Managua, November 2-5. Peeling paint; warped plywood; shantytowns; rationed water; walls smeared with graffiti; unrelieved shabbiness. At night only a few streetlights poke themselves into the darkness; they too are rationed.
Police kiosks, mounted on cement tripods, are falling over into street intersections they are meant to control — an engineering miscalculation. In response to a rumor of an October invasion by the United States, scores of tanks were dug in around the city. Six weeks later, deep pools of fetid rainwater replace the tanks, threatening the city with an arsenal of disease-ridden mosquitoes (aedes aegypti). The mosquitoes are offered by the Sandinistas as the latest evidence of a bacteriological war being waged by the CIA.
The shortages of basic commodities, rationing, and the general economic decline have led some optimists to predict the Sandinista’s demise as popular discontent grows. The situation has also led to some humor. The latest joke from Managua is: “when things were worse (the Somoza era), they were better.” However, the opÂtimists are confronted with the historical fact that there has never been a single Communist regime overthrown because of the economic mess it has created. In fact, the general shabbiness and physical dilapidation of Managua disguise the consolidation of Sandinista power. Though things are falling apart, the center holds. Despite severe economic decay, the Sandinista regime continues its reign unimpeded by public outcry. As one Nicaraguan put it: “If this were the Somoza era, there would already be riots and strikes.” But there are no riots and strikes in Nicaragua today.
The official reason for this quiescence is the “state of emergency” decree reinstituted by the Sandinistas on October 15th, which prohibits freedom of assembly and formally suspends other civil rights. But the decree simply made de jure what was already de facto. The real reason for the lack of strikes and riots is terror. Terror and resignation. The terror is sufficiently subtle and sophisticated that it may appear mild to those whose idea of repression begins at the concentration camp level. There are, indeed, what Senator Edward Kennedy has called “concentration camps” elsewhere in Nicaragua, into which the Miskito Indians have been herded, but in Managua there are no recent reports of people disappearing.
People do disappear, but for only short periods of time. They return very badly shaken and quiet. Terror in Managua today is festering under the surface. It is in the brewing stage. Those who withstand its pressure are exÂtraordinarily brave men and women, all the more so for their mild and gentle manners. What they are withstanding and the courage it takes to do so were revealed to me in several days of visits with leaders from every sector of the civic opposition.
On October 24, Dr. Enrique Meneses Pena held a program celebrating the fortieth anniversary of the United Nations. Dr. Meneses runs the Center for Unity and the Promotion of Democracy from a large hall attached to his modest home. The following night at 7:00 p.m. the State Police entered and searched his home while he was away. At 1:00 a.m. they returned and, after a further house search, took Dr. Meneses to interrogation headÂquarters directly behind the Intercontinental Hotel. The Sandinistas use the same building Somoza employed as his secret police headquarters before the earthquake in 1972.
Dr. Meneses was fingerprinted, photographed and put in a prison uniform. He was told to walk with his head down and, if a door opened, to face the wall. He was placed in an isolation cell for three days and then released at 10:30 Monday morning, October 28th. On Saturday, he was interrogated every half-hour with parÂticular focus on his alleged relationship to the U.S. EmÂbassy and the CIA. He was told that he did not have any right to invite high school students to his institute because “the youth belongs to us.” The police returned to his residence at 3:00 a.m. Saturday and confiscated ten years of his writings.
On November 1, Guillermo Quant, the director of the Nicaraguan Chamber of Commerce, was forced to State Security Headquarters and interrogated about his ties to the U.S. Embassy. Mr. Quant, who had been sick for several days and was clad only in pajamas, was then ordered to wait in a cramped closet with no light and little air. After two hours he was fingerprinted and photoÂgraphed. During his interrogation he was told, “you are already in prison because of your CIA connections. You may be here for thirty years.” He was released several hours later. Shortly after his release, Mr. Quant got a late night phone call: “Are you ready?” a voice said. “Get your things in order because I’m going to kill you.” He could not have easily forgotten that voice; it was one of his Sandinista inquisitors.
Threatening telephone calls after formal interrogation seem to be standard operating procedure in Nicaragua. On September 5, Andres Zuniga, president of the ConfederaÂtion of Professional Associations, was among the group of COSEP (an independent free enterprise organization) representatives summoned by Lenin Cerna, the chief of the State Police. During this meeting, Mr. Cerna inÂformed the group that “the government would not allow the assembly (scheduled for September 7) by any means and . . . would not hesitate to resolve the situation . . . in the same way it did with Jorge Salazar.” (Salazar was a prominent Nicaraguan businessman whose disillusionment with and eventual activism against the Sandinistas led to his assassination in December, 1980.)
