July 19th: Nicaragua and the Stigma of Dictatorships
The Ortega-Murillo dictatorship promotes hate and fear of different ways of thinking. Neither God nor his priests escape the persecution.
HAVANA TIMES – Forty-six years have gone by, and I can still feel the cool breeze on my face when we entered Managua in an open vehicle, at the head of an immense line of trucks, pick-ups, buses, and every kind of vehicle, all carrying hundreds of young people from different social classes, waving arms of various types and dressed in a multitude of ways.
After the battles in Managua, we had staged a retreat with our forces, then fought in the towns south of the capital, where we succeeded in liberating Jinotepe, before moving on to the emblematic taking of Granada. As we rolled down the Eastern Highway, I breathed deeply and thought about the close friends who had fallen in battle. Later I wrote: “I want them to share this mouthful of air, this magic moment they couldn’t experience.”
July 19, 1979, was a day of joy, expressed the next day with the countless crowds in the Plaza of the Revolution: a genuine representation of a people celebrating the end of a dynastic dictatorship that had held us captive through force of arms, repression, and lies. I’ve said many times that the victory wasn’t only military. Above all, it was a popular victory, a citizens’ and political one. Arms were a means of confronting the military dictatorship’s mode of operation, but the decisive factor was the will of an entire people, backed the guerrillas as they entered the cities.
The 110 rifles with which we entered Managua’s eastern neighborhoods would have been worthless without the thousands of women, elderly, youth and children who erected barricades, arming themselves with whatever they could, fed us and sheltered us. Struggling together.
This may seem a common occurrence, but a careful examination of history confirms that in struggles where the people haven’t yet decided to join in and fight, there’ve been only setbacks, no matter whether or not we had powerful rifles, like the FAL. Many factors came together to inspire the people to fight. Being fed up, yes, but also the conviction of unity, the convergence of diverse forces, contrasting opinions, and different perspectives. Courage, yes, and also the good kind of rage. Honest rage. To break with fear and internalized oppression. The conviction that we either end the dictatorship or be devoured by it.
The assassination of Pedro Joaquin Chamorro [journalist murdered in January 1978] ended by persuading the most comfortable and fearful that the moment had arrived. Even private capital gave their backing. At this stage, socialists, social Christians, liberals, conservatives and Sandinistas all closed ranks: Everyone against the Somoza dictatorship!
The long multi-faceted struggle and the triumph that finished off that dictatorship is a fertile source of many lights and hopes. The factors that allowed the dictatorship to persist for so long, the small and large successes, and above all the setbacks experienced in the course of so many years, are full of teachings. Dissecting them and extracting the lessons they teach is vitally important to those of us now, some of us with white hair, who are struggling against the Ortega-Murillo dictatorship.
In carrying out this struggle, there’s a simplistic tendency to reduce the fight to a search for the guilty parties, and to vent our hatred and venom on them, as if this were the solution to our ills. Political and social phenomena are much more complex and less predictable than those of nature, It’s essential that – without prejudices or special interests – we unravel the causes, factors and conditions that have favored the current dictatorial regime, in order to exorcise it in the collective commitment that the future project must contain. That will contribute very constructively to the organization of the struggles for resistance under these new conditions.
I consider it key that we investigate the relationship between the recurrence of dictatorships in Nicaragua and its ties to our human failings: the links between the political culture and the customs that underlie our failures to come together and our clashes as a people. These are the seven deadly sins that all religions highlight, and the political manuals warn of. Those who hold power – large or small – and don’t want to lose it, exploit greed, anger, envy, lust, pride, gluttony and laziness. I don’t know if the sum of these adds up to the hatred that is present in such massive form that you have to ask yourself if there’s not an eighth element missing from the list of sins.
Authoritarianisms of all kinds that are so present in contemporary life all cultivate hate for the other – the different one, the one who doesn’t think like me, who comes from another culture, another history. These are the lethal arms wielded by the powerful. Evidence abounds. The Ortega-Murillo dictatorship utilizes and promotes hates and differences, both directly and through its agents, open or undercover. And in this war of persecution neither God nor his priests escape.
However, I want to hold on to a positive synthesis, recalling the virtues that contrast with these scourges. Because our history also abounds with examples of dignity, patience, honesty, humility, resistance and courage. Without them, July 19 wouldn’t have been possible, nor would there be so many people inside Nicaragua or in exile who haven’t resigned themselves to accepting the oppression. Thousands of those who are resisting today were part of or hiers of those young men and women who 46 years ago celebrated our victory in the Plaza of the Revolution.
I offer a well-deserved recognition of the generosity of so many people who lost their lives fighting for liberty and justice in the decades of the 50s, 60s, 70s, 80s, and 90’s; and to those murdered during and after 2018. Soon the inevitable moment will arrive when the Ortega-Murillo dictatorship falls, and I hold the conviction that we’ll be able to create a more humane country. With ourselves, and with our dead, so that no one is left behind.
First published in Spanish by Confidencial and translated and posted in English by Havana Times.