Memories of a generation of internationalists

Why did so many from the United States come to participate in our revolutionary process with us? What did they come to offer? What did they learn from us? How did they experience the revolution’s electoral defeat in 1990? And why did some of them stay on in Nicaragua afterward? I’ve put together eight testimonies from that generation of people who came from the United States. Each story is interesting and admirable.

William Grigsby Vergara

After Salvador Allende’s socialist government won in Chile in 1970, then was overthrown by Augusto Pinochet on September 11, 1973, the Sandinista Popular Revolution in 1979 was the next great revolutionary movement in Latin America to attract the West’s attention. Thousands of “cheles” [a neutral term meaning fair-skinned people] from all over the world got caught up in the enthusiasm for the Sandinista victory, packed their bags, left their own countries and came to witness what the Nicaraguan people were capable of doing. Some even helped defend Nicaragua militarily. They sacrificed their comfortable life in the First World for the faith and hope our little country inspired.

In that reverse migration, a great many US citizens came to work as volunteers. People of all ages but especially those in their twenties enlisted in the international ranks, rejecting and actively opposing President Ronald Reagan’s 1980 campaign promise to “roll back the revolution” one way or another. Many of these people acted on their belief that the stronger the presence of “gringos” in areas of the country besieged by counterrevolutionary activities, the less the risk of a direct military intervention. Pacifists, journalists, social researchers, engineers, photographers, filmmakers, sociologists and more… men and women from the country of Abraham Lincoln were part of that humanitarian flood in solidarity with our little Nicaraguan triangle.

What motivated them to come? Was it just the revolution? Was it even the revolution? What did they learn here? How did they experience the electoral defeat of 1990 and why did some of them decide to stay on afterward? These and other questions are answered in eight testimonies that reflect that period in our history in which hundreds of US citizens gave part of their lives to Sandino’s revolutionary project.

Circles Robinson, 59 years old: “You lived
with the adrenaline always pumping”

I was born in Los Angeles. I left there when I was 18 and, with the exception of short visits, never went back. I’m a translator and journalist. I’m now working full time as editor of Havana Times, a bilingual on-line daily newspaper that aspires to be a source of information and a way of getting closer to the realities of the Cuban people.

I came to Nicaragua in 1984, a few days after the elections in which the FSLN [Sandinista National Liberation Front] won. It was a rather dramatic time: Ronald Reagan was reelected only two days after Nicaragua’s elections and with that his government took an even more aggressive stance against Nicaragua. They seemed to be considering the option of invading. I decided to come to contribute what I could, although I wasn’t very clear what that would be. I wanted to participate in the effort to rebuild a country with a young revolution. I also wanted to put my feet on the ground in a country I identified with a great deal, because I was against my government’s policies.

I participated in the coffee-picking campaign for two months with the National Association of Nicaraguan Educators (ANDEN) in the area of El Crucero and afterward with the National Institute of Statistics and Census (INEC) in Miraflor, Estelí. Later, I had the chance to use my bilingual abilities in a job with TurNica. I spent a year and a half as an interpreter or sometimes interpreter-guide, working with sociopolitical tourist groups and with different delegations that came to learn about Nicaragua. After that I took a job with the Union of National Farmers and Ranchers (UNAG-Matagalpa) in the area of International Relations. I did that for six years.

I was always busy and I felt good being part of a larger effort, “offering my grain of sand” for what I considered was a better world. I had good relationships with my workmates and, although my personal life was rather limited, I was highly motivated by what I was contributing. You lived with the adrenaline always pumping due to the urgency you felt in a war situation.

I was far from Nicaragua when the FSLN was defeated in 1990. Through UNAG-Matagalpa I had traveled to share the expected electoral victory with a solidarity group in Hawaii, where we were trying to develop a relationship with Hawaiian coffee growers and obtain support for projects on cooperatives. Everyone in UNAG thought the FSLN would win the elections and that the victory would open up a situation conducive to seeking support.

