In the early years of the 21st century, I was lucky enough to travel to Nicaragua, a country that I love like few others, with some frequency.
In 2009, when I arrived in Managua, I found some strange camping in the roundabouts of the city's ring roads. People were kneeling inside the tents. They are prayers, they told me, people who pray for hours for the country, in exchange for a little money and a sandwich ... It was hard to believe it, but the posters of the campaign in which Daniel Ortega was running for one of his many re-elections showed a great photo of the Sandinista commander of yesteryear under a scary slogan, To
fulfill the People is to fulfill God.
Around Ortega's head there was a luminous shadow, like the halos that surround the heads of the saints in classical iconography.
It was 2009 and I didn't just visit Managua. In Granada, where an important poetry festival was being held, I was lucky to have breakfast one morning with Ernesto Cardenal. The Sandinista poet and priest was already over 80 years old, but I found him very well, physically and mentally. He was depressed, however, and more than depressed, pissed off, because the government had deprived him of internet access. How, we ask, have they done that to you? Well, yes, he answered us, they came to my house, took the gadgets and forbade them to reinstall the connections. Father Cardenal had not been the only one, but he was the most significant of those affected by the Government of Daniel Ortega, which already then, in 2009, had completely lost modesty. Friends like Sergio Ramírez, Claribel Alegría and Gioconda Belli told me, on that trip and later,in Spain, in Central America or anywhere in the world where we meet, other incredible stories, all sad.
I was still lucky enough to travel to Nicaragua a couple more times, to see the "trees of life" promoted by Ortega's wife, Vice President Rosario Murillo, metallic structures over 15 meters high, inspired by a painting of Gustav Klimt, which are illuminated every night in a country where the energy poverty of the population is overwhelming. I saw more campaigns, more posters, they told me more sad stories and I tried to tell them later. And in 2018, when two representatives of the caravan of Nicaraguan students that had traveled the country from protest to protest arrived in Madrid, I presented them at a ceremony that was held at the headquarters of the Izquierda Abierta, a current organized within the Izquierda Unida. There, a Spanish gentleman, who declared that he was present due to his good relations with the Nicaraguan Embassy,He said that the students didn't know anything, that they only told lies, and he called all of us fascists, and especially me.
This is my last article before my annual vacation. During the next month, you will not read me on this page again, and I know that today I should, like other years, tell you how happy I am going to be in my corner of the Bay of Cádiz, with my beach, with my tuna, with my garden. and with my friends. But this strange course has become short for me and I could not finish it without crying for Nicaragua, immersed in the mad orgy of arrests of opponents decreed by Ortega, the ultimate degradation of the Sandinista revolution that was the dream of my generation, the only process revolutionary that we saw triumph.
A few weeks ago, Daniel Ortega and Rosario Murillo appeared in public, in Managua, before the monument to Carlos Fonseca, to justify the arrests of those who, according to them, are not candidates, but terrorists and coup plotters who seek to end the legacy of the revolution. .
And yes, I know that we are going on vacation and that nobody wants to read sad things, but I am going to end with some verses by Gioconda Belli that have not been removed from my head since then.
How lucky is yours to be dead, Carlos Fonseca / How lucky that Tomás's phrase that you are one of the dead who never die is only poetry / ... I hope the little ants don't tell you / that the people will tuck you in their poverty / and protect you from ourselves.
Happy summer only for those who deserve it.
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