Getting to Know the General (21 page)

There was a rather Panamanian comedy about my departure to Managua. Chuchu was with me, of course, and at the airport we learnt that the Nicaraguans had sent a small jet to fetch me, carrying my future host, Mario Castillo, who worked for Humberto Ortega, the Minister of Defence, but the Panamanians were insisting that I should fly in a Panamanian plane. After a lengthy discussion Castillo consented to join us in our plane and the Nicaraguan plane flew alongside of us empty. We drank Señor Castillo’s vodka all the way to Managua and that eased any awkwardness in the situation.

5

At Managua I found some familiar faces on the tarmac to welcome me. Father Cardenal, the Minister of Culture, was there and Daniel Ortega’s beautiful wife, Rosario, whom I had seen last in San José, Costa Rica, when we drank together out of earshot while Chuchu had his rendezvous with the leader of the Junta. It was the beginning of some very crowded days.

My siesta at the house of Castillo was broken that afternoon by the visit of an old monsignor whom I had been recommended to meet before I left Europe by an Irish professor who had spent some months in Nicaragua. With him I was able to discuss the strange attitude of Archbishop Obando.

The Archbishop had played a very courageous part at the beginning of the civil war. He had in a sense legitimized the war in the eyes of Catholics by publishing a pastoral letter against Somoza which could easily have cost the Archbishop his life. When the National Palace was captured by Eden Pastora he had flown to Panama with Pastora and the men whom Somoza had released, including Tomás Borge, in order to ensure their safety, and now he had turned against the Junta as Pastora had done. Was it only because there were Marxists in the government? I remembered Chile and how Allende had Communist ministers in his government and yet he had never lost the support of the Archbishop of Santiago. Indeed, on the National Day in 1972 I had watched the Archbishop presiding at an ecumenical service in the cathedral attended by all the members of the government, including the Communists. The gospel was read by a Protestant, prayers were said by a Jewish rabbi and the sermon was preached by a Jesuit. Even the Chinese embassy sent their representatives.

The old monsignor had his own theory to account for the Archbishop’s change of side. He believed it was wounded vanity. The Archbishop had been in the habit of appearing on television every Sunday saying the Mass in Managua. The new government had decided with reason that the television Mass should be said in a different parish each Sunday – in the cities of Granada and León and also in the country parishes. The Archbishop refused to lose his monopoly, so that the government cancelled the televised Mass altogether.

The government had done their best to reward the Archbishop for the brave stand he had taken at the beginning of the civil war. They had offered to help rebuild the cathedral shattered by the earthquake. He had refused their aid on insufficient grounds. They had offered a large building site for a new cathedral, but he had rejected this because a military camp was to be made nearby. Are soldiers forbidden by the Church to hear Mass?

‘He’s very conservative,’ the old monsignor remarked gently. (As a parish priest he had at great risk sheltered in his home Sandinista refugees from Somoza.) ‘He always wears a soutane.’ It was as though for Archbishop Obando John XXIII had never lived and Vatican II had never taken place.

Next morning I visited the Centre for Ecumenical Studies. Apart from one American Presbyterian minister, the young government representative at the Vatican and a translator, they were all Catholic priests and they were even more severe critics of the Archbishop than the monsignor. There was, for example, the strange story of the ‘sweating Virgin’ at Cuapa.

In 1981 the Archbishop inaugurated a Marían campaign, consecrating the country on 28 November to the ‘Immaculate Heart of Mary’, a rather unnecessary campaign, it might be thought, to wage in Nicaragua which was quite as Catholic a country as Poland. The campaign was promoted by
La Prensa
, the conservative opposition paper, and there was a distinct smell of politics about it.

In December
La Prensa
reported on the ‘miracle of the Virgin that perspires’. A wooden image in the church at Cuapa was seen to be sweating and soon pious Catholics were gathering at the improvised altar built for the statuette to collect the sweat with cotton wool. Later the sweat became known as tears (sweat was regarded perhaps as undignified), tears wept for poor Nicaragua under the rule of the Sandinistas. It was strange that she had never wept for Nicaragua under the rule of Somoza.

