"You say our country's never been invaded? You're right, little buddy. Because I'd like to see the needle-dicked foreigners who'd have the guts to try. We drink napalm to get our hearts started in the morning. A rape and a mugging is our way of saying `Cheerio.' Hell can't hold our sock-hops. We walk taller, talk louder, spit further, fuck longer and buy more things than you know the names of. I'd rather be a junkie in a New York City jail than king, queen and jack of all you Europeans. We eat little countries like this for breakfast and shit them out before lunch."
Of course, the guy should have punched me. But this was Europe. He just smiled his shabby, superior European smile. (God, don't these people have dentists?)
Thirty--sLc Hours in Managua '-An In-depth Report
SEPTEMBER 1987
There are probably more fact-finding tours of Nicaragua right now than there are facts-the country has shortages of practically everything. Nonetheless, everyone's going, every senator and representative, the entire pet shop full of '88 presidential candidates, every church-group bake-sale committee and Mush-R-Us liberal coalition. I see that even Mayor Koch is planning to go, probably looking for new kinds of mismanagement to be used in New York City.
Well, I wasn't about to be left out. I wheedled my way onto a weekend trip sponsored by the National Forum Foundation, a conservative think tank founded by former Vietnam POW Senator Jeremiah Denton and headed by the senator's son Jim. The Forum Foundation has been taking bipartisan delegations of congressional staff members to Nicaragua. The theory is, I guess, that congressional staff members haven't been listening to their own campaign promises for years and are therefore not insane yet. If you take staff members, they might see something. Whereas if you take con gressmen themselves, they'll probably think they're back in their home districts and promise to quit committing adultery.
Anyway, my staff delegation (or "StaffDel," as these things are called) was made up of young men and women whose bosses were potential swing votes on the contra aid question. The staffers were in their middle twenties, earnest, bright and dutiful. On the plane to Managua they studied State Department briefings and Congressional Research Service reports, scoured books pro and con about the Sandinistas and filled note pads with neatly lettered questions to ask anyone who'd stand still. I drank.
Is Nicaragua a Bulgaria with marimba bands or just a misunderstood Massachusetts with Cuban military advisors? Beats me. Personally, I like the kind of research you can get your hands on, the kind you can heft. That is, I like to do my principal research in bars, where people are more likely to tell the truth or, at least, lie less convincingly than they do in briefings and books. But I hadn't even made it to the bar in the Augusto C. Sandino Airport when Nicaragua began researching itself and in a palpably hefty way. To get into the country, you have to change sixty U.S. dollars into Nicaraguan cordobas. Jim Denton went to the exchange window with $480 for our group of eight and came back with 4,080,000 cordobas, which filled an entire Adidas gym bag. In 1979, in the last days of the utterly bankrupt Somoza regime, the "corb" was fifteen to the dollar. Now the official rate is 8,500 to 1. On the black market you can get 14,000.
Somebody has definitely let a dialectical materialist loose in the Nicaraguan monetary system. You probably have to take economics over again two or three times at Moscow U. before you can make cash worth this little. And free enterprise had disappeared from Sandino Airport (if enterprise is the word for what goes on at Latin ports of entry). There were no taxis, no guys trying to snatch your luggage, no touts, no beggars, no shoe-shine boys, no Indian urchins selling you Mayan relics from Taiwan, no nothing but runty teenagers in army uniforms staggering around morosely under the weight of AK-47s. (Amigos, if you'd get with the right superpower block, you could have M-16s. They're four and a half pounds lighter)
We drove to Managua in a U. S. embassy van with bullet-proof windows. It was early Friday evening but downtown was nearly empty. The traffic was mostly East German IFA trucks full of soldiers. Our Nicaraguan driver said IFA stands for Imposible Frenar A tiempo, "Impossible to Stop on Time." The few private cars were shambling down the vacant streets trailing smoke. Hardly a one had both headlights working. Many of the streetlights were also out. There were still a few commercial billboards, stained and faded. But there were lots of brightly painted new signs with pictures of workers and peasants-chins, guns, gazes and what-not uplifted. And the Sandinista Front initials, FSLN, were spraypainted on all vertical surfaces.