I had left two days before the elections and the night of February 25 found me announcing the first election results at the party they were throwing. I’d call the Nicaraguan Embassy in Washington periodically. Rolando Sánchez, who was from Masaya and living in Honolulu, was playing with the band he had put together and everybody was dancing and drinking. One moment that comes to mind was when an older guy who said he’d been a life-long socialist remarked that those elections would be the first in which his candidate won. The final results hadn’t yet been announced when we had to close up the place at around 11 pm, but the silence wasn’t a good omen. Since Hawaii is further west than Nicaragua, Daniel Ortega’s famous press conference announcing the Sandinista defeat was heard at just before midnight, and of course I was awake.

“Adrenaline can blind you”

The news of the electoral defeat left me very anxious. My first reaction was to think about September 11, 1973, in Chile so I was very worried for my colleagues and friends and for the Nicaraguan people in general. Fortunately there was no coup, only a peaceful defeat in the polls. Three days later I was back in Matagalpa experiencing the situation first-hand. From there I observed the famous and regrettable “piñata” [in which some officials in the outgoing Sandinista government appropriated properties for themselves] and the rapid deterioration of values, which had already been in decline before the elections.

I stayed in Nicaragua despite the defeat because I felt at home here and also because I was able to continue working with UNAG-Matagalpa. The experience of the eighties in Nicaragua was unique and I’m thankful from the bottom of my heart that I was able to participate. However, I believe that the adrenaline you feel during wartime and ongoing emergencies can end up blinding you to what’s happening around you and you don’t realize that everything isn’t black and white.

I married a woman from El Cuá who’s a community activist and feminist and who continues to work for the people even though the FSLN has backpedaled into pure “caudillismo” [centering on one strong party boss]. We’ve been together now for 17 years. When we got together her daughter was 10. She’s now 27 and her own son is 10. We lived a long time in Matagalpa, then seven years in Cuba (2002-2009) and have now been back in Nicaragua for three years. We live on the island of Ometepe.

Anne Larson, 50 years old:
“Coming here was an act of protest”

I’m from Pennsylvania but I studied Environmental Science in California. In 1986, when I came to Nicaragua, I had several friends who had already come and I had worked in the solidarity movement during and after college. I never thought about coming because I was clear that with what was happening in Nicaragua, even though I really admired the Sandinista revolution, I could do more by being in my own country. I was always against Reagan’s Nicaragua policy and from the beginning supported the successful uprising against the Somoza dictatorship in 1979. But I reached a point in my work life when I started asking myself how one builds a new way of thinking, and I sensed that going to Nicaragua to learn about the revolutionary process would help me answer this question.

Geographically speaking, Nicaragua was close by. When I decided to come, I called a friend who had already spent a couple of years here and she told me about another friend who was organizing a construction brigade to build houses in the countryside. He worked with the Association of Architects and Planners in Support of Nicaragua (APSNICA). They were preparing their second trip as a solidarity brigade, so I signed up.

“Here in Nicaragua I
confronted my country’s history”

Before I came, I took a 10-week intensive course in Spanish at the university. With APSNICA, we organized various activities in Palo Alto to encourage people to join the brigades. Each one was made up of about 10-15 people, with four a year, and they lasted for six weeks. The most important thing at that time was to increase the opposition of US citizens to intervention but we also wanted to break the embargo. To come here was like saying “I don’t agree” with our government’s intervention. It was an act of protest.

In 1986 many people thought the US might do in Nicaragua what it did in Panama against Noriega three years later: bomb Managua, remove Ortega and occupy the country militarily. It certainly wouldn’t be the firt time the US had invaded Nicaragua. At the time there was a certain conviction that the more North Americans there were in Nicaragua, the less possibility there would be that the US would intervene directly in the war against the Sandinistas. Our idea was to challenge the support to the contras. We wanted to bring more people to prove to the Reagan government that we weren’t in agreement with his measures.

One of APSNICA’s strategies was to work out in the countryside. It was near where we were, between San José de Bocay and El Cuá in the department of Jinotega, that the contras killed Benjamin Linder the morning of April 28, 1987.

I remember in 1988 we were in Muy-Muy, Matiguás, and there were rumors of a possible contra attack in the area. We dug trenches together with the Sandinista peasants. But some of the brigade members weren’t in agreement with armed struggle so it created friction with those who were pacifists.

