csua.org/u/8ey -> www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/gate/archive/2004/08/02/nica.DTL
Click to View graphical line There were still red-and-black revolutionary banners waving over Managua, though the largest, on the sweltering afternoon of July 19, was marked with the Coca-Cola logo. Twenty-five years after the idealistic young guerrillas of the Sandinista National Liberation Front (FSLN) came down from the mountains to overthrow Nicaragua's brutal Anastasio Somoza dictatorship and seize the world's imagination, little remains of the romantic fervor that marked their unlikely triumph -- or the meager gains of their 10-year revolutionary experiment. On the anniversary, the plaza where 1979's rifle-waving companeros entered in triumph was thronged not with impassioned, singing crowds like the ones that hailed them as liberators so long ago but with Nicaragua's exhausted masses of jodidos -- slang for the "screwed-over ones." Sweating in the fierce sun, vendors hawked beer, pink motorized bunnies, fried yucca, beer, Chiclets, hats, water, beer, sunglasses, Che T-shirts, cigarettes, beer and red-and-black armbands imprinted with the Nike swoosh. Drunken teenagers tried to form human pyramids, then collapsed. At the edges of the plaza, homeless families huddled in makeshift shelters fashioned from trash bags and sticks, oblivious to the celebration; across town, glue-sniffing teenage prostitutes worked the gleaming new casinos. Far above the frenzy, from a remote platform, the middle-aged survivors of the FSLN shouted slogans at the crowd. For a good part of the 1980s, I worked in Nicaragua, covering not only the Sandinista revolution but also the contra war the Reagan administration had launched against it. In those heady early days, when the Sandinista foreign minister spouted poetry, the Sandinista army (briefly) abolished rank and radical land reform gave starving peasants their first property, the more than 50,000 "heroes and martyrs" who died to overthrow the dictatorship were an essential part of the mistica, or mystique, of the revolutionaries. Sergio Ramirez, a novelist and FSLN leader, wrote that the sacrifices of the early Sandinistas "made it possible to open the doors of paradise ... That paradise, in a tiny country historically dominated by the United States, fell apart almost before its people had a chance to savor their victory. I watched the hopeful women and men of the FSLN -- untrained students, priests, soldiers and poets who had the business of running a government fall into their laps before most of them were 30 years old -- grapple with land reform, ambitious literacy and health campaigns and the staggering economic challenges facing the second-poorest country in the hemisphere. I watched as the contra war raged throughout the countryside, killing and terrorizing thousands, undoing the social programs of the revolution and undermining popular democracy in the name of anticommunism. Then, as the US embargo and war further impoverished the country, top Sandinista officials reacted with repression, austerity programs and a wildly unpopular draft. By the late 1980s, the country was near collapse, and the intransigence of Sandinista leaders, most notably former commandante Daniel Ortega, was gutting support for the FSLN. In 1990, Ortega was defeated in elections that gave the presidency to opposition candidate Violeta Chamorro. It was perhaps the revolution's finest moment -- for the first time in Nicaragua's history, there was a peaceful and democratic transfer of power -- but it was wrenching for those who had streamed into the plaza in 1979, expecting a new dawn. A wave of shameless self-enrichment by Sandinista leaders who abandoned their revolutionary principles for cars, houses and careers as elite politicians had led to a split in the FSLN; intellectuals and "pro-democracy" Sandinistas had left the party, and Ortega had consolidated his strongman's grip on the leadership. Many retreated into shock and for years refused to come to the plaza to celebrate the anniversary of the revolution. "It's too painful," one woman, a former Sandinista, told me in 1991. The next decade saw only a worsening of Nicaragua's plight, as even the minimal reforms of the revolution were reversed. The country staggered under corruption and political scandals, runaway inflation, drug trafficking, gangsterism, the collapse of world coffee prices, drought, floods and a hurricane that devastated the country, killing thousands and destroying the country's pathetic infrastructure. Meanwhile, the FSLN, side by side with Nicaragua's right-wing political parties, reverted to the backroom deal making of traditional Central American politics, its leaders cynically embracing what Managua-based sociologist Jose Luis Rocha called "political impunity and the state-as-booty concept." By the 25th anniversary of the dictatorship's ouster, no politicians, including current President Enrique Bolanos -- elected on an anticorruption platform after his predecessor was jailed -- had made much headway against poverty. Nicaragua, part of the International Monetary Fund's Highly Indebted Poor Country Initiative, was surviving mainly on international aid, cash remittances from Nicaraguans living abroad and, unofficially, the drug trade. More than one-fourth of the total population is malnourished, nearly half are unemployed and the per capita income -- slightly under $470 -- has fallen since the Sandinistas took power in 1979. It got darker in the plaza as the revolutionary anthems of the past played over and over and the crowds drifted away. A bedraggled pet pigeon, whose owner had dressed it in a red-and-black capelet, flapped its wings weakly, and a barefoot child gnawed on a corn cob next to his mother's flickering charcoal fire. Onstage, Daniel Ortega was winding down his two-hour-long address, an oddly dissociated recitation of platitudes; nearby, his entourage waited, idling their new SUVs as night fell. It was not, finally, in the plaza that I found a surviving remnant of the mistica that had sparked such hope in 1979. The morning after the anniversary, I drove to the mountain town of Esteli, which Somoza bombed and strafed unrelentingly during the insurrection, which contras attacked during the war and which was hit by economic disaster in the 1990s -- and which has remained loyal to the revolution. In Esteli, where leathery men rode horses up narrow, cobbled streets past peeling FSLN murals, I found a dim, shabby room maintained by a group of elderly mothers of the town's "heroes and martyrs." It was a heartbreakingly homemade museum, a cement-floored shrine filled with curling black-and-white photos of the dead -- boys of 16 with serious eyes and wavy hair, girls with high-school-yearbook smiles, a stolid housewife, a shy man with full lips -- and their names painstakingly written on masking tape: Martha Torres Lagos, Noel Gamez, Ulises Antonio Espinoza. Hundreds of faces gazed out below hand-lettered cardboard signs grouping them by the dates of their deaths. In the center of the room was a rough box containing a lock of hair and some neatly folded clothes: a stained blouse, a pair of socks, a shirt. Little scribbled notes identified the belongings -- "These pants belonged to the combatant Igor Ubeda, who died January 15, 1970"-- and empty Fanta bottles stuffed with tissue-paper flowers were placed beside them. Another box held a statue of the Virgin Mary, plus a string of Christmas lights, more dusty fake flowers in jars and an FSLN bandanna. I walked around the room slowly, passing 1979 and the faces of those who died just days before the insurrection triumphed. Immediately after came the long years of the contra war. My eyes blurred as I saw a snapshot of a grinning peasant boy mounted next to some lines of a song by Nicaraguan musician Carlos Mejia Godoy copied out on creased notebook paper. When I couldn't bear any more, I paused by the door under an old photo of Esteli, bombed into ruins, with tanks in the streets. "I've got three sons here," she said, gesturing to the walls. "The youngest died in the mountains, so I never got his body back. I saw the ragged red-and-black banner draped over a broken chair near the doorway and asked ...
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