I had a flight to Panama in the morning, and was finishing my work in Managua. But there was an opportunity to meet with Ben Lugo in Granada. So I  finished my interview with broadcasting icon Carlos Chamorro and boarded a ‘chicken bus’ for my dinner with Benjamin. After a rollicking bus ride, I sat in the vernanda of a grand old hotel overlooking the Parque Central, the same spot where Tenneseean mercenary William Walker once roamed, burning the city to the ground after his dreams of being emperor of Central America was dashed. Ben was late but I didn’t mind as I sipped a beer on beautiful, sultry evening. A scantily-clad prostitute periodically approached, each time lowering her price ($20!). Finally, Ben arrived and we went to a deserted outdoor restaurant for an unhealthy dinner of nachos, beer and vodka. Below are parts one and two of our three hour chat. The transcription is the work of new Afterparty intern Anaka Allen. 

PART 1

Contrarrevolución

Benjamin Lugo is a democracy activist, a former Sandinista who has seen Nicaragua struggle through a quarter century of political growing pains.  The United States has been involved  in Nicaraguan politics for more than a century.  With support from Cuba and the Soviet Union, Sandinista revolutionaries launched a guerrilla war against US-backed president Anastasio Somoza Debayle, overthrowing him in 1979. President Jimmy Carter cut off long-standing economic and military aid to Somoza in 1977 because of his widely-condemned human rights record. 

Ben begins his analysis of American intervention and its effects in Nicaragua by introducing how the relationship of the Nicaraguan Sandinistas with the FMLN of El Salvador. 

Lugo: In 1979 there was a historical opportunity to have a different relationship with the United States. And then I think that because of all that was happening here in the Sandinista regime against private enterprise, against all these people that were not part of the Somoza dictatorship, I think that worked against El Salvador (so) people would not help or support the FMLN.

The FMLN, the Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front, was a left-wing political party in El Salvador, comprised of multiple leftist guerrilla groups.

Lugo: Because the private sector in El Salvador and the United States said, “This is happening in Nicaragua.” So that actually was a catalyst against the FMLN in El Salvador; what was happening here back in 1980. And then what happened was terrible because all of this started to decrease efficiency and production, and then more and more resources were committed to war efforts against the contras, which was a small group in Honduras but then—

BG: So are you suggesting that the Sandinistas used the contras as a way to create a paranoid justification for more radicalization?

Lugo: To be more radical. They like to be warriors, you know. I think there is even this syndrome of greatness.

BG: Going from a bitter, brutal, bloody guerrilla life in the mountains, with that kind of camaraderie and success, [to] then suddenly [having] to govern; that’s pretty boring. You have to compromise and fix potholes, you have to do all the boring administrative stuff. These twenty-year old kids who have been the commanders of some large area, they’re neither trained nor interested in doing that. So to say, now we’re back, we have this common enemy…

Lugo: It was more exciting to say that, but it was terrible for the country. Because then you started getting into the Cold War with two big players, with the United States. Then this Nicaragua, instead of learning from the Cuban failures — there are good things in Cuba, education and health care for the kids, that we should take.

BG: Even take some of their doctors.

Lugo: See if they can help us. But to go and ally yourself with that terrible, state-owned, state-directed economy, is terrible. So the country started failing economically and then the war effort made it worse. It’s not only the war that created all this chaos. It was the attitude of confiscating everything, everything becomes state-owned. We don’t need a new war to ruin the country, that made it worse, of course. But [there were] already a lot of problems back in ’83-’84, before the war.

In 1981, President Reagan withdrew aid to Nicaragua when the Sandinistas would not end their support of the rebel forces in El Salvador. The Reagan administration viewed the Sandinistas as a dangerous political enemy because of their interaction with communist Cuba under Fidel Castro and the Soviet bloc. The Reagan administration, led by the CIA, began covertly assisting anti-Sandinista fighters, the contras, claiming that their intention was to disrupt the flow of arms to revolutionaries in El Salvador. By late 1982, the United States was funding and managing operations of the contras. President Reagan claimed that America’s goal was to ensure that Nicaragua did not spread violence and rebellion to its Latin American neighbors, specifically El Salvador.