Usually the Church is very suspicious of miracles and any ‘miracle’ undergoes strict investigation. No such investigation was made. The Archbishop visited the statuette and his conservative henchman Bishop Vivas announced that there was no human explanation for the perspiration (or the tears).

However, the human explanation was soon found. Each night the statuette had been submerged in water and then put in a deep freeze, so that quite naturally it sweated during the day. The discovery of the fraud, however, received no publicity from
La Prensa
or from the two bishops. Indeed, at the end of 1982 the bishops were planning to make Cuapa an official shrine.

The Pope’s forthcoming visit to Central America was discussed at the Centre. Everyone was apprehensive, as it later proved with reason. A new cardinal from South America had been recently appointed, an archbishop who belonged politically to the extreme right, and the right in Latin America is not like the conservative right in Europe. It is the right of the killer gangs in El Salvador and the murderers of Archbishop Romero. Perhaps under the new cardinal’s influence, the Pope had made the retirement of the two priests in the government, Father D’Escoto, the Foreign Minister, and Father Cardenal, the Minister of Culture, a condition for his visit. Everyone at the Centre was in favour of refusing the condition. However, it was later withdrawn, but Father D’Escoto went on a very diplomatic mission to India during the papal visit, and television sets all over the world showed white-haired old Cardenal, a very respected poet in Central America, on his knees in front of the Pope, trying to kiss his hand which the Pope snatched from his reach and then wagged a finger in rebuke – an ugly spectacle, which didn’t please the crowd, nor were they pleased that the Pope made no reference to the funeral on the same spot the day before of seventeen young Sandinistas murdered by the Contras.

After seeing the priests at the Centre I drove on to a town renamed Ciudad Sandino to visit two American nuns who belonged, like Father D’Escoto, to the Mary Knoll order. The town consisted of about 60,000 very poor inhabitants. The nuns lived in the same conditions as the poor – a tin-roofed hut and a standing pipe for water in the yard. One of the two, quite a young woman, particularly impressed me. She had lived for ten years in the town so that she had experienced the dictatorship of Somoza and the whole civil war.

She spoke of the changes which had been made by the Sandinistas. Under Somoza there had been only one doctor in the town, a lazy and inefficient man. Now there were three clinics, midwives were being trained, and there was a vast improvement in the children’s health. Under Somoza no inhabitant had a title to his hut and patch of ground. The whole town was owned by Somozistas who could turn anyone out at will, so that there was no point in planting. Now I could see for myself how the inhabitants were growing vegetables and even flowers.

I asked about the Miskito Indians. A great deal of anti-Sandinista propaganda had been made about the removal of the Miskitos from where they lived on the Atlantic coastline. This had become the main war zone which was constantly penetrated from Honduras by the Contras led by members of the old Somoza National Guard. Tomás Borge, the Minister of the Interior, himself admitted to me that the Sandinistas had behaved clumsily. They had not explained properly to the Indians, he said, the reason for removing them into camps outside the zone. However, the American nun had visited the camps and she denied the truth of their ill-treatment. She found them well housed and well fed and better cared for medically than they had ever been before.

Next day we started early, at 6.45, for another war zone on the northern frontier with Honduras. We were a party of six, Chuchu and I, a fat bearded doctor, a Cuban journalist, a woman photographer, and our leader, an army captain. When we entered the war zone after Chinandega we were joined by an escort car. A bridge on the main road had been blown up by the Contras and was under repair with the help of Cuban engineers.

We stopped at Somotillo, where there was a military headquarters, and watched the training of the local
milice
– a kind of home guard of peasants and artisans. As it was a Sunday there were many small children watching with their mothers, and I had a feeling of unease when I saw a child of eight posing with a rifle for a photographer – an irrational feeling, for what is the difference to a child between a real rifle and a toy one? A boy of fourteen ran, flung himself to the ground, opened fire at a target beside an old man who looked in his late seventies. I had noticed that in Nicaragua the peasants age early, but when I learned that he had fought years back with Sandino against Somoza and the United States Marines I realized that his looks did not belie his age, for Sandino was killed in 1934. He had great dignity and spoke to me very seriously, when he heard that I was a writer, of García Márquez. When I said that ‘Gabo’ was a friend of mine he shook my hand.

