A Paradise Built in Hell (25 page)

Somoza seized control of assets and industries with such rapacity that even the affluent and powerful who had previously tolerated him turned on him, and he alienated the Catholic Church as well. These wealthy Nicaraguans—Belli aside—were not the ones who made the revolution, but their disaffection with Somoza and what was called his “kleptocracy” helped open the way for it. Nor did the disaster inevitably result in a revolution; the revolutionaries themselves did the hard work of bringing it about, but the earthquake was a shift that helped. Other, later, events mattered: the 1978 assassination of the moderate but independent newspaper (
La Prensa
) editor Pedro Chamorro was a final outrage. But the shift in atmosphere came with the disaster on the night before Christmas Eve of 1972, and it lasted. Belli recalls, “June or July, I went back to Managua and there was still that sense, it was like—how could I explain it—like we were going back to the city, like we weren’t going to give the city up. There was a lot of talk of moving the city somewhere else, people that swore they would never go back. So there was a sense of community in the neighborhoods. There was so much of a sense of having survived a catastrophe that really does bond people together. You never look at your neighbor the same way because after you go through something like that, you really land in reality in a different way.

“Life now is changed back, but I think that’s also what [then] allowed revolution to become stronger, because, really, you had a sense of what was important. And people realized that what was important was freedom and being able to decide your life and agency. We had a sense of agency in those days that we were able to decide and to do. Two days later you had this tyrant imposing a curfew, imposing martial law, all those kinds of things. The sense of oppression on top of the catastrophe was really unbearable. And once you had realized that your life can be decided by one night of the earth deciding to shake: ‘So what? I want to live a good life and I want to risk my life because I can also lose my life in one night.’ You realize that life has to be lived well or is not worth living. It’s a very profound transformation that takes place during catastrophes. It’s like a near-death experience but lived collectively. It makes such a big difference. I think that’s what brings out the best in people. I’ve seen it over and over, when you cease to think about yourself only. Something kicks in and you start worrying about the tribe, the collective. That kind of makes life meaningful.” What’s clear from Belli’s and other accounts is that the experience is profoundly subjective: it cannot be measured by seismometers, casualty counts, fallen buildings, or anything so quantifi able. The disaster as we usually understand it is tangible, but its psychic consequences are both intangible and often its most important effect.

Scholars agree about the profundity of the rupture. Richard Stuart Olson writes, “Legacies of the Managua 1972 disaster and its aftermath persist to this day, including the emigration of thousands of Nicaraguans of all classes to the United States. Increased pluralism, social mobility, political opportunity, and, in the end, democracy are the most important and enduring. In fact, the 1972 disaster still abruptly divides Nicaraguan history and collective memory.” The revolution did not come right away, but the insurgency grew, as did popular support for it. The Sandinista Revolution that took over Nicaragua in June of 1979 was the last of the old-style leftist revolutions, the last socialist revolution but also one of the last in which a small armed group overthrew a government in the name of justice and the people. And it was perhaps the last revolution in which the old idea of state socialism triumphed; a decade later the Berlin Wall would fall and a revolution in the nature of revolution would follow—but that is another story. Belli devoted much of the 1970s to working toward the revolution. Seven years after the earthquake, the revolution swept the country and the Sandinistas approached Managua in triumph.

Belli remembers, “Those first few days were like a dream because—just that feeling I remember of driving down the road toward Managua and people coming out to get the paper: their faces and the happiness. Yes, everyone was exultant and organizing. . . . This whole system of government disappears from one day to the next and you are left with this country, and you get to do it from the bottom up. It’s quite an amazing energy. Everybody came to volunteer and bring things. The peasants would come with corn and whatever they could find. People would give you things and do this and that and would contribute things. It was this outpouring of love and goodwill, and wherever we went were these crowds that would come and they would kill a pig and have a big feast for us.” Where disaster brought fear and grief, the revolution brought triumph—and bloodshed, but also a sense of radical uncertainty, shared fate, and urgency that brought on generosity and an atmosphere of mutual aid.

