Would a truth commission be possible here?

This lifelong human rights promoter and defender offers her reflections on Nicaragua’s human rights history, the limitations to adopting the right to truth in the country and why there has been no “transitional justice.”

Vilma Núñez de Escorcia

What is transitional justice? What does it mean? It’s a relatively new concept in human rights doctrine that refers to the justice that should be fostered in countries that have gone through transition processes from a dictatorship to a democracy or from an armed conflict to peace. Nicaragua is a country that clearly applies, since it has done both. It has experienced some of the judicial and non-judicial strategies required to ensure justice in those difficult transitions, which basically involve three aspects: learn the truth, do justice and compensate the victims. Nonetheless, there is a huge hole in Nicaragua in this regard, one we are all responsible for as a society. We have a debt with the victims of the transitions we have experienced, as impunity has reigned in virtually everything.

Addressing this issue means looking into our history to see what happened and why… I admit that it’s very emotional for me to remember, to relive so many painful situations. As the years have passed, I’ve grown to realize that many of the things I thought had to be a certain way at the time shouldn’t have been that way at all. I get mixed feelings again when I remember them. I don’t know whether it’s vicarious shame, a personal responsibility I didn’t assume in time, or even helplessness… The only thing I’m sure of is that we in Nicaragua have a pending debt with the many victims of human rights violations committed over the course of our recent history. I’m going to mention a few of the violations that characterized the three relatively recent and very different periods: the Somoza dictatorship, the revolution and the war, and the transition period of the Chamorro government.

The Somoza dictatorship:
Like something out of Dante

I have an early recollection deeply etched in my memory of the cruelties committed during the Somoza era. I was a little girl of seven or eight years old when I saw people running through the streets of Acoyapa, the town where I was born, following someone bringing what they said was the body of Rito Jiménez. He and another man named Orozco, I don’t remember his first name, were opponents of Somoza and the regime had “disappeared” them years earlier. When their bodies finally appeared it was learned that they had been buried alive in a pit of lime at La Libertad mine. I remember running behind with the other children from the town, listening to that horror story . Things like that happened in so many other places in our country…

The Somozas installed a repressive dictatorship that lasted for decades and took the repression to an extreme any time they felt threatened. The Conservative Party members and National Guard officers who rose up against him on April 4, 1954, were tortured mercilessly and exterminated in the coffee plantations of Carazo. I personally remember vividly the massacre of students in the streets of León on July 23, 1959, because I was in that demonstration. I also recall the murder of Silvio Parodi and of David Tejada, whose body was thrown by National Guardsmen into the incandescent crater of the Masaya volcano.

And when the FSLN was beginning to express its strength in the mountains and the cities, Somoza responded with a massive violation of human rights. There were massacres in rural zones that annihilated entire peasant communities. Waslala was one of the symbols of those atrocities. I remember the case of the Tijerino family, which was completely wiped out. The National Guard took its victims up in helicopters and threw them out, disappearing them so their families could never find where they were. There was also mass rape of peasant women. I recall the story of the abuses suffered by Doris Tijerino and Amada Pineda. These realities were presented very clearly by Father Fernando Cardenal when he spoke before the US Congress in 1976, in the first well-prepared effort to denounce to the world the brutal human rights violations in Nicaragua.

The Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR) verified these cases and hundreds more when it visited Nicaragua on October 3-12, 1978. At the time I was a member of a human rights commission in León and was responsible for accompanying them. In addition to characterizing the Somoza government as a repressive dictatorship responsible for massive human rights violations, that report paved the way for a report presented on December 18, 1978, to the 17th Organization of American States Meeting of Ministers of Foreign Relations in Washington. There, for the first time in the history of the OAS, and perhaps of any international organization, it was declared that an incumbent government of a member state lacked legitimacy based on the human rights violations it had committed against its own population. The first point of the resolution issued was the “Immediate and definitive replacement of the Somoza regime.”

