Ortega Returns
Rodriguez, Luis J.
Writing to America Luis J. Rodr?guez Ortega Returns Daniel Ortega is back. So is Robert M. Gates. In early November, Ortega, the former Sandinista president in the 1980s, again won the...
...The Nicaraguans welcomed us Chicanos...
...Something new and vital is emerging throughout the continent...
...We need to end this ideologically led inanity...
...Finally, we located a camp and tried to get as close as possible to take photos...
...I spoke to anti-Sandinista businessmen as well as pro-Sandinista youth, to Marxist priests and amazing thirteen-year-old poets...
...We carried proof of U.S...
...I visited Nicaragua in the spring of 1983 and had a chance to meet Ortega, as well as other Sandinista leaders, including Tom?s Borge, Rosario Murillo, and Ernesto Cardenal...
...The soldier got a towel from the jeep and then pulled the bomb out...
...After a long pause, we realized the bomb did not go off...
...Although Ortega is Sandinista Lite these days, he is not that much different from most of the other recent victors who have complicated, often mediated, relationships to their office, the people, and the economy...
...The Senate overwhelmingly confirmed Gates in December, even though in 1984 he called for the bombing of Nicaragua in a memo to his boss, then-CIA Director William J. Casey...
...Even Gates says the United States is not winning...
...In time, the fact of U.S...
...Also in early November, President Bush nominated Gates to replace Donald Rumsfeld as Secretary of Defense...
...We were wrong to interfere in Nicaragua back in the 1980s...
...That is the same ideology Gates was acting upon when he advised bombing Nicaragua in the 1980s...
...Borge, who had spent two years imprisoned under the Somoza regime, was particularly taken by Gamboa, who had spent seventeen years in California prisons such as San Quentin, Folsom, and Soledad, mostly due to a twenty-year heroin addiction...
...We jumped back into the jeep and tried to speed off back to Nicaragua...
...Nicaragua is in an economic mess...
...We traveled by jeep through rough terrain, across the Rio Coco...
...Embedded in the ground was a small winged round object—a dud...
...I met with Sandinista men and women who fought, some with maimed limbs, against the U.S.supported Somoza government, which the Sandinistas toppled in July of 1979...
...The rest of us followed...
...Then, much to our horror, we felt the tremors of an explosion not far from our jeep...
...Luis J. Rodr?guez is the author, most recently, of “Music of the Mill: A Novel” and “My Nature Is Hunger: New & Selected Poems...
...publication to accept this story...
...He’s older, maybe wiser, but also compromised—as his alliances with former Contra members and rightwingers testify...
...And we’d be wrong to interfere in what is going on today in Latin America...
...They are all on a track of progressive change in their respective countries...
...We are wrong to interfere in Iraq today...
...Meanwhile, Bush is rapidly losing ground in his Iraq War...
...The Sandinista soldier who was driving us stepped out of the jeep and walked toward the bomb...
...involvement in funding and training the Contras became big news...
...We all placed our arms over our heads, as if this could possibly shield us...
...In early November, Ortega, the former Sandinista president in the 1980s, again won the presidential elections in Nicaragua...
...I know he’s not the same firebrand I heard speak at Sandinista rallies in the poorest sections of the country back in 1983...
...But he is part of a growing and promising trend away from U.S...
...The other five are the presidents of Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Ecuador, and Venezuela...
...I read poems in Barrio Sandino, a new housing development in the capital of Managua...
...I was part of a fact-finding group with another Chicano writer and friend, Manual “Manazar” Gamboa...
...One day, four of us ventured into southern Honduras to locate the Contra camps, which at the time the Reagan Administration refused to say it was aiding...
...Gates, who was CIA deputy director at the time, argued in the December 14, 1984, memo that Nicaragua was being controlled by the Soviet Union, possibly making Nicaragua another Cuba...
...But I soon heard the whistling of another bomb, which fell right in front of our vehicle...
...But Bush is undeterred, cemented in delusions and the ideology of force...
...Apparently his suggestion of air strikes was considered too extreme even for Reagan...
...It was a U.S...
...it doesn’t work now...
...government-issued ordnance...
...The United States will do everything in its power short of invasion to put that regime out,” he wrote...
...I interviewed children and adults taking part in a vast literacy campaign...
...I welcome Ortega’s return...
...U.S.-backed governments since Ortega was ousted in a 1990 election have only made things worse...
...influence and IMF policies to more localized, popularized, and socially based strategies...
...Gamboa, who had been indigenous fighters...
...We carefully placed the bomb onto the jeep, jumped back on, and drove safely across the border...
...Yet, it was difficult for me to get any major U.S...
...Otherwise this practice, and this ideology of force, will become our legacy...
...It would not have worked then...
...involvement, what I thought was an important story for the media back home...
...Ortega is the sixth major left-of-center politician to take office or be reelected in a little more than a year...
...As in other Latin American countries where people have elected leftist leaders, the people want answers to increased globalization, rising unemployment, and obscene national debts...
...It’s time to learn that the practice of bombing, undermining, and impoverishing countries does not work and should be banished...
...Somehow the Contras spotted us...
...Now Ortega is back in office...
Vol. 71 • February 2007 • No. 2
