Carlos Fonseca, Cuaderno Sandinista, June 12th 2020
https://cuadernosandinista.com/2020/06/12/la-revolucion-es-algo-mas-que…
Recently, Señora Gioconda Belli wrote something that caught my attention, but only because her determination to say things that, when challenged, makes it possible to expose very important issues for Sandinismo and the knowledge of our history by new generations, so even though blasting mosquitos with artillery fire is not a good idea, using this military technique is sometimes necessary, not so much to eradicate the mosquitos, but if they succumb to the fire unleashed, so much the better.
Doña Gioconda begins her text by saying, with unusual frankness: "I was a Sandinista from 1970 to 1993". Congratulations on the confession, not that of having been a Sandinista, but of no longer being one, even though, for her, the offence is to have been one. We already knew that she had ceased to be Sandinista some time ago, but it seems it took her 27 years to realize it. Because during all that time, and as other ex-Sandinistas continue to do, she took advantage of that political identity and the ethical condition that it implies and the prestige it entails, in fact to the detriment of that cause, the Sandinista cause, which she has worked against ever since.
Those others, who agree with her on everything, continue to speak in the name of an unrecognizable Sandinismo, celebrating the interventionism of North American imperialism in Nicaragua and on whose birth certificate as an internal current of the FSLN, when they had not yet left the Party, appeared the proposal to renounce anti-imperialism, socialism, popular struggle and the vanguard character of the Sandinista Front for national Liberation (FSLN); in other words, to renounce being Sandinistas.
Doña Gioconda, who is very disenchanted, continues to say that she knows what it is like "to wait for dreams that never get realized", or to see "the arrogance of the leaders to listen to criticism, the fear, which little by little is watered down, of saying what one feels and thinks; the fear of being accused of being a 'Contra' or of becoming an outcast", all of which, according to her, happened when she lived through "the most romantic and vital period of the revolution" in the 1980s. How "romantic and vital" can a time be for a revolution, when the dreams that have inspired it never happen?
People's access to health and education, the end of illiteracy, the eradication of polio which used to decimate Nicaraguan children, agrarian reform, the nationalization of mines, banking and foreign trade, people's freedom to organize, democracy, the rescue of national dignity, were apparently not dreams that came true for her. How "romantic and vital" can a time be for a revolution, with arrogant leaders, fear of expressing opinions and all those things that Dona Gioconda talks about? But then again, those arrogant leaders she refers to are, for the most part, the self-same ex-Sandinista traitors, like herself, who agree with everything she now says.
Yes, power generates arrogance in the revolutionaries who exercise it, if they allow themselves to be trapped by its oppressive essence, and this has always happened in all revolutions, which are not perfect. But they are the best thing that humanity has carried out to achieve more just, more dignified and fuller forms of existence. The essence of power is reactionary, because it was invented to oppress, not to liberate. But it is necessary for the latter, that is, to make revolution, to end oppression and to achieve freedom and justice, and therefore, for power itself to cease to be necessary.
Revolutions that are capable of surpassing themselves survive, that is to say, revolutions capable of correcting their faults once they have recognized them, as against revolutions that renounce being revolutionary, renouncing the very principles that are their reason for being. The revolutionary dreams that come true, that did happen in the eighties and that are happening now, even though Dona Gioconda cannot see them, just as it seems that she didn't see those of that period she calls the most "romantic and vital of the revolution" (but I don't know why, if she thinks the dreams never came true). But she doesn't say that this was "the era of the revolution," but rather "the most romantic and vital era of the revolution," so at least she recognizes (well, finally) that the revolution is still going on, now in another era, one this lady no longer sees as "romantic and vital". But how would she see it that way, since she is no longer even Sandinista?
Really Doña Gioconda is not just pretending to be blind to the fact that revolutionary dreams did indeed come true in the 1980s and continue to come true now, for the benefit of our people. She is even trying to criminalize those dreams when, referring to the 1980s ("the most romantic and vital era of the revolution"), she speaks of "a dream that cost Nicaragua more than 30,000 dead, dead that were peasants, that were our own Nicaraguan people, that rebelled against the lack of democracy and the authoritarianism that was imposed in the 1980s, but that by putting the label "Contras" on them they taught us to hate."
Romanticism is a characteristic of emotions, which for some people are a passing inspiration and for others a secondary expression of something much more important, which is the passion of revolutionary struggle as a reason for being. What is really vital is even more important, as is our revolution in this era, in which dreams are coming true in some ways even more than they were in that other earlier era. Because now we have peace which we did not have then, and not, as Doña Gioconda says, owing to "the lack of democracy and the authoritarianism that prevailed in the 1980s" (in "the most romantic and vital era of the revolution", according to her own incoherent words), but because the United States government organized and publicly financed a counter-revolutionary army (known as the Contras) whose embryo was the previously defeated Somoza National Guard that had been created decades before by that same country during the intervention of US troops in our national territory, victoriously confronted by Sandino.