A few cantinas and cafes were open, but the people inside them just seemed to be standing there. We passed a Japanese car dealership with one car on the lot. Broken mechanical things seemed to be piling up at intersections. Factory yards were high with weeds. I opened the van door to find out if music was playing anywhere. It wasn't. And one thing that I saw was truly shocking. Nicaraguans were in line at bus stops-long, orderly, silent lines. Latins don't queue up for anything, let alone quietly. It's contra, as it were, everything in the culture. Imagine Lutece serving a Bartles and James wine cooler. Imagine British soccer fans applauding politely when Milan scores. Imagine the Supreme Soviet conducting business in bikini underpants. Something, I realized, was deeply, deeply wrong in Nicaragua.
Now, a lot of people tell me this gray and depressing atmosphere is a product of the civil war, that Nicaraguans are on short rations and under tight discipline because they're in a struggle to the death with vicious mercenaries supported by massive U. S. covert aid. These are the same people who tell me the contras are completely ineffective, have no chance of winning and have squandered all the cash they get from America on big houses with swimming pools in Miami. I don't know. I'm not a liberal so I have a poor grasp of stuff I don't know anything about. I have, however, been in places where guerrilla wars were being fought-El Salvador, the Philippines and Lebanon. Those places weren't like this, and East Berlin, Poland and Russia were.
But let's be fair. Maybe Nicaragua isn't really communist. Maybe it's just going in for the "Communist Look." You know, the way you can get a "Turbo Look" Porsche 911 with the air dam and the fat tires and the big whale-tail spoiler in the back but without the actual turbo-charged motor-sort of a life-style, fashionstatement kind of thing. Some Albanian-trained decorator probably came over to our luxury hotel, the Managua Intercontinental, and pulled up all the carpets at the corners, spread dust and mildew in the rooms, rubbed the chrome off the sink fixtures, broke the shower heads, made the bar service surly and complicated, and took all the comic books, sexy fotonovelas and copies of the Miami Herald out of the hotel newsstand and replaced them with biographies of Fidel Castro and the works of Lenin. "Today's tourist .. . goes back to his air-conditioned hotel and orders haute cuisine," read the brochure from the government tourist agency called Intu- rismo, as in the Russian Intourist. "Friday Special-Festival de Hamburguesas' read the menu in the lobby.
We met our first Sandinista that same night, General Secretary of the Foreign Ministry Alejandro Bendana, who mentioned that he'd rather be out dancing at the street festivals (which I saw no sign of) and said he assumed we would, too. Tsk. Tsk. There but for lack of international understanding . . . Bendana oozed selfconfident charm. His clothes were nattily rumpled, he bummed cigarettes and, having gone to Harvard, he spoke better English than we did. He was full of enthusiasm for the Central American Peace Pact, the Arias Accord. Bendana vowed Nicaragua would comply-unilaterally if need be-with all of the Accord's requirements, though he had to look in his briefcase to see just what those requirements were.
In a fit of bonhomie, Bendafla then hinted the government would soon allow the one opposition newspaper, La Prensa, to publish again, permit the Catholic radio station to resume broadcasting, free some political prisoners and announce a partial cease-fire with the contras.
"The revolutionary process," said Bendana with real heat, "does not require having a newspaper shut down, does not require having a radio station shut down, does not require eliminating political parties. Those measures go ag
ainst the grain of the revolution!" By the look on the faces of the StaffDel members, I'd say it had occurred to them that Bendana worked for a revolution that didn't require those things but had done them anyway. The aides had some major questions, which Bendana parried like an amused and slightly absent-minded Northwestern football coach defending his team's record against Michigan and Ohio State.
"The revolution has made mistakes," said Bendaiia. "We are prepared to put the Cubans on a boat tomorrow."
I liked the guy-a bad sign. People I like shouldn't be allowed anywhere near government. I know my friends. They'd borrow the Soviet Hind helicopters for picnics, seduce Rumanian gymnast nymphettes and tell every gaggle of visiting Americans exactly what they wanted to hear, just like I would. "Some believe the Nicaraguan revolution was on a Marxist-Leninist track. We don't see it that way," said Bendafla.
