Nicaragua
34 years of blameful forgetfulness, 23 of interested memory (part 2)
“It goes without saying that we fought hard,
but we had corrupt chiefs, cowardly leaders,
a propaganda apparatus that was worse than leprosy;
we fought for parties that, had they won,
would have immediately sent us to a forced labor camp…
because we were stupid and generous, as youths are,
giving their all and asking for nothing in return.”
This remark by Chilean writer Roberto Bolaño
upon receiving the Rómulo Gallegos prize in 1999,
serves as an opening for this second part of my reflections
on the justifications we used to silence and internalize
the abuses of power committed during the revolution.
José Luis Rocha
In an insightful paper delivered to circumspect lawyers, German historian Reinhart Koselleck took a look at various historiographical tendencies, distinguishing them according to their formulations about the “justice” inherent in history. Koselleck’s central thesis is that there’s a link between morality and history that historians can’t escape. The aim of subjecting historiography to judgment reaches far back in time, but so does the desire to suspend judgments. That’s why Cicero wrote that the historian must proceed “without the roughness of judicial pleadings and the sharp-pointed sentences used at the bar.” In the opposite corner, Koselleck held that “not only must the statements made by science be adjusted to their object, but a judgment must be legitimately made about that object, or the reader must at least be empowered to make that judgment.” Koselleck bases his thesis on determining that historians have vindicated some type of justice inherent to history. But what type of justice have they been talking about?
The place of justice in historyThe five main responses reviewed by Koselleck couldn’t be more divergent. Herodotus shows us a history that punishes obfuscation and impudence. History can slow down generations, but always ends up punishing injustice and ensuring that crimes are expiated. The historian’s work is to discover the sense—the verdict—of history. Thucydides offers another response by introducing the chance factor and holding that men aren’t totally responsible for everything that happens to them. For Thucydides there is no justice inherent to history because randomness plays an important role and power and law travel on different paths. But that bifurcation also means—in practice—that power can judge law (and abuse it to the point of crushing it) and law can judge power (and challenge it). Koselleck refers to this as a silent dialogue.
In contrast, St. Agustin postulated that God punishes many injustices in this world, but insists that justice will only be fully done in the final judgment. A fourth response comes from considering the absurdness of history: some events are incommensurable for our representations of justice and hence their absurdity; or as Hanna Arendt would say, hence “the banality of evil.” Finally, the fifth response comes from Hegel, for whom justice—whatever it may be—is meted out in the whole of and through the world’s history. There is no individual justice. Personal or group histories, and particular episodes, are barely patchworks, or knots in the great historical fabric that is leading toward the rule of law.
All these proposals about the place of justice in history have one point in common according to Koselleck: appraisals of historical events are generated by those events, not their stylized and literary creation. What happens generates the deliberation of history and its justice, whatever that may end up being.
There aren’t two revolutions or two FSLNsI mention the above to emphasize that we can only analyze what the FSLN represents for Nicaragua’s history from the bottom line of what it has come to be. The only material we have is that which is provided to us through the evolutionary history of that movement turned party.
From the subjective perspective of many former party activists who now oppose the FSLN, this approach doesn’t do justice to those who sacrificed themselves for the FSLN or of the revolution’s achievements. That’s not in doubt. But the problem is that there isn’t one revolution—or one FSLN—that Daniel Ortega and his followers stole, and another floating weightless, conceived of as unspoiled, a work of archangels and cherubim. There isn’t one revolution of the Ortegas who committed abuses and another of the good guys who did everything worthy of rescue.
The subjective viewpoint tends to put all its money on the heroism of the protagonists and disdain the results. This is the central point of Nicaraguan political scientist Andrés Pérez-Baltodano’s book Postsandinistas: Crónica de un diálogo intergeneracional e interpretación del pensamiento político de la generación XXI (Post-Sandinistas: Chronicle of an intergenerational dialogue and interpretation of the political thinking of the XXI generation), to be published this year by the Central American University’s Institute of History of Nicaragua and Central America in Managua.
Pérez-Baltodano points out that “because of the limited vision of the future with which our society operates, government administration or the pertinence of a transforming political experiment is not measured or evaluated by its results over time but, fundamentally, by the audacity of its leaders and above all by the magnitude of the force, the conviction and courage with which they try to achieve their objectives. In other words, in a world conceived as a game of chance in which the capacity to recognize and organize the causal relations that define the social order over time, a government’s quality or a revolution’s merits don’t count; they are evaluated simply and flatly by the heroism of the men and women who have put themselves in the forefront of history.” He adds that “the revolutionary struggle was worth it because the heroism, which was the principal mark of the Sandinista revolutionary experiment, legitimizes itself; in other words, it is validated regardless of its results.”
A similar deliberation, which is a more in-depth examination of the existential roots of the personal reasons for such interpretive bias, was distilled by the Austrian Jewish novelist Joseph Roth in his work Der stumme Prophet (The Mute Prophet): “The joy of working for a great idea and having suffered for humanity determine our decisions long after doubt has turned us clairvoyant, wise and desperate. We have gone through fire and remain marked for the rest of our lives.”
Sandinismo has the
challenge of rememberingThe bottom line of history provides a support for making the leap from the subjective vision to “causal relations that define the long-term social order,” whose establishment is historical justice as Hegel conceived it. It’s also a rung for getting to what Koselleck calls the “step from primary experience of a plural and segmentary origin to institutionalized recollection.”