As we drove on along the frontier the road was almost empty of traffic and it was dominated all its length by the hills on the Honduran side. According to our leader, two or three deaths were caused almost daily by indiscriminate mortar fire from Honduras to which there was no way of replying if Nicaragua were not to be accused of making war on Honduras. None the less I suspect it was a fairly peaceful section of the war zone to which they were taking us. Finally we reached a small town, Santo Tomás, which was three kilometres from the frontier – indeed one end of the town, where the
milice
had their headquarters (an old
milice
lay asleep on the floor with his rifle for a pillow), was only three hundred yards from Honduras. Trenches had been dug in a semi-circle against a possible attack and for our benefit an exercise was held. An alarm was sounded and the
milice
took to the trenches – old men and boys leaping down and taking up positions with varying agility. The spirit was there – but not always the physical ability. It was a spectacle which would have amused and delighted Omar. All through those days I missed his presence and spoke of him often – to Tomás Borge, to Daniel Ortega, the head of the Junta, to Humberto Ortega, the Minister of Defence and head of the army, to Lenin Cerna, the head of security, to Father Cardenal to whom he had given refuge in Panama. Sometimes I found myself wondering whether Eden Pastora would have deserted his companions if Omar had lived.

Next day, when I visited Tomás Borge at his home and met his wife and child, I found my mission was not quite so easy as I had thought. He proved to be critical of both Colonel Diaz and Colonel Noriega. Perhaps they seemed a little tainted in his eyes by the fact that their official leader was General Paredes.

I suppose for a man like Borge, who has been imprisoned, fought and suffered in a civil war, there must often be an impatience with patience. Omar had shared that impatience, even though he reluctantly controlled his own. But in Panama now bloodshed seemed a long way off: it was not the natural form for a revolution to take there. General Paredes, the friend of the American General Nutting, would not be at the head of the National Guard for much longer: he had got to resign in order to stand for the presidency in 1984 – indeed, he was to resign the next year before the election date. As Diaz had said, the heroic days in Panama were over – the days when Omar was ready, if he failed to get his Treaty, to sabotage the Canal and take to the mountains and jungle, while in Nicaragua the heroic days continued, the fight against Somoza had been succeeded by the confrontation with the Contras, with Pastora, with Honduras and behind them with the immense power of the United States. Perhaps to Borge Panama without Omar was only the Panama of 163 banks and the rich foreigners’ yachts sailing under the Panama flag and the oligarchy of which I had not yet had a glimpse: confrontation with the United States belonged, apart from Omar and the Wild Pigs, only to the students, to the slums of the cities, to the
barrios
of the poor like El Chorillo. To many of the peasants in the countryside politics, as I had witnessed, meant very little beyond the price of yucca, while in Nicaragua almost the whole country has risen against the tyrant and the armed forces.

Borge took me to see Lenin Cerna, the head of security, who showed me his small museum dedicated to proofs of American intervention: military clothes bearing the American manufacturers’ name and address, and some very unpleasant explosives disguised as EverReady torches and, even worse, one made up as a Mickey Mouse picnic box (marked ‘Walt Disney Productions’), magnetized so that it could be stuck on the side of a car – an irresistible attraction to any child. The head of American intelligence had been visiting Nicaragua, and when I lunched with Humberto Ortego and his staff I asked him if he had shown the general these bombs. ‘Yes,’ Ortega replied, ‘and he told me that they didn’t come from the army.’ He said that the general had begun their conversation with a hint of blackmail, but he had ended in a more friendly spirit by admitting that there were some differences between the Pentagon and the State Department. I remembered how the Pentagon had warned Carter that 100,000 troops would be needed to guard the Canal and the Zone. How many would be needed to take over Nicaragua?

6

On my last night in Nicaragua I received an unexpected visit which has left a sad memory behind it. Chuchu and I were still the guests of Señor Castillo, who was assisting the business side of the Ministry of Defence, in a beautiful house and garden with a beautiful hostess, guarded by uniformed sentries, where I felt, I must admit, a little isolated from the Sandinista revolution. I had a room in the house and Chuchu occupied a small guest house in the garden. Then a message came to us that Marcial wanted to visit me, but he didn’t wish to come to the main house. A rendezvous was made for a meeting in the guest house.