Coming to Nicaragua was an incredible moment in my life—an unrepeatable moment for me. I thought I was a very educated person and knew US history well until I came to this country. But here I realized that I had so much more to learn. I confronted my country’s history and matured a great deal.

After the defeat of the FSLN in the elections I wasn’t ready to leave Nicaragua but the majority of my friends—we were like a family—were packing their bags. I was searching for a reason to stay, and then something happened to me that I never expected—I fell in love with a Nicaraguan and I stayed here.

Tom Loudon, 61 years old: “I fell in
love with the revolutionary process”

I was born in Detroit, Michigan. Today I work in alternative development. I learned about the war in Nicaragua in the early eighties and I came here in 1984, motivated by the incipient movement of US citizens opposed to the war financed by Reagan. I came with a short-term Witness for Peace (WFP) delegation. We went to Jalapa, to various settlements deep in the countryside near the border with Honduras.

I fell in love with Nicaragua’s revolutionary process and decided to stay even though I didn’t speak Spanish. The project coordinators noticed my enthusiasm and accepted me into the WFP team, even with my lack of language. I made a short trip to the US and came back in early June 1984 ready to live here. Ocotal had been attacked by the contras on June 1, and I was sent to work there. It was pretty terrifying. WFP kept changing our territory following the development of the war at the time. I worked with a base community organization in the regions around Somotillo and Achuapa, heavily impacted by the war through the end of 1986.

During that time we also did tours around the United States, bringing people directly affected by the war. We would go to give talks for a month or two to raise the consciousness of US society. In September 1986, I accompanied a woman from Lagartillo who had lost her husband and a daughter in a contra attack and a Swiss woman who lost her husband in an ambush near Somotillo. At the end of 1986 I returned to Nicaragua and got together with the woman who would later become my wife, a cooperant from the United States who had also worked for WFP. Together we went to one of the intense zones of the war—Río Blanco, Matagalpa.

“We did the work of little ants”

In 1987 and 1988 we worked with an organization building resettlements for war displaced in that area, along the road from Río Blanco to Mulukukú, others on the road to San José de Bocay and also between Río Blanco and Bocana de Paiwas. We built twelve settlements, which were subjected to strong attacks by the contras. The project, called Cristo Ray, was a joint church-government effort.

We worked with military permission for two years. In April 1988, my wife and I decided to get married in Río Blanco. That was 25 years ago now. We had been very moved, very hard hit by the war experience. In order to assimilate it all, my wife decided to study theology in August 1989. We came back in 1990, after the electoral defeat of the Sandinistas, and moved to Achuapa, one of the communities we had lived in during our time with Witness for Peace.

I believe that the presence of so many internationalists in Nicaragua avoided a direct US military intervention, although we knew Reagan was capable of sending troops and felt it could happen at any time. Our approach was to bring delegations, take testimonies, get in the news and work with other internationalists here so we could then go to congresspeople and senators in our country. It was the work of little ants but it was worth it.

From the first time I came to Nicaragua, I felt welcomed by the people. I remember only one protest from the “Right” in which we felt hatred towards internationalists. I think those protesting that day were people from the Catholic Church. They labeled us “criminal communists.” But in general the average person was very thankful for our presence.

I decided to stay in Nicaragua in spite of the 1990 defeat. I felt much more comfortable living here than in the United States. But I came and went. My wife did the same. We thought that by growing up between Nicaragua and the United Sates our daughters would have the chance to choose where and with whom to live. I’ve always felt that the human relationships among Nicaraguans were much deeper than those in US society.

Lillian Hall, 52 years old: “I wanted to
know what my government was doing”

I was born in Wilmington, Delaware, and moved to Arizona when I was nine. I’m an agronomist and in 1979 was in college studying international agriculture. My dream was to work in my profession in Latin America. In the early eighties I got involved in a solidarity group called Committee on US-Latin American Relations (CUSLAR). It wasn’t just solidarity with Nicaragua but also with El Salvador, Guatemala and Chile.

