The Jaguar Smile

2 THE ROAD TO CAMOAPA

The walls of the home of Nicaragua’s Vice-President, the novelist Sergio Ramírez, were hung with masks. ‘Ah,’ said the security guard, admitting me to a courtyard of old trees surrounded by spacious verandahs, ‘el escritor hindú.’ Spanish uses hindú to mean ‘Indian’; the construction de la India, which seemed OK to me, sounded stilted to Nicaraguan ears. So during my stay I became the hindú writer, or even, quite often, poeta. Which was quite a flattering disguise.

In Nicaragua, the mask was an indispensable feature of many popular festivals and folk-dances. There were animal-masks, devil-masks, even, as I was to discover, masks of men with bleeding bullet-holes in the centres of their foreheads. During the insurrection, Sandinista guerrillas often went into action wearing masks of pink mesh with simple faces painted on them. These masks, too, originated in folk-dance. One night I went to see a ballet based on the country’s popular dances, and saw that one of the ballerinas was wearing a pink mask. The mask’s associations with the revolution had grown so strong that it transformed her, in my eyes at least, into something wondrously strange: not a masked dancer, but a guerrilla in a tutu.

The true purpose of masks, as any actor will tell you, is not concealment, but transformation. A culture of masks is one that understands a good deal about the processes of metamorphosis.

I set off in the company of Sergio Ramírez and one of the nine-man National Directorate of the FSLN, Luis Carrión, to the town of Camoapa in Boaco province, to witness a part of one of the most important transformations taking place in the new Nicaragua. It was National Agrarian Reform Day, and in Camoapa land titles for no less than 70,000 acres were to be handed out to the campesinos.

Sergio Ramírez was unusually big (well over six feet) and heavily built for a Nicaraguan, and could look, at times, positively Chinese in a Mikadoish sort of way; Luis Carrión was of a much more characteristically Nicaraguan light, slight build, with a moustache that was — as they used to say in the Paris of the 1968 événements — ‘Marxiste, tendance Groucho’. They were both remarkably free of the pomposity and circumlocution that were so often the stock-in-trade of politicians. ‘How many acres have been redistributed since the revolution?’ I asked, and once they had agreed how many manzanas (the Nicaraguan land unit) there were in a hectare, and we had all haggled about the number of acres a hectare contained, we arrived at a rough figure of over two million acres, handed out to about 100,000 families.

I was impressed, and said so. Ramírez nodded. ‘It shows the people that we have the will to keep our promises.’

When Don Anastasio Somoza fled the country, he took with him everything he could carry, including all the cash in the national treasury. He even had the bodies of Tacho I and Luis Somoza dug up and they, too, went into exile. No doubt he would have taken the land as well, if he’d known how. But he couldn’t, and nor could his cronies who fled with him, and so the government of the new Nicaragua found itself in possession of the abandoned estates, amounting to half the arable land in the country. The land being redistributed was taken from those immense holdings and not, as Carrión and Ramírez clearly felt obliged to explain, from anywhere else. ‘Nobody who stayed in Nicaragua to work his land had it confiscated,’ said Ramírez, who spoke excellent English but tired of it after a while and lapsed into Spanish. ‘Since our absolute priorities are production and defence, why should we meddle with someone who is producing? On the contrary, we assist many large, private landowners.’ On the road to Camoapa, which passed between the country’s two big lakes, Lake Managua and Lake Nicaragua (really an inland sea, and the only place in the world where you could be eaten by freshwater sharks), they were at pains to point out farms and industries that remained in private hands. There was often a little, defensive something that would creep into the discourse of Nicaraguan leaders. ‘No country is put under a microscope the way we are,’ Foreign Minister d’Escoto would tell me. That sense of being watched, all the time, for the tiniest slip, made them jumpy.

The road to Camoapa was made of brick, like many roads in Nicaragua. Somoza used to own a brick factory. After the ’72 earthquake he insisted that the nation’s thoroughfares be reconstructed in Presidential bricks, which he then sold to the nation at high prices. ‘But we discovered that the bricks were also very easy to lever up,’ Luis Carrión told me contentedly, ‘so that during the insurrection years we were often able to stop his convoys quite easily, thanks to his own brick roads.’ Carrión looked too young to be running a country. Nicaragua made ‘young novelists’ of thirty-nine years feel antique. At least Sergio Ramírez was a few years older than me. Then again, he made me feel short.

I asked Ramírez about the recent pronouncements on Nicaragua by the famous Peruvian novelist Mario Vargas Llosa, in the New York Times and elsewhere. ‘His positions have moved so far to the right these days that I wasn’t surprised by his criticisms,’ Ramírez said. What, then, did he think of Vargas Llosa’s suggestion that the people who merited the West’s support in Nicaragua were neither the Contra nor the FSLN, but the anti-Sandinista democratic Nicaraguans, who might even now be a majority? Carrión and Ramírez both laughed. ‘There’s no such majority,’ Ramírez said. ‘Let me know if you locate it.’

Vargas Llosa also hinted that the Sandinistas were a Soviet-style state in disguise; that the various nods in the direction of a mixed economy and a pluralistic democracy were no more than window dressing; and that, in fact, the FSLN was being obliged to preserve such things precisely on account of the pressure from outside. (Though, of course, he hastened to add that he did not support the Contra.)

Ramírez seemed genuinely annoyed by this suggestion. If it weren’t for the war, he said, much more power could be given to the people than a state of emergency permitted; that is, peace would mean more democracy, not less. ‘We have the right to self-determination. Our internal structures are nobody’s business but our own.’

‘But,’ I suggested, ‘now that the $100 million for the Contra has been approved, other people have made it their business, haven’t they?’