During the insurrection that began in September 1978, the Somoza regime committed all kinds of violations of humanitarian law in times of war. I recall how they killed Red Cross activists on their way to Chinandega to aid victims of the bombings Somoza had ordered. The civilian population was the victim of indiscriminate aerial bombings in five or six cities of Nicaragua. I lived through that in León, where the National Guard dropped 500- and 1,000-lb. bombs, leaving the historic center in ruins. And after each insurrectional outbreak, the regime would conduct what it called a “clean-up operation”: the National Guard would go through pulling people out of their homes and killing the men. I remember a mass execution in 1978 in La Arrocerra, on the highway leading out of León. At the request of AMPRONAC, the Association of Women in Response to the National Problematic represented by Zoila Guadamuz, we went there to verify what had happened. What we found was like something out of Dante: 27 already decomposing bodies of young men.

The Somoza dictatorship’s dossier of constant, systematic human rights violations has gone totally unpunished. In those years the Somoza regime would hold trials and war councils to judge some events, but they nearly always ended in self-amnesty, on the pretense of freeing the victims but really seeking to exculpate the victimizers. And after these simulations the regime’s repression would continue and its cruelty would intensify. Despite many civic attempts and struggles, the Nicaraguan population was left with no other option than to bring down that dictatorship by the force of arms.

The Sandinista revolution:
Serious violations on both sides

And that brings us to the revolution. Soon, very soon, too soon, armed groups emerged in opposition to the revolutionary project. The already shattered country found itself facing another war in barely a year and a half. During the revolutionary period and the years of that war, both sides violated the human rights and humanitarian law established internationally to avoid or at least limit human suffering during an armed conflict. These humanitarian norms are of obligatory compliance both for governments and the bands they oppose in a conflict. In this case one side was the revolution’s two armed institutions, the Sandinista Popular Army and the Ministry of the Interior, both of which committed excesses combating the excesses of the other side, the US-financed army we called “the Contra” at the time.

Both parties were responsible for very serious violations of human rights and humanitarian law. When I think about those committed by the bodies of the revolution I still ask myself whether I could have done anything to prevent them… I don’t believe I could. Could others? I don’t know, but those of us who have identified ourselves our whole lives with respect for human rights can’t help but feel that in some way we failed. We can’t help but feel that given the triumphalism born of having brought down the Somoza dictatorship and the great expectations we had of the transformations the revolution would bring about, perhaps we minimized them, ignored them, or in some cases perhaps didn’t even realize what was happening…

Even before the war was underway…

There are many examples of how the victorious military forces violated the human rights of the dictator’s defeated military in the first months of the revolution, even before the contra war began. I remember some of those events because I was vice president of the Supreme Court of Justice in those years, and we had to implement procedures and make decisions to try to ensure respect for the principle of legality and the laws that the revolution itself was keeping in effect. One of the best known cases was the execution of some two dozen people in the prison called La Pólvora, in Granada. But there were also summary executions in other prisons in various parts of the country.

How could a government legitimated by its triumph over such a bloody dictatorship commit horrors similar to those against which it had fought? In 1981 the IACHR issued a report on the executions in La Pólvora, and continued to demand they be dealt with right up to the end of the revolutionary government, as did Amnesty International. Although there were attempts to ensure justice was done, the violation of the right to life remained unpunished in that case, where there was no truth to investigate because those executed were identified and the military command in Granada was known.

When Federico Mejía, the head of the National Guard Chiefs of Staff, fled the country, he left General Fulgencio Largaespada in charge of the Guard. Various documents of the time verify that Comandante Humberto Ortega, who headed the FSLN’s military forces, reached an agreement with him that no one who had committed atrocious crimes would be allowed into the new army but that their life and personal integrity would be respected. I still have the ordinance in which General Largaespada ordered the National Guard members to lay down their arms and surrender, recognizing that they had lost the war. At the moment of surrender more than 4,000 Guardsmen took asylum in the Red Cross, while others of higher rank did so in embassies and others in churches. But the agreement was not respected. The FSLN’s armed forces went around pulling the Guardsmen out of the Red Cross and churches to throw them in jail, some in the Modelo Prison, others in the Zona Franca. In those first moments more than 6,500 Guardsmen were behind bars. They were gradually released, with the first group totaling 1,760. The night of June 27, 1981, those in the Zona Franca rioted to protest the terrible conditions. Ministry of the Interior forces quelled the protest, killing 16 of them.