But it’s a fragile and controversial rung because the closer to power—to the decision-making authorities—those who have the “primary experience” were, the more they resist an objective vision and the more inclined they are to disparage those striving to fuse the diverse and often contradictory experiences into an institutional memory or, at least, into an ephemeral and polysemous narrative that includes the ambivalence of the events. They want us to take the revolution at face value based on their intentions and their programs. They think that way in part because the meaning of their lives is tied up in it and in part because of the many memories that some have swept under the rug and want to keep there.
That’s the thorny part of the task that Fernanda Soto proposes in her book Ventanas en la memoria (Windows in memory, fragments of which were published in envío in December 2011), when she wrote that “Sandinistas have yet to face the challenge of remembering the revolution by reaffirming the positive but also discussing the revolutionary legacies that weren’t revolutionary. To do this means rearticulating revolutionary memories. These memories aren’t just in the past; they are part of a long process of continuous reformulations within Sandinismo, Nicaraguan society and what we call Nation.”
Why bring something new out into the light?“Will we be able to tell other stories about the revolution and Sandinismo?” asks Fernanda Soto. “The answer is yes. Many Nicaraguans are now questioning aspects of both and several are now narrating other histories of that past. It’s evident that many of the personal dilemmas for some reside in the difficulty of that task, not only due to the personal consequences it involves but also its political and economic implications. When I refer to a rewriting of Sandinismo, I’m talking about re-imagining it, leaving aside the stories of sacrifice, goodness and heroism,which aren’t unique to the FSLN. Sandinismo isn’t about goodness.”
Soto’s agreement with Pérez-Baltodano’s reflections is obvious. The current moment offers us very special circumstances for exploring that line of analysis in greater depth. Koselleck pointed out that “there’s no primary experience that can be had, accumulated or transferred, as what characterizes experience is precisely that it is not transferrable; that is what experience consists of.” He therefore argued that the presence of the protagonists is a stumbling block but also a unique opportunity to rescue the “segmentary modes of experience” in order to melt down their personal experiences, either reluctantly or against their resistance, in the crucible of an interpretation without excessive pretensions. This is because that presence forms part “of a constant process in which each present moment scientifically and ex post fixes an experience and always entails surprises for the generation that primarily lived it because something new always comes to light and something different than before is always learned.”
This opportunity to obtain something new can fail if the owners of the primary experience dedicate themselves to erecting self-exculpatory monuments. That’s perhaps why Spanish-Nicaraguan filmmaker and sociologist Mercedes Moncada, in her indispensable film “El inmortal,” conducted her exercise with people “from the base,” who are less inclined to sprinkle themselves with incense and feel that Nicaragua owes them for their incommensurable sacrifices.
The FSLN had many possible
lives but only one livedThis ex post condition of the crystallization of experiences brings us back to the importance of the current bottom line to clarify what happened in the past, so that the justice of history in the Hegelian sense can hand down its sentence.
Even recognizing that at diverse moments the FSLN arrived at crossroads that could have led to it being something other than what it is today, what we have is an FSLN that clearly came to be one of the versions of what it already potentially was, to use the classic Aristotelian terminology. There was an FSLN that was bursting with creativity, heroism and abnegation. And as long as historic development doesn’t bring up another bottom line, we can say that the party’s upper echelons managed to annul that dispersed vigor with a negative vigor to cement the all-encompassing domination it regurgitates today. Perhaps there were other possible lives for the FSLN—something impossible to demonstrate at this late date—but there was no other route to this current domination than the revolution, with the FSLN, in all its splendor and miseries, in the vanguard.
I’m writing to trigger reflectionThat is precisely what this two-part article is about: how the FSLN succeeded in tying together complicities and heroics, creativities and opportunisms, abnegations that indulge and silences that confer, to end up in its dubious splendor and proven misery of today, and which provide the materials based on which history makes its judgment. I’m not looking to make a balance sheet of the revolution. There are other inputs, an enormous number of them, both positive and negative, about the revolution that aren’t being considered here.
My previous article, which appeared in last month’s issue of envío, addressed the abuses committed during the eighties, interpreting them as indicators of the looming domination—in some cases, its darkest versions. Here I’ll attempt to explain that these abuses couldn’t have expanded without the justifications that are the mechanism of ideological domination used by the upper echelons of political vanguards to mute internal dissidence, expropriate personal responsibility and tie subjects into murky complicities.
Hopefully this focus on moral responsibility and the justification of abuses that intensify domination will inspire similar reflections to those of Leonardo Padura’s Trotsky in El hombre queamaba a los perros (the English translation will be released in December of this year as The man who loved dogs). “He carried on his back the responsibility for having fired union leaders, erased democracy from the worker organizations and helped convert them into amorphous entities that the Stalinist bureaucrats now used as they pleased to promote their hegemony. As part of the power apparatus, he had also contributed to the assassination of the democracy he now demanded from the opposition. The proletarian dictatorship was supposed to eliminate the exploiting classes, but was it also supposed to repress the workers? The dilemma had become dramatic and Manichean: it wasn’t possible to allow the expression of the popular will, since that could reverse the process itself. Hadn’t they used the justification of the survival of the revolution to crush rivals, as Lenin did in 1918 to make illegal the parties that had fought for the revolution alongside the Bolsheviks?”