This hardly jibes with what Bendana's Sandinista companeros have been saying.
`... Marxist-Leninism is the scientific doctrine that guides our revolution," announced Defense Minister Humberto Ortega in a speech to the Sandinista military in 1981.
"You cannot be a true revolutionary in Latin America without being Marxist-Leninist," Interior Minister Tomas Borge told Newsweek in 1984.
For years now you've been able to count on the Sandinistas for William F. Buckley fodder, for Reagan-electing quotes:
We are not going to be so naive as to accept a civic opposition, because that doesn't exist anymore.
-President Daniel Ortega, quoted in The Economist, 1986
Our friendship with Libya is eternal.
-Tomas Borge, quoted in The Washington Post, 1986
And my personal favorite:
They [La Prensa] accused us of suppressing freedom of expression. This was a lie and we could not let them publish it.
-Nelba Blandon, Interior Ministry Director of Censorship, quoted in The New York Times, 1984
I guess the big question is, are they kidding? Are the Sandys pulling our leg when they say this stuff? Or are they goofing on us when they say they're going to allow unfettered elections and freedom of speech? Should we believe what they've said before? Should we believe what they're saying now? Or should we sit by the algae-choked swimming pool at the Managua Intercontinental and drink two dozen beers brought to us by a waitress who can no longer legally be tipped and has turned as efficient and willing as the average Budapest customs official?
The next morning we went to meet with the leaders of the Nicaraguan Permanent Commission on Human Rights, who were not nearly as full of pep as the General Secretary of the Foreign Ministry. In fact, they were a depressing bunch.
Nicaragua has two competing human-rights commissions. Human-rights commissions seem to go forth and multiply in places where a human right hasn't been seen in years. The Permanent Commission on Human Rights was founded in 1977 to deal with the heinous crimes of the Somoza regime. In those days the commission defended a number of people who later became Sandinista leaders, including the present Interior Minister (and head of the DGST secret police) Tomas Borge. Now the Commission has its hands full dealing with the heinous crimes of its former clients. "They called us communists before. Now they call us counterrevolutionaries," sighed Executive Director Lino Hernandez.
We sat in a drab and cluttered boardroom. An ancient, wounded air conditioner sputtered and 40-watt light bulbs winked as Managua underwent its daily electricity shortage.
Hernandez and his commissioners presented us with a neatly organized horror of figures and cases. The Commission has been tallying about one hundred and thirty "severe violations of human rights" per month. Each complainant must provide identification and be fingerprinted and otherwise get serious about his or her allegations. The commission estimated there were about seven thousand political prisoners in the country not counting between thirty-five hundred and forty-five hundred former members of the Somoza National Guard, mostly enlisted men serving jail sentences of up to thirty years for having backed the wrong horse.
According to Hernandez, most of the political prisoners are campesinos accused of giving some kind of aid and comfort to the contras. "Attempts against the state" is the cover-all charge. The campesinos are usually grabbed by the military and always handed over to the DGST, which stands for "General Department of State Security," just as KGB stands for "Committee of State Security"another one of those commie fashion statements. The prisoners are held incommunicado under less than delightful conditions and interrogated with the usual Latin American light touch. So far, said Hernandez, only one political prisoner, the head of a labor union, had failed to sign a confession. Not bad, out of seven thousand.
After confession and about nine months of waiting around in jails without counsel, the guilty parties are tried by a "People's Anti-Somoza Tribunal," made up of two Sandinista-block committee members and one lawyer from the Sandinista lawyer's association. The regular Nicaraguan court system has no jurisdiction over these trials. No copies of charges or confessions are made available to lawyers, press or defendants. "If a person is under control of State Security, all we can do is ask and wait," said Hernandez.
"And despair," piped in another member of the Commission.
The StaffDel scribbled furiously, taking down names and numbers, probing each statement, asking for more precise translations. I doodled. I was drawing little pictures of mobile homes. It must have been something subconscious to do with "workers' paradise." I was drawing the workers paradise we have back in the States-cars up on blocks and broken toys in the crabgrass and a nasty dog chained to the satellite dish. These workers' paradise things just never seem to pan out.