I wanted to know more about what our government had done with our taxes in so many places in the world. I particularly wanted to see with my own eyes what was happening in Nicaragua, a place CUSLAR people raved about. That was in 1982, when Nicaragua was still at the height of the post-triumph revolutionary euphoria, before the war ground things down. It was a unique time.

I decided to come and live here in September 1984, but was only planning to stay two years then go to El Salvador. I came with a two-fold purpose: to offer my services as an agronomist and to witness what our government was doing in our name. I never trusted the foreign policy of the United States.

In Nicaragua they told me a lot about the agrarian reform. I realized that during the Somoza dictatorship there was almost no opportunity to study because only the children of the rich and the upper middle class could become professionals. Nicaraguan society needed new professionals, especially to work in the countryside.

“I came because of the Sandinista revolution
and stayed because of the Nicaraguan people”

I always felt very welcomed in Nicaragua. People were very generous, of a friendly and generous spirit with strangers. Kindhearted and funny. I liked them a lot: “Thanks for coming and don’t believe what the US newspapers say about our revolution.” They also appreciated the fact that we internationalists had left a comfortable life in the First World where we could have earned good salaries. I worked here for five years without pay and felt that people were very appreciative and I felt supported by this. I lived in the countryside with very humble people, washed my clothes in the river, ate whatever they were eating and liked what I was doing. It was fulfilling to me. Despite the fact that things got harder each year, I always felt there was a great spirit of wanting to achieve goals and create a new society for the poor majority. Nicaraguans have always lived in the moment and celebrated the little things in spite of their difficulties. Their way of facing daily life is admirable.

I was outside the country on election day in 1990. I left in September of 1989 to get my masters in the US. I was in California when my husband, who was Nicaraguan, listened to the news and told me, “You’re not going to want to go back to Nicaragua; we lost the elections.” But I decided to return in 1991. The people were the same. They had changed the government but their problems were the same and perhaps worse.

I feel that I came to Nicaragua because of the Sandinista revolution but stayed because of the Nicaraguan people. I always make this distinction. It pains me a lot that the electoral defeat had hardly happened when a huge number of people left and didn’t wait to see what was going to happen with Nicaragua. The defeat threw us off base and no one expected it but I feel that many internationalists didn’t know how to deepen their solidarity commitment or be consistent and follow through with their ideas. They saw the revolution as a passing phenomenon and they left after the FSLN lost at the polls. That didn’t seem right to me.

Warren Armstrong, 53 years old: “I didn’t come for the FSLN; I came because of my faith”I was born in Philadelphia. I’m an economist. My main reason for coming to Nicaragua in the eighties wasn’t because of the FSLN government but because of my faith. Within the Catholic Church there’s a branch called liberation theology in which one makes the conscious decision to work for and support the neediest. I became involved. My parents didn’t support my decision to come to Nicaragua until I was captured and held by the contras during a trip down the Río San Juan on the border with Costa Rica in 1985. After that harrowing experience, which I luckily got out of alive, I began to get more involved in Nicaraguan society.

The story started a bit earlier when I was living in Costa Rica. I was a Peace Corp volunteer for three years there in a coffee cooperative and then was planning to work with Maryknoll lay missionaries where Father Miguel D’Escoto was also involved. The base community of that group was in New York and they were going to send me to Thailand or Chile as a lay worker. But I had six months off when I finished my work with the Peace Corp and while still in Costa Rica I met a representative of the Inter-American Foundation. His wife, who was from the States, recommended a nongovern¬mental organization established in Nicaragua called Witness for Peace. They were looking for volunteers and I decided to travel to Managua to interview with their recruiter.

I knew very little about the country’s situation and took my only important reference about the political and social process in Nicaragua from a famous book titled Cry of the People written by Penny Lernoux. That book talked in general terms about the priests, nuns and laypeople who had been murdered in Central America during the recent revolutionary wars and offered an historical context for each country.
When I came to Managua, volunteers were covering the deployment of a US Navy warship in the Port of Corinto. They were organizing the sending of small boats to confront this military vessel. The person who interviewed me asked if I was in agreement with US policy against Nicaragua. Without much basis, I answered no. Later I realized that was the best response I could have given.