Three justifications of domination:
Tradition, charisma, legalityDomination and subjection require justification. For Max Weber, the State, like all historically previous political groupings, is a relationship of domination by some over others, one maintained by what is considered legitimate violence. To sustain itself, it thus needs the dominated to subject themselves to the authority that the dominant of the moment claim as their own. When and why is that subjection produced? What justifying motives and external means is that domination based upon?
In modern societies, it isn’t based on religious reasons, or at least not blatantly religious reasons. In Politics as a Vocation, Weber identified three sources of legitimacy for domination, which are precisely labeled as internal justifications: “To begin with, in principle, there are three inner justifications, hence basic legitimations of domination. First, the authority of the ‘eternal yesterday,’ i.e. of the mores sanctified through the unimaginably ancient recognition and habitual orientation to conform. This is ‘traditional’ domination exercised by the patriarch and the patrimonial prince of yore.
“There is the authority of the extraordinary and personal gift of grace (charisma), the absolutely personal devotion and personal confidence in revelation, heroism or other qualities of individual leadership. This is ‘charismatic’ domination, as exercised by the prophet or—in the field of politics—by the elected war lord, the plebiscitarian ruler, the great demagogue, or the political party leader.
“Finally, there is domination by virtue of ‘legality,’ by virtue of the belief in the validity of legal statute and functional ‘competence’ based on rationally created rules. In this case, obedience is expected in discharging statutory obligations. This is domination as exercised by the modern ‘servant of the state’ and by all those bearers of power who in this respect resemble him.”
The Sandinista revolution turned to all three internal justifications: tradition, charisma and legality, embodied in the invocation of Sandino’s feat as the historical antecedent of the FSLN, in the “deification of the comandantes”—as one of my interviewees called it—and in the project of establishing a more just social order. Some aspects of the domination—the bleakest—are based on other types of justification. Let’s inspect them.
The war as the great evil
that justified all lesser onesHaving been subjected to a war understood as imperialist aggression continues functioning as the master key of the justifications. Each time people start digging, find a new abuse and look into its origin, the proverbial response emerges: we were at war, with limited options, subjected to exhausting pressures and determined to save the revolutionary process.
The war justified everything, recalls one cooperant: “The diplotienda wasn’t a good example of revolutionary equality. Nor were the salaries in dollars or córdobas according to job description. But they were ‘small sins’ we all pardoned in the greater interest of the revolution and also because of the aggression.”
envío frequently used that justification. I read in a human rights report by the Catholic Institute for International Relations published in the October 1987 issue that “Because of the war the international community has not been able to assess how the Sandinistas and the internal opposition would have fared in creating and consolidating new institutions in peacetime, nor how the Sandinistas would have attempted to cope with the contradictions of being a vanguard party pledged to political pluralism. The war being waged against Nicaragua by the most powerful nation on earth requires a national response.”
The Caribbean Coast caseThree years earlier, in its June 1984 issue, envío published an article by the Center for Research and Documentation on the Atlantic Coast (CIDCA) based on its human rights report called Trabil Nani (Many Troubles in English), which also minimized the abuses against the ethnically complex Caribbean Coast population and the Sandinista government’s role in committing them: “The war in the Atlantic Coast, as in the Pacific, has been tragic and costly, most of all for those in whose name the aggressions are being conducted. Communities have been uprooted and families, traditionally close, have been divided emotionally, physically and politically. Many Miskitus have died, usually as contra combatants, now sometimes as Sandinista combatants, and even occasionally as civilians. Of the latter, some have died at the hands of the counterrevolutionaries, some in crossfire or at the hands of Sandinista soldiers, and some due to the difficulty of survival when they flee to the bush to avoid the fighting in or near their villages.”
No mention is made of the civilians who died because much of the fighting took place in the Miskitu communities, where counterrevolutionaries had sought refuge, only to be encircled by the army and subjected to indiscriminate fire. No shame is displayed in the contradiction of saying that the Miskitus died “mainly as contra combatants,” but if they were civilians they died “at the hands of the counterrevolutionaries.” They were, then, both base and victims of the counterrevolution.
The CIDCA article concluded: “While there have been many problems on the Atlantic Coast, particularly but not exclusively with the Miskitus, and abuses by some military personnel as well as many errors committed on all sides, it is impossible to conclude that there has been any government policy to violate the human rights of anyone.”
We now know about many policies that indeed violated human rights in the area. The first was the now widely known policy to make the coast into the country’s Siberia, because the state bureaucracy was full of officials the government wanted to punish and ban from public view. I could cite many examples, but will limit myself to a case mentioned by one of my interviewees very close to the events: “A Spanish expert working in one ministry was raped by a general director. The ministry tried to cover it up as well as possible, with our cooperation, including that of the raped girl. The general director was fired and sent to the Atlantic Coast with a lower post in the ministry, but was not charged or sentenced, to avoid damaging the revolution.”
“I am ashamed today of
my hardness in that period”The war was a reality. It was financed by the Reagan administration, which did not hesitate to use dirty tricks such as the sale of arms to Iran or providing drug cartels with US Air Force planes and airports to introduce cocaine in exchange for drug moneyan allegation now beyond all doubt. But changes have also evolved in the appreciation of that war. The most important shift in perspective is that some analysts, including people with Sandinista roots, have stopped depicting the war of the eighties as an aggression financed and advised by the US government, a form of indirect imperialist intervention. Instead, they have come to consider it an internal conflict caused partly, largely or mainly by erroneous FSLN policies and abuses in the rural sector; a civil war that US imperialism certainly stirred up during the death rattle of the Cold War.
