The Jaguar Smile

8 ABORTION, ADULTHOOD AND GOD

The most important task facing the National Assembly was the drafting of the new Nicaraguan constitution. I went along to the Assembly building, which still looked like a bank, to meet four members of the constitutional committee, two of whom, inevitably, turned out to be poets: Luis Rocha and Alejandro Bravo. A third, Manuel Eugarrios, was a journalist, and the fourth, Serafín Soria, was the FSLN’s chief whip.

In the general election, the FSLN won sixty-one of the ninety-six seats in the Assembly. The others were divided between six opposition parties, four to the right of the Frente and two tiny ones, the PS and the Marxist-Leninist MAP, to its left. (The left parties regularly attacked the Sandinistas for being fakes, not revolutionaries at all; the Frente leadership seemed to enjoy these attacks.) Initially all the opposition parties co-operated with the constitution committee, but then Dr Virgilio Godoy of the Liberal Party, which was actually to the right of the Conservatives, and held nine seats to the Conservatives’ fourteen, refused to participate. ‘He wants to keep apart,’ Rocha said, ‘to make himself an option for the United States.’

(This tendency to dismiss their opponents out of hand could land the Sandinistas in some trouble. After my return, I heard that Godoy had persuaded the other opposition parties to join him in refusing to take part in the constitutional process until the FSLN agreed to discuss the ‘great problems’ facing the country. Even though, on this occasion, the opposition did not insist that the Contra leaders be party to such talks, it seemed likely that the constitution could become a political football.)

At the time of my visit, the first draft had been completed and then discussed, up and down the country, in seventy-three public forums. Alejandro Bravo said: ‘This is the first time in the history of Latin America that the people have been consulted on their constitution.’ The draft constitution spoke of ‘the construction of a society with broad based participation of the people, the right to vote and to be elected, freedom of speech, organization and assembly, and the rights to housing, education and health care.’ It defined political pluralism as ‘the participation of all political organizations without ideological restrictions, except to those who advocate a return to a Somoza style of government.’ It stipulated ‘a mixed economy … where diverse forms of property exist — state, private, mixed and co-operative — and where the principal objective is the well-being of the people, without impairing the ability to maintain reasonable profits.’

‘Every person,’ one clause read, ‘has the right to freedom of conscience, of thought, of religion … No one can be subject to coercive measures which violate this right.’ The State was obligated to provide social security, welfare, and ‘protection against hunger’. It was even responsible for ‘conserving the environment.’

There had been no shortage of criticism from the public forums. At the forum of journalists, writers and cultural workers, one speaker demanded that the constitution should ‘amplify the concept of public liberties, freedom of expression and information’. Another insisted that it must ‘define the State’s policy regarding communication’; a third, more ambiguously, that ‘there should be no restriction on freedom of expression, especially for parties representing the working class’.

The committee was re-drafting the constitution in the light of all the comments. A two-thirds majority was technically required for each clause, but, Eugarrios said, ‘We are trying to work by consensus. We want a pragmatic constitution that will last.’

Wasn’t it true, though, that there were a number of issues on which such a consensus would be impossible to form? ‘I want,’ I said, ‘to ask you about abortion, adulthood and God.’

Of all the issues raised in the people’s forums, the right to abortion on demand had come up most often. Women all over Nicaragua had demanded that this right be included in what many of them considered a very male constitution. But in a country as deeply rooted in Catholicism as Nicaragua, abortion was always going to be an explosive topic.

‘Now if such a right were to be enshrined in a constitution,’ I suggested, ‘it really would be revolutionary.’ The men facing me all looked a little shifty. ‘We don’t think this is a suitable matter for such a document as a constitution,’ Soria said. ‘What we propose is that immediately after the constitution is ratified we will introduce a bill legalizing abortion.’

‘Surely,’ I said, ‘it could be argued that a woman’s right to jurisdiction over her own body is a suitable subject for a constitution? It’s never been put in one before, but so what?’

‘As I said,’ Eugarrios answered, owning up to the real reason, ‘consensus is very important.’ It was clear that abortion wasn’t going to make the revised draft.

The question of adulthood was almost as tricky. ‘You must remember,’ Soria said, ‘that in Nicaragua men have been joining the armed forces, and before that the Frente, and dying in great numbers, at the age of sixteen.’ I didn’t need reminding. The boys at the Pomares hospital clamored in my head: ‘I can’t wait to get back to the front line!’ — ‘I’m going next week!’ … ‘So the argument runs,’ Soria went on, ‘should they not be considered full adults by the constitution?’

Eugarrios, the oldest of the quartet, wasn’t happy about that. ‘My own opinion is that they should get the right to vote,’ he said. ‘But full adulthood at sixteen? With the right to borrow money, and so forth? Many people think it’s too young, and I must say I am one of those.’

‘Many others, however,’ Rocha said, ‘believe that the muchachos cannot be treated as half-adults in this way. We are still discussing this.’

And so to God. In several of the public forums, including the one with the writers, there had been demands that the constitution should ‘invoke the name of God as a Supreme Being’. A passionate debate on the subject was in progress all over the country. Where did the committee stand?

The official FSLN position, they told me, was opposed to the idea of mentioning the name, but this wasn’t a ‘final’ position. Some Sandinistas thought that it wasn’t very important either way, so if it made some people happy, why not concede it? On the other hand, a number of Christian participants in the forums had said that merely mentioning the name was neither here nor there; it was more important that the constitution should reflect the Christian love-thy-neighbour spirit.

‘The ones who are really pushing for this are the Conservatives,’ Alejandro Bravo said. So what was the probable outcome? ‘It’s still uncertain. Maybe God will be in, maybe not.’

With or without God, sixteen-year-old adults and abortion, the constitution ought to have been ratified by the end of 1986. (The subsequent politicking made this less certain.) It struck me, and I said so, as a uniquely important document. But as long as the state of emergency lasted, the constitution would be little more than a piece of paper; the President would retain most of the power, and a number of civil rights would remain suspended. Critics of Nicaragua would argue that the emergency might never end; that it might, in fact, be the first step towards the establishment of a dictatorship. (My own relationship with the term Emergency, formed during Mrs Indira Gandhi’s dictatorial years of emergency rule in India in the middle 1970s, was an uncomfortable one.)

But the enthusiasm, the vigour with which Nicaragua had entered into the constitution-making process did not smack of window-dressing or tokenism. The emergency in Nicaragua was not the product of a politician’s desire to hang on to power, as it had been in Mrs Gandhi’s India, but the inevitable response to acts of aggression from outside the country. This was what Sergio Ramírez had meant when he said that peace would bring more democracy, not less.

I left the Assembly building feeling genuinely angry. At the Enrique Acuña co-operative, and again today, I had seen a people trying hard to construct for themselves a new identity, a new reality, a reality that the external pressure might crush before construction work had even been completed.

Nicaragua’s constitution amounted to a Bill of Rights that I wouldn’t have minded having on the statute book in Britain. But to hell with all that; to hell with all the dead sixteen-year-olds. Give a dog a bad name and hang him.