“I’m a pacifist and was
against any form of violence”

I came in February 1985. I spoke Spanish and was against violence in any form. I knew my country’s taxes were hurting Nicaragua. My belief was, and continues to be, one of pacifism. There must be another solution for the political problems between two nations. At that time I had already been in El Salvador and Guatemala. I realized you couldn’t talk about politics in Guatemala because they would kill you. It was extremely dangerous. I decided it would be best to come to Nicaragua where I felt one at least had space to discuss mixed opinions.

The 1990 elections were on a Sunday, and I was on a farm in Jinotega. I didn’t pay much attention when they started reporting the vote count that night because everyone thought the Sandinista government would be reelected. We went to bed unperturbed. However, early the next morning my colleague was listening to the radio and a woman was talking in a very high agitated voice saying that the Soviet Union was going to respect the election results. I was very surprised. Then we learned about the Sandinista defeat.

I remember that day as though it were yesterday. When we returned to Jinotega City that night, there wasn’t a soul on the streets and the parks were deserted. The following day, at least half the people didn’t go to work and stayed in their houses perplexed. Matagalpa, where the CARE offices I was working for were, seemed a ghost town.

We wondered what we would do. I already had residency in Nicaragua. I sought permanent residency and they gave it to me without any major problems. Many people left and others of us stayed. I’ve always liked working in community development with rural Nicaraguans. I married a Nicaraguan woman and my first son was born here. Later I was divorced, met my second Nicaraguan wife and had a daughter who was also born here. I started on a six-month volunteer job, but one thing led to the next, and the next, to the point last year that I reserved by burial plot in Jinotega’s cemetery.

Judy Butler, 72 years old: “I was
fascinated by the Caribbean Coast”

I was born in in a working-class neighborhood of Los Angeles. My work before coming to Nicaragua was as editor of a magazine called NACLA Report on the Americas based in New York. We did long analytical articles on topics related to the US and Latin America, always with an anti-imperialist perspective. I did an issue of NACLA on Nicaragua in 1978, together with Alejandro Bendaña, who was studying at Harvard at the time but later became the secretary general of Nicaragua’s Foreign Ministry.

I first came in 1980, during the first anniversary of the Sandinista revolution, invited by Oxfam-America as part of a delegation of alternative journalists. Reagan was elected on November 4 of that same year, my 40th birthday… what a depressing birthday party that was! He soon began demonizing Nicaragua in the media, telling egregious lies about it and secretly financing the incipient contra movement. With that I began to bring delegations of our magazine’s readers who wanted to learn about this country first-hand, then go back to the US, talk about their experiences and undermine Reagan’s justification for his war. The Sandinista government welcomed such visitors and generously spent a lot of their valuable time meeting with them. Over a hundred thousand people from all walks of life and all ages in the United States came here in the eighties, and I believe they played an important role in staying Reagan’s hand.

I never thought of living here. My Spanish was mediocre and I didn’t have a valuable skill, plus I had done anti-imperialist solidarity work with Vietnam, Chile and then Nicaragua starting in 1978, so felt more useful continuing to do that in the States.

During that first visit I “discovered” Nicaragua’s Caribbean region and its history and problems, so different from those of the Pacific Coast. Since tensions were building between the coast people and the new government, I made sure that each delegation I brought could spend a few days on the coast to get an idea of the issues. Through that I met the director of the Center for Research and Documentation of the Atlantic Coast (CIDCA) and in 1983 he asked me, a bit tongue-in-cheek, if I knew anyone who spoke English and knew how to put together a magazine of CIDCA’s studies. Me, obviously! I first took a year’s leave from NACLA, but it took two years before the magazine was ready. It’s called Wani.

By then I was hooked; I felt politically at home here. I was invited to head up a team of English- language journalists and translators for envío and have been working for envío ever since. I continued to cover the coast as a journalist throughout the eighties, which meant covering the war and the autonomy process, both of which were unforgettable experiences.

