By Sergio Ramírez, In Revista Proceso June 26, 2021
In the face of the critical situation that Nicaragua is currently experiencing and after the arrest of Dora María Téllez, Sergio Ramírez wrote the following special text for PROCESO, where he emphasizes the complete honesty of the Sandinista combatant, one who showed her valor and integrity in the revolution of the 1970s. And the Nicaraguan former vice president ends without concessions: “one pays a cost for one´s convictions, be that in a dictatorship like that one back then or this other one now.”
Mexico City – When I returned home after have been called in to testify by the Prosecutor´s office of the dictatorship in the process fabricated against Cristiana Chamorro, under the false charge that the Violeta Barrios de Chamorro Foundation which she presides, was carrying out money laundering operations, the first call of solidarity that I received was from Dora María Téllez. “We would have sent people to support you if we would have known,” she complained.
I had decided to appear alone, just in the company of my lawyer, without advising anyone; but when I left, with my bundle of papers under my arm, a cloud of journalists were waiting for me outside, and it was then that Dora María knew. They had called me in for being the president of the Luisa Mercado Foundation, which carries out the International Central American Story Literary Festival, and we had signed a cooperation agreement with the foundation of Cristiana to hold encounters and workshops on modern journalism.
The prosecutor did not ask me any concrete question, and it seemed that he only wanted to have me in front of him, interrogating me, and making me sign the official document, in accordance with orders received, so that I did not need to resort to the documents that I brought with me, accounting statements, copies of checks, receipts. I told Dora María about it and we laughed, as always, and also as always, we bemoaned that revolution of our youth, a dream now defiled.
I met Dora María in Managua in August of 1978 clandestinely, a little before she would participate in the spectacular action of the taking of the National Palace, as number two in command; Hugo Torres, the number one, now under arrest as she is. At that time, she was 22 years old, and had to cut her hair to look like a man, the only woman among 25 members of the group, so that she would look like a soldier of the EEBI, the elite troops of Somoza. The ploy used by the guerrillas to enter the building by surprise was to disguise themselves as members of that force.
The next year on July 1, 1979 she received us in León when we the members of the Junta de Gobierno landed at midnight coming from Costa Rica, in a landing strip for planes that fumigated cotton, illuminated by kerosine candles. Under her command, the Sandinista guerrilla forces had freed the city, fighting block by block, until isolating on the base of the National Guard Vulcano, the five star general who was able to get away because he left protected by a shield of prisoners who he tied up in front of himself.
She was the heroine of that epic campaign. On passing through the streets people came out to the door and soon she had behind her was a procession of admirers following her. At her age, and being a woman, which at that time was no small matter, the guerillas, many older than her, battle hardened, obeyed her without the blink of an eye.
The Junta de Gobierno took possession in a ceremony celebrated in the auditorium of the hundred-year-old university, and Dora María, her hair always short under the felt beret, occupied with us one of the high-backed chairs assigned to the Presidents and Deans, a rifle between her legs.
From the classrooms of that same university she had left for clandestine life a few years earlier, abandoning her studies of medicine, to fight against the dictatorship of Somoza that now was reaching its end.
She was minister of Health in the years of the revolution, and when the electoral defeat of the FSLN happened in 1990, together we moved to lead the Sandinista Parliamentary group in the National Assembly, at that time looking to build bridges with adversaries, who were now the majority, to reach consensus, a strange word in the political life of Nicaragua. They were the years in which Daniel Ortega, after having accepted at one moment the triumph of Violeta de Chamorro, recanted later that democratic commitment, and lit the blazes of confrontation under his slogan of “governing from below”, which constituted an ongoing riot to destabilize the freely elected government.
Also together, we led the initiative for the 1995 reform of the Constitution in alliance with other parliamentary benches, and we were able to get presidential re-election prohibited, and inhibit close relatives of a president from succeeding him in the post, that the chief of the army and the president not be related; and that the institutional structure be strengthened, especially the independence of the judicial branch.
These reforms were annulled through the alliance begun in 2002 between Daniel Ortega and Arnoldo Alemán, who during his presidential period committed acts of corruption for which he was later found guilty; and in exchange for not going to jail, whose keys Ortega held, he agreed to facilitate his return to the presidency in 2006, and now he can be re-elected forever.
Dora María continued dedicated to the struggle for a democratic Sandinism from the ranks of the Sandinista Renovation Movement (MRS), which we founded in 1995, fighting fearlessly the growing authoritarianism of the Ortega regime; but even so she took time to get a doctorate in History, with a brilliant thesis on the indigenous rebellions in the time of the conservative governments at the end of the XIX century, and that later was published under the title “Muera la gobierna!”, which was the war cry of the rebellious.
Now grey was appearing in her hair, still short. We used to laugh also about aging. She is a lot younger than I am. “But we are no longer the two we were back then,” she would say and laugh again.
She was captured in an operation that involved dozens of members of the police and special forces, the streets closed down and drones flying over her home, surely to determine whether she had weapons in her possession to resist. She had none. In the times of the fight against Somoza, when she was underground, they would not have taken her alive. Now her decision was to turn herself in, as a form of peaceful resistance, convinced that jail is also a form of resistance. And that armed struggle always produce time and again strong men desirous of staying in power forever.
They hit her in the stomach, handcuffed her. They were afraid of the person they arrested. Capturing a legend is not just anything. And since then, she finds herself in a cell in isolation, without any lawyer or relative allowed to see her. The charge against her is that of undermining national sovereignty, accused of betrayal of the country.
I imagine her in the solitude of her reclusion, strong and serene. She knows that struggles always are hard, and that your entire life a cost is paid for convictions, whether it be a dictatorship like the one back then, or this other one now.