Perhaps due to that and other shifts, some of those who risked their skin in that war are now reappraising some of their actions. The researcher and renowned feminist María Teresa Blandón today questions sending people who didn’t want to go to war or even didn’t sympathize with the revolutionary process to fight anyway: “I was part of the recruitment commissions once. It was terrible to see the suffering and terror of peasant mothers and fathers who came to plead for their sons. That’s the only thing I’m ashamed of: my hardness in that period in my role as FSLN ‘political secretary’ in a war zone.”
Who knows where the line is?It’s not just that the Sandinista revolution is now undergoing a period of reflection and struggles that are expanding the notions of social justice to previously unnoticed, neglected or minimized terrains, such as the oppression of women, nondiscrimination of indigenous minorities, sexual diversity, the environment, individual freedom, gender equity… There was also a series of values back then in many social movements that are now being recovered: nonviolence, respect for personal decisions, conscientious objection, civil disobedience… The Sandinista leaders’ blocking of their development in Nicaragua put the revolution in a very bad position, triggering polymorphous reactions up to the present day.
On the one hand, María Teresa Blandón reviews her own behavior based on an imperative of justice and freedom that revolutionaries should not have renounced. On the other is the relativizing of that imperative with regard to the circumstances of the war and what history teaches has happened in similar circumstances: “Within the political field some restrictions of freedom of expression, the closures and censuring of La Prensa could be criticized. I don’t know if this was very serious, but we didn’t give it any more importance due to the war. In the United Kingdom during the Second World War the Nazi newspapers that supported the Germans were also prohibited. And in some aspects La Prensa played that fifth-column role. Naturally, the censorship crossed the line in unjustifiable cases.”
These are some of the responses I got when asking about justifications. And these lead to other questions left hanging in the hope of answers: Who knows where the line is? Who’s supposed to warn us when we cross it? Who draws the line? How many times and how far can we cross it? How do we know which cases are justifiable?
“All opposition should be executed”The war was the total evil that opened the door to presumed lesser evils. And the fact is that, over history, few have thought through like Hannah Arendt that it’s preferable to die than to commit crimes. In the case of the war of the eighties, the worst crimes were justified by the always imminent US invasion.
“Kill your neighbor above all else” could take on an appalling expression, as we see in the narrative of a colleague and friend I interviewed: “This happened in a municipality close to Managua. My father came home very little in the eighties. My sister and I were little. Later we used to talk to my dad about those years. That’s when he told me what the Army was supposed to do should the United States invade. When the US invaded Panama and there were the problems with embassies, they received an order: If the invasion took place at a time they were on leave at home, they were to ‘execute’ all ‘counterrevolutionary opposition’ in the town. In my town the big fish was a neighbor; he would have undoubtedly been first on the list because he was one of the revolution’s main enemies. But in 1988, when we were preparing for Hurricane Joan, that man gave us shelter because his house was much stronger. We were friends. He had ideological differences with my family, but we were neighbors and helped each other. Years later he ended up mayor of my town. And he’s still alive.” How was a bloodbath on the scale that would have resulted from that order justified? By the war. By the invasion. By the revolution.
“Revolutions aren’t made by saints”St. Ambrose referred to the Christian Church with a celebrated oxymoron. He called it casta meretrix: a chaste whore, a prostitute with holiness. Not chaste and whore, saint and sinner. He wasn’t talking about a bipolarity that shows two faces of the Church but rather a noun and its adjective. According to St. Ambrose, the Church is a prostitute because it doesn’t reject union with different lovers and becomes more chaste the greater the number of people with whom it joins. In the same text he also calls it a public woman for love and a sterile widow because in the absence of the husband it can’t give birth. But no expression was as successful as casta meretrix, a term divested of the explanation that St. Ambrose gave: The Church is a chaste prostitute because it is frequented by numerous lovers with the attractions of love and without the contamination of blame, because whoever joins with a prostitute becomes of one body with her.
I won’t get bogged down in details about the correct exegesis. What matters more in this context is that over time the interpretation that proclaims the dual nature of the Church has been imposed, and that’s the interpretation that was applied by several of my interviewees when they talked about the revolutionary process: “The revolution isn’t made by saints.”
“There were abuses, but they’re part of the complexity and humanity of such a gigantic feat,” “Great ideals include great errors, if they’re implemented by flesh and blood men.” And someone even said: “The revolution commits errors, but it’s greater than its errors.” I insist that it isn’t the revolution that commits errors: they’re committed by decision-makers.
This recourse to bipolarity functions via a fallacious extrapolation because it’s not the revolution but specific individuals who have committed errors. Formulating such an extrapolation—which denies responsibilities—is as fallacious as insisting on the logic that Achilles had a vulnerable heel so anyone with a vulnerable heel is an Achilles.
The new world utopia in the New WorldMany Europeans came in the eighties to “make the Americas.” Nicaragua was the American utopia. They weren’t looking for material wealth, nor did they get any; they were seeking new political horizons where it was feasible to do what tired and polarized Europe denied or only did half-heartedly.
