The Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega and his wife Rosario Murillo have crushed civil society and thrown their former comrades in jail. What remains of the Sandinista ideal?
Nicaragua is a small, hot Central American country made beautiful by a few perfect volcanoes and two glassy lakes. It doesn’t register much attention abroad, and yet, in the late years of the Cold War, the world was anxiously focussed on events there. A young, ragtag army under the leadership of something called the Sandinista National Liberation Front looked like it just might manage to overthrow the forty-three-year dictatorship of the Somoza-family dynasty and its brutal Guardia Nacional.
, Daniel Ortega, who had spent years in Somoza’s terrible dungeons until, in 1974, a Sandinista commando unit—which included a very young Torres—secured his release in a hostage-taking strike. Hugo Torres and Dora María Téllez, Ortega’s former comrades-in-arms, were among the first to be taken out of their homes. They had made the unwise decision to remain in Nicaragua and wait calmly for the police to arrive. It was a moment of bitter irony for the aging fighters, who, sickened by Ortega’s swamp of corruption, had left the Sandinista National Liberation Front in 1995, and co-founded an opposition party, now called Unamos. The police did not bother with a warrant.
Through the inevitable prison grapevine, a picture of Torres’s final days has begun to emerge. Last September, at his first, brief family visit, Torres seemed healthy, so much so that his relatives tended to disbelieve the other prisoners’ reports of mistreatment. By December, he could not feed himself or walk without assistance, and he was transferred to a less crowded cell. His legs were swollen, and he often fainted.
He was dull even when I interviewed him all those years ago. If Ortega had been their sole voice, the excitement the Sandinistas provoked around the world would have fizzled: it was charismatic figures such as Torres and Téllez who lit a spark in us. Meanwhile, at the Sandinistas’ semi-clandestine headquarters in San José, Ortega droned on about.
In a conversation with me in Costa Rica, Zoilamérica recounted how Murillo alternated between railing against her, accusing her of seduction, and instructing her that Ortega was a sick man, and that she should put up with his abuse for the sake of the revolution.
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