I felt welcomed by Nicaraguans, who continually assured those of us from the United States that they love us but hate our government. I couldn’t get a grip on that distinction, particularly after Reagan was reelected in 1984, which deeply frustrated and angered me. The next time someone said that same thing—a peasant out in the countryside—I asked him how he could make that distinction since US voters had just reelected the very man who was financing the war here. He looked at me as if I were simple-minded and patiently explained that Somoza had been reelected time and again through fraud but his government didn’t reflect the feelings of the Nicaraguan people.

“Nicaragua’s revolution attracted some of the ‘best and brightest’ from around the world” Remembering the FSLN’s electoral defeat in 1990 is like remembering the day Kennedy was killed; I still recall every detail of that day. I was on the coast covering the elections and I stayed a month crunching election numbers for my envío article because I couldn’t wrap my head around anything more profound. When I got back to Managua I discovered that something important had happened among the internationalists. Many were packing their bags or had already had left while others were taking out Nicaraguan nationality because they feared the new government would throw them out. It was a very weird scene. Neither idea had occurred to me.

My profound reaction to the change in the country was rather late in coming; not until the end of the nineties when the existential and political crisis so many others had already gone through finally hit me, too. It wasn’t just the FSLN’s loss of the elections; it was also the world changes that meant revolution was no longer on the horizon and the Left was adrift. And of course it was also the cumulative effect of seeing what the FSLN was becoming. I wanted to be more involved in activist political life again, yet each time I started getting close to some group I would discover it was infected with serious problems of corruption, authoritarianism and/or infighting, and after a while it would succumb to them and fall apart.

My work with envío saved me to some extent, but Nicaragua had changed and even though I had made my life here I began to think about leaving. There were lots of pros and cons, but what finally tipped the balance to stay was that Nicaragua’s revolution was a magnet—made up of both its people and the uniqueness of the revolutionary process in those years—that attracted some of the “best and the brightest” from Nicaragua and from other countries around the world during the eighties. I met incredible people here I would never known otherwise. Even those who left keep coming back to visit, so I decided that this is where my life is the richest. I owe the chance to see these friends occasionally and to be a small part of this ongoing example of struggle to Nicaragua. It has also taught me most of the hard, often painful, but important political lessons I’ve learned in my life and continue learning.

Paul Dix, 76 years old: “I’ve traveled all over the world and have never seen such warm people” I was born in North Carolina. I left there when I was six years old and today I live in Oregon but I’m a resident of Montana. I’m a photographer. I came to Nicaragua in 1985 as a volunteer with Witness for Peace. I did photojournalism here for five years, between 1985 and 1990, traveling in the war zones documenting contra atrocities from Jalapa to the Río San Juan, in Chontales and other places where there were ambushes, attacks, shoot-outs... I lived through at least a dozen confrontations, but I was lucky to come out alive and retreat to Managua at times of extreme danger. The real war heroes were the peasants. We internationalists were only witnesses, but they had to live with fear of the contras 24 hours a day.

I was an independent photographer and my task was to make society aware with my graphic work. There was a big demand for graphic documenting of the war. I sent my photographs to the alternative media. I made a darkroom in Managua to develop the photos, but never had enough time to make sufficient enlargements and send them to all those who were asking. My photos circulated in newspapers, magazines, books, videos and other media in the US: Yes, Utne Reader, Reuters, AP, New York Times, Miami Herald, AFP...

I was always well received by Nicaraguans even though I came from their enemy country. This never stopped surprising me. Nicaraguans always accepted me and were completely confident that I was here to give testimony, to witness and report the reality while fighting alongside the people. I’ve traveled all over the world and I’ve never seen such warm people as in Nicaragua. I could have been a CIA agent but the Nicaraguans didn’t distrust us. They were candid and opened their doors to us.

“Here I learned to be
humble in the face of defeat”

I got more than I expected in Nicaragua. I learned a great deal and it was a very important experience in my life. I was about 50 years old in the eighties but it wasn’t until I came to Nicaragua that I learned what I wanted to do with my life: work on social justice and human rights issues.