Caribbean Coast cases
marked the revolution

Very soon armed groups formed against the revolution in rural zones. The response consisted of military operations in which flagrant human rights violations were committed. The case of Pantasma is emblematic, as it was the setting of mass executions committed by the Sandinista Army against peasants who opposed the revolutionary model being imposed on them. Pressure from the IACHR and other international bodies led to a military court made up of members from the Ministry of the Interior and the Sandinista Popular Army’s Military Auditing Body trying 42 military personnel for those acts, some of whom were sentenced to 30 years in prison for the crimes committed. There were also other condemnable acts, and not only in the rural areas where the war was fought. A well-known case was the murder in 1980 of business leader Jorge Salazar, a firm opponent of the revolutionary government, which had a high political cost for the revolution.

The armed opposition to the revolution began on the Caribbean Coast, in the area of the Río Coco, the river that forms the border between Nicaragua and Honduras. Serious human rights cases were committed there as well, and they have still not been punished. The revolutionary leadership didn’t understand the cosmovision of the Miskitu indigenous people and most of them never assimilated the model the revolution was imposing. In response to the growing discontent and the initial military actions of armed Miskitus camped in Honduras, the revolutionary government ordered the massive evacuation of the civilian population from 42 villages along the river in February 1982. Some people died in that exodus and many arbitrary abuses were committed. Although the government presented the operation as a measure to protect the civilian population, which I believed at the time, with the benefit of hindsight I can now see that it was a counterinsurgent strategy to remove a potential social base from those who had taken up arms.

It was not the first or last human rights violation on the coast. There had already been battles, deaths and tortures. In December of the previous year, two months before the exodus, some 35-40 Miskitus taken prisoner in the context of those first battles were allegedly executed. While the government told the IAHCR it would investigate the case, the commission was not satisfied with the results. What came to be known as the Leimus massacre also marked the revolution’s human rights file with blood.

The government also used
legal instruments to repress

The contradictions the revolutionary model created among those who opposed it triggered other condemnable acts of a juridical-legal nature, in addition to the repressive-military ones, because the government also repressed using legal instruments. On July 20, 1979, the day-old government junta decreed and began to apply the Law for the Maintenance of Order and Public Security. It was a time in which there was virtually no social control in the country and many weapons were still in civilian hands after the overthrow of the dictatorship. There was massive disorder with frequent killings resulting from personal vendettas, brawls, or any other reason.

The extra-jurisdictional courts: While the new law was conceived to gain control, with time it turned into a repressive legal instrument applied indiscriminately by the Special Tribunals and Popular Anti-Somocista Tribunals, two temporary authorities created by the revolution in the person of Comandante Tomás Borge. We in the Supreme Court, presided by Roberto Argüello Hurtado, advised Borge that we opposed them. Our arguments were juridical: that they violated jurisdictional unity, made it harder to strengthen an independent judicial branch and removed from ordinary jurisdiction people who should be tried by ordinary courts. The response was that our ordinary courts didn’t have the capacity to try so many people, but the real reason was political distrust. They disqualified us as legalistic and viewed us as reactionaries.

So they ignored us. They named special attorneys to accuse and special tribunals to judge, made up of people who in some cases didn’t even know what a lawyer was and held exceedingly summary trials that decided a person’s life or death in a question of hours. …Well, not death, because one of the revolution’s first acts was to abolish the death penalty, but people found themselves in jail with sentences of 20 to 30 years for any old reason. Many were sentenced for the offense of “association to commit a crime” merely because they had been in the National Guard. I recall the case of one boy recruited by the Guard only 15 days before the triumph of the revolution. Without having committed any crime in those few days, he ended up in prison on the grounds of association. The majority of guardsmen tried in the anti-Somocista Tribunals were conscripts and noncommissioned officers, because most of the top-ranking officers had fled the country. History repeated itself: always punishing the poorest…

The abuses of those tribunals, which didn’t follow even the most elementary juridical norms, deserved the international condemnation they got and had an enormous political cost for the revolution. We in the Supreme Court had to repair much of the arbitrary decisions and abuses those tribunals committed; we fired judges, sought to annul some trials and revoke their sentences, such as the one against Colonel Bernardino Larios, the revolution’s first defense minister. We were the judicial branch, but we had no power because there was no political confidence in us. I sometimes wonder whether we did all we could and resisted as far as possible…

The Emergency Law: In October 1981 the revolutionary government issued the Emergency Law for the first time. That law was extended continually, year after year, so we virtually lived in a permanent emergency during the revolutionary years. The Emergency Law meant taking people out of their jurisdiction to subject them to the special courts. It also meant prior censorship of the media, a continual violation of the right to inform and be informed.

Another consequence of the permanent state of emergency was prolonged detentions: if you were arrested you could spend two years in jail waiting for your trial. We in the court were able to document those cases. It was one of the most consistent and systematic human rights violations of the revolutionary period.

From the juridical viewpoint, another of the most serious aspects of the state of emergency was total suppression of the right to file writs of habeas corpus. The IACHR severely criticized that disposition, because under no circumstance can habeas corpus be suspended. With time and under pressure, the revolutionary government began reestablishing that legal guarantee, indispensable to the protection of individual freedom.

The Law of Those Absent: In the Supreme Court we also opposed as repressive what was called the Law of those Absent, handed down on July 22, 1981, which caused general rejection. That law established that all individuals who were out of the country for six months without returning would have all their goods confiscated, even if they had no links to Somocismo or any armed or unarmed opposition group.

Law of Jurisdictional Police Functions: We in the Supreme Court also firmly opposed the Law of Jurisdictional Police Functions because it transferred functions and faculties from the ordinary courts to the Sandinista Police, allowing them to apply sentences in addition to investigating events. That law was the cause of serious abuses.

The Contra
The Contra was another actor that gravely violated human rights during the revolutionary period, also a period of war. That army we later learned to call the Resistance indiscriminately murdered peasants it suspected of supporting the Sandinistas or those who didn’t want to join its ranks or refused to support it as a social base. They too raped peasant women. In those years our peasant population was caught between the crossfire and repressed by both bands.

One of the atrocities I consider most painful for many Nicaraguan mothers, one that makes me feel we are in debt to them, was the kidnapping by the contras of boys who were doing their military service in the Sandinista Army. There were moments during the war in which mothers organized in AMFASEDEN, the Nicaraguan Association of Mothers of Kidnapped and Disappeared Relatives, which worked with its fingernails because nobody supported it, claimed some 10,000 kidnapped youths had disappeared, surely taken to the counterrevolutionary camps in Honduras. After I left the Supreme Court to head up the revolutionary govern¬ment’s human rights commission, we succeeded in documenting nearly 900 cases of young men in that situation, specifying the place where they had been kidnapped based on the information those mothers gave us. By then the Sapoá peace agreements were coming up and I remember turning all that documentation over to someone who was part of those negotiations, confident that there would be some response, but I didn’t see any interest. The case of the boys kidnapped by the contras is one of those that hurt me the most, because I was very close to it. What really hurt was the indifference with which my Sandinista compañeros viewed it. Given the urgency to stop the war, they didn’t consider it a priority.