Doña Gioconda says in her complaint that in the war of the eighties "we were taught to hate" the Contras, as they were known, for being members of the army organized by the United States from the extinct National Guard to overthrow the Sandinista Revolution. But who was teaching whom to hate? Because it seems, according to Gioconda Belli, that "we were taught" by a grassroots militant and not by the very person, herself, who was head of the FSLN's Propaganda and Political Agitation Department in those years that she contradictorily describes as "the most romantic and vital era of the revolution," the era of "dreams that never came true" and in which "the arrogance of the leaders to listen to criticism, the fear, which is slowly being watered down, of saying what one feels and thinks; the fear of being accused of being 'Contra' or becoming an outcast" were our daily bread, if we stick to her version.
If there was indeed an intention to teach someone to hate, it would have to have been be an intention on the part of cadres like her to teach the Sandinista grass roots and those of us on the frontlines to hate the Contras, although neither my fellow combatants nor I ever perceived that intention or allowed ourselves to be possessed by any hatred, quite the contrary: Comandante Tomás Borge taught us that "my personal revenge will be your children's right to school and to flowers," and the successive decrees of pardons and amnesties for the Contras that were handed down, from the very beginning of the war were for us reliable proof of the generosity of the Revolution, because, in any case, we did not need to be taught to hate the Contras. For that, the terrible experience we had of seeing our comrades fall, or knowing how the Contra murdered comrades they kidnapped or captured, or the ambushes of FSLN militants, or the crimes against defenseless peasants, the burning of cooperatives, schools, health centers, all that would have been enough for us, the murders of the Christian revolutionary activists Felipe and Mary Barreda, raped in front of her captured and tortured husband, the murder of Benjamin Linder, the mining of the port of Corinto, seeing Brenda Rocha with her arm amputated but with her smile intact, the smile of Nicaragua, the smile of the Sandinista Revolution, the smile of the most generous Revolution in history.
But all of this did not prevent us from forgiving and understanding that the immense majority of the Contras were not heartless psychopaths, but rather, as Gioconda Belli calls them, "campesinos... our own Nicaraguan people," in other words (although this is obviously not what she says any more), blind instruments of their own class enemies, as were the Somocista guardsmen, also mostly campesinos, who were part of the Contras. And when it was our turn to talk to the Contras we captured, we realized that they were mostly humble people from the village, manipulated to the detriment of their own interests. Then we knew that, as Che said, our hatred was necessary, not towards them, the Contras, but hatred for imperialism and the national sell-out oligarchy behind all this manipulation and instrumentalization by which the enemies of the people (among them traitors like Doña Gioconda) continue now seeking to spread hatred through lies, blocked however by the advances of our revolutionary process and the combativeness of our party militants in the battle of ideas. If they "taught" us anything (not Doña Gioconda, but our heroes and martyrs, or true leaders like Daniel and Tomás), it was generosity, love, vocation for peace, humility, revolutionary firmness with which we are once again confronting the imperialist enemy and the quislings who call on it for help.
This lady forgets too easily that after the war those Contras, who in fact and as she now says were peasants, became allies of the FSLN, recognizing in our organization the only political force defending their class interests; an alliance that, by the way, was rejected at the time by Doña Gioconda and the "Sandinistas Renewalists", as they have called themselves since the mid-1990s, when (as she now recognizes) she had already stopped being a Sandinista. So the Contras were not for her those peasants she refers to when talking about the 30,000 deaths in the war of the eighties, as if among those deaths there were not also thousands of Sandinista combatants and party militants (many of whom were killed fighting), militiamen, reservists, young soldiers, border guards, regular soldiers and army officers, many of them also peasants. In other words, Doña Gioconda applies to the war of the 1980s the same lie used in the attempted coup d'état of 2018, pretending to ignore that a large part of the dead were Sandinistas. We therefore allied ourselves with the ex-Contras, peasants from the 1990s, opposing the opinion of Dona Gioconda and the "Sandinista Renewalists" who in reality were no longer Sandinistas (as she herself now confesses), precisely because we did not learn to hate.
The ones who learn to hate are those infected by the virus of lies, deliberately introduced for that very purpose by imperialism, through political manipulation by the oligarchy, by traitors like Doña Gioconda into the souls and minds of some people when their spiritual defenses are down.
