Last May, he left Nicaragua for the United States to visit his daughters. She had a suitcase with summer clothes and a return ticket dated June 22, but Gioconda Belli (Managua, 1948) never returned to her home. When she was in Los Angeles, President Daniel Ortega began a raid against the most prominent opposition voices of his regime, among which is that of the writer. His brother’s house was brutally raided by ten hooded men and his niece was assaulted. Belli decided not to return to Nicaragua and stayed for a while in the house of her youngest daughter until she decided to settle with her husband in Madrid.
This is the second exile of the writer, who was a member of the Sandinista National Liberation Front and after years of service to the cause, during the dictatorship of Augusto Somoza, she had to leave her country until the revolution triumphed in 1979. Belli, as his friend and compatriot Sergio Ramírez, joined the government led by Ortega until this leader’s desire to perpetuate himself in power and his radicalization produced, first, disenchantment, and then dissidence and bold criticism. Ortega triumphed in a highly questioned election in November 2021 after arresting all the opposition leaders.
Belli is currently based in Spain, where she receives invitations to various literary events and tributes. Casa de América dedicated a week-long series to him in Madrid to analyze his work, his ideas and trace his life. Mario Vargas Llosa summoned her to Escribidores, the festival that does not bear the name of the Nobel Prize, but bears her spirit, a meeting that had an auspicious first edition, in Malaga.
In addition, the recently elected president of Chile –Gabriel Boric– invited her to his inauguration.
Novelist, poet and feminist, in The Country Under My Skin: Memories of Love and War, Belli goes through her political history as a guerrilla, first, and later as a civil servant. Here she recounts, in a vertiginous chapter, number 41, her first trip to Havana, in 1978, where she had a meeting that she defines as “strange” with Fidel Castro.
(In other news: Nicaragua celebrates the decision of the ICJ in litigation with Colombia).
The seduction attempt, the machismo, his rhetoric, his manipulation and the Commander’s temperament They are narrated through the eyes of an author who always broke with the corsets and prejudices of society. Her first book, Sobre la grama (1972), built with erotic verses, generated a stir after its publication.
Winner of the Casa de las Américas award (for the poems in Line of fire) and the Short Novel Library Award (for The infinite in the palm of the hand), in the poem I do not regret anything she writes: “I dare to be she is crazy, fallible, tender and vulnerable, / who falls in love like a soul in pain with just causes, beautiful men, / and playful words”.
How did you interpret Gabriel Boric’s invitation to attend the inauguration of the government?
In two ways. First, it was very important that he invited Sergio Ramírez and me, giving the signal that the main thing in his government is going to be respect for human rights; It doesn’t matter what regime, whether it’s left or right. He also said it in his speech. Obviously, Nicaragua has given very clear signs that it does not respect human rights and I think there was no official invitation to the president and vice president (Daniel Ortega and his wife, Rosario Murillo). But Boric did invite us, with a very affectionate letter, Sergio and me, each one separately. So, I interpret it as an accolade to Nicaraguan culture. Second, I think that Boric is also seeking to distance himself from the atrocious policy that Ortega is carrying out in my country, not only in relation to his own people, but also in relation to the international community. He expelled the Nuncio and the ambassador from Spain, just to name two examples.
Do you feel that the governments of Latin America have not been firm in their condemnation of Ortega or that their rejection of the regime has been ambiguous? How do you evaluate the role of Argentina?
I feel that there is lukewarmness on the part of Argentina and also of Mexico. But not from Colombia, which has deplored it, or from Peru, Ecuador and Brazil.
Is the government of Ortega and his wife a leftist government?
Everyone identifies Sandinismo with the left, but I really think that Ortega is a tyrant
Ortega is usurping the entire legacy of the Sandinista Revolution, which was a leftist revolution. Obviously, everyone identifies Sandinismo with the left, but I really think that Ortega is a tyrant.. A person who is trying to pass for someone from the left, but who has really created a repressive system. Since the April 2018 rebellion in Nicaragua, Ortega has lost popular support for him. So much so that I think he believed that he was going to lose the elections in 2021 and that is why he did not dare to have clean and transparent elections and imprisoned all the electoral candidates, the possible ones and the real ones. For example, Cristiana Chamorro could have won the elections. They interviewed her brother (Pedro Joaquín Chamorro) on CNN and asked him if he would run as a candidate. He replied that he was a public servant and if the party asked him to, he would do it. That same afternoon he was arrested.