The Contra was also responsible for extremely serious violations of the humanitarian law that should prevail during a war. In the crimes of that war we must also include the terrorist actions financed by the government of the United States and organized by the CIA, such as setting fire to the fuel tanks in Corinto or speedboat attacks against objectives on our country’s coasts. Those actions were condemned in the April 1984 sentence of the International Court of Justice at The Hague, which was a transcendental ruling, although without binding force. It’s important to remember that the US government alleged that the objective of its participation in Nicaragua’s war was to defend Nicaraguans’ human rights, but in its resolution the Court stated that no government can assume that right, because that’s what the corresponding international entities are for.

The move from war to peace
Then there was another transition, the one starting in 1990, in which we moved from war to peace. But the first years of that peace were also plagued with serious human rights violations, with more crimes and abuses that have gone unpunished. In the first years of the transition we received continuous denunciations of murders of Resistance veterans in rural areas and also of peasants and rural Sandinista leaders. There were also emblematic assassinations, such as that of Arges Sequeira, a Liberal Party farmer, and the contra leader Enrique Bermúdez, known as Comandante 3-80.

Those crimes can’t be directly attributed to Violeta Chamorro’s administration, because she didn’t hold all the strings of power; in particular she had no control over the Army or the Interior Ministry, armed institutions that continued taking orders from the FSLN and followed what Daniel Ortega had said only days after losing the elections: that they would continue governing “from below.”

Understanding the concept
of transitional justice
I’ve summarized only some of the extensive evidence we have that there was never any intention or even possibility in Nicaragua to comply with what today is known as “transitional justice.” I want to take a minute now to reflect on that concept, which is relatively new and in permanent evolution, as happens with all new advances in human rights doctrine given that human rights aren’t static; they are continually developing as peoples evolve and the conditions of societies change.

While it wasn’t called that back then, the concept of transitional justice can be considered to have started with the Nuremburg trials at the end of World War II, in which the victors, the Allies, judged the crimes of the defeated, the German Nazis. This concept began to be developed from that point, although it was so diluted during the Cold War period that virtually no one spoke about it for years. In the early nineties, after the collapse of the Soviet Union and the fall of the Berlin War, the concept was revived with the investigations into what had happened in the Eastern European countries. That stage coincided with different democratization processes in Eastern Europe, Africa and Latin America. And it was precisely in Latin America, especially Argentina and Chile, countries coming out of military dictatorships that had applied the national security doctrine with an iron hand, that the concept of transitional justice reached a culminating point and began to display its possibilities.

Although transitional justice doesn’t yet have a convention to underpin it in the UN’s development of international law, it’s making real advances. When I was looking for more information to share in this article, I found a very recent UN document titled “Transitional Justice and Economic, Social and Cultural Rights.” This is a real step forward, because transitional justice had previously been understood and applied to respond to the violations of civil and political rights: the right to life, to personal integrity, to a fair trial, to not suffer torture… the rights the Somoza dictatorship, the Contra and the revolutionary government violated.

Now the UN is inviting us to expand our perspective and understand transitional justice to include the violation of economic, social and cultural rights as well. It is asking us to consider that there can only be true justice in the transitions societies go through if we can get to the causes that provoked the conflict. This is a very familiar idea for those of us working in human rights who know how many crimes, abuses and arbitrary acts are committed to defend interests contrary to the economic, social and cultural rights of the great majorities.

The right to the truth
To better grasp the sense of transitional justice, we need to assume a new right: the right to the truth. This is not enshrined in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which is the cornerstone for all human rights juridical development. The right to the truth not only doesn’t appear in the Declaration, it doesn’t appear in any treaty or international convention, the conventional instruments States are obliged to comply with.

The first time the UN General Assembly recognized the right to the truth as a human right was on April 20, 2005, when it passed resolution 66 of that year, presented as a proposal by Argentina with the support of 50 countries from various regions of the planet. For the first time the right to truth was proclaimed as a human right, although only in a resolution, which is not binding for States. In that resolution the UN consecrated the right to autonomous truth and stated that it is “the right of the victims of gross violations of human rights and the right of their relatives to the truth about the events that have taken place, including the identification of the perpetrators of the facts that gave rise to such violations.” That was the first step in the development of the human right to the truth. Given the importance the United Nations granted it, in 2010 it declared March 24 of each year International Day for the Right to the Truth. It chose that date in homage to Monsignor Óscar Arnulfo Romero because it was the day he was assassinated.