The Sandinistas in power did many splendid things—there were literacy campaigns and measures to bring economic justice and alleviate poverty—and some things that were less than splendid. They never resolved, for example, their relationship with the Miskito Indians who lived on the Honduran border, and the ways they confiscated the property of the rich was often vindictive or self-serving. But what the Sandinistas might have done is impossible to know, because “the Reagan Revolution” overtook the United States in 1980, and the Reagan administration, in those late years of the cold war, sought to extirpate all signs of socialism in Central America. The administration surreptitiously funded the Contras, the anti-Sandinista guerrillas who made sallies from the Honduran border to attack small rural communities struggling to raise food and realize the reforms. The Contras stiffened the Sandinistas’ positions and sapped the economic vitality of the country, and it was in part to put an end to this hemorrhage that the people elected a non-Sandinista government in 1990.

Since then, much of the Sandinista achievement has trickled away, and the widespread poverty has become more dire—though some achievements of the 1970s still matter. Nicaragua is not a dictatorship anymore. Belli went back to her country after Hurricane Mitch in 1998 and says of those who had been hit hard, “They were amazing. I was so happy to see it. It was a product of the revolution. These people had organized themselves into this group, this community had organized themselves so they had their demands and what they needed, but not just asking; they had their own plan. The way they talk, they are so articulate and amazing, it’s great to watch. They had that sense of purpose, of strength, and of dignity, which was not there before.”

Less than nine months after the Mexico City quake, the nuclear reactor in Chernobyl, Ukraine, melted down and eventually dragged down an empire with it. In 2006, the man who had been head of the Soviet Union, Mikhail Gorbachev, reflected, “The nuclear meltdown at Chernobyl twenty years ago this month, even more than my launch of
perestroika
, was perhaps the real cause of the collapse of the Soviet Union five years later. Indeed, the Chernobyl catastrophe was a historic turning point: there was the era before the disaster, and there is the very different era that has followed.” Part of the catastrophe was due to the secrecy that was by then habitual to Soviet bureaucrats, which endangered millions, and to the overall sense of unaccountable, incompetent, and callous governance. The forces that emboldened the civil societies of the Soviet satellite states in Poland, East Germany, Hungary, and Czechoslovakia to liberate those nations are not directly related to Chernobyl, but they benefited from a superpower that did not crush them when they rose up, a power that had mutated beyond recognition. Gorbachev asserts, “The Chernobyl disaster, more than anything else, opened the possibility of much greater freedom of expression, to the point that the system as we knew it could no longer continue. It made absolutely clear how important it was to continue the policy of
glasnost,
and I must say that I started to think about time in terms of pre-Chernobyl and post-Chernobyl.”

The relationship between disaster and revolution has seldom been explored, though it crops up throughout the history of revolutions. Catastrophic weather across France in the summer of 1788 brought on the crop failures and bad harvests that led to the rising bread prices, shortages, and hunger that played a major role in triggering the French Revolution the following year. The 1870-71 siege and occupation of Paris in the Franco-Prussian War brought on the sense of daring and solidarity that made possible the Paris Commune—several weeks of insurrectionary self-government Kropotkin and anarchists everywhere have cherished ever since. Belli spoke of Nicaraguans feeling after the earthquake that since they could lose their life, they wanted to make it mean something, even if that involved risks. Disaster and crisis can stiffen resolve, as did disarming a bomb single-handedly for that young woman in the London Blitz who then felt emboldened to confront her boss. Sometimes they work by making a bad situation worse to the point of intolerability; they create a breaking point. Sometimes they do so by making obvious an injustice or agenda that was opaque before. Sometimes they do so by generating the circumstances in which people discover each other and thereby a sense of civil society and collective power. But there is no formula; there are no certainties. Leftists of a certain era liked to believe that the intensification of suffering produced revolution and was therefore to be desired or even encouraged; no such reliable formula ties social change to disaster or other suffering; calamities are at best openings through which a people may take power—or may lose the contest and be further subjugated.

