Gioconda Belli on Nicaragua’s Current Dictatorship
“equal to or worse than Somoza’s”
The acclaimed Nicaraguan poet and novelist received the international Carlos Fuentes Prize in Mexico, calling him “the great magician of words.”
By Deutsche Welle (Confidencial)
HAVANA TIMES — “Exile and dispossession are hard at this stage of life…” The poet’s words resonated in the hall of the Palace of Fine Arts in Mexico City, where those present listened with respect, scarcely breathing.
In that venue, during a solemn ceremony, Nicaraguan writer Gioconda Belli received the 2025 international Carlos Fuentes Prize for Literary Creation from the National Autonomous University of Mexico on Tuesday, November 11, 2025.
This is her most recent visit to Mexico, a country she first arrived in back in 1975 as a young woman forced into exile by the military dictatorship of Anastasio Somoza, due to her involvement with the Sandinista guerrillas that would overthrow him four years later.
And now, half a century later, Daniel Ortega’s government — led by a man who was once part of those guerrillas — has turned viciously against the opposition and his old comrades, forcing Belli and thousands of other Nicaraguans into exile in recent years.
“Fuentes would be horrified”
In her moving speech, focused on Nicaragua and its political situation, the author of The Inhabited Woman recalled that Carlos Fuentes was one of the first foreign intellectuals to visit the small Central American country in 1979 to support the nascent Sandinista revolution.
Today, Fuentes “would be horrified at the tyrannical drift” of the Ortega–Murillo regime, Belli said. Not even his boundless imagination could have foreseen that she would now come to Mexico to receive this award “after having been denationalized, stripped of my property, and declared a traitor to my homeland,” she added.
Her friend and fellow writer Sergio Ramírez, winner of the Cervantes Prize in 2017 and the Vargas Llosa Prize in 2025, ended up in the same situation, exiled at age 83. “Sergio and I, with no fault other than using our words, have been victims of abuses of power and the manipulation of justice and the state in our country. We’ve had to watch how the memory of that revolution that so justifiably stirred such enthusiasm around the world has been squandered,” she said sadly.
She then regained strength to recall Mexico’s solidarity with the young Sandinistas who, like her, confronted Somoza’s regime in the late 1970s. She grew emotional remembering the support they received from writers such as Carlos Monsiváis, Elena Poniatowska, and Fuentes himself.
“I lived for several months in Mexico, which was my first safe harbor, the cradle of a magnificent solidarity movement,” she said, noting that Mexico’s government under Jose Lopez Portillo did not hesitate to break relations with the Somoza dictatorship.
“May Mexico recover its spirit of solidarity”
“I hope that Mexico and its government recover their spirit of solidarity and understanding, and realize that there is no sovereignty when it is not supported by popular will,” said the author of Waslala and The Country Under My Skin, drawing loud applause.
A few weeks earlier, the Mexican Senate created a so-called Friendship Group with Nicaragua, backed by Ortega and legislators from the ruling Morena party, despite protests from hundreds of Nicaraguan exiles living in Mexico and other countries.
The poet was again greeted with ovations when, apparently referring to those politicians, she explained: “The legacy and symbolic dimension of the Sandinista revolution are today the façade behind which Nicaragua’s current rulers hide. And there are still those who support them, despite the widely documented crimes and human rights violations that show that my country has once again become a dictatorship, equal to or worse than Somoza’s.”
Hope for freedom
The Carlos Fuentes Prize jury decided to honor Gioconda Belli for “her ability to renew Spanish-American poetry and for the power of her dialogue between society, history, and literature through her narrative.”
The 76-year-old poet, who in 2023 won the Reina Sofía Prize for Ibero-American Poetry, dedicated this new award “to my Nicaragua, to its people, to its political prisoners and exiles,” as well as to singer-songwriter Norma Helena Gadea, who died last week in Managua after a long illness.
“I give thanks to life, which has served me a banquet of intense experiences, both bitter and sweet. I give thanks for literature and words, which have given human beings a language to express beauty and appeal to our emotions,” she said, closing her speech with a call to hope:
“The strength of poetry and literature — which have been light and elevation in that small country of poets — will continue singing its struggles for freedom, with faith that the word will go on recounting the end of tyrants.”
First published in Spanish by Confidencial and translated and posted in English by Havana Times.