One Year Before the War
Alejandro Ramirez
After Jorge Soto Sánchez’s Untitled, 1976, paint, felt-tipped pen, and pencil on paper
What would Dad think of the painting? A red and black flag, men and women with rifles on the top half, books in their hands on the bottom half. That red and black flag always makes me think of Nicaragua, reminds me of the Sandinistas. Tío Sergio was doing some secret agent shit for them. His wife was an aristocrat, so he’d be rubbing shoulders with generals and their bougie friends one night, passing info to Fonseca’s crew the next. Tío Darvin was a great pitcher, could’ve played for the Masaya San Fernandos. Then some Somocista bullets left a crater in his forearm. Tía Marlene died fighting. They used her likeness on some recruitment posters. A poet mentioned her in a disparaging piece about the war. The family beefed with the poet.
Dad was subversive in his own way. If his brother and sister wielded rifles, Dad brandished the books. He’d read Marx and Che, but his main book was Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed. Dad, an agronomist for the government, was sent to the countryside to help campesinos improve their crops’ yield—a yield that usually was sold to the dictator, Tachito Somoza. One day, Dad decides to teach the campesinos to seek alternate markets, so they wouldn’t be selling to the dictator anymore. This pissed off Tachito. Tachito killed my dad’s boss. Dad and Mom scooped up my sisters—babies at the time—and got the hell out of Nicaragua, one year before the war ended.
He’s gotten more bitter—or maybe just more honest—about the Sandinistas with age. I’ve heard him call the early leadership a bunch of kids, a bunch of “wannabe Che Guevaras,” young people with more guns than knowledge. You gotta navigate politics instead of junglas, feed a country and not just hardened soldiers, create actual policies instead of Marxist platitudes. And do all that without any U.S. dollars. Maybe they should’ve laid down the guns, picked up more books, maybe that could’ve made things run more smoothly. Maybe Reagan’s Contras would’ve shot right through those books anyway, made them run red with blood, left the course of history unchanged.
President Daniel Ortega’s election brought the Sandinistas back to power, in name at least. But he ain’t flying the black and red. His pink and purple billboards brag about him being a Christian. He made a deal with a Chinese business to build a canal through Nicaragua. Imperialists have tried it before—way before Panama, in fact—but the efforts always failed: not enough money, not enough manpower, too much internal conflict. The campesinos and environmentalists aren’t happy. How can they stop it? Guns won’t save those islands, the canal will cut right through, and books can’t stop that cash flow. I would have imagined literature would prevent this sort of thing. That’s what that whole cliché about knowing history is about, right?
Maybe the whole Sandinista thing was doomed from the start. Hell, the namesake of the party is the famous guerilla Augusto Sandino, who fought back against U.S. Marines in the Nicaraguan jungles from 1927 to 1933. During a round a peace talks in February 1934 with the president of Nicaragua, General Anastasio Somoza Garcia, leader of the U.S.-supported National Guard, ordered Sandino’s assassination. As they were leaving the presidential palace, Sandino and his men were rounded up by members of la guardia and executed. Two years later, Somoza Garcia ousted the president and installed himself as dictator, a mantle his son would take up decades later. In a Masaya museum, you can find a picture of Sandino and Somoza men shaking hands. Sandino’s last words, supposedly uttered after he checked his empty pockets before a firing squad, were: “Screwed. The politicians cleaned me out.” Politicians cleaned the Sandinistas out decades later—former Sandinistas turned politicians, doing nothing for the soldiers who fought for the cause, doing not enough for the people they set out to help, the party ultimately too fractured to get reelected in the 1990 elections. I don’t know if Darvin or Sergio were ever bitter about it—Dad thinks they got screwed over, should’ve gotten better jobs and better treatment after the revolution. Especially Darvin—he’s puro, a true Sandinista, Dad says. Years later, it’s not a true Sandinista in the president’s office, it’s a politician named “Ortega.” And he might clean out campesinos across the country for a canal.
In the end, maybe the losers are buried by the winners. Plenty have lined up and raised their guns and their books high, run red flags, called for change. The lucky ones hold office for a while. The corrupt ones betray their values for a longer rule. The majority, the unlucky ones, they just die and get their faces painted on some mural. I try to remember their names.