Some died, many gave the best years of their lives and left big, medium or small opportunities hanging on the barbed wire of a country fenced in by conflicts. They came, they saw abuses and they justified them based on their dreams: “First of all,” responded one high-level cooperant, “to understand some things, you have to look at how many of us ‘internationalists’ came to Nicaragua, specifically from Spain, after a political transition that was exemplary for some and frustrating for others. Nicaragua was the hope of our lives, perhaps like Spain was in 1936 for many members of the international brigades. Some were very young. Others, like myself, not so much. Those of us between 30 and 40 years old no longer believed in fairy tales. But the revolution fascinated us with its open style and its freedoms, which had nothing in common with the situation in the Eastern European countries, or even with Cuba, which we also supported, but without so much pleasure. I’ll perhaps agree that all this was done without much formal democracy, but you can’t expect an armed revolution to set up a Swiss democracy in 24 hours.”
“The negative part didn’t
keep us awake at night”Other cooperants, those from the trenches of academia, where Konstantinov’s manuals were imposed and where those who it was feared would contaminate things with capitalist values were purged, also witnessed abuses and drank deep from the same cistern to swallow them: “The negative part didn’t keep us awake at night. We understood it as something that would pass. A new country was being constructed in which all the institutions wanted to transmit new values and a new way of acting. We thought that with time all that strict revolutionary fervor would calm down. Our heart was with the revolution. The revolution’s ideals were also ours, although we were by then sufficiently critical to see that it couldn’t last the way it was proposed. But we collaborated with good faith, because the people we worked with were really good people and the majority of them were dedicated to the cause. Those were a few years in which we met wonderful people, from both Nicaragua and all parts of the world, all united by the same ideal of forging a new man in a new world.”
Another cooperant, this one from the “insane north,” found an oasis in Sandinista Nicaragua, which was critical of opulence. “After living in the India of Indira Gandhi and the United States of Ronald Reagan, a great deal of what happened during the revolution deserved to be defended in my view. Despite all the economic problems we suffered during those years, there was a generalized spirit of generosity, collaboration and even happiness, a shared poverty.”
Did the cloud of ideals opaque the vision of these self-sacrificing men and women, hiding abuses and paling privileges? No. Many were aware and moderately critical. But being foreigners limited them, inducing self-censorship or dulling their questioning. Their hope did the rest. The unavoidable gamble on a stained but perfectible dream kept them busy in support and distant from criticism. The abuses got a free ride on their utopic attitude and decision to give it time. Meanwhile, the dominating serpent’s egg continued maturing.
Others are worse,
others are more evilIn La Celestina, Sempronio said that all comparison is odious, a sentiment later echoed by don Quixote. A friend of mine added that it’s also unfair. But it is extremely useful to minimize one’s own and others’ wrongdoings. Comparisons, for example with other countries in Central America, are high on the list of justifications used.
But Nicaragua must be compared with Nicaragua, with its diverse “befores” and its vacillating steps toward better futures. The desire to clean up the revolution’s image with international public opinion frequently led to an argument that was a patent contradiction: comparing the project to create a new man in a new world with regimes headed by the skull-and-crossbones gorillas in countries such as Honduras, El Salvador and Guatemala.
This old a-critical and complacent attitude was reviewed in later years. When at the end of the nineties we in the envío team digitally reviewed all of our past articles to put them on our new web site, we were embarrassed and ashamed. We discovered that in fulfilling the mandate of Jesuit superior general Pedro Arrupe, who recommended that we “critically support” the revolution, we had leaned far more toward support than criticism.
On the back of peasantsThis recounting of justifications—the war, the fragile human condition, comparisons, utopia—is far from exhaustive. There are dozens more, including Nicaraguans’ proverbial poor organization, as one priest related to me: “Shortly before the end of the war a friend from the cooperative returned home from the mountains (it was his fifth mobilization!) with a fractured collarbone caused by an accident. He needed quick and professional treatment. Before looking for a doctor I asked him for his army document, thinking the best thing would be to take him to the Military Hospital, where he would be seen quickly and given professional and free treatment as a ‘war veteran.’ The boy had no document at all, much less anything accrediting him as an army recruit. He had to look for his own doctor and pay for his treatment. In the end we found a doctor, but it was probably already too late. He never healed properly and couldn’t work like before. My response? Fury at what I perceived then more as bad organization and lack of sensitivity than corruption and the manipulation of youths and peasants in the war.”
I heard many similar cases of non-retribution for those who served the revolution. With horror one has to recognize that it was the predominant policy. Just as “progress” came to Matagalpa in the 19th century on the back of the indigenous people forced to carry the telegraph cables, the revolution sustained itself with the blood and mutilated limbs of “compas” [short for compañeros, used to refer fondly to those in olive green and thus erase the memory of the former National Guardsmen who dressed in the same color]. Those combatants, predominantly drafted peasants, including people with shrapnel buried in their cranium, amputees, para- and even quadriplegics, today receive a miserable pension, while former Sandinista Popular Army Chief Humberto Ortega is now a prosperous businessman enjoying the fortune they involuntarily earned for him during the eighties.
“I felt important”There were also negative retributions, when those who had served well were poorly rewarded. I know of very dramatic cases, but I’m only going to mention one that concerns me because it also illustrates other mechanisms of domination. In one of my first tasks in the Sandinista Popular Militias, I was asked to temporarily collaborate with Military Counterintelligence (CIM), the section of the Sandinista Popular Army responsible for identifying and dismantling cases of sabotage and espionage within the Army’s own ranks. I was 15, an age at which being recruited for that work made me feel incredibly important: I was a member of a select group, a sort of secret society. In fact, I was called to participate in very exclusive meetings and invested with a special power. As these invitations continued, I assumed the CIM must have a database or something, and had me as an ideal resource due to some special quality. But most likely they were looking for ad hoc collaborators, based on circumstantial reports.