And on the subject of the COVID-19 virus, in another part of her article, Doña Gioconda, as a good pandemic fighter, reveals her main objective, namely, trying to distort the handling of the current pandemic by our government, when she says: "Didn't the Comandante and the Compañera say that they were prepared for this pandemic; that, with community health, with health brigades, there was nothing to worry about because they had everything under control? Didn't they say it would be like a flu, like a cold?"
What does Ms. Gioconda think she is referring to by having "everything under control"? To not having any victims in a pandemic? Or to reducing those victims to the minimum possible without, rather, multiplying them by paralysing the country, which is what she and the other "Renewalist" traitors along with their liberal-conservative allies would like to see?
While they were demanding quarantine (that is, to paralyze the country) even before there was a single case of the virus, they were also asking for and celebrating economic attacks by foreign powers against Nicaragua, starting with the United States. To have everything under control is to have at this point a mortality rate of barely 0.87 deaths for every 100,000 inhabitants, and even if the number of deaths from the virus were in fact what our detractors say, we would still be at 11.26, while the country they idolize, the United States, is at 34.05 and there are European countries with a mortlity rate from the virus of around 60.
On the other hand, has anyone ever heard Comandante Daniel or Compañera Rosario say that COVID19 is "like a flu, like a cold"? They have never said that, neither they nor any representative of our government, because despite the fact that the vast majority of those affected are mild or even asymptomatic cases, we will never fall into the irresponsibility of minimizing the mortal danger that this pandemic represents for people at risk, which by the way, in our country are many fewer than in Europe, due to the youth of our population. But we must still protect them, because they are our parents, our grandparents and our historical militants, whom we love and appreciate so much, and whose lessons we need so much. And that is what we are doing, caring for our people, caring for ourselves and caring for others. I have already referred innumerable times to the countless measures that our government has taken and guided in order to face the pandemic with the least possible number of fatalities and without paralyzing the country.
Doña Gioconda says that "this government has done nothing to help the poorest". That indeed reaches the height of impudence. What in other countries is presented as a great thing, for example food aid to people in situations of greater economic vulnerability in the context of the pandemic, has been done here in Nicaragua for thirteen years now. In other words, the very same period in which Sandinismo has been back in government, but this time now without traitors like Doña Gioconda and company, who for that very reason see nothing "romantic and vital' in this era.
Free health and education, reduction of illiteracy, property titles, "Hambre Cero" agricultural production incentives, "Zero Usury" microcredit for low-income women, accessible housing, a program to repair families' roofs, solidarity packages of food and household items, increases in the minimum wage much higher than in the neoliberal years, collective agreements for workers, gender equality, sports and recreation, being among the first countries in the hemisphere in reducing poverty and social inequality. For Doña Gioconda apparently none of this is "helping the poorest". But in fact, this government is not here merely to "help the poorest," Sra. Gioconda. Rather it is a government of the people serving the most impoverished so they will no longer be poor, as indeed many have ceased to be, and so that there will be fewer and fewer poor people in our country.
Doña Gioconda says our government called on us all "to ignore the calls of civil society, of the Alliance and Unity bloc to take care of ourselves", because those calls were "alarmist". And here we are faced with the typical propaganda line of the right wing coup spokespersons, that people who want to take care of themselves should only pay attention to them. With criminal cunning, this is what they are trying to get us to believe. But we Sandinistas know that taking care of ourselves does not mean listening to the "calls of civil society...", etc.; it means listening to the calls of our own government, which from the beginning has been directing and putting into practice the correct measures, adequate to each phase and to the reality of Nicaragua.
We will not take the bait, Doña Gioconda, believing that to protect ourselves is to obey you, which is the disastrous purpose of these supposed calls to take care of ourselves, or your plan "B" now the objective of paralyzing the country has not been achieved. If we look closely, the coup promoters are now becoming hysterical because our own calls for people to take more care are now to the fore, so now the coup promoters want to create the false perception that we are backing down, (which should surely cheer them up...). Their own fury at this makes them feel so bad that, unfortunately for them, they cannot hide that they want more deaths. Nor can they hide their joy with each new fatality of the pandemic. Not to take care of ourselves now and thus to spread the virus, that indeed would be to listen to them.
In tune with this same criminal propaganda goes the already mentioned combination of demands for quarantine and the requests and welcome applause for economic attacks, or at the spreading of the false news that our hospital system has collapsed so as to discourage people from coming to receive timely medical orientation. We also have the phenomenon of the dissemination of videos by the coup plotters and their foolish stooges, for example of burials of people who have died of respiratory diseases, to create anxiety, panic and collective hysteria, and so, consequently, cause death, beacuse they work against the very measures that need to be taken. This stands in contrast to the dissemination by Nicaraguans of good will posting videos of people who have recovered after managing to defeat the COVID19 virus, and which cause so much irritation among the coup promoters. They celebrate the triumph of death and are upset by the triumