Fridays with Vindell

Bamaragua note: I have never read the book that I just referenced in the title of this blog entry. I have considered it though.

My conversation teacher Karen has been bringing in a radio journalist friend named Pedro Vindell to speak with me the last two Fridays. Pedro is in his 60s, can speak at a rate that's almost painful for a non-Nicaraguan to try and keep up with, and unlike most journalists wears his colors on his sleeve. When I met him his small eyes greeted me from under the shade of a baseball cap bearing the image of Che Guevara, and he wore a T-shirt with the image of Sandino, the symbolic torch of a revolution that would be waged under his name 40 years after his death. Vindell was a student of Marxism well before the Sandinista revolution, he even went to Russia to study it, and took up arms alongside the Sandinistas early in the 1970s. He was captured by the Somoza dictatorship on two occasions and faced months of torture in prisons, including the ole electrodes to the genitals trick, before he was sent into house arrest. Some fellow revolutionaries helped him sneak out though, and soon enough he was back in the mountains near Esteli fighting against the dictatorship. When the war was over he became a founding member of El Nuevo Diario, a left-leaning national newspaper that still competes with the equally popular and more right-leaning La Prensa. He also worked for the official Sandinista newspaper La Barricada, which Salman Rushdie once fairly described as "the worst newspaper I've ever read."

Before I continue I think I should lay down my take on the revolution here, which ended July 19, 1979 when Somoza fled, taking all the reserves in the Central Bank with him, and the Sandinistas marched into Managua to take the capital without a fight. It led to years of counter-revolution by guerrillas openly funded by the U.S. government and former President Ronald Reagan, who was hands down the most malicious president Latin America as a whole ever had to deal with. Of all the horrible acts committed by the dictators this region has suffered through, a number of them propped up by the U.S. government, the things Ronald Reagan personally saw done to Latin America throughout the 1980s ranks right up there with the slimiest of them all. Cheers to the great Republican hero.

The Contras never seemed to have much direction. Their philosophy was sort of a "Hey let's burn ferries and power plants, let's put land mines in the middle of ports and highways, specifically target and terrorize rural communities, and if they fear us enough, fuck, maybe we could make ourselves president!" They were trained in Honduras, and funded by the U.S. They had such little support around Nicaragua that the Sandinista government adopted a policy of distributing AK-47s to families throughout the country no matter what their political persuasion was. That's how confident they were in their widespread support, and the policy paid off. But the war destroyed Nicaragua's economy, left thousands more dead, and created a tired populace that knew if it voted the Sandinistas out and elected a candidate openly backed by the U.S., there would finally be peace, and that's just what happened in 1990. The Sandinistas were never what they were painted to be by the media or the politicians in the U.S. They weren't radical communists, they were socialists, and even that's a loose usage of the term. But there was too much hysteria over the idea of "another Cuba" after a tired and abused people overthrew a very real dictator, and Henry Kissinger and Reagan and Bush and the CIA and the whole gang of cowboys saw to it that Nicaragua would "do as we say," which is what the U.S. ambassador literally told some top Nicaraguan officials one time.

The newest twist, and tragedy, in Nicaragua's story is that Daniel Ortega, the Sandinista revolutionary leader re-elected president after almost 20 years of Liberal Party rule, is using more and more underhanded tactics to preserve his power. He had a Sandinista supreme court remove the ban on consecutive re-elections, used fraud to steal numerous municipal elections for this party in 2008, and has a paid army of small-time thugs who break opposition protests. Anyone who travels the highways in Nicaragua also notices a strange trend, that every light post or bridge is colored red and black, the colors of the Sandinistas. There's less and less space between the interests of one party and the power of a "unified" government. The revolution that rooted out the beast is itself growing claws and salivating.

This has caused some important revolutionary leaders to part ways with Ortega and found a separate Sandinista party, but not Vindell. He speaks of Ortega with the same look of sugary sweet admiration a child may have for his mother. But at least he doesn't completely sugarcoat his reaction to the administration's slow move towards dictatorship. Those small-time Sandinista thugs who attacked me in front of the U.S. embassy would say Ortega not facing term limits means "the people can now decide who they think is best to run the country." Vindell's reaction to the decision, when I asked him about it, was, "I love it. It means we'll be in power for at least 40 more years."

I try to talk to him more about journalism because I can tell he gets uncomfortable after a while of questioning him on how he could support the government's outlandish acts, but I can't help it. I've been mesmerized by the political situation here ever since I was stared down by that mob of thugs masquerading as genuine protesters, the fire of immunity from the Sandinista police forces flickering in their eyes in front of this lone gringo, whose ambassador dared say that he was "troubled" by the supreme court's decision on reelections. I could almost hear the embers bursting. Those people didn't have the first clue, Vindell is well-educated on what's happening, and it takes a very strange if not equally dangerous attribute to go along happily with what you know is a subversion of everything your revolution once stood for. Or maybe winning the war on paper took enough of his soul and body to not complain anymore afterwards.

I stepped out onto the second floor balcony of my Spanish school last Friday to take a break after we'd wrapped up our talk. A breeze picked up and my sweaty forehead thanked it. Then I saw Vindell pass by under me on his dusty bike, peddling slowly, waving at an old friend or two also strolling gently by the horses and carriages in Granada's central park. He looked completely at peace, more with the air of a cow chewing grass in the shade than a man in denial that his country is slowly unraveling once again.