Normally that commitment was limited to keeping a close watch and preventing something out of the ordinary from happening. The monotony was broken in January 1985, when Daniel Ortega was inaugurated after the revolution’s first elections the previous November. By that time I was 18 and billeted in Managua, in what is now the dance school, behind Radio Ya, together with hundreds of other militia members who were daily sent out to strategic points defined by the President’s agenda. They placed us at points along the highways from which a potential attack on Daniel Ortega and the visiting Fidel Castro would come. Our positions and hours were determined by the head office of State Security, and at some posts Cubans reinforced our work.
At the time my boss in the CIM was a skinny agent whose appalling phlegm was an obvious target for typical Nica ridicule. He decided to entrust me with a special mission that night: keep an eye on Humberto, one of the other militia members who had committed the atrocious crime of joking to another CIM member that Daniel and Fidel were going around copulating. I rushed to the task, convinced of my sacred mission.
“I wanted to be useful to
the revolutionary process”I was supposed to get information out of my buddy to determine how dangerous he was, but only learned that his mom was living in Costa Rica and he was considering leaving to join her. The war and defense of the revolution of course justified being the “eyes and ears of the revolution.” While convinced that it was worthless, I didn’t hesitate to report what I had learned: information whose knowledge benefited and damaged no one. It seemed stupid to me to be spying on someone due to a bad joke or because he had relatives abroad, so what drove me to be of service in that particular way? I wanted to continue being a militia member, to be of use to the process. Also fanning that fervor were the expectations of my friends, family, family friends and a whole chain of relations that also “served” the revolution.
I was acting under the mechanism that makes it easier to control a group than individuals, above all if the group’s cohesion is based on ideals and shared tasks. That mechanism operates with the force of justification: being part of… joining… merging with… Today I’m perplexed by the banality of the motives of my modest contribution to the industry of informing. Due to its lack of importance, I think it never crossed my mind that such information served to protect the revolutionary process and its objectives. I simply executed a ritual that expresses that individuals meant nothing in those years. I knew many such rituals.
“They were lesser evils, inevitable evils”I mentioned one such ritual in the first installment of this article. Writer, union leader and politician Onofre Guevara was treated as a kind of personal scribe for Tomás Borge, who didn’t hesitate to take credit for his ideas: “I put up with it because at that moment there was a top-down conception and practice of party discipline,” Onofre now admits. “That conception predominated over all personal interest, despite the fact that I never privately accepted it as correct.” He suggests what lies behind that justification of the abuse: “That position I adopted at the time cannot be separated from the idea that the revolution was above almost all else.”
“I don’t think there was any justification for that silence and lack of denunciation,” one foreigner told me, “although it does have an explanation. In the middle of the mare magnum of the revolution, the war, the international conflict that was unleashed, with Nicaragua at the center of the world, the abuses were seen as lesser and inevitable evils. We didn’t think those acts could have much impact on the march of history, but we did believe that publicizing them could really harm the revolution.”
German theologian and economist Franz Hinkelammert provided an excellent explanation of this submission to the magnificence of historical processes and causes that thirst for human lives, with monumental sacrifices of concrete men and women: “There is such a thing as a utopian round that leads to the utopianizing of structures and smashing of the subject, legitimized by this utopianized and therefore redeeming structure. Church, liberalism and socialism give themselves over to this utopianization of structures in the name of a respective perfect society. And perfect societies devour the human subject, whether in the name of salvation by the church, of market structures, or of planning structures. Structures smash the subject because they require their realization to be sought in the blind internalization of the structure, be it in the name of salvation, liberty or justice.”
Individual sacrifices in the
name of “collective” idealsIn revolutionary processes, self-determination, lauded as a right when applied to peoples, becomes a petty bourgeois aspiration when demanded by individuals. The cause is everything… but not for the dominant, the ones who reap the multiple individual sacrifices and gorge themselves with the offerings made to the gods, happily forgetting that “the gods neither eat nor enjoy what is stolen.” The sacrifices made soteriologically end up honoring and glorifying the domination, giving power to the power.
“Predestined” and total institutions with a divine mission oblige their honest members to justify, forgive and even submit to their dishonest members. Those who believe the acts of FSLN officials are lost in the complex swells of actions demanded or induced by the revolution and avoid judging their abuses and our responsibility to denounce them only help reinforce the domination.
The “collectivist” ideology that annulled or denied individuality churned out justifications that were restricted to benefit the dominant elite. Those extoled reaped the sacrifices made in the name of the collective.
“What exactly was that
mystique to which I appealed?”All justifications are mechanisms of domination that at the end of the day only benefit a specific dominant group, whose abuses are shifted to abstract entities, i.e. hypostatized, situated away from the subjects and interests in which they’re rooted. All justifications and mechanisms to minimize the abuses committed were reproduced in a terrain in which there was no room for reflection about individual responsibility because the laws of history were leading the process.
If there were any reflections, they came later: “After 1990,” wrote one researcher and cooperant, “I had profound doubts about everything related to morality and ethics, everything related to politics. On the one hand it seemed evident to me that everything related to ethics, the revolutionary mystique and morality had taken a powerful hit. On the other, I found it very difficult to define/clarify in my own mind exactly what that mystique to which I appealed was all about. It became clear to me that it wasn’t viable to expect an entire population to adopt a morality based on sacrifice and austerity. It became clear to me that even leftist governments in many places and moments had adopted social policies that felt totally immoral to the poor families that had to endure them. And it was very clear to me that I wasn’t as opposed to measures of state violence when they were implemented in the name of a leftist government as when they were practiced in the name of a rightwing government, except in extreme cases such as torture and massacres of civilians. And it was abundantly clear that, in actual, existing politics, in politics of all sorts, if you only ally with the good guys, you won’t ally with anyone, and will be irrelevant.”