There have also been advances in relation to the right to the truth in the Organization of American States’ Inter-American System, the system closest to us. There it is based on the jurisprudence emanating from the IACHR and Inter-American Court of Human Rights for having learned about and examined the truth of concrete cases of human rights violations. Both the Commission and the Court state something very important when they declare that the right to the truth is “consubstantial and inherent” to the Inter-American Human Rights Convention, the American continent’s maximum human rights instrument. They argue that various articles established in the Convention are violated if the truth of events is not known. The IACHR also provided a very important point when it stated that amnesty laws, “full stop” laws, laws of “due obedience”—in other words all those that posit a “clean slate”—impede the right to the truth.

From there to truth commissions
Truth commissions, which are one of the transitional justice process’ own instruments, grow out of the development of the right to the truth. They become necessary when, for whatever reason, ordinary justice is unable to guarantee the right to truth and justice for people whose human rights have been violated. These commissions work to find out what happened and how it happened when the respective country’s judicial system cannot do it due to inability, indifference or even complicity.

Truth commissions are investigative bodies created to help societies that have experienced major political violence or internal war come to terms with their past and thus move beyond the profound crises and traumas generated by serious human rights violations committed in those stages. They don’t replace the judicial branch and don’t have any binding power on States, as judicial sentences do. When the judicial branch is really independent but simply weak, they can make a truly indispensable contribution. As near as I have been able to count, there have been some 30 truth commissions in different countries to date, although not all have been effective or had a happy ending.

Not all truth commissions have the same origin. Some are the result of a governmental decision to aid the judicial system; others result from peace agreements and seek to achieve national reconciliation. Nor do they all have the same work methods, as they depend on the different national realities and the information available to them. Their efficiency—or lack of it—is determined by the context. Some have only produced minimal financial compensations for the victims, as a way to silence them. Worse yet, some have even helped cover up the real truth and legitimize the “official truth,” as happened in Peru, when one chaired by Mario Vargas Llosa investigated the massacre of eight journalists and the guide accompanying them in the Andean community of Uchuraccay in 1983.

The two closest to us
The two truth commissions closest to us were El Salvador’s and Guatemala’s. The one in El Salvador was created by legal mandate to end the civil war in 1992 as a product of the Peace Accords. Its report, “From madness to hope: The 12-year war in El Salvador,” was released on March 15, 1993. Only five days later the ARENA party, which at that time controlled the Legislative Assembly, pushed through an amnesty law “for the consolidation of peace,” which granted “broad, absolute and unconditional amnesty” to all those mentioned, seeking to exonerate them from responsibility and otherwise annul any reparations that could be sought based on the report’s conclusions.

Even more serious was what happened in Guatemala. The Commission for Historical Clarification (CEH) was the truth and reconciliation commission agreed to in the 1996 Peace Accords to investigate the truth of what happened in the country over three decades of internal conflict. The commission’s report, “Guatemala - Memory of Silence,” was presented in February 1999. An earlier report published by the Archdiocese of Guatemala, called “Recuperation of Historical Memory,” was presented in April 1998 by noted human rights campaigner Bishop Juan Gerardi. He was beaten to death only two days later.

While the direct results of the commissions were frustrating, the 2013 trial of General Ríos Montt could be considered a symbolic act of transitional justice for Guatemala beyond its juridical consequences, especially for the Ixil population because they had the opportunity to tell the truth before a tribunal that was heard all over the country. The persistence of Guatemala’s human rights bodies not only put Ríos Montt on trial, but also created a milestone in the history of international law because a former head of State was found guilty of genocide.

