Gabriela Selser (Buenos Aires, 62 years old) arrived in Nicaragua in 1980, at the age of 18, to join the literacy brigades that the Sandinista National Liberation Front was deploying in rural communities. She traveled from Mexico, the country that her family had chosen as a refuge from the Argentine dictatorship. What was a passing fling lasted 42 years. Selser became a war correspondent for different media, including the daily Barricade, in Managua and built a life in Nicaragua. Today, she lives a new exile. Selser joined the more than 200 journalists who have fled the persecution of the Daniel Ortega regime. A year and a half ago he returned to Mexico, to the house of his first exile. Just published April Chronicles. The truth about the 2018 rebellion in Nicaragua (A tour that begins with the student marches of five years ago and reveals step by step the end of the revolutionary illusion.
Q. Why a book like April Chronicles?
A: In 2018, in Nicaragua, I was the correspondent for the German agency DPA and took notes parallel to the news that I wrote. For example, I woke up at midnight thinking about the boys who were on the barricade, about the entrenched kids. I would send a note to the agency at night and then I couldn’t sleep. I began to feel that the same process that occurred with the Revolution was repeating itself. The people in Nicaragua were once again experiencing events that had to be recorded in time, it could not take ten, 15 years for it to be written about.
Q. Are the books a counterweight to the government’s story?
R. We know that Daniel Ortega was not in any guerrilla front because he was imprisoned for seven years, between 1967 and 1974. He is released in the action of the commando Juan José Quezada, one of whose members, Hugo Torres, was imprisoned by Ortega himself, until he died in prison. However, in the official history that is now being told of that time, Daniel Ortega y [su esposa] Rosario Murillo were the absolute heroes of Nicaragua.
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Q. How did Nicaragua get to the point where it is?
R. Because of the ambition for power of two people, Daniel Ortega and Rosario Murillo, and of the clique that they themselves involved in crimes against humanity. For that reason, that clique cannot and does not want to distance itself. It must be borne in mind that Ortega is not a leftist leader in quotes, that he became corrupt and that he armed himself with power. The thing no longer goes by left and right, but by freedom and authoritarianism, by democracy and dictatorship. I think it’s the human condition and the disease of power that makes it stay at any cost. In the book I quote precisely that famous phrase by Tomás Borge, when he says ‘anything can happen here, unless the Sandinista Front loses power’.
Q. You cite current leaders from different countries that have made the transition towards a change of power. In Nicaragua will we be able to see that transition?
R. A change for Nicaragua requires the unity of the opposition forces that are disjointed and confronted. I also think of the diversity and spontaneous participation of the self-summoned of the April rebellion. The fact that there were no caudillos became a problem. Interlocutors in the international community wondered who are we talking to? who do we support? And there were no or they were different movements. We saw in 2021 how the ambitions for power of some candidates or leaders of supposedly opposition parties led the rest to that weakness that led to the arrest of the main presidential candidates. And then all that wave of captures that ended with more than 200 prisoners.
Q. Is there a lack of unity or organization?
R. I think there are both. There is disorganization, but there is also rivalry between some opposition groups and I do see that as more serious, because that was not seen in 2018, but as the process of repression and harassment and persecution of all dissident voices progressed, the opposition began to break up and seek its own.
Q. How do you evaluate the international response to what is happening in Nicaragua?
R. He reacts to what he sees. There are people who tell you ‘well, in Nicaragua everything is now allowed because there are no demonstrations.’ And they don’t know that any opposition march is prohibited. The slightest gesture, a like on social media can land you in jail. The international community is perhaps waiting for the unity of the opposition to be able to act with more energy. And there isn’t, so far.
Q. Will Ortega continue without Ortega?
R. It’s hard to predict, but I hope it doesn’t continue. Ortega has managed the party and has transformed it into anything, into a Frankenstein. And it has destroyed Sandinismo from its initial ideals and the principles that we knew in the 1970s and 1980s. That desire for all-encompassing, personal and exclusive power has prevented Ortega from taking over. I don’t see Ortega’s children, not even Rosario Murillo, because her bases don’t respect her.
Q. How does this, your second exile, begin?
R. On January 13, I was traveling to Mexico to spend time with my daughter and they stopped me at the Managua airport. When trying to leave, they took my Nicaraguan passport. But since I had an Argentine passport, I left two days later due to a request from the Argentine embassy. Now we are more than 200 journalists who are in exile and cannot return to Nicaragua, more than 50 media outlets closed. The information blackout strategy that the Government proposed is giving results. That’s what we journalists are fighting against
Q. In that revolutionary Nicaragua, did you imagine writing a book like April Chronicles?
R. I did not imagine this outcome, nor that I would live a second exile in Mexico. I thought there was going to be some kind of social explosion from the young, because when I presented the book at universities they were disappointed and angry. They told me “tell us how we make another revolution, because we want to get out of this”. And well, there was that episode in 2013, which was a very strong repression, perhaps the first against young people who came out to support the elderly over the issue of pensions.
Q. What are the damages suffered by Nicaragua?
R.. The demolition of the democratic system that had been created with a lot of effort and a lot of sacrifice. Starting in the 1990s, when Violeta Chamorro agreed to pacify the contras, the army was reduced and non-partisan. They were very important steps, where the institutions had their autonomy. Until in 1998 there is the famous pact between Ortega and [el expresidente [José Arnoldo] German, and everything starts to get corrupted.
Q. Is there something missing to see?
![The journalist Gabriela Selser.](https://imagenes.elpais.com/resizer/6PqcFXMWCA3z5lZH5GnBu0ALJhg=/414x0/cloudfront-eu-central-1.images.arcpublishing.com/prisa/RHU6GWPHXZCYXDXYE2C2ZSBRAQ.jpg)
R. We fall asleep thinking that we have seen everything and the next day we wake up with something more atrocious, because it is a perverse and cruel system that exceeds all limits.
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