Mónica Baltodano was a commandante of the Revolution of 1979 and was a deputy for the Sandinista Front in the 1990s. She did not break with the Front when the Movement for Sandinista Renovation left before the elections of 1996, but did break with the Front over the pact Ortega made with then President Alemán in 1999. She is well known for her interviews of hundreds of participants in the 1979 revolution which originally were broadcast on radio and later were published in four volumes. Yet she and her family were forced to go into exile in 2021. In February the Nicaraguan government stripped her of her citizenship and confiscated all her assets in the country, froze her bank accounts and credit cards. She recently began a trip around Latin America to talk to progressive sectors about what has happened to Ortega and to debunk the idea that he continues to be a revolutionary. This interview took place during her time in Argentina.
“We are thousands of Sandinistas who are against the Ortega dictatorship”
By Luis Hessel in contrahegemoniaweb
Mónica Baltodano was a commandante of the last armed revolution in Latin America. She wrote “Memorias de la Lucha Sandinista”, a four-volume work where she gathered the testimony of many of the protagonists of the Sandinista Popular Revolution. Confronting the dictatorial regime of Daniel Ortega, she went from being a heroic guerilla fighter to a persecuted politician forced into exile. In her travel through Argentina, we spoke about the current situation of Nicaragua, the violation of human rights and the importance of the fight for freedom in the lands which at one time were the hope for a new time for all of humanity.
At times it is hard for us to understand from a distance how the process of the decomposition of the Nicaraguan government happened, when today we see many people in prison, a society practically militarized in their daily life, without forgetting about the level of the corruption of the regime and the abandonment of the historic banners of liberation of Sandinism. How can this be understood?
What I can tell you is that Daniel Ortega clearly showed from the first years of the 1990s a nearly obsessive decision of control and power, that began with the Sandinista Front, moved through the control of popular organizations, and ended up not caring about the means, the means do not matter, in order to be able to get to the government. That is also why he made a pact with Arnoldo Alemán who was a super corrupt president, a pact with mafia like content, and then, once he had that pact, he moved quickly against the very institutions and the institutionality which had been built with so much sacrifice. Everything was practically dominated by a logic of control. So it was that when he came to government, the revolutionary no longer existed, because he is a strong man who using all means went after the presidency and in order to remain there, and that is what he has clearly shown in his entire journey, and now for what purpose, now he had been turned into a capitalist and responsible for the control of wealth, not just for him, but for his family. Controlling the State becomes indispensable because it is not capital independent of the State, but is directly connected to the management of resources which, to some extent, were for the people, like the Venezuela aid that was completely privatized.
What was the level of tension, resistance, and contradictions inside of Sandinism when this process happened?
Since the first moment there were contradictions. In the beginning the phenomenon called “La Piñata” caused tension with a sector of Sandinism, which was led by Fernando Cardenal and Ernesto Cardenal, who thought that these private appropriations of assets which had been made state-owned by the initiative of the revolution were not correct. But in 1995 the first rupture emerged with the formation of the Sandinista Renovation Movement, this rupture was paired with the demand especially about democracy, internal democracy, and then in 1999, when the pact happened, there was another large rupture where many of us who did not share that pact, and even some as deputies like I was, we voted against the constitutional reforms. And at that time that meant for us an exclusion from all the organs of the Sandinista Front. But then came another rupture in 2005 when he closed all the possibilities for primary elections to choose the candidate, because a candidate presented himself who aspired to occupy the post of candidate for the presidency for the Sandinista Front for National Liberation (FSLN), that is the case of Herty Lewites, at that time instead of opening democracy and restituting primaries, what he did was repress. They repressed the entire movement that supported Herty Lewites with expulsions, but also with aggressive actions like throwing stones and busting people´s heads instead of more democracy. What he used was internal repression. So throughout this time there have been different rifts, and I maintain that the biggest one has been what happened precisely because of the repression of 2018 where sectors who had been supporting him, above all youth sectors, were not in agreement and instead joined the uprising against Ortega, and that is why we are thousands of Sandinistas who are against the Ortega dictatorship.
I understand that was the moment when, because of the disappearances and murders fundamentally of students, that the “Mothers of April Association” emerged, inspired by the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo of Argentina.