What about a truth commission for Nicaragua?
If Guatemala and El Salvador, neighboring countries that suffered internal wars, have had truth commissions, why hasn’t that happened in Nicaragua, which not only lived through an internal war, but also escaped a dictatorship? Why has no one considered initiating a process of transitional justice in Nicaragua, which would allow the victims to speak the truth, learn it and be compensated?

Analyzing the 30 truth commissions in different countries, I didn’t find a single one created as a result of the transition from a dictatorship to a revolutionary process, as was Nicaragua’s case. Furthermore, analyzing all the documents of the first years of the revolution, I found that no one ever spoke of a truth commission or even anything like it by a different name. I saw that the revolutionary leaders did want to do justice, to punish the brutalities of the Somocista dictatorship, but in the end they only did imitations, simulations. One of the revolutionary government’s first decrees, for example, was an order to extradite Somoza and his family, at that time exiled in Miami, to stand trial for their crimes in Nicaragua. But that was pure triumphalist rhetoric, with no legal basis to make it viable. Those who issued it sought no juridical council, which would have explained to them that extraditions don’t happen as the result of a country’s unilateral decree; they require a bilateral treaty between the two countries. After that, no one ever even tried proposing Somoza’s extradition to the US government.

Pardons and amnesties
I want to mention something else that I don’t know if any other country has done. Right from the day after the revolutionary triumph, in a context of enormous chaos and lack of control, the new government began to issue pardons. Comandante Borge handed them out like candies. He’d get whoever he wanted out of jail, or pardon someone who personally asked him to. The number of pardons with no legal foundation was so huge that the international human rights agencies began to criticize the practice because a pardon doesn’t expunge the responsibilities for the crimes committed. They began to insist that at the very least amnesty laws should be passed.

Amnesties also abounded in our transitions, and not only as a fruit of international pressure. The Plan to Achieve Peace and Stability, the first government plan drawn up by the FSLN in exile, already contained the promise of a general amnesty. And in the Sapoá Accords between the revolutionary government and the Contra, the former agreed to a “general amnesty” so broad it covered not only opponents and those who had taken up arms, but also “members of the army of the previous regime” for crimes they had committed before the triumph of the revolution. It was an a posteriori amnesty for all members of Somoza’s National Guard and established that “they would not be judged, sanctioned or prosecuted for any political-military activities they may have executed.”

In the attempt to put an end to the internal war, one of the main points of the government program put forward by UNO, whose presidential candidate was Violeta Chamorro, was the promise of a general amnesty covering everyone who had committed crimes during the war. The last report of the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights that I consulted, the one for 1988, written when the Esquipulas agreements had been signed and it was known that Nicaragua’s elections would be moved forward, recommended that the Sandinista government decree a general amnesty, going so far as to state that without such an amnesty the 1990 elections would not be recognized internationally. That revealed the Commission’s political bias at that time, as it was under pressure from the US government. Years earlier, seeking to halt the war, the Contadora Group had proposed the need for the Nicaraguan government to “issue, endorse, expand and perfect the legal norms that would offer a genuine amnesty.” The Esquipulas agreements also established the need for amnesty decrees to achieve “national reconciliation.”

That’s how the amnesty proposals that replaced justice for Somocistas, Sandinistas and contras, no matter what abominations each may have committed, came about, at least in part the result of international pressure. If we compare Nicaragua’s situation with that of other countries that have gone through transitions, we can observe a sui generis situation here, characterized by continuous pardons and amnesties that had determinant effects in consolidating a situation of total impunity. Finally, with the end of the revolution in 1990 when President Chamorro came to power, followed by the end of the war and initiation of the disarmament process, an Amnesty Law was approved on May 23, 1990.