BG: So you’re talking about ’83-’84. It’s my general understanding, that in the beginning, the contras were created out of whole cloth by the United States CIA. They supported the soldiers in Honduras, gave them money, gave them ideological talking points, gave them direction, told them what to do, brought them together in Miami to create a committee.

L: I have to be honest with you, no matter what Reagan or the United States did, if there were no people willing to fight, there was nothing they could do. There were a lot of people willing to fight against the Sandinistas.

B: The Guardia Nacional.

L: No! That was only a small nucleus of maybe two to three thousand people at the most. It’s just an educated guess. I didn’t count them, [laughs] I didn’t like them either. But then from there to eighteen thousand? Something happened there. There were no more National Guardsmen. That was it.

B: So would you say that if the United States did not make that effort—and I wasn’t meaning to demean the broad base of support based on all the issues you talked about that caused people to want to join the contras or one of the contra factions—but would you say that if the United States did nothing, the contras, the counter-revolution would have still happened?

L: Oh yeah, maybe not the way it happened, but a lot of disaffected people, people that were kicked out of their own small plots of land—

B: And then you have the Miskito Indians. Reagan went on television and said, “I am a Miskito Indian.”

L: Yeah. “Yo soy un freedom fighter,” but that was later. Those Miskito Indians did not even know who the CIA was.

B: And my understanding is that the Miskitos had a lot of autonomy under Somoza, so they really didn’t have a lot of problems with him.

L: No, they did. They were taking down the forest, were cutting up trees, this and that.

The Miskito Indians are a tribe that inhabits the northeastern coast of Nicaragua near Puerto Cabezas.  During the Sandinista revolution, many of the tribe sided with the contras.

PART 2

Betrayed Revolution

Lugo claims that the Nicaraguan people suffered great disappointment during the Sandinista regime because they betrayed their original intentions of dismantling the practices of the Somoza dictatorship, ushering in a new government focused on unifying Nicaragua through Marxist-Leninist ideology. 

L: [There was a] change in the direction of the revolution [that] was catastrophic to the country. It led us to a war because, without us knowing, they were trying to confiscate areas, in the rural areas to make [room for] enormous foreign projects, for sugar cane, etc. They were displacing all these small peasants from the land, so these people started fleeing to Honduras and that’s where the contras got bigger and bigger. It’s not like they were imported from Afghanistan. They were Nicaraguans that were displaced from the Sandinista repression.

And then the Miskito Indians, los Miskitos in Puerto Cabeza, they started organizing themselves because they said things were going to be very different with the new revolution, but they started being persecuted too, all of a sudden in like 1981/1982. By that time, the economy was coming down. No political parties were allowed.

Some things were done in a short period of time, including the invasion of Afghanistan by the Soviet Union, that was not denounced by the Sandinista regime. I said, “This is not what we fought for, this is not what we wanted, this is not what all my friends died for.”

Another terrible [betrayal] was that the former Somoza regime, the leaders, lived in these big houses, and then the Sandinistas came to live in those same houses, with the same swimming pools and sometimes they even kept maids and drivers. So that was terrible because if you are preaching to be humble and to be for the people, and that you are going to save money so that people can live better, and then all of a sudden you go out and live in the same houses…It was a continuous degradation from the original 1978 proposition.

B: And in your personal evolution, what official, unofficial or active role did you have with the Sandinistas in ’79, and how did you gradually change and decide to actively oppose the regime?

L: This revolution was so much my revolution that I never fought against it afterwards. So I was never part of the contras. For one thing, I resented the fact that some of the leaders were part of the Somoza National Guard. We have nothing to do with them, you know. And then the United States being so openly supporting it with Reagan, you know.

B: More of the same.

