Professional Documents
Culture Documents
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It goes without saying that we fought hard, but we had corrupt chiefs, cowardly leaders, a propaganda apparatus that was worse than leprosy; we fought for parties that, had they won, would have immediately sent us to a forced labor camp because we were stupid and generous, as youths are, giving their all and asking for nothing in return. This remark by Chilean writer Roberto Bolao upon receiving the Rmulo Gallegos prize in 1999, serves as an opening for this second part of my reflections on the justifications we used to silence and internalize the abuses of power committed during the revolution.
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n an insightful paper delivered to circumspect lawyers, German historian Reinhart Koselleck took a look at various historiographical tendencies, distinguishing them according to their formulations about the justice inherent in history. Kosellecks central thesis is that theres a link between morality and history that historians cant escape. The aim of subjecting historiography to judgment reaches far back in time, but so does the desire to suspend judgments. Thats why Cicero wrote that the historian must proceed without the roughness of judicial pleadings and the sharp-pointed sentences used at the bar. In the opposite corner, Koselleck held that not only must the statements made by science be adjusted to their object, but a judgment
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must be legitimately made about that object, or the reader must at least be empowered to make that judgment. Koselleck bases his thesis on determining that historians have vindicated some type of justice inherent to history. But what type of justice have they been talking about?
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the sensethe verdictof history. Thucydides offers another response by introducing the chance factor and holding that men arent totally responsible for everything that happens to them. For Thucydides there is no justice inherent to history because randomness plays an important role and power and law travel on different paths. But that bifurcation also means in practicethat power can judge law (and abuse it to the point of crushing it) and law can judge power (and challenge it). Koselleck refers to this as a silent dialogue. In contrast, St. Agustin postulated that God punishes many injustices in this world, but insists that justice will only be fully done in the final judgment. A fourth response comes from considering the absurdness of history: some events are incommensurable for our representations of justice and hence their absurdity; or as Hanna Arendt would say, hence the banality of evil. Finally, the fifth response comes from Hegel, for whom justicewhatever it may beis meted out in the whole of and through the worlds history. There is no individual justice. Personal or group histories, and particular episodes, are barely patchworks, or knots in the great historical fabric that is leading toward the rule of law. All these proposals about the place of justice in history have one point in common according to Koselleck: appraisals of historical events are generated by those events, not their stylized and literary creation. What happens generates the deliberation of history and its justice, whatever that may end up being.
There isnt one revolutionor one FSLNthat Daniel Ortega and his followers stole, and another floating weightless, conceived of as unspoiled, a work of archangels and cherubim; one revolution of the Ortegas who committed abuses and another of the good guys who did everything worthy of rescue
poltico de la generacin XXI (Post-Sandinistas: Chronicle of an intergenerational dialogue and interpretation of the political thinking of the XXI generation), to be published this year by the Central American Universitys Institute of History of Nicaragua and Central America in Managua. Prez-Baltodano points out that because of the limited vision of the future with which our society operates, government administration or the pertinence of a transforming political experiment is not measured or evaluated by its results over time but, fundamentally, by the audacity of its leaders and above all by the magnitude of the force, the conviction and courage with which they try to achieve their objectives. In other words, in a world conceived as a game of chance in which the capacity to recognize and organize the causal relations that define the social order over time, a governments quality or a revolutions merits dont count; they are evaluated simply and flatly by the heroism of the men and women who have put themselves in the forefront of history. He adds that the revolutionary struggle was worth it because the heroism, which was the principal mark of the Sandinista revolutionary experiment, legitimizes itself; in other words, it is validated regardless of its results. A similar deliberation, which is a more in-depth examination of the existential roots of the personal reasons for such interpretive bias, was distilled by the Austrian Jewish novelist Joseph Roth in his work Der stumme Prophet (The Mute Prophet): The joy of working for a great idea and having suffered for humanity determine our decisions long after doubt has turned us clairvoyant, wise and desperate. We have gone through fire and remain marked for the rest of our lives.
