WHAT A SINGLE PERSON CAN DO
Lisa Thomas (page 1)
07/19/01

For several years, I have quietly celebrated this day which, like so many Central American events, happens to be a couple of days off. Twenty-one years ago on the 17th of July, the Sandinista tanks rolled into Managua to declare it a free democracy. There was no one to fight, so it was all flowers and cheers and celebration by a people who had been slaves to a U.S.-backed dictatorship for forty-something years. A dictatorship had been toppled by bands of workers and peasants and intellectuals led by, of all things, a group of poets. True. They weren't all GOOD poets, but poets they were, in this land of literature.

The fighting was all over on the 17th, having taken place for decades until Somoza ("Tacho", the last dictator) alienated the entire world by bombing parts of Managua. Some of his last acts made their way to the world due to brave tv newsman (one ABC reporter was executed roadside-style in the last days), so there was no way the U.S. could intervene.

In one small, crude house not far from downtown Managua, Somoza's National Guard forced open the door of Dolma Sevilla's house, knowing that two of her four sons had been fighting with the rebels for some time and knowing that the rebels were now spilling down from the mountain into the city. They quickly searched Dolma's house, getting dirt all over the floor. She stood nearby, then raised her broom against them, screaming at them for messing up her polished floor. They ran, their work done, this formidable Indian woman appearing to have touched some leftover taboo in the remains of their consciences.

Two hours later the Somocista police returned to Dolma's house. She met them at the door, pouring all the fury of the Mayan priests she had most likely descended from at them through the end of her broom, with which she actually attacked them this second time. Mayan gods must have intervened, as she again succeeded in driving them off, yelling that they had messed up her shiny floor once and weren't about to do it again.

She closed the door and leaned against it, trembling. In the back room, having come in the intervening two hours, was her son Rafael and his friend, with a wounded third rebel. Dolma put the injured young man to bed, fed Rafael and his friend, and saw them head back off into the night, into the war that the world was watching. I was told that Rafael played a large role in the victory that followed.

On the night of the sixteenth, further U.S. aid to Somoza refused by Jimmy Carter, with the eyes of the civilized world upon him, Somoza and his mistress took the Nicaraguan national treasury aboard a helicopter that whisked them (and the coffin of Tacho's brother, the former dictator) out of Managua and to a plane headed for South America. It was the next day that Daniel Ortega's troops entered the city and the open arms of the citizens. By then, Somoza's National Guard had fled.

The leaders of the rebels who immediately formed a temporary junta to handle the new headless democracy passed a notable first law. They outlawed capital punishment. Somoza's killers who had been captured and even those who had committed the most egregious crimes against their fellow Nicaraguans would not be put to death.

This was what would later be dispersed through the U.S. media as a communist takeover of Nicaragua. At that time the Nicaraguan communist party had not even been formed. The new junta begged aid (remember that Somoza stole the small national treasury - ALL of it) from everyone. The U.S. refused, and the Soviet Union (along with Britain and most other European countries) offered it.

There was what some still call a wisp of Camelot. The former law school student and poet, Daniel Ortega, was elected president in 1984 in an election overseen by observers from all over the world. The U.S. stood alone in saying that the election was illegitimate. Even the staunchest allies of the U.S., including Britain, validated it. Under Daniel Ortega, the Nicaraguan literacy rate soared. Volunteers from all over the world, many from the U.S., went down to the little country and volunteered to go to the mountains and help teach the campesinos to read. The high rate of infant mortality under Somoza was dramatically lowered by free clinics where nurses treated diarhhea, the most common killer of infants. Generous gifts for building up the battered nation arrived from Sweden, Austria, Switzerland. But from the U.S. came supplies and funding for terrorists, whose mission was to destroy the Sandinistas.

These were the Contras, many of them former Somoza guardsmen, many more mercenaries who fought in Africa or wherever there was a fight that paid. Ronald Reagan called them "freedom fighters." He and the elder Bush, with the help of people like Oliver North and Elliott Abrams, illegally bypassed congress to sell arms to Iran and use those funds to sponsor the terrorists. The terrorists were fearsome. I've looked at the little wooden shacks that had to have the bottom 3 feet outlined in concrete blocks to protect the inhabitants, who slept on the floor, from being shot in their sleep during the night. In the two winters I spent in Nicaragua, I was taken to churches that, in honor of these brave campesinos, had fortified the lower part of their own walls the same way. There was never a special on this heartbreaking architecture on U.S. television. Or the beauty. Jesuits and priests of other orders opened their doors to artists who painted the walls of their churches with primitive murals of the birth and death of Christ, a near-black Christ, surrounded by nearly childlike worshippers, many of them holding the red and black Sandinista flag.

Aside from remembering these brave people and their David and Goliath tragedies because of the anniversary, I have also been thinking of Dolma Sevilla in recent days. I knew her well in 1989 and 1990, a shy mostly-Mayan woman who spent her time hauling coffee to the market, working there from three a.m. until dark. She raised seven children, and all of them had at least a little college. She did not enjoy good health and needed medications that were hard to obtain because of the U.S. blockade. The blockade was lifted in 1990, when a U.S. supported coalition defeated Daniel Ortega in his second run, but the country - already very poor, always poor - began to plummet financially. I was gone then and never able to find out if Dolma found the resources to get her medication. She died in 1993.

She was a small, rather round woman who could not have defended herself against a band of Somocista soldiers, but I like to imagine that scene - one brave woman with a broom, taking them on, then sending her soldier son (a biologist) back into the night to continue the fight.

The Nicaraguans won their freedom not because they had a good army, and not because they were well outfitted. They won it because they KNEW they were right and almost all the world, excepting the U.S., knew they were right. KNOWLEDGE brought the European countries to their side, not in sending them arms but in being the eyes of the world, before whom the U .S. could not continue to keep Somoza propped up.

Dolma's role is not to be underemphasized. How many other small Mayan women contributed to the winning in the people vs. the dictator? I would dare guess there was a tribe of them, silent warriors.

Later, I tried to get permission to bring Azucena, Rafael's sister, back to the U.S., to stay with me. My congressman laughed in my face as I pursued it.

Now, in our own dark times, watching our democracy slip from us and remembering how some people I loved very much fought with every ounce of strength against overwhelming odds in Nicaragua, I'm made pensive on this day. Is it enough in our case to send an occasional email, to sometimes wear an "Impeach Bush" button?

A tribute to what one small woman can do seemed appropriate.

Patria libre o morir,

Lisa

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