By Julio María Sanguinetti

Nothing has lacked in Nicaraguan history. As Pablo Antonio Cuadra says, it emerges “as a crossroads and transit center for geographical routes and cultural influences. It is the passageway for Indian migrations, it is the Dubious Strait, it is the transit between the two seas before Panama and it is the route of an interoceanic canal that costs us greed and interventions. That marks us. That keeps us with our doors open to the world.”

From that history in which the national affirmation is nourished by an unexpected universalism, a sort of paradox is born, which is the coexistence of a remarkable openness towards literature with a dramatic political destiny, loaded with invasions and long dictatorships, exiles and liberating revolutions. Son of that environment was Rubén Darío, the most universal poet, as American as Spanish, as Nicaraguan as European and, in any case, a pioneer of a modernism that dazzled the transition from the 19th to the 20th century. In Argentina, in Chile, in Madrid, he summoned crowds and a cloud of declaimers filled theaters reciting his sonorous musical verses.

Of that lineage, in more contemporary times, we find Claribel Alegría, Ernesto Cardenal, Gioconda Belli and our friend Sergio Ramírez. They provoke these reflections in us in the face of the incredible attack by the dictatorship of Daniel Ortega. The release of two hundred and twenty-two prisoners, accompanied by their loss of nationality and exile, is a diabolical kind of grievance, in which relief from jail is paid for with the devastating rancor of estrangement. The same spirit inspires the condemnation of these recent ninety-three citizens, in which Ramírez and Belli appear, expatriates, denationalized and –as if anything else were needed– confiscated their assets. Not even in old Greece did the disastrous “ostracism” go so far.

It is incredible that Daniel Ortega ended up in this, the same who led that hopeful revolution in 1979, the opening of his first government (with Ramírez as vice president) and that of Doña Violeta Barrios de Chamorro, widow of Pedro Joaquín Chamorro, the legendary director of La Press, murdered by Somoza, and mother of Cristiana and Carlos Fernando, now also victims of the draconian pseudo-judicial guillotine. There is no journalist left standing without the ominous sanction. All those who, even from exile, publish and report on Nicaragua have fallen to this almost unprecedented measure. We say «almost» because Pinochet did the same with Armando Letelier, but this denationalization of 317 honorable citizens is an act for the worst history of our Latin America.

The case of Sergio Ramírez is the most emblematic, insofar as he was a member of the 1979 government junta, he was vice president of the republic under Ortega’s own government, and in the literary field he stands out as one of the greatest exponents of the Spanish language. The Cervantes Prize, in 2017, recognized a narrative work of singular values, a mixture of history with fiction, built on short stories and some extraordinary novels. Margarita, the sea is beautiful is always mentioned as the great moment of his career, but other notables such as Did the blood scare you?, do not left behind. His collection of stories Catalina and Catalina, I think his latest collection, is an example of the mastery of the short story, that greedy and risky genre, started by Poe and brought to its culmination by Chekhov.

Disqualifying a superior literary figure in this way takes this painful episode to its most absurd, most anti-national dimension, despite the contradiction.

Naturally, the Nicaraguans sanctioned today will be from now on more Nicaraguan than ever, transformed into an emblem. “Exiled but free”, Ramírez has said.

The question also deserves another look and is the one that causes the doubts, hesitations and reluctance of the Latin American countries. Happily, Chile took the lead in solidarity, joining Spain’s immediate reaction. But it was very difficult for the rest to condemn the attack and much more to describe the regime as a dictatorship, as it has been for a long time.

Our populisms drag the old conflict of Marxism with freedoms. The ideology has been left behind, but its remnants in the mentality emerge as soon as the fundamental values of liberal democracy are put into play.

We have also seen it in the case of Peru. President Castillo decreed a coup. He signed the closure of Parliament and read the liberticidal text with a trembling voice. We all saw it. His already proven incompetence was also there to implement that coup d’état that he decreed and did not go beyond the manuscript. Parliament stripped him and assumed the vice president. Without judging his performance, which is being highly resisted, no one can doubt Castillo’s coup act. However, countries as relevant as Mexico show solidarity with it and thus add, to the already known difficulties of democracy, a shadow over its very essence. One cannot ignore such emphatic realities and ignore a coup, as if it were a trivial anecdote, a kind of mischief, when it threw the country into a tremendous crisis.

The same thing has happened with Daniel Ortega. He has rigged elections; viciously persecutes the Catholic Church; in the last election, he disqualified the candidates that appeared one by one, until configuring the inevitability of his already eternal re-election. However, his dictatorship has not been described accordingly since then. Not even when it ran over the OAS, last year, and even its own ambassador, Arturo McFields, resigned and took refuge in the United States.

Was this rude liberticidal attack necessary for a reaction to begin only now, which –on the other hand– has not been as clear as it should be?

Far, far away, we are from those clarions of Darío, when he dreamed of singing “new hymns” for the “illustrated races, fertile Hispania blood”.

Published in La Nación – February 25, 2023