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Even recognizing that at diverse moments the FSLN arrived at crossroads that could have led to it being something other than what it is today, what we have is an FSLN that clearly came to be one of the versions of what it already potentially was
The FSLN had many possible lives but only one lived
This ex post condition of the crystallization of experiences brings us back to the importance of the current bottom line to clarify what happened in the past, so that the justice of history in the Hegelian sense can hand down its sentence. Even recognizing that at diverse moments the FSLN arrived at crossroads that could have led to it being something other than what it is today, what we have is an FSLN that clearly came to be one of the versions of what it already
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potentially was, to use the classic Aristotelian terminology. There was an FSLN that was bursting with creativity, heroism and abnegation. And as long as historic development doesnt bring up another bottom line, we can say that the partys upper echelons managed to annul that dispersed vigor with a negative vigor to cement the all-encompassing domination it regurgitates today. Perhaps there were other possible lives for the FSLNsomething impossible to demonstrate at this late datebut there was no other route to this current domination than the revolution, with the FSLN, in all its splendor and miseries, in the vanguard.
in 1918 to make illegal the parties that had fought for the revolution alongside the Bolsheviks?
The abuses described in the first part of this article couldnt have expanded without the justifications that are the mechanism of ideological domination used by the upper echelons of political vanguards to mute internal dissidence, expropriate personal responsibility and tie subjects into murky complicities
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Finally, there is domination by virtue of legality, by virtue of the belief in the validity of legal statute and functional competence based on rationally created rules. In this case, obedience is expected in discharging statutory obligations. This is domination as exercised by the modern servant of the state and by all those bearers of power who in this respect resemble him. The Sandinista revolution turned to all three internal justifications: tradition, charisma and legality, embodied in the invocation of Sandinos feat as the historical antecedent of the FSLN, in the deification of the comandantesas one of my interviewees called itand in the project of establishing a more just social order. Some aspects of the dominationthe bleakestare based on other types of justification. Lets inspect them.
able to assess how the Sandinistas and the internal opposition would have fared in creating and consolidating new institutions in peacetime, nor how the Sandinistas would have attempted to cope with the contradictions of being a vanguard party pledged to political pluralism. The war being waged against Nicaragua by the most powerful nation on earth requires a national response.
Each time people start digging, find a new abuse and look into its origin, the proverbial response emerges: we were at war, with limited options, subjected to exhausting pressures and determined to save the revolutionary process
The war as the great evil that justified all lesser ones
Having been subjected to a war understood as imperialist aggression continues functioning as the master key of the justifications. Each time people start digging, find a new abuse and look into its origin, the proverbial response emerges: we were at war, with limited options, subjected to exhausting pressures and determined to save the revolutionary process. The war justified everything, recalls one cooperant: The diplotienda wasnt a good example of revolutionary equality. Nor were the salaries in dollars or crdobas according to job description. But they were small sins we all pardoned in the greater interest of the revolution and also because of the aggression. envo frequently used that justification. I read in a human rights report by the Catholic Institute for International Relations published in the October 1987 issue that Because of the war the international community has not been
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Spanish expert working in one ministry was raped by a general director. The ministry tried to cover it up as well as possible, with our cooperation, including that of the raped girl. The general director was fired and sent to the Atlantic Coast with a lower post in the ministry, but was not charged or sentenced, to avoid damaging the revolution.
position, triggering polymorphous reactions up to the present day. On the one hand, Mara Teresa Blandn reviews her own behavior based on an imperative of justice and freedom that revolutionaries should not have renounced. On the other is the relativizing of that imperative with regard to the circumstances of the war and what history teaches has happened in similar circumstances: Within the political field some restrictions of freedom of expression, the closures and censuring ofLa Prensa could be criticized. I dont know if this was very serious, but we didnt give it any more importance due to the war. In the United Kingdom during the Second World War the Nazi newspapers that supported the Germans were also prohibited. And in some aspects La Prensa played that fifth-column role. Naturally, the censorship crossed the line in unjustifiable cases. These are some of the responses I got when asking about justifications. And these lead to other questions left hanging in the hope of answers: Who knows where the line is? Whos supposed to warn us when we cross it? Who draws the line? How many times and how far can we cross it? How do we know which cases are justifiable?