L: During these years in 1980/81, Doña Violeta [spoke against] the regime; Alfonso Robelo too. Another experience that I lived, was in Nandaime. Robelo called for a citizens movement in Nandaime against what we were seeing: the overtaking of the revolution by these radical people. So he said we are going to march in Nandaime. It was on a Sunday. That was the first time I saw the Sandinista army with guns opposing the people. That was marked in my mind. I saw this and thought, “It’s almost the National Guard, again.” It was terrible what happened to me that Sunday morning.

B: So talk about the 80s, you said you didn’t join the contras, tell me more about your personal evolution from 1979 to 1989. I mean, you’ve already talked about how you were seeing certain things that were troubling to you.

L: In 1982, a little brother of mine had this terrible accident in Atlanta. He suffered a stroke at 16 years old. So I had to go urgently to the hospital in Atlanta. When I left the country, they said that I had fled the country, and they knew it was because of this reason, because of my brother. So they decided to confiscate our properties: my family’s, mine, whatever we had. It was kind of ironic, having been part of this revolution, you know.

B: Were they targeting you for any reason?

L: [It was to counter] the bourgeoisie. Because of this decision, they wanted everything to be state-owned. So, they said I had fled so they took over the company, houses—bite by bite, ruining the country, the economy. It was a no-win situation because you are degrading your productive system, inside the country, and then you have a war that was financed by the United States, by Reagan. But there were no mercenaries, in the sense that, they were all Nicaraguan people that were disaffected by this regime. So you could have all the money in the world, but if you have no people willing to fight, the money sits there. Period. So it was this combination of factors. Then by becoming pro-Cuba, you were actually confronting the United States.

After the Sandinistas took control of the Nicaraguan government, they became more radical in the eyes of both the opposition and supporters. New economic policies included confiscating, occupying and redistributing properties, businesses and finances.  At one point, they began to restrict the press. Parts three and four of the conversation will be posted shortly.

Carlos Chamorro wins the Cabot Prize, administered by Columbia’s Graduate School of Journalism, fort exceptional reporting on Latin America and the Caribbean. Only once before in its 72-year history has it gone to a Nicaraguan journalist, and that was to Chamorro’s father in 1977.

Carlos Chamorro is a busy man. He runs a nightly news show Esta Noche, a 60 Minutes style weekly newsmagazine, and an online newsletter called “Confidencial.” His father Pedro Chamorro, editor of La Prensa, is a Nicaraguan icon, murdered a year before the revolution, a constant critic of the ruling Somoza family.  His mother, Violetta, became the first post-Sandinista president. Author, teacher and journalist Stephen Kinzer told me that Carlos is the one interview I need to get while in Nicaragua.

“I taught a course in Berkeley on Central America in ’98-’99, ” Carlos says as we sit down in his elegant office for the interview. “We went through the history of the relationship with the U.S., the crisis of the seventies and the eighties, how the U.S. press covered the topics, and contemporary issues like immigration. I went over a lot of the books written in the eighties. Kinzer’s book is one of the best.”

He is a great storyteller. Were you ever involved with La Prensa?

Yes, but for a short time. I entered La Prensa after my father’s assassination. This was early in ‘78, worked there until May/ June 1979. But after the insurrection I did not go back to La Prensa, I stayed with the Frente (FSLN/ Sandinistas), and participated in Barricada (the national Sandinista-controlled newspaper).

If the U.S. did not fund and support operations for the contras, would there still have been a counter-revolution?

That is a tough question. But I think, probably yes.

You were in the middle of it.

Editor-in-Chief Eduardo Enriquez and Brian Gruber in the La Prensa Newsroom, Managua, Nicaragua

Yes, at that time, if you would have asked that question to me, my answer would have been no. Because we perceived it was a foreign creation, and in fact it was, but it was also a civil war, which was something that we did not recognize. It was both, a civil war and a war of foreign aggression.

There was also a civil resistance from business people, the press, even members of your family, who became slowly disenchanted. How did that turn, there was great exuberance when Somoza was overthrown, when was there a feeling when people started to think this was not going the way we thought it would go.