“I don’t want to be a tool of the State”Many became perplexed by the complexity of the dilemmas. Some engaged in their ruminations from personal conditions of financial bonanza, but still anchored in conceptions that continued requiring sacrifices by the masses. Others began to confront their “natural” utopian slant with more pragmatic conceptions of politics and its ambiguous rules of the game. Still others have undertaken a process of deconstruction, albeit privately.
Public conduct later becomes private because the convictions were private though the acts were public. But very little progress has been made in this area because the majority of those in Nicaragua who have taken up the pen to analyze their personal participation in the revolutionary process have done so to slough off all guilt. Hell is lined with self-exculpating monuments. Their attitude only confirms Pierre Bourdieu’s sentence: “Intellectuals are, as possessors of cultural capital, a (dominated) faction of the dominant class.”
In 1800 Heinrich von Kleist wrote to his fiancée Wilhelmine von Zenge: “I do not want to accept any post. Why? I must do what the State requires of me, and yet I must not investigate whether what it requires of me is good. I must be a simple tool for its unknown objectives, and this I cannot do.”
Kleist put himself at the opposite extreme of the argument by which journalist William Grigsby Vado today justifies the illegal dismissal of representatives on the FSLN legislative bench. “You’re not there because of who you are,” said Grigsby Vado, “but because you’re a party militant, have a certain representativeness and have been assigned a party responsibility. If you don’t fulfill it, then you shouldn’t have that responsibility. That’s how it is. And that’s been made very clear to everybody before being a candidate to any public post; they’ve all been spoken to in those terms.”
Moral responsibility:
A dialogue between me and myselfFor those who believe that the complexity of the revolution exempts individuals from their responsibility, Kleist’s questioning is meaningless. And it can become painful for those of us who weren’t able to make many denunciations at the time and undervalued those dissidents who did. We’d like to think that they made the right denunciations for the wrong reasons because we want the reverse of that paradox to be applied to us: we made some errors and remained silent for the right reasons. And it’s there that we’re playing with the meaning of life, the imperious need not to toss a piece of our existence into the trashcan.
But digging into moral responsibility doesn’t lead to the “Je ne regretterien”(I don’t regret anything) with which Edith Piaf sings to the past and tosses it far away. Denial and rationalization are nothing more than defense mechanisms. Kleist’s decision must be taken up as a challenge, and no one has done so better than Hannah Arendt, who believed that we can only venture into that slippery moral terrain with some hope of expecting firm ground if we accept the assumption that there is a human faculty that allows us to judge rationally without allowing ourselves to be carried away by emotion or our own interests and that at the same times functions spontaneously, i.e., isn’t tied down by norms and rules in which particular cases remain simply enveloped, but on the contrary produces its own principles by virtue of the very activity of judging.
Arendt argued that the prior condition for this type of judgment isn’t a highly developed intelligence or great subtlety in moral matters, but a willingness to explicitly live with oneself, to have contact with oneself, which means taking up that silent dialogue between me and myself, which ever since Socrates and Plato we usually call thinking.
That possibility of thinking is within reach of us all, since, Arendt points out, the dividing line between those who want to think and therefore must judge for themselves, and those who don’t want to do so crosses all social, cultural and educational differences.
We must expel obedience
from the political sphereArendt brought up a principle of Aristotelian eudaemonism and turned it completely around. For the peripatetic there’s an identity between wisdom and virtue—only someone with a knowledge of good can act in a good way—so citizens must let themselves be guided by those who know best, even if that supposes sometimes accepting measures that seem to involve some connected discomfort but lead to happiness. Arendt thinks that good is within reach of us all because the capacity for judgment is within our reach. She further believes that before letting themselves be guided by an enlightened caudillo or by bureaucratic procedures, citizens, must be guided by their own independent judgment alone. She thus breaks with the aristocratism of virtue and knowledge, thus definitely reinforcing the optimism of reason by expanding its scope, democratizing it.
Arendt retakes up a basic principle of German romanticism: certainties reside within the subject. She also refers us to a Kantian version of “sapereaude” as a norm of life to avoid moral waywardness. But that principle doesn’t resolve the problem of the morality of the coordinates of the thinkable. It says nothing about the cultural factors that inform it and make up that intellect: how can a person break with the oppression of women having been trained day in and day out to contribute to that domination? Is one’s own judgment enough to overcome socially approved customs? What happens when not even those whose job it is to think critically actually do so?
That may be why Arendt warns that while neither judicial procedure nor personal responsibility authorize the evasion of personal responsibilities to the system under a dictatorship, the system can’t be left outside of all consideration either. It appears in the form of circumstances, from both the legal and the formal viewpoint, in a sense very similar to the one that makes us take into account the situation of socially disfavored people as attenuating but not exempting circumstances.
“Nobody should agree to
obey without first asking why”What then remains of Arendt’s thinking as a guide for personal responsibility? What can be rescued is that sapereaude can’t be suspended due to the Zeitgeist effect. Also recoupable is that Arendt expels the category of “obedience” from the political sphere. The fallacy of requiring or arguing obedience is based on equating consent and obedience: an adult consents while a child obeys. If it is said of an adult that he or she obeys, that supports the organization, authority or law that demands “obedience.” The fallacy is all the more pernicious the more it can invoke an old tradition: the secular idea of political science that has been telling us since Plato and Aristotle that all political bodies are made up of those who govern and those governed, and that the former rule and the latter obey.
It is now evident that the FSLN promoted—and promotes—a paternalistic-filial relationship with the masses, drilled into our heads over and over again in the eighties in the slogan we chanted: “National Directorate, ordene (order us)!” which in fact suggests a master/slave relationship that rebellious FSLN militants parodied in private sarcasm as “National Directorate, ordeñe (milk us)!” In any event, it tended to produce the kind of vacuum of moral responsibility that paves the way for the dominant ones in any context. Sandinista leaders paraded on that pavement, acclaimed, surrounded by a cohort of genuflecting followers who subcontracted others to administrate their responsibility.
Also recoupable is the certainty that no one, no matter how strong, can bring anything either good or bad to fruition without the help and obedience of others and without the a-critical attitude of many.
Along those lines, Fernanda Soto argues that the idealization of the revolution that reigns among some simplifies both the past and the present. “The idealized memory talks of a struggle of good against evil, where the interests of the good are always unquestionable right from the start.”
She agrees with Arendt that nothing is unquestionable. “This idealization,” continues Soto,”inseparable from an exacerbated sense of defense, limits understanding and overcoming many of Sandinismo’s current problems and dilemmas.… The revolution didn’t come to save souls but to build areas where justice isn’t a privilege, where we don’t say we’re poor because that’s how God wanted it, where nobody accepts obeying without first asking why.”
That “why” involves combining self-respect with respect for history to avoid awakening from the revolutionary dream world and discovering, like Luis Sepúlveda in La sombra de lo quefuimos (The shadow of what we were), that “everything that was loaded with future was suddenly corrupted with past.”
What Pascual knewAre revolutions cursed with realizing a certain quota of social justice at the cost of running roughshod over both friends and enemies? Did that happen because the revolution, like Saturn, devours its children? No, it wasn’t the revolution, but those dominating it at the time.
This was something known to Pascual, a peasant leader for whom the myth of the FSLN’s before and after had another calendar. In April 1983, the minister and three deputy ministers of the Ministry of Agriculture and Agrarian Reform (MIDINRA) called in a researcher from the ministry’s Center for Research and Studies on Agrarian Reform who had been part of a movement within the ministry, the Agricultural Workers’ Association and the National Union of Farmers and Ranchers to pressure the FSLN National Directorate to promulgate the eternally postponed agrarian reform. They spat at him: “You all said the entire peasantry is demanding land. We know of a community in western Matagalpa that rejected being given land belonging to a big landowner. We want you to visit the district and explain to us why your theory doesn’t apply there. And you should know that’s not the only case.”
When he got to the district, the researcher sought out the local leader, a peasant named Pascual: “Why aren’t you accepting the land?” To which Pascual responded: “Everyone from MIDINRA acts like they don’t want to know. Goodbye.” The researcher didn’t give up so easily. “I’m here on behalf of Minister Jaime Wheelock and he does want to know.” “If he wants to know, he should come,” said Pascual. “Have a good trip back.”
Given the insistence of the researcher, who ended up claiming personal curiosity just to break through the leader’s hermetic attitude, Pascual finally explained to him that the answer lay deep in the mountain. “Are you willing to walk a long way to learn it or are you just going to climb in your jeep and return to Managua?” he challenged. They climbed up and down paths, crossed ravines, sometimes in shade, always at Pascual’s pace, with his long stride, which increasingly made the city dweller’s legs tremble. After four hours with no rest, when for the fourth time the pale researcher felt like he was going to die, Pascual invited him to sit down on a nearby rock. “Do you know who sat on that rock in 1974?” he began. “Carlos Fonseca sat on that very rock and he said to me: ‘Pascual, our struggle is hard. By the time we win, nearly all genuine Sandinistas will be dead. I very much fear that only false Sandinistas will remain. They’ll offer you health, education and land. Pascual, be loyal to the Sandinista struggle. Don’t trust them. Reject what they offer you. Even if they offer you land, be loyal and reject it. Some five years after the victory, young genuine Sandinistas are going to unseat the false Sandinistas and that will begin the change we’re struggling for.”
Three weeks later Pascual was murdered. The official version: a victim of the contras. We’ll probably never know the real version.
History hasn’t yet had the last wordAfter more than 30 years of intrepid effort, the Ortega brothers have seen to it that part of the prophecy Pascual heard has been fulfilled. But history hasn’t yet had the last word. Its justice, according to Hegel, is only realized by the whole of history. Will it show that the history of the revolution is something more than the history of a dominant leadership? Or will it only show the absurd: the certainty that what occurred can’t be measured using our categories?
We don’t know. But it’s very probable that it will hand down a verdict on what we began to forget on July 19, 1979, and have put a gloss on since February 25, 1990. The weight of Herodotus’ historical justice will come down on that forgetfulness and that gloss; it will take its revenge out on those who are enjoying the carpe diem and couldn’t care less about posterity’s judgment.
José Luis Rocha is a member of envío’s editorial council and is associated with the Institute of Sociology of Philipps University, Marburg, Germany.
|
a monthly magazine of analysis on Central America