The new government promised to organize a truth commission, but that initiative never went anywhere. In its place, as a product of the Verification and Follow-up Protocol of October 22, 1992, President Chamorro created a Tripartite Commission made up of José Pallais, Nicaragua’s deputy foreign minister; Santiago Murray, head of the OAS’ International Support and Verification Commission; and Cardinal Miguel Obando y Bravo, who named Roberto Rivas to represent him. That commission’s function was to oversee the rights and guarantees of demobilized Resistance members, repatriated refugees and relatives of both sides that had fought in the war. At the insistence of the Nicaraguan Human Rights Center (CENIDH), various cases were presented to the commission demonstrating violations of Sandinistas’ human rights, but the Tripartite Commission was useless because when it passed its reports to the corresponding courts, they simply alleged the cases had already been judged or declared there was no longer any responsibility based on the decreed amnesty.

Could a truth commission still happen?
Considering this history and this context, is a truth commission still possible in Nicaragua? I think that woud be very difficult for many reasons. For one, there was no systematic documentation during either the Somoza dictatorship or the revolutionary government. If there was any intention to do this, I believe the 1978 IACHR report, when the commission visited Nicaragua, could provide quite a lot of data. On that occasion the IACHR received some 3,500 charges by victim’s families of human rights violations committed by the Somocista regime. What did the commission do with all that documentation? Might it have saved it? What emblematic cases could a truth commission begin to work on in Nicaragua?

In the current circumstances, when serious human rights violations continue to be committed, would it be possible for us to investigate the truth? Could we say it publicly? What chance is there of a truth commission today, when various officials who were close to grave human rights violations are members of a judicial branch we know isn’t independent?

What use would a truth commission even have in today’s Nicaragua? So victims can learn the truth or so they can be paid to keep quiet, given that a government like this one is expert at silencing with perks? If the government doesn’t change course there will never be the possibility of knowing any truth. And beyond the positions of the government, which so fears the truth, the atmosphere in our society is so polarized that a truth commission seems impossible. It’s difficult, very difficult. Not even from a very purist human rights defense perspective would I be so bold as to promote a truth commission today.

In addition to these impossibilities, which are condemning Nicaragua to eternal impunity, there’s also the obstacle I experienced in Colombia, when the Permanent Tribunal of the Peoples, on which I sit as a judge, met on April 22-25, 1991, to judge the impunity of the crimes against humanity committed by Latin America’s military dictatorships. On that occasion we judged what had happened in all the countries of the continent that had suffered dictatorships with the exception of Nicaragua. Why not Nicaragua? Because the human rights bodies had strong left leanings and opted to ignore what had happened during the Somoza dictatorship to avoid having to address what had happened during the revolutionary government. Alejandro Bendaña, who had been secretary of Nicaragua’s Foreign Ministry during the revolutionary government and was invited to that Tribunal session as an expert, clearly laid out the obstacle: What should prevail when promoting transitional justice or installing a truth commission: truth or peace? What should be given priority: the victims’ right to the truth or the right of entire societies and nations to peace? There’s a debate around this dilemma, because a real contradiction is involved; and it’s based on that contradiction that we must analyze and understand what Nicaragua has lived through.

Saying the truth is the first step to healing
Although truth commissions have only a relative value, as they don’t replace ordinary judicial branches, don’t have binding force and don’t oblige the States, they are an important contribution when investigations are limited by lack of political will, technical incapacity or other problems. In these cases, truth commissions at least provide a voice for those who lived through or witnessed cruelties and tragedies they cannot forget. Although I might not live to see or hear the truth about all the tragedies experienced in Nicaragua, one must trust that the truth will out someday. We’re obliged to continue struggling to create the right conditions for it to prevail. We must never tire of claiming the right to the truth, a right that’s imprescriptible, no matter how many years may have passed.

There are many people in Nicaragua who have the right to know the truth and receive justice and reparation. We have the obligation to continue making efforts to ensure that day will come, to pay the debt we have with so many victims. Those who survived so many cruelties have resisted, but they haven’t healed. Knowing the truth, saying it, listening to it, making sure it’s heard, is always a first step to healing. Nicaragua has that debt pending.

Vilma Núñez de Escorcia is president of the Nicaraguan Human Rights Center (CENIDH).

Print text

Send text