From Rio de Janeiro
Dora Maria Tellez, the “Comandante Dos”, a historical figure of the Revolution that in 1979 overthrew the dictatorship of the Somoza dynasty that suffocated Nicaragua for decades, was sentenced a few days ago to eight years in prison. Her trial that convicted her was a grotesque farce: she was given four minutes to make a statement.
In the same trial for another prominent figure in the disappeared Sandinismo, Victor Hugo TinocoThe sentence was thirteen years.
It was also recently learned of the death of Commander Hugo Torres, who became general when the Sandinista Army existed. He had been detained by the government of Daniel Ortega.
One detail reveals in an absolutely clear way what kind of people Ortega became: then Commander Torres and Dora led the action in 1979 that freed the current dictator from Somocista prison.
Exiles and detainees
There are many who were figures of special importance in the period in which Sandinismo existed – from the victory in 1979 to the electoral defeat of 1990 – and who today are exiled, isolated or detained.
What was initially a greedy thirst for power from the Ortega-Murillo couple became a brutal copy of what was the dictatorship of the Somoza dynasty. And if at first this realization opened a gash in my soul, now it covers me with indignation.
memories of the revolution
I remember well that January 24, 1980 had been a Thursday. That day I traveled for the first time to Sandinista Nicaragua. The revolution that brought down Anastasio Somoza It had been exactly six months and five days.
Until then I had maintained contact at a distance with the writer Sergio Ramirezwith whom I am united to this day by a warm friendship.
I still keep in my memory the emotion of that first of a very long series of visits during the Sandinismo that liquidated the dynasty that for decades looted and suffocated that beautiful country.
They were my young years, and together with a handful of foreigners that we supported and tried to collaborate, I was able to have a lot of contact with several of the members of the government.
In those informal meetings, often long dinners that lasted for hours, I was always at the side of more Sandinistas, with Daniel Ortega.
He seemed to me to be a closed man, with a distrustful look, who broke down only once: in 1986, when he told me regarding his brother Camilo, who died in combat with Somoza’s forces when he was very young.. That day he also told me that from the age of 15 to 34 he, Daniel, had no home: he lived in hiding, wandering from one place to another.
For the first and only time I felt something human in that stone figure.
Our last meeting was in Rio de Janeiro, in mid-1990, in a meeting with artists and intellectuals months following the electoral defeat once morest Doña Violet Chamorro.
pinata and following
I never went back to Nicaragua. From afar, I knew regarding the “piñata”, the dispossession that led some of the highest figures of Sandinismo, Ortega among them, to become millionaires.
I confess that together with other foreign friends who had lived the Revolution so closely, I was slow to accept what was true as true.
Even in that aspect the traitors made round copies of the Somocistas.
That of the Sandinistas has been the last Revolution of my generation and, according to their model, perhaps the last in history..
In many moments we felt that they were leading Nicaraguans to something very close to making impossible dreams come true, to brushing the sky with their hands.
I will keep forever in the best of my memory moments lived in those years of hope, which seemed to be of a real luminosity.
After losing the elections, as a consequence of the brutal armed aggression carried out by Washington with the support of the most reactionary sectors of Nicaragua, Sandinismo began to be destroyed.
It did not take long for what had been a living and beautiful Revolution to begin to be betrayed in a vile, unforgivable way.
That hope that defeated the Somoza dynasty was succeeded by another dynasty, equally perverse, abusive, murderous.
Since 2006, that is, 16 years ago, the presidential couple has absurdly manipulated elections to remain in absolute power.
the worst traitor
Daniel now heads that new dynasty that represses, persecutes and kills even young students like his brother Camilo was when he was assassinated by the previous dynasty.
A traitor is and always will be a traitor, an abject and despicable figure.
But there are traitors of a worse kind.
José Daniel Ortega Saavedra belongs, with merits and brilliance, to that second species.