I am thinking of another leader who has perpetuated himself in power, as is the case with Vladimir Putin. How do you interpret this historical moment?
Putin is really behaving like a tyrant, also subjugating a country. What worries me the most about Putin is that aspiration that exists in him to rebuild the Soviet Union and to return to being a world power. It seems to me that it is a mistaken policy, imperialist, and really not leftist at all. I think we are no longer talking about left or right. I think that today there is a reactionary left that understands the left as a tool of domination and that thinks that the end justifies the means. They believe they have a noble purpose and the means don’t care if that means killing people or breaking people.
(Also: The story of the Colombians who fought in the Sandinista revolution).
In Latin America it would still seem that there are several governments and also an intellectual sector in love with this left that you are. Why do you think there is still, for example, that longing for the idea of revolution?
I can’t honestly understand it, it seems to me an ideological unreason. I think they are confused. We see it today in countries like Cuba and Venezuela. They want to see a reality that does not exist and that seems to me to leave a lot to think about their true ideological conviction, because in none of those countries have the means of production been nationalized, for example, nor are they a Marxist or Leninist left. They take from Leninism the concept of the avant-garde, the concept of the dictatorship of the proletariat, but at the same time they have a nomenclature and an unequal distribution of power, as well as a discourse and a pretense of a formal democracy that is actually totally empty of content. What they have done is a hodgepodge as best suits them. And they use bourgeois legality to justify the greatest atrocities.
Speaking of content, has it been indoctrinated, politically or ideologically, in Latin America through education?
I think what happens is that leftist, utopian thought, that is, the one you are not seeing, is very attractive to young people. I remember how fascinated I was by the idea of social justice, that there were no classes, and the dream of revolution. Many of those people who were young when I was still have the dream of the Sandinista Revolution. They are with Daniel Ortega and believe the history of imperialism. They create a whole narrative corpus that allows them to believe in that subsequent bonanza, that almost mythical goodness of a socialist utopia.
She met Fidel Castro and experienced a confusing episode with him, both alone, one night, in his office, after he went to pick her up at her hotel without telling her why. Do you think that if so many people who idolize him had met him in person they would still admire him?
I was dazzled, like all that generation, with the idea of the Cuban Revolution, the great revolution, which was quite epic, with the epic of the bearded men. There were some very handsome, like Che Guevara, like Camilo Cienfuegos, Fidel himself, who had that figure; “the horse”, they called him. I had an infatuation with the Cuban Revolution, but not with Fidel. It never occurred to me to fall in love with him, but I did admire him. One evolves. In this incident that I had, when I was alone with him, I thought: “This man is acting wrong. He is missing a revolutionary principle”. He wanted me to give him some information. In the end I never knew if what she was really doing was trying to make me fall in love or if she was really interested in knowing what I knew. Today I do believe that it was a man who was using his power to try to get information out of me that I was not supposed to say. It makes me very sad what has happened with the Cuban Revolution and it also makes me very angry how they have been able to use all that patriotic language to dominate the people.
You come from the left. Did you have a ‘shock’ or discomfort when you moved to the United States?
I first moved to the East Coast. And I couldn’t help thinking that the person sitting next to me in a cafe might have been responsible for Reagan’s aggressive policy toward Nicaragua. I felt alone, strange. As everywhere, what saves countries is the good people that exist in all of them and one realizes that in places like the United States, politics is often a matter of minorities. I came to respect the democratic idea that underlies the organization of that country; the fact that it is home to an enormous variety of nationalities, languages, colors, accommodating one another thanks to a system that respects, theoretically at least, dissidence, different thinking, individual freedom. That is very difficult everywhere and in the United States it is achieved when there are enough people willing to claim it.
Laura Ventura
THE NATION (ARGENTINA) – GDA
More news in depth
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-Nine years in prison for the manager of a newspaper critical of Ortega in Nicaragua
-The UN approves the investigation of human rights violations in Nicaragua
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