Sergio Ramírez was Daniel Ortega´s Vice President through the 1980s and one of the founders of the Movement for Sandinista Renovation, but he was first known throughout the Spanish speaking world as a prolific writer and novelist. He won the Miguel de Cervantes Award for lifetime achievement to Spanish literature in 2017.
Nothing has happened here
by Sergio Ramírez, Editorial en La Prensa, Dec 26, 2020
One of the great virtues that 100 Years of Solitude has, the novel for all times in Latin America, is serving as an archetype for historical situations that are repeated, because the mechanisms and trappings of power continue to be the same. Right or Left. It doesn´t matter.
After the massacre happens of the striking banana workers, gathered in the plaza of the train station which leaves 3,000 dead, the cadavers are hauled away in two hundred freight cars and thrown into the sea like rejected bananas. But “the official version repeated thousands of times and pounded throughout the country by all the media that the government found within its reach, ended up imposing: there were no deaths, the satisfied workers have returned to their families.”
And meanwhile, under the curfew imposed by martial law, the soldiers “beat down doors, took suspects from their beds and put them on a one-way trip. It was even the search and extermination of evildoers, murderers, arsonists and troublemakers.” And for those who asked about their disappeared relatives, the response was: “Nothing has happened in Macondo, nor is happening nor ever will. This is a happy people.”
Beginning in the month of April 2018 protests happened in Nicaragua of disarmed youth who were repressed by gunshot in the streets, with the result of more than 300 deaths and dozens of people wounded. A massacre executed throughout several weeks, widely documented by international human rights organizations, later expelled from the country, about which exist countless testimonies gathered in videos and photographs, and about which media throughout the world took notice. Hundreds ended up in jails, and more than 100,000 fled the country, according to official data from UNHCR.
Barely two years have gone by. But this month of December, during an act of the presentation of credentials of twelve new ambassadors, President Daniel Ortega has denied that such a massacre had occurred. In Nicaragua nothing has happened, nor is happening, nor ever will. This is a happy people.
Worse than that, just the opposite happened. Evildoers, murderers, arsonists and troublemakers took to the streets to overthrow the democratic government. Like in Macondo. “Armed protest came here, armed with rifles, shotguns, attacks on State institutions, destruction of hospitals and burning hospitals, destruction of schools and burning schools, destruction of municipal governments and burning their buildings, everything that had been able to be built to benefit the poor, to benefit the people.”
And the reports of the human rights commissions? “Those from the United Nations as well as those from the OAS, what they focused on was doing interviews, where without any basis they would accuse the police, the Front of having killed citizens who had died in the hospitals for other reasons.”
And the lists of the dead? They were made up. And the hundreds of wounded? They never existed. And the prisoners? They are common criminals, delinquents, drug traffickers. And the hundred thousand in exile? They left the country because they wanted to.
Like in Macondo that long ago December 6, 1928. Peace reigned throughout the national territory. Those who were murdered in the streets by machine guns and sharpshooters with Venezuelan made Catabumbo rifles died a natural death, in their homes or in hospitals, or they never died and had hidden themselves from public view only to discredit the constituted authority.
What these troublemakers did was to enlist the dead as their own victims: “they themselves filmed the moment of the capture, they filmed the moment that they were dousing them with gasoline, they filmed the moment they set them on fire and were burning and they passed that through the social networks.”
“Evildoers, murderers, arsonists and troublemakers,” pointed out the military authorities who imposed order in Macondo after the massacre that never existed. And the first lady of Nicaragua declared: “unfortunately when we say that history repeats itself, we have to recognize that the traitors are a plague, they are termites, fungi, bacteria that reproduce.” And they are also blood-sucking, toxic, groveling, satanic vampires.
The falsification of the reality is nothing new. There is nothing new under the sun, not even alternate realities.
Absolute power, that seeks to be a power forever, establishes its own falsehoods as truths, and applies a thick layer of tar to erase the facts, writing over it a new story with the aspiration of ending up being believed as the only true one. And language peppered with epithets that discredit, deny, and diminish is nothing new either.
I remembered that while reading recently a writing of judge Baltasar Garzón, when he talked about fascism in Spain.
But there is also a fascism of the left, and the language is similar. Garzón says that it “divides the population between the good and the bad, between patriots and traitors, turning political adversaries into enemies. Once it is clear who is who, the process of the dehumanization of the opponent comes in, labelling them rats, scum, ticks, lice or pestilence.” Or roaches, says Judge Garzón. Humanoids.
The author is a writer. Managua, December 2020.