Yes, in 2018 in some demonstrations that happened within the framework of the neoliberal reforms to social security which caused a protest of elderly people, the elderly were beaten by shock groups, they were attacked and there the student movement got involved in such a way that they took over the universities, and the first repressive acts began, in a short period of time there were now more than 100 deaths, and that resulting in the building of barricades, tanks on the highways, and then we Mothers of May 30, which is “Nicaraguan Mothers Day”, we marched, we held a march which was the largest one that we have known so far, it was calculated that half a million of us Nicaraguans marched, and there were also killings, 18 people died that day and since then the “Mothers of April Association” emerged, which has to do with the children and youth who were murdered in those campaigns that began in April, but that really lasted for several months reaching a total amount of 355 murdered, 2,000 wounded, 800 captured, many people raped, young men sexually attacked and all type of crimes which were categorized by the Interamerican Commission of Human Rights as crimes against humanity, because they followed a pattern, they were not random, they followed a clearly repressive pattern which was established by not just this human rights organization, but also Amnesty International, and which have been ratified in the recent report which the expert group of the United Nations presented to the Human Rights Council meeting in Geneva last month, all those crimes were ratified, and it is deemed that Rosario Murillo and Daniel Ortega gave precise orders for these crimes to be committed and they are now implicated. Now this continues to need to be investigated and that is why the Human Rights Council granted this group two more years of work to be able to establish the chain of responsibility, of the heads of the police as well as paramilitaries, who were directly responsible for all this slaughter.
Has it been possible to establish the quantity of political prisoners that exist in this time in Nicaragua?
In 2021 there were some large raids that reached a total of more than 300 political prisoners. On February 9th two hundred and twenty two were freed, after many pressure campaigns, and they were placed on a plane and sent into exile to the United States, and immediately they also proceeded to take away their nationality, later they took away the nationality of another 94 dissidents among whom I find myself, but there are still 37 additional prisoners, a priest who did not want to leave, Bishop Rolando Álvarez , and now in these days in Holy Week there were new arrests and now there are new people criminalized, so that the figure of 37 has now been increased by at least more than 40 at this time.
I would like to ask you how you personally experienced the removal of your nationality, how did you experience it in subjective terms, because it is something that goes beyond what is legal and that has to do with your own identity?
Sincerely it surprised us because taking away one´s nationality is not in the national legal framework, article 20 of the Constitution says that no citizen of Nicaragua can have their nationality taken away, nor does there exist in the international legal framework a punishment that leads to the extreme act of declaring a person stateless just for thinking differently or for reasons of a political nature, for any reason, so that there are now experts who have described this measure of taking away our nationality of 317 of us Nicaraguans as also a crime against humanity, which is totally at odds with the entire international legal order, which rather has international agreements and treaties which protect the nationality of children, but it is a completely atypical case because it is not the style in the modern world and in the XXI century that a government could take citizenship away from anyone, so it did surprise us and left us in a brutal situation which is accompanied by the confiscation of all our assets, in addition it is accompanied by the non-payment of our retirement pensions for those of us who are retired, and in addition has been accompanied by wiping us from the registry as if we had never existed in Nicaragua, frozen our accounts, credit cards and literally made us disappear, as if we never existed in Nicaragua, which is of such a brutality that all the nations of the world and particularly in Latin American had to make a statement, not just rejecting such a brutal measure, but offering their own nationality to those of us who were banished.
And you, what are you going to do?
I, we, are in Costa Rica as a refuge and we are analyzing what nationality we are going to seek, because a nationality is needed to be able to have a passport, to be able to have a document which is much stronger than that which we currently have, which is a travel document of a refugee, which has a lot of disadvantages.
Thank you, Mónica.
You are welcome.
The interview was held prior to a conference which Mónica Baltodano gave on May 2, 2023 in the School of Social Work of the National University of La Plata, organized by the Abya Yala Feminists, Pañuelos en Rebeldía, Las Azucenas Feminist Collective, the Migrants Coordinator, the Communications Collective Contrahegemonia Web, Marabunta Social and Political Current, and the Darío Santillán Multinational Popular Front.