Luis Carrión replied. ‘The hundred million is not the point. The counter-revolution is not the real threat.’ His view was that the Contra army had effectively been defeated. ‘These days they try hard to avoid meeting us in direct combat, because of their heavy losses. They concentrate instead on terrorist acts, aimed at the civilian population, and at damaging production. We expect more of these now. We expect they will try something in the cities, even in Managua, now that they have the extra money; but we are prepared. They also have a major problem of recruitment and morale. Their numbers have fallen by several thousand in the past two years. No: the real threat is the CIA.’

Ah yes, la Cia. My reflex reaction to the Agency’s entry into the conversation was simultaneously Eastern and Western. The Western voice inside me, the voice that was fed up with cloaks and daggers and conspiracy theories, muttered, ‘not them again’. The Eastern voice, however, understood that the CIA really did exist, was powerful, and although it was easy to make it a scapegoat, it was also just a bit too jaded, too cynical, to discount its power.

The CIA operated in Central America through what it charmingly referred to as UCLAs: Unilaterally Controlled Latino Assets. Now that it was to be permitted to resume overt operations, those Assets would be going to work with a will. Conservative estimates of the CIA’s planned 1986–87 budget against Nicaragua suggested a figure somewhere in the near vicinity of $400 million — four times the aid allocated to the Contra forces. Add to that the $300 million being spent by the Reagan administration to try and ‘buy off’ Nicaragua’s neighbours, and you had a grand total of $800 million being spent on dirty tricks and destabilization, to bring to heel a country of under three million people.

(The total amount of money raised by the Band Aid, Sport Aid and Live Aid events, just to offer some sort of comparison, was less than a quarter of this figure.)

It was the CIA that had mined the harbour at Corinto, and in the face of overt operations like that, the Nicaraguan government would face real problems. Carrión said, ‘Against such aggression, there is simply not much we can do. We lack the resources.’

Carrión believed that when Reagan realized the Contra would never do the job for him, a direct US invasion on some pretext or other would follow. I was to discover that this was the more or less unanimous opinion of the Sandinista leaders I encountered. ‘Reagan has invested too much personal prestige in the Nicaragua issue to leave office without trying to smash us,’ Ramírez said. The government was preparing for the US invasion by arming the campesinos. ‘Our best defence,’ Luis Carrión told me, ‘is the people in arms.’ It was a phrase I heard many times during my stay. Many thousands of ordinary Nicaraguans had already been given AK-47 automatic rifles, as well as other hardware. If the the Pentagon could be convinced that the US body count would be high, it might make an attack politically unsaleable. ‘Nicaragua will not be like Grenada for them,’ Luis Carrión said. ‘It will not be quick.’

I had begun to see great mountains of corpses in my mind’s eye. I changed the subject, and asked Sergio Ramírez about a recent report by the ‘International League for Human Rights’, published in the Herald Tribune. ‘Repression in Nicaragua is not as conspicuous or as bloody as in other parts of Central America,’ said Nina H. Shea, programme director of the ‘New York-based’ group. ‘But it is more insidious and systematic.’

Ramírez began by saying that the most important human rights organizations had given Nicaragua a pretty clean report. Then he lost his temper. ‘You see,’ he cried, ‘if we do not murder and torture people as they do in Salvador, it just proves that we are so fiendishly subtle.’

A cow strolled across the road and the driver braked violently. Ahead of us, the security outriders, who all, rather unusually, wore bright orange washing-up gloves, came to a halt. ‘One must understand one’s animals,’ Luis Carrión said mildly. ‘A cow will never deviate from its chosen direction, never turn around. A dog, however, is unreliable.’

We arrived in Camoapa, which was in holiday mood. Five thousand campesinos filled the main square, around which fluttered great hosts of small blue-and-white national flags, alternating with the red-and-black banners of the Frente. Straw Sandino-hats, scrubbed children in their best clothes, militiamen on guard. ‘Señor Reagan,’ read a placard held up by a member of the Heroes and Martyrs of the First of May 1986 Co-operative, ‘you won’t get even the smallest lump of our land.’ And, elsewhere in the crowd, another banner demanded: ‘Trabajo y fusiles!’ Work and rifles. It wasn’t easy to believe in Vargas Llosa’s hypothetical anti-Sandinista majority here. The government, understanding that its power base lay with the campesinos, had given rural areas such as this priority over the cities in terms of the allocation of the country’s scarce resources. Food shortages weren’t nearly as acute here as they were getting to be in Managua, Granada and León; and such preferential policies, coupled with the land reforms, had ensured that communities such as Camoapa had remained loyal FSLN strongholds.

Jaime Wheelock, another of the FSLN’s nine comandantes de la revolución, who was now the agriculture minister and looked even younger than Luis Carrión, addressed the crowd. It was impossible not to notice that the emotional distance between the audience and the orator was very small. I couldn’t think of a Western politician who could have spoken so intimately to such a crowd. The parish priest of Camoapa, Father Alfonso Alvarado Lugo, also spoke. ‘I am happy,’ he told the campesinos, ‘that you, who used to be on the streets, can now cultivate the land.’ The campesinos came up and received their land titles, informally, with little fuss. It seemed natural to be moved.

The versicle-and-response format took over. A young Sandinista woman acted as cheerleader. ‘The people united,’ she cried into a microphone, and the crowd replied: ‘ … will never be defeated!’

‘Let us struggle!’

‘…For peace!’

‘Venceremos!’

‘No pasarán.’

Oh, by the way: at the end of the ceremony, the village band played — amongst other popular local tunes — the Internationale.