After his September 5 meeting at State Security Headquarters, Mr. Zuniga received a phone call at his home at 11:00 p.m. and every half-hour thereafter until 3:00 a.m. The callers informed him that he and his family would be killed. The calls continued for a week. Then, on October 25, they began again. One caller warned: “We know you are a counterrevolutionary and we are going to kill you. Anything might happen to your family.” Mrs. Zuniga, a charismatic Christian, responded to these threats by asking the callers if they knew about Jesus Christ and whether they read the Bible.
The Catholic Church is probably the strongest source of insecurity for the Sandinistas due to its claim on the loyalty of the people and the antipathy of its principles to those of Marxism-Leninism. Consequently, the Sandinistas take every opportunity to weaken the Church, though they do so warily. In particular, the Sandinistas are trying to establish a triangular plot implicating the Church, the opÂposition political parties and the U.S. Embassy. The week before my visit of November 5, Cardinal Obando y Bravo had been told by Minister of the Interior Tomas Borge: “If it is possible we will expel all foreign priests if they are involved in politics. And Nicaraguan priests will be dealt with severely. . . . The revolution is eternal and we are ten times more powerful than the National Guard (of Somoza).” When the bishop of Granada was summoned by the State Police, he was warned: “If you don’t show up we will expel foreign priests and we will draft the seminarians.” In fact, fourteen seminarians have been dragooned into military service and are serving as virtual prisoners in Ocotal. They have refused to wear the FSLN uniform or engage in military training, and therefore are performing forced kitchen duty.
At the same time, the Church is being denied its regular avenues of communication. Monsignor Bismark Carballo, Cardinal Obando’s director of communications, attempted to publish a Catholic magazine called Iglesia. The State Police seized the offices of Iglesia, forcibly shoved Monsignor Carballo out of the building, and confiscated the magazine as a “subversive publication.” Three members of Monsignor Carballo’s parish council have also been summoned and grilled by the State Police.Â
Radio Catolica has also been heavily censored and, at times, shut down. On October 25 the Sandinista censors struck from the Radio Catolica broadcast, “Blessed are those who are persecuted for the cause of justice, for theirs shall be the reign of the Kingdom.” Apparently the Beatitudes are considered subversive by a regime which has also denied permission for Mother Teresa to open a home for the Nicaraguan poor.
The denial of freedom of assembly is also curtailing the Church’s ability to communicate. Cardinal Obando has been touring the provinces in Nicaragua. Everywhere he is greeted by massive and enthusiastic crowds that could not possibly be accommodated inside a church. Such gatherings are now prohibited.
On November 5, the priests of Granada, -Masya, Rivas, and Carazo were called to the Granada State Police headquarters along with Cardinal Obando. Frederico Lopez from the Ministry of the Interior explained to them that the state of emergency requires prohibition of religious processions unless a special permit is obtained at least 72 hours beforehand. The priests were told not to tell the people of these restrictions because that might lead them to believe there is a Sandinista persecution of the Church.
But the people are discovering this for themselves. Three women and five men who organized a demonstraÂtion for Cardinal Obandp; in Chinandega on Sunday, November 10, have been arrested and are being held in a military base in northern Nicaragua. Priests are also forÂbidden to visit jails or army posts. Every eight days someÂone on Cardinal Obando’s staff is called in by the State Police for interrogation and intimidation. Horacio GonÂzales Irias, Jr., a staff member for COPROSA (the ComÂmission for Social Promotion for the Archdiocese of Managua), was summoned to State Police headquarters. Security chief Lenin Cerna personally questioned Mr. Gonzales with a particular interest in his family: “Do you have children?”
Mr. Gonzales answered, “Yes, three.”
“How old?”
Mr. Gonzales answered, “Twins, a year and a half old, and a little girl of two months.”
Lenin Cerna replied: “Well, remember we are in a state of emergency and whatever thing we find related to you will also be related to those who love you most. It is your little twins, as you said.”