Hernandez and the Commission members looked exhausted. Hernandez himself had just gotten out of jail, where he'd been put for observing an anti-Sandinista protest. Maybe they were all lying. But to what end I can't imagine. All sorts of other lies are available that would be easier and more profitable to tell.
After the Permanent Commission of Human Rights began reporting Sandinista human-rights violations, the Sandinistas set up their own human-rights commission, the National Commission for Protection and Promotion of Human Rights, the CNPPDH. One of its members is a U.S. nun, from the Agnesian order, named Mary Hartman. She has spent twenty-five years in Nicaragua and bears no resemblance to the character once played by Louise Lasser.
Sister Mary Hartman, carrying a large Souvenir of Cuba key ring, ushered us into the CNPPDH headquarters, which looked like it had once been someone's middle-class house. The walls were decorated with Sandinista slogans. "I want this to be a dialogue," Hartman said and then didn't shut up for forty-five minutes. She was an intense, fidgeting, tall and alarmingly skinny woman with hatchet face and lantern jaw. She spoke against the United States with considerable venom, tacking a disconcerting little north woods "huh?" to the end of each sentence. ".. violators of international law, huh?"
One of the StaffDel members asked Mary Hartman about the unusually high rate of confessions among prisoners appearing before the People's Anti-Somoza Tribunals. Hartman said it was only 95 percent. "I don't find that surprising," she said. "Because they were captured, huh?"
"You mean," said the staffer, "that because the government has them in custody, it stands to reason that they're guilty?"
Hartman answered by saying there are only fourteen thousand contras. Six thousand of them are ex-Somoza National Guardsmen, and the rest are "kidnapped or fled and then were somehow convinced to fight or something."
"This afternoon," said Jim Denton, "we're going to talk to a group called Mothers of Political Prisoners."
Mary Hartman said the group was funded with U.S. money and that many of the mothers were not women of good character and that they had been bribed "with things like Camel cigarettes, huh?"
"No doubt you've investigated hundreds, if not thousands of these cases," said Jim. Hartman nodded vigorously. "Could you give us specific cases where the mothers had been bribed or were otherwise found to be untrustworthy?"
Hartman said she could, she certainly could.
"Well . . ." said Denton.
"I don't have the files right with me, huh?"
"If you could give us just one or two specific cases, even just the names," said Jim. "That way we'll be able to respond to these women this afternoon, when they complain to us about how their chidren are being treated."
"I've investigated many, many of these cases," said Hartman.
"Actually," said Denton, "just one would do."
"Why, yes, I have one right here," Hartman looked at a pile of file folders on a desk and pulled one off the top. She searched through it, but it seemed to be the wrong file. "Nicaragua has an excellent record on speech, assembly and property rights, huh?" she said.
"But could you give us one example of unreliable or suspect testimony from one of the members of the Mothers group?" said Denton.
Hartman's eyes darted momentarily to the spot where she'd laid her souvenir key ring. "I can't right now, huh?" she said. "My office is locked."
The StaffDel members had never seen a whole bunch of Mothers of Political Prisoners before, which group-as such groups usually do-also included wives, girlfriends, sisters, grandmas and diaperless, dirty-faced, crying infant children of Political Prisoners. It wasn't something that exactly brightened the StaffDel's day. Or mine. I peeked at this angry, indignant and impoverished assemblage and slid for the door. There is a certain look these women have-a mix of love lost and one atom of hope that you, because you're an American and clean and well-fed and rich, can somehow help. They are all over the world, those ladies, in South Africa, the Middle East, Indochina, Russia, Northern Ireland, Cuba, Chile-all bearing the same expression and all coming at you singly or in groups, publicly or on the sly, as the political climate of the time and the place allow. What possible damned thing can you say to them? The only real answer would be to load up and start shooting dictators, juntas, ayatollahs, politicians and, of course, every communist you can get in your peep sights because the commies are the top-seeded players in the twentieth century political prisoners cup match. But the Congress of the United States doesn't approve of anybody doing this sort of thing anymore, especially not when accompanying a congressional staff delegation and, besides, I didn't have a gun.
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