Still the resemblances and ties between disaster and revolution matter. If a revolution is a disaster—which many who oppose them would heartily endorse—it is so because a disaster is also a utopia of sorts; the two phenomena share aspects of solidarity, uncertainty, possibility, and the upending of the ordinary systems governing things—the rupture of the rules and the opening of many doors. Naomi Klein’s
Shock Doctrine
explores one side of the impact of disaster: the scramble for power on the side of the powerful, of authorities, institutions, and capitalism. It is a scramble because multiple parties or facets of society are contending for power and legitimacy, and sometimes the other side—the people, civil society, social justice—wins. Not easily—in Nicaragua, Somoza strengthened his hold temporarily, but the same earthquake that gave him his opportunity intensified resolve and brought on the revolution. The destabilization of disaster is most terrifying to those who benefit most from that stability. (Perhaps future historians will regard 9/11 too as an event that initially strengthened right-wing power in the United States but led to the election of Barack Obama and long-term change.)

Historian Mark Healey writes of natural disasters: “Insurrections by a ‘nature’ that had seemed subdued, they unsettle, disrupt, and potentially overthrow apparently natural structures of social power. Because the existing arrangements of power are so often justified as ‘natural,’ the unexpected reshaping of the ‘natural’ can call many of those arrangements into question. Such theaters of ‘outrage and blame’ test the authority of states and technical elites: they can serve to challenge or undo that authority, but also to justify or reaffirm it.” This declaration comes in his essay on the 1944 San Juan earthquake and the rise to power of Juan Perón. The temblor that hit San Juan at the foothills of the Andes on a summer evening was the worst natural disaster in Argentine history, killing ten thousand and destroying the housing of half the people in the province. Secretary of Labor Perón led the rescue and reconstruction effort and through it achieved the national visibility that helped launch him to the presidency. (Then U.S. secretary of commerce Herbert Hoover attained a similar prominence with his relief efforts in response to the great Mississippi flood of 1927, likewise sometimes credited with bringing him to the presidency.)

Perón ruled the country for eleven years, and his blend of authoritarian populism is still known as Peronism there. “The provision of relief by outsiders can undermine the recovery it is intended to produce. As the gratitude of the moment faded, the disaster revealed and produced widening fissures within San Juan,” writes Healey. The top-down disaster relief produced alienation and despair: bodies were incinerated in great heaps without being identified; children were evacuated without careful records being kept so that many of them too were lost to those who loved them; the sale of food and goods was forbidden, and though supplies were given away, not enough were available to forestall want. People became helpless and hopeless, denied a role in their own survival. And Perón rose to an extraordinary career as Argentina’s most charismatic politician to date, so much so that more than six decades later Peronism is still an important force in that country’s politics, though other strains matter more in this millennium. Many trusted authorities and centralized power more in that era when even most of the alternative visions included Socialist or Communist governments with pervasive control. In Argentina that trust is gone.

On December 19, 20, and 21 of 2001, Argentines launched an unprecedented uprising in response to that country’s financial crisis and growing political disgust. In the election that October of 2001, citizens were so disgusted that nearly half did not show up or cast blank or spoiled ballots—putting pictures of Osama bin Laden in the ballot envelopes was one popular response. Three months later, the economy collapsed, victim of the neoliberal policies of “free trade” that brought in a rush of cheap imports that undermined many Argentine companies, privatized formerly public services and companies, caused massive foreign debt, and pegged the peso to the dollar in ways that destabilized the currency and the economy. Spreading poverty and unemployment had dogged the country in the 1990s, and the economy finally crashed in the South American midsummer of 2001. All personal bank accounts were frozen, and the middle class found themselves nearly as penniless as the chronically unemployed. The president resigned, the public rose up, chanting
“Que se vayan todos!”
(“Out with all of them!”), and within the next two weeks, the country went through three more presidents. On New Year’s Eve of 2001 the American secretary of state tried to put through a call to the Argentine president, only to be told that there wasn’t one at the moment.