The Sandinistas are also continuing their ideological indoctrination throughout the school system. The curÂriculum is totally controlled by the Sandinistas. Teachers are forced to attend ideological workshops. Inspectors are sent to check schools for implementation of the approved curriculum. One worried parent thinks it is already too late for Nicaragua because his children are turning against him. When the head of the Catholic school parent’s association, Sofonios Cisneros, protested against this inÂdoctrination in “a materialist ideology” in a letter to the Minister of Education, Fernando Cardenal, he was arÂrested, stripped, beaten, and interrogated by Lenin Cerna, then dumped on a roadside without any clothes in the middle of the night.
As Monsignor Carballo said, “We have here an ideological invasion. They’re trying to experiment with us as in a laboratory.” When I asked Cardinal Obando what he thought the future holds for Nicaragua, he answered, “The FSLN (the Sandinista Party) is like a train, it makes stops along the way, but it gets to its destination.”
Labor and business have also been hit since the OcÂtober 15 “state of emergency” decree. In response to an October 24 press release protesting the further suspension of civil rights in Nicaragua, the headquarters of CTN, one of the free trade unions in Nicaragua, was broken into by the State Police and three members were arrested. The State Police confiscated CTN documents and the personal passports of some of the CTN members. Three CTN staff persons were taken directly to State Police headquarters, put in a dark closet with little air space, forced to strip, do three push-ups, placed in prison uniforms and then put back into small cells. This was followed by interrogation about the press release: How many were distributed? To whom? All were fingerprinted and photographed in prison uniforms, then moved to larger cells. At noon the State Police chief of operations, Captain Oscar Loza, accused them of being thieves, conÂspirators, employees of the American Embassy, and part of the conspiracy in which Monsignor Carballo was inÂvolved with the Coordinadora. They were taken back to smaller cells, then all three were removed to a room in which they were filmed by movie cameras. They were released with the threat of long imprisonment if they conÂtinued their activities. Captain Loza warned them, “You will stay in jail twenty years.”
Confiscation of private property continues. What percentage of the economy is now in the hands of the Sandinistas is hard to judge because economic statistics are considered national security information, and therefore held as state secrets. Sometimes property is simply taken outright without any notification. Sometimes the forÂmalities of the agrarian law are observed. For instance, in the case of the recent confiscation of Enrique and Nicolas Bolonas’s cotton gin, the notification of confiscation was posted inside the building. The owners were forbidden to enter the confiscated property and so were never able to see what law they were purportedly breaking. One must exercise one’s right to appeal within three days from the receipt of the notification of confiscation order. Such apÂpeals can be made to the agrarian reform tribunal. There are very few cases of land being returned, but in the Bolonases’ case an appeal could not be made since they had no way of finding out the charges against them.
If small farmers refuse to sell their land, it is often taken, and the terms of sale dictated and executed in twenty year government bonds. The campesinos who work on the cooperatives do not receive title to the property and function, essentially, as serfs of the state. They plant by order of the state and they must sell to the state.
The groups to which I spoke in Nicaragua feel that they have fallen behind a curtain, not an iron curtain or a bamboo curtain, but an invisible one. This invisible curÂtain is formed by the currency relationship between the cordoba and the dollar, which makes outside communication and travel prohibitively expensive. One three minute call to the United States now costs 9,500 cordobas, apÂproximately equivalent to one month’s salary for a secretary, or 300 pounds of green coffee. Travel abroad is restricted due to the enormous expense of hard currency, roughly 800 cordobas to the dollar.
Behind this invisible curtain the Sandinistas continue their effort to break the civic opposition into isolated, terÂrorized, impotent fragments. They have increased the dependency of individuals on the state by requiring perÂmits to buy batteries, tires, spare parts — even ration cards for toilet paper. They have almost total control of the flow of information. The absence of the rule of law leaves individuals permanently insecure, uncertain of what the rules are, or of how they may be applied to them. Isolation, intimidation, confusion, fear, joined with the physical deterioration of Managua, are leading to the desired demoralization and feeling of abandonment within the civic opposition. But the unintended effect of this terÂror has been to deepen the resolve of a brave and patient people determined to be free.
During one intense session in which the question was repeatedly asked by a private sector leader, “What can we do?” Another individual bitterly responded, “We can die.” At the very least, one of them pleaded with me, please get a message through the invisible curtain: “We have just one little word: ‘help!'”
On Wednesday, November 6, I traveled from Managua to Guatemala City. Anyone who has made the passage from East to West Berlin knows the feeling.