What I learned most from Nicaraguans is that, in spite of the poverty and pain they’ve experienced, they always have faith and hope in tomorrow. Their joy and optimism were contagious. US society is a competitive one in which we all want to be winners. In Nicaragua I learned to live in the moment and enjoy the process of achieving an objective… and to be humble in the face of defeat.

The defeat of 1990 left me in shock. It was difficult to believe. The first thing I thought of was the resettlements of all those thousands of war refugees. What would happen to them now that the Sandinistas had lost? That really distressed me. Many internationalists had their heart in the refugee camps, but thousands of them lost hope in the country’s future and left. Because the war was ending, we thought we were no longer needed here. I went back to the United States too, but Nicaragua had impacted me so much that I returned.

“We worked on this book for ten years”

In 2002 I came back with my partner, Pamela Fitzpatrick, whom I met in 1895 through Witness for Peace. We returned to write a book, “Nicaragua: Surviving the Legacy of US Policy.” It took us ten years to do—from 2001 to 2011.

We made five trips, four to photograph the peasants we met in the eighties and find out how they were twenty years later. We found most of them, photographed them and recorded their testimonies as victims of war. Three thousand copies have been published in Nicaragua, Mexico and the United States. We’re now looking for someone who can help us distribute them throughout Europe.

Our book is in Managua’s supermarkets and bookstores, including a bilingual edition in the Managua airport. This past October we presented it at the Central American University’s Institute of History. It was very well received. The 18 months of work with my partner was worth it. It has over 200 pages with more than 100 black-and-white photographs. We published it with donations from US foundations and with the seal of our publishing company, Just Sharing Press.

The book has a prologue by Gioconda Belli and an endorsement by Eduardo Galeano. We’re now on a book tour at various US universities to tell the story of the Nicaraguan revolution, presenting the book all over the country from Oregon to Miami. In September we go to Chicago and then Delaware and Maryland, among other places. We’re educating the youth. It’s very interesting, since many of those we meet were born after 1990 and have no idea of the Sandinista history, in fact the majority of them don’t even have any idea where Nicaragua is. We’re very happy to be able to rescue a bit of forgotten history.

Aynn Setright, 52 years old: “Everything was
different after seeing death for the first time”

I was born in Wyoming. I’m a university professor and today I’m associated with the National Autonomous University (UNAN) in Managua, and am also the academic director of a program from the United States called School for International Training (SIT Study Abroad). We bring 15 to 20 US students to Nicaragua to study for a full semester twice a year.

I came to Nicaragua in 1985 through Witness for Peace (WFP). I felt that my generation’s most serious problem was my country’s war against Nicaragua and had been part of strong debates against the war in my university. At that time, Dick Cheney, who later became George W. Bush’s right hand, was my state’s Republican representative in Congress. I heatedly debated him and his policies, particularly his open support of the contras, at the University of Wyoming.

My plan had been to get my undergraduate degree in international relations, then continue studying for a master’s degree in rural sociology, but once I graduated I felt it wasn’t the right time to keep studying so I decided to come to Nicaragua to put my political activism and solidarity with the revolution into practice. Nicaraguans forgave my poor Spanish since I only spoke Portuguese, having lived in Brazil in 1978-79. While in Brazil I had been moved by the way South Americans reacted to the Sandinista triumph in July 1979. Brazil was still living under a military dictatorship, although it wasn’t as violent by then as the Somoza dictatorship had become. When the news about the triumph in Nicaragua was announced, Brazilians went out into the streets to dance and celebrate; it was like a mini-carnival, with Brasilia’s streets filled with red and black [the FSLN colors]. That encouraged my solidarity towards this small country even more.

When I came to Nicaragua WFP had a presence in different parts of the country. They sent me to the Bocana de Paiwas-Mulukukú-Río Blanco area, which was a major war zone. My job was ambulance driver. They needed someone “neutral” who could go from the health post in Paiwas to the health center in Río Blanco, or if necessary down to the hospital in Matagalpa, without representing a threat to the contras. I was a foreigner and my truck-ambulance flew the Catholic Church flag so they didn’t attack us. I typically carried women in labor and people with machete injuries, although also seriously wounded Sandinista soldiers—insisting first that the doctor cut their uniform off. My stint with WFP was for a year and a half then I got in involved in a parish community resettlement project called Cristo Rey in the same area.