You should ask that of people who felt that way. I didn’t feel that way. I had a commitment that Nicaragua needed a radical change. Part of that was correct, and probably part of that was wrong. In the sense that, we did what we had to do, but probably we were not respectful of other people’s rights, of the need to maintain consensus, dialogue. There was a kind of vanguard-ism at the FSLN. When you overthrow a dictator like Somoza, even though it was a collective work, it was one organization that claimed the leadership of that, so you had an incredible legitimacy. You had also good ideas, in the sense of not having an orthodox Marxist-Leninist conception of power, of revolution, but some of the old ideas were still there. It is a question also of the epoch, of the period…

The Cold War.

…there were not many alternatives. The overthrow of Allende in Chile had tremendous repercussions for a generation of Latin Americans that wanted to promote change. The simplistic reading was, that, OK, if you try to do socialist change through democracy and elections, one way or another, you are going to face counter-revolution, from the army or the U.S.

Guatemala in 1954.

Carlos Chamorro with his mother Violetta. She was in the original junta after the revolution and ran for president ten years later, defeating Sandinista Daniel Ortega.

Yes, so you cannot trust anyone, and therefore, counter-revolution is inevitable. If it is going to happen, you have to accelerate transformation as much as you can. This sounds very brutal, but I think that is more or less the way it was.

You would think that with your father being in the vanguard against Somoza, that there would be some sensitivity to freedom of the press, certainly with La Prensa, and yet the Sandinistas….

There was a tremendous reference of Chile and the CIA. Let me put it this way. Democracy was important but more important than democracy was social justice,. I think the concept of democracy as I accept it today in terms of equal rights for everyone, the rule of law, the separation of powers, there was a tremendous distrust of these ideas. Democracy was associated with popular participation, citizen participation, people power. Elections, OK, yes, nothing against elections, but elections were not a priority. The priority was social justice, trying to do some of the good things that were done in the eighties, like the literacy campaign, massive health programs, or agrarian reforms.

I saw the picture of Giocanda Belli at the entrance of your office…

You should read her memoir. She is going to be with me today for a presentation of a book.

The person I am staying with lent it to me just yesterday. In reading her memoir, she says, early on, we have a vision for what Nicaragua can be. My question to you is, what has been achieved from that original vision?

I think these days we feel there has been a lot of regression. The revolution was defeated by the Nicaraguan people and by the U.S.  This combination of civil war and aggression, foreign war. In the ‘90’s, there was this process of transition, that was not good for Nicaragua but not everything was bad. There were some good processes of transformation, for some of the institutions created by the revolution, like the police and the army.  I feel afraid now about what is going on with the army and the police, and the kind of authoritarian control that Ortega maintains. For me, one thing was to promote revolution, where you really think that you are going to promote social change; a different thing is Ortega’s sort of personalistic government that resembles in a way the old Somoza.

At La Prensa today, I was a little surprised when I heard from editor-in-chief Eduardo Enriquez that Ortega today looks the same as Somoza in the ‘60’s.

It looks similar. It is not exactly the same.

On our way out of the office, Carlos arranged a ride for me to the bus station. He laughed, ”So you came to Managua without knowing we were going to have this crazy long weekend? They love to have vacations here.”

I ask one final, personal question. Was the Somoza family directly involved in the assassination of your father?

“We don’t have any specific, direct evidence, but I cannot exclude that at all, because the people who participated in the physical assassination were part of a kind of a mafia that had been related with people that were loyal to Somoza’s son. My father wrote a diary, and I printed that diary in the late ‘80’s.  He wrote a diary because in early 1975 a friend came to him horrified, he was an advisor to the minister of defense, and he said, I hear these people discuss how are they going to kill you, some people say they want to throw you from a plane, other people say do this or that.  So we think that within the Somoza inner group, there had been in many different moments plans to kill my father. So I cannot exclude that.”