's statement that no one can liberate anyone, and no one can liberate himself/herself alone.'

"Consciousness-raising, organizing, and people's mobilization are not ends in themselves but rather necessary steps toward demanding a new national and world order in which the interests of the majority will be prioritized and promoted. This means that for the people to gain power they must begin to walk again. Today's problems can be overcome only by decisive and organized action by the poor and by those who identify with their cause. This is facilitated by the fact that the stuff of consciousness-raising, i.e., the suffering of the majority, is seen everywhere; it is also clear everywhere that salvation will not come from the rulers.

"This work of consciousness-raising, organizing, and mobilizing is the challenge for the FSLN; it must offer the people a program of action which shows its commitment to confront the problems of the impoverished majority. Once again it must hear the cry of the poor, making their cause its own, walking once again with them, and ready to suffer martyrdom if necessary in the struggle.

It is true that some Sandinistas have become corrupt or betrayed the cause, but that is also true among Christians (including their leaders) and does not stop me from following Jesus. I continue trying to be a Sandinista, because I believe that their cause is still the cause of the poor and that their defeat is the defeat of the hopes of the oppressed. Fifteen years after the victory over Somoza, we must regroup our forces, be united, and take up the needs of the people as our program of action, working with the people so that tomorrow may be better than today. I hope, in humility, to have the strength to make my contribution to that cause."
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Or, in the words of the revolutionary poet Miguel Hernandez:

No me conformo, no; me desespero
Como si fuera un huracan de lava

I will not conform, no; I despair
As though I were a hurricane of lava

The country under my skin

This is a book written by Giaconda Belli. I want to quote from her introduction.
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Two things decided my life: my country and my sex. As a child, I was no rebel. My parents would never have guessed the their demure, sweet, proper little girl would turn into a defiant women who caused them so many sleepless nights. [She became involved with the Sandinistas.]

I have been two women, and lived two lives. One of these women wanted to do everything according to the classical feminine code: to get married, have children, be supportive, docile, and nourishing. The other woman yearned for the privileges men enjoyed: independence, self-reliance, a public life, mobility, lovers. I have spent the greater part of my life trying to balance and blend these two identities, to avoid being torn apart by their opposing forces. In the end, I believed I have found a way that allows both women to like together beneath the same skin. Without renouncing my femininity, I think I have managed to live like a man.

Lost in the anonymity of a giant American city [she lives part of her life in Santa Monica, California], I am one among many: a mother who takes her daughter to kindergarten and organizes play dates. To look at me, nobody would ever guess that at one time a military tribunal tried, convicted, and sentenced me to prison for being a revolutionary.

But I did live that life. I witnessed and was involved in the realization of great deeds. I lived through the gestation and of a revolution brought forth by the flesh, blood, and will of a nation. I felt the thrilling release of energy that comes from daring to defy fear and the survival instinct, in the name of a goal the transcends self-interest. I cried a lot, but I laughed a lot too. I discovered the joy that comes from surrendering the “I” and embracing the “We”. These days, when cynicism abounds, when we can easily become dismayed, lose faith and renounce dreams, I write down these memories in defense of the kind of happiness that makes life - and even death - worthwhile.

Love letter from a guerilla

This is from Fire from the Mountain: the making of a Sandinista
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I remember once, before leaving to go underground, I had said, “Look, Claudia, if they kill me someday - I’m going to tell you something I don’t want you to tell anyone - if they kill me someday, it’ll only be if I’m in too much pain or if they spray my face with bullets - that’s the only way they’ll keep me from dying with a smile on my lips, with a smile on my face. So when you see the paper Novedades or La Prensa with this caption ‘Unidentified criminal dead’ and you see me and recognize my face and my smile in the newspaper. You’ll know, I want you to know, that this smile is for you, that it belongs to you.

And when the students march in the streets, when they hold assemblies in the university to protest my death, I want you to sit in one of those seats in the middle of the auditorium, or in the back. And when they say fine things about me, about how I was a brave man who did his duty, a man who fought the dictatorship, a brave man, and all that, I want you to sit quietly with that paper in your hand and look down on my face and think the smile belongs to you, to you alone, and that nobody can ever take it away from you.

And when you march in the demonstrations, and are walking or running with the Guard chasing after you, my smile will be with you, walking or running, and don’t let anybody ever take that away. It belongs to you. And nobody will be able to take that smile from you, because I gave it to you. But don’t tell this to anybody; don’t talk about it. And if you have to die, too, and before dying, you’ll have that smile, but never tell anybody that smile is yours, that I gave it to you.”
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The Latino verbosity sometimes bothers me, but in passages like this it shows its eloquence.