“Here, there, the Yankee will die!” (referring to our government, not to us), was a slogan chanted a lot at the time. However, I only identified with it deeply when a very close friend of mine, Carmen Mendieta, was killed in a contra ambush on December 2, 1987. I had lived with her and her family when I first got to Nicaragua and was close with them. She was a community organizer, so she and I also worked together in the Cristo Rey Project. That night, during her wake, I seriously asked myself why my government was doing this. I was in shock. With my arms around Carmen’s two youngest daughters I went to the health center to see her. The shrapnel had penetrated her back from the torso down, but lying there face up on the wooden plank she just seemed asleep. Between their sobs, the girls kept asking me to wake her up. That had a really profound impact on me.

I was so angry and I blamed the US voters who had reelected Reagan. I had planned to leave at the end of 1987 but due to Carmen’s death I kept working and helping out with her two youngest orphaned children. I felt incapable of returning to college in the US. Everything was different for me after my experiences as an ambulance driver, after the first time I saw a dead person, after carrying, washing and transporting bodies of war victims, and of course after Carmen’s death. I felt no longer I could go back to my country.

“The people asked us not to leave”

I kept working on behalf of Nicaragua, but also in order to heal myself and feel better. I was working with 16 communities and 800 families displaced by the war. The community leaders were predominantly women since the men were away at war. In October 1988 Hurricane Joan hit Nicaragua and it affected our area severely; we lost 200 houses just in Mulukukú. It was a huge blow for the people, even though they are so resilient and tenacious. That time it wasn’t the war but Nature that dealt them such a lousy hand. I decided to stay and help until the elections, assuming the FSLN would win and that would assure a new path for the people.

On July 19, 1989, I met Guillermo, a political officer in the Sandinista Army, at a rodeo in Rio Blanco. He caught my attention because while all the other Sandinistas were celebrating the tenth anniversary of the revolution, drinking and riding bulls, he was reading a book by Nietzsche. We became friends, but the friendship grew deeper in 1990 when we started working together on one of the Peace Commissions around the country that were disarming the communities and self-defense cooperatives. When the FSLN was unexpectedly defeated in the elections that February, the community members begged us not to leave. They thought that if we did, the demobilizing contras would kill them because they no longer had weapons to defend themselves. It was a very tough time. I postponed my return to the USA once again.

In December of that same year, Guillermo proposed, very romantically. I accepted and we got married on February 14, 1991, Valentine’s Day. I was 30 years old. We’ve built a family together and I thoroughly enjoy my life in Nicaragua.

Praise for a generation of internationalists

Nicaragua owes a great deal to so many men and women in solidarity with our country in the most difficult period of our recent history—the war of the eighties. They became attached not only to the people but also to the customs, the landscape, the history and Nicaragua’s tireless struggle.

They are a generation of rebels—some pacifists, others not; some already opposing US foreign policy, others learning to; some drawn by the revolution and others by humanitarian values. They donned seven-league boots and came to Nicaragua, where they risked their lives on its battlefields and had the necessary human spirit to take on an adventure without borders, themselves growing wiser in the process. Most left a comfortable life of pleasure and prosperity in the First World to confront their own government from “enemy territory.”

Many got married, made families and had children then stayed to make their lives in our country. Others left but never were the same again. Today they are thankful to have lived through a unique time of history—one that will never repeat itself and in which they feel very fortunate to have participated.

All of them knew how to draw close to a suffering people, who welcomed them even though they came from the belly of the beast. These backpacking “sandalistas”—as the idealistic younger generation of them was called during the revolutionary decade—and older professionals were valuable witnesses to the struggle that still has not ended, Nicaragua’s struggle against its own poverty.

In order to take on the social commitment they were offered, they also had to confront themselves. Lucky for us, all of those in these pages survived their great adventure, lived to tell the story” and are still among us.

William Grigsby Vergara is a journalist.

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