Those who recall subsequent events in Nicaragua — Cuban-backed dictatorship, U.S. sanctions, divisive Washington debate over Reagan administration aid to anti-Sandinista contra rebels, the Sandinistas’ defeat in a free election in 1990, a fledgling democracy, and, most recently, a new and harsher Sandinista regime — know better than to suppose the U.S. exit from Kabul means an end to Afghanistan’s strife, or U.S. involvement in it, albeit reduced.
Almost 90 years after President Herbert Hoover ended a U.S. intervention in Nicaragua by withdrawing Marines and handing Nicaragua over to a U.S.-trained National Guard — many of whom deserted at the end in 1979 — the Central American country is not quite done with us.
I was reminded of this by a letter I received, as catastrophe loomed in Kabul, from a 21-year-old woman, one of about half a million Nicaraguan Americans whose presence, a legacy of past Nicaragua-U.S. entanglements, is soon to be augmented by an infusion of Afghan haven seekers.
The letter writer, Isabella Cruz, pleaded with the media not to forget her father, Arturo Cruz Sequeira. On Aug. 13, in a Managua jail cell, he marked his 68th birthday. He has been held there since June 7 as a political prisoner, arrested by the Sandinista dictatorship under Daniel Ortega.
“I miss my dad so much,” Isabella Cruz wrote. “It’s difficult to put these intense feelings into words. The impotence of not being able to help him, to embrace him, is hard to bear.”
Arturo, a professor at Central America’s leading business school and former Nicaraguan ambassador to Washington, stands accused of “conspiracy to diminish national integrity,” which carries a maximum prison term of 15 years.
His actual offense was to consider running against Ortega in the Nov. 7 presidential election. Ortega has jailed six other potential rivals: José Bernard Pallais, Juan Sebastián Chamorro, Félix Maradiaga, Noel Vidaurre and Medardo Mairena Sequeira; a seventh, Cristiana Chamorro, is under house arrest.
They are among 164 political prisoners that Ortega, and his vice president and wife, Rosario Murillo, are holding in an effort to smother all opposition — and build an Ortega family dynasty to rival the Somoza regime that arose, with U.S. indulgence, after Hoover pulled out.
Arturo is sustaining a different kind of family tradition: opposition to tyranny. The Somoza regime twice jailed his father, also named Arturo, for opposition activities.
Also incarcerated by the Somoza regime in the 1950s was Pedro Joaquin Chamorro, the independent journalist whose assassination in 1978 triggered the uprising against Somoza. Today, his son and namesake, Pedro Joaquin Chamorro Jr., is a political prisoner alongside the younger Cruz.
To be sure, Arturo Cruz Sequeira’s political biography has zigged and zagged, like his nation’s political history itself. He (and his father) supported the Sandinistas early in their revolution, when it seemed possibly democratic, then campaigned against Ortega in a 1984 election before dropping out due to alleged Sandinista manipulation. In the late 1980s, the younger Cruz joined the contras. After the 1990 election produced, seemingly, a lasting democracy, he turned to academic pursuits.
By then, Arturo had had his 15 minutes as an improbable late-Cold War Washington celebrity, lobbying, arguing and writing for his cause du jour. Those of us who knew him could barely keep track of his political shape-shifting — yet couldn’t help liking him. He was that brilliant, that charismatic, that devoted, in his own way, to his country.
Arturo’s most significant political involvement before this year was a stint as Ortega’s ambassador to the United States, between 2007 and 2009, just after Ortega had returned to power for the first time since 1990 — and many Nicaraguans, Arturo included, thought he might have changed.
Incarcerating Arturo, a mutual friend tells me, is in part the dictator’s revenge for what he considers the ingratitude of a former employee. Certainly Ortega is banking on the Afghanistan mess and other issues to distract the United States from his destruction of democracy.
Arturo’s motivations in opposing Ortega were not personal, except — perhaps — insofar as he felt himself following in his father’s footsteps. In any case, his intentions and ideology, and those of the other political prisoners, are secondary. To employ one of Arturo’s favorite academic formulations, they are “objectively” on the side of freedom, which is the main point.
Their plight, and that of Nicaragua, challenges any notion that Washington can draw a clear and consistent line between the past of U.S. foreign policy and its present, or between U.S. “values” and “interests.”
Rather, recent events confirm the wisdom of Pedro Joaquin Chamorro Sr., who wrote: “History doesn’t come to an end … with the rumbling of tanks against a peaceful city. History begins when it is firmly established that an ideal lives in a people, though men die.”