The most important shift in perspective is that some analysts, including people with Sandinista roots, have stopped depicting the war of the eighties as an aggression financed and advised by the US government, a form of indirect imperialist intervention. Instead, they have come to consider it an internal conflict caused partly, largely or mainly by erroneous FSLN policies and abuses in the rural sector
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Kill your neighbor above all else could take on an appalling expression, as we see in the narrative of a colleague and friend I interviewed: This happened in a municipality close to Managua. My father came home very little in the eighties. My sister and I were little. Later we used to talk to my dad about those years. Thats when he told me what the Army was supposed to do should the United States invade. When the US invaded Panama and there were the problems with embassies, they received an order: If the invasion took place at a time they were on leave at home, they were to execute all counterrevolutionary opposition in the town. In my town the big fish was a neighbor; he would have undoubtedly been first on the list because he was one of the revolutions main enemies. But in 1988, when we were preparing for Hurricane Joan, that man gave us shelter because his house was much stronger. We were friends. He had ideological differences with my family, but we were neighbors and helped each other. Years later he ended up mayor of my town. And hes still alive. How was a bloodbath on the scale that would have resulted from that order justified? By the war. By the invasion. By the revolution.
Those of us between 30 and 40 years old no longer believed in fairy tales. But the revolution fascinated us with its open style and its freedoms, which had nothing in common with the situation in the Eastern European countries, or even with Cuba, which we also supported, but without so much pleasure
meretrix, a term divested of the explanation that St. Ambrose gave: The Church is a chaste prostitute because it is frequented by numerous lovers with the attractions of love and without the contamination of blame, because whoever joins with a prostitute becomes of one body with her. I wont get bogged down in details about the correct exegesis. What matters more in this context is that over time the interpretation that proclaims the dual nature of the Church has been imposed, and thats the interpretation that was applied by several of my interviewees when they talked about the revolutionary process: The revolution isnt made by saints. There were abuses, but theyre part of the complexity and humanity of such a gigantic feat, Great ideals include great errors, if theyre implemented by flesh and blood men. And someone even said: The revolution commits errors, but its greater than its errors. I insist that it isnt the revolution that commits errors: theyre committed by decision-makers. This recourse to bipolarity functions via a fallacious extrapolation because its not the revolution but specific individuals who have committed errors. Formulating such an extrapolationwhich denies responsibilitiesis as fallacious as insisting on the logic that Achilles had a vulnerable heel so anyone with a vulnerable heel is an Achilles.
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that all this was done without much formal democracy, but you cant expect an armed revolution to set up a Swiss democracy in 24 hours.
sons, for example with other countries in Central America, are high on the list of justifications used. But Nicaragua must be compared with Nicaragua, with its diverse befores and its vacillating steps toward better futures. The desire to clean up the revolutions image with international public opinion frequently led to an argument that was a patent contradiction: comparing the project to create a new man in a new world with regimes headed by the skull-and-crossbones gorillas in countries such as Honduras, El Salvador and Guatemala. This old a-critical and complacent attitude was reviewed in later years. When at the end of the nineties we in the envo team digitally reviewed all of our past articles to put them on our new web site, we were embarrassed and ashamed. We discovered that in fulfilling the mandate of Jesuit superior general Pedro Arrupe, who recommended that we critically support the revolution, we had leaned far more toward support than criticism.
The unavoidable gamble on a stained but perfectible dream kept cooperants busy in support and distant from criticism. The abuses got a free ride on their utopic attitude and decision to give it time. Meanwhile, the dominating serpents egg continued maturing
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already too late. He never healed properly and couldnt work like before. My response? Fury at what I perceived then more as bad organization and lack of sensitivity than corruption and the manipulation of youths and peasants in the war. I heard many similar cases of non-retribution for those who served the revolution. With horror one has to recognize that it was the predominant policy. Just as progress came to Matagalpa in the 19th century on the back of the indigenous people forced to carry the telegraph cables, the revolution sustained itself with the blood and mutilated limbs of compas [short for compaeros, used to refer fondly to those in olive green and thus erase the memory of the former National Guardsmen who dressed in the same color]. Those combatants, predominantly drafted peasants, including people with shrapnel buried in their cranium, amputees, para- and even quadriplegics, today receive a miserable pension, while former Sandinista Popular Army Chief Humberto Ortega is now a prosperous businessman enjoying the fortune they involuntarily earned for him during the eighties.
