Deja Vu

November 24, 2008

El Pueblo Vencerá

Tags:

Latin America,

Managua,

Nicaragua,

socialism

“Sandinista Fervor Turns Sour for Former Comrades of Nicaragua’s President,” The New York Times, Nov. 24, 2008.

MANAGUA, Nicaragua — The music of President Daniel Ortega’s Sandinista party, the rousing songs sung during political rallies and street protests that draw his supporters by the thousands, is the same as what rang out during the war years of the 1980s. “Brother, give me your hand, we now march united toward the victorious sun, on the path to liberty,” goes one.

But Carlos Mejía Godoy, the revolutionary singer-songwriter who dreamed up those songs when he was the Sandinistas’ chief balladeer, has told Mr. Ortega’s government to stop using his music and in recent days has been furiously scribbling new lyrics that lament the direction that Mr. Ortega is taking the country.

Like many prominent Sandinistas who have left Mr. Ortega’s movement in disgust, Mr. Mejía Godoy is now denounced by party members as a sellout who has lost his revolutionary fervor. But ex-Sandinistas, it turns out, are some of Mr. Ortega’s harshest critics these days, hounding him and provoking his ire.

Mr. Ortega’s critics have accused him of rigging this month’s municipal elections in an effort to spread his power. Leading the charge against Mr. Ortega have been some of his former comrades in the Sandinista National Liberation Front, which ruled Nicaragua in the 1980s and returned to power two years ago. The dissenters include cabinet members in Mr. Ortega’s old government and intellectuals who championed the revolution that brought him to power.

“I want a peaceful and harmonious Nicaragua,” goes Mr. Mejía Godoy’s latest song, which he pulled out proudly on Thursday afternoon after spending much of the previous evening working on the arrangement and fine-tuning the lyrics. “I want a Nicaragua that is free, where nobody destroys the flower of my happiness, nor puts a straitjacket on my way of thinking.”

The Jaguar Smile, by Salman Rushdie, 1987.
In 1986, the ruling Sandinista government invited Salman Rushdie to tour Nicaragua for three weeks. The result, The Jaguar Smile, was Rushdie’s first nonfiction book. Though the book overlooks Sandinista authoritarianism (which, of course, had replaced the Somoza dynasty’s authoritarianism), Rushdie skillfully captures the spirit and various mythologies of 1980s Sandinismo.

A painting by the primitivist painter Gloria Guevara, titled Cristo guerillero, showed a crucifixion set in a rocky, mountainous Nicaraguan landscape. Three peasant women, two kneeling, one standing, wept at the foot of the cross, upon which there hung a Christ-figure who wore, instead of a loincloth and a crown of thorns, a pair of jeans and a denim shirt. The picture explained a good deal. The religion of those who lived under the volcanoes of Central America had always had much to do with martyrdom, with the dead; and in Nicaragua many, many people found their way to the revolution through religion. The versicle-and-response format of the Mass now formed the basis of much political activity, too. Sandino’s old slogan, patria libre o morir (a free homeland or death), was now the national rallying-cry, and at the end of public meetings a platform speaker would invariably call out, “Patria libre!” to which the crowd would roar back, rather spookily if you hadn’t shared their history, and if, for you, another faraway martyr-culture, that of Khomeini’s Iran, represented a fearsome warning, “O MORIR!”

The Nicaraguan revolution had been, and remained, a passion. The word had secular as well as Christian resonances. It was that fusion that lay at the heart of Sandinismo. That was what Gloria Guevara’s painting revealed.

And then,
we’ll go wake our dead
with the life they bequeathed us
and we’ll all sing together
while concerts of birds
repeat our message
through the length and breadth
of America.

(From Until We’re Free, by Gioconda Belli.)

The generations of the dead were the context of seven-year-old “Nicaragua libre,” and without context there could be no meaning. When you stood in front of la Loma, the terrifying “bunker” which became the seat of the Somozas’ power, you began to remember: that the first Somoza, Anastasio Somoza García, had presided over the killing of some 20,000 Nicaraguans until he himself was shot, at a ball in León, by the poet Rigoberto López (who was himself killed by the National Guard an instant later); and that, after a brief period of (slight) liberalization under one of Tacho I’s sons, Luis, the other son resumed normal Somoza operations in 1967. This was Tacho II, last ad greediest of the line. It was just seven years since the horror ended, seven years since men were fed to panthers in the despot’s private zoo, since torture, castration, rape. Seven years since the beast. La Loma made the United States’ claim that Nicaragua was once again a totalitarian state sound obscene. The bunker was the reality of totalitarianism, its hideous remnant and reminder. The beheaded, violated, mutilated ghosts of Nicaragua bore witness, every day, to what used to happen here, and must never happen again.

The most famous ghost, Augusto César Sandino, had by now been thoroughly mythologized, almost as thoroughly as, for example, Gandhi. A little, frowning man in a big hat, he had become a collection of stories. In 1927, he had been head of the sales department of the Huasteca petrol company in Mexico, when the Nicaraguan Liberal, Sacasa, backed by the army’s chief of staff, Moncada, rose in arms against the US-backed conservative, Adolfo Díaz. Sandino returned to Nicaragua to fight on the Liberal side, and when Moncada dd a deal with the US and laid down his arms, Sandio refused, so that Moncada had to tell the Americans: “All my men surrender except one,” and Sandino and his “Crazy Little Army” took to the mountains . . . Yes, that story, and the story of his betrayal, his assassination by Somoza’s thugs in February 1934, after he had signed a peace treaty and when he was on his way home from the celebratory banquet. I was struck by the fact that it was Sandino’s hat, and not his face, that had become the most potent icon in Nicaragua. A hatless Sandino would not be instantly recognizable; but that hat no longer needed his presence beneath it to be evocative. In many instances, FSLN graffiti were followed by a schematic drawing of the celebrated headgear, a drawing that looked exactly like an infinity-sign with a conical volcano rising out of it. Infinity and eruptions: the illegitimate boy from Niquinohomo was now a cluster of metaphors. Or, to put it another way: Sandino had become his hat.

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