I was acting under the mechanism that makes it easier to control a group than individuals, above all if the groups cohesion is based on ideals and shared tasks. That mechanism operates with the force of justification: being part of joining merging with
some special quality. But most likely they were looking for ad hoc collaborators, based on circumstantial reports. Normally that commitment was limited to keeping a close watch and preventing something out of the ordinary from happening. The monotony was broken in January 1985, when Daniel Ortega was inaugurated after the revolutions first elections the previous November. By that time I was 18 and billeted in Managua, in what is now the dance school, behind Radio Ya, together with hundreds of other militia members who were daily sent out to strategic points defined by the Presidents agenda. They placed us at points along the highways from which a potential attack on Daniel Ortega and the visiting Fidel Castro would come. Our positions and hours were determined by the head office of State Security, and at some posts Cubans reinforced our work. At the time my boss in the CIM was a skinny agent whose appalling phlegm was an obvious target for typical Nica ridicule. He decided to entrust me with a special mission that night: keep an eye on Humberto, one of the other militia members who had committed the atrocious crime of joking to another CIM member that Daniel and Fidel were going around copulating. I rushed to the task, convinced of my sacred mission.
I felt important
There were also negative retributions, when those who had served well were poorly rewarded. I know of very dramatic cases, but Im only going to mention one that concerns me because it also illustrates other mechanisms of domination. In one of my first tasks in the Sandinista Popular Militias, I was asked to temporarily collaborate with Military Counterintelligence (CIM), the section of the Sandinista Popular Army responsible for identifying and dismantling cases of sabotage and espionage within the Armys own ranks. I was 15, an age at which being recruited for that work made me feel incredibly important: I was a member of a select group, a sort of secret society. In fact, I was called to participate in very exclusive meetings and invested with a special power. As these invitations continued, I assumed the CIM must have a database or something, and had me as an ideal resource due to
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tect the revolutionary process and its objectives. I simply executed a ritual that expresses that individuals meant nothing in those years. I knew many such rituals.
multiple individual sacrifices and gorge themselves with the offerings made to the gods, happily forgetting that the gods neither eat nor enjoy what is stolen. The sacrifices made soteriologically end up honoring and glorifying the domination, giving power to the power. Predestined and total institutions with a divine mission oblige their honest members to justify, forgive and even submit to their dishonest members. Those who believe the acts of FSLN officials are lost in the complex swells of actions demanded or induced by the revolution and avoid judging their abuses and our responsibility to denounce them only help reinforce the domination. The collectivist ideology that annulled or denied individuality churned out justifications that were restricted to benefit the dominant elite. Those extoled reaped the sacrifices made in the name of the collective.
All justifications are mechanisms of domination that at the end of the day only benefit a specific dominant group, whose abuses are shifted to abstract entities, i.e. hypostatized, situated away from the subjects and interests in which theyre rooted
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tion to adopt a morality based on sacrifice and austerity. It became clear to me that even leftist governments in many places and moments had adopted social policies that felt totally immoral to the poor families that had to endure them. And it was very clear to me that I wasnt as opposed to measures of state violence when they were implemented in the name of a leftist government as when they were practiced in the name of a rightwing government, except in extreme cases such as torture and massacres of civilians. And it was abundantly clear that, in actual, existing politics, in politics of all sorts, if you only ally with the good guys, you wont ally with anyone, and will be irrelevant.
not investigate whether what it requires of me is good. I must be a simple tool for its unknown objectives, and this I cannot do. Kleist put himself at the opposite extreme of the argument by which journalist William Grigsby Vado today justifies the illegal dismissal of representatives on the FSLN legislative bench. Youre not there because of who you are, said Grigsby Vado, but because youre a party militant, have a certain representativeness and have been assigned a party responsibility. If you dont fulfill it, then you shouldnt have that responsibility. Thats how it is. And thats been made very clear to everybody before being a candidate to any public post; theyve all been spoken to in those terms.
Arendt argued that the prior condition for this type of judgment isnt a highly developed intelligence or great subtlety in moral matters, but a willingness to explicitly live with oneself, to have contact with oneself, which means taking up that silent dialogue between me and myself
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who want to think and therefore must judge for themselves, and those who dont want to do so crosses all social, cultural and educational differences.
It is now evident that the FSLN promotedand promotesa paternalistic-filial relationship with the masses, drilled into our heads over and over again in the eighties in the slogan we chanted: National Directorate, ordene (order us)!
able is that Arendt expels the category of obedience from the political sphere. The fallacy of requiring or arguing obedience is based on equating consent and obedience: an adult consents while a child obeys. If it is said of an adult that he or she obeys, that supports the organization, authority or law that demands obedience. The fallacy is all the more pernicious the more it can invoke an old tradition: the secular idea of political science that has been telling us since Plato and Aristotle that all political bodies are made up of those who govern and those governed, and that the former rule and the latter obey. It is now evident that the FSLN promotedand promotesa paternalistic-filial relationship with the masses, drilled into our heads over and over again in the eighties in the slogan we chanted: National Directorate, ordene (order us)! which in fact suggests a master/slave relationship that rebellious FSLN militants parodied in private sarcasm as National Directorate, ordee (milk us)! In any event, it tended to produce the kind of vacuum of moral responsibility that paves the way for the dominant ones in any context. Sandinista leaders paraded on that pavement, acclaimed, surrounded by a cohort of genuflecting followers who subcontracted others to administrate their responsibility. Also recoupable is the certainty that no one, no matter how strong, can bring anything either good or bad to fruition without the help and obedience of others and without the acritical attitude of many. Along those lines, Fernanda Soto argues that the idealization of the revolution that reigns among some simplifies both the past and the present. The idealized memory talks of a struggle of good against evil, where the interests of the good are always unquestionable right from the start. She agrees with Arendt that nothing is unquestionable. This idealization, continues Soto,inseparable from an
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exacerbated sense of defense, limits understanding and overcoming many of Sandinismos current problems and dilemmas. The revolution didnt come to save souls but to build areas where justice isnt a privilege, where we dont say were poor because thats how God wanted it, where nobody accepts obeying without first asking why. That why involves combining self-respect with respect for history to avoid awakening from the revolutionary dream world and discovering, like Luis Seplveda in La sombra de lo quefuimos (The shadow of what we were), that everything that was loaded with future was suddenly corrupted with past.
answer lay deep in the mountain. Are you willing to walk a long way to learn it or are you just going to climb in your jeep and return to Managua? he challenged. They climbed up and down paths, crossed ravines, sometimes in shade, always at Pascuals pace, with his long stride, which increasingly made the city dwellers legs tremble. After four hours with no rest, when for the fourth time the pale researcher felt like he was going to die, Pascual invited him to sit down on a nearby rock. Do you know who sat on that rock in 1974? he began. Carlos Fonseca sat on that very rock and he said to me: Pascual, our struggle is hard. By the time we win, nearly all genuine Sandinistas will be dead. I very much fear that only false Sandinistas will remain. Theyll offer you health, education and land. Pascual, be loyal to the Sandinista struggle. Dont trust them. Reject what they offer you. Even if they offer you land, be loyal and reject it. Some five years after the victory, young genuine Sandinistas are going to unseat the false Sandinistas and that will begin the change were struggling for. Three weeks later Pascual was murdered. The official version: a victim of the contras. Well probably never know the real version.
Jos Luis Rocha is a member of envos editorial council and is associated with the Institute of Sociology of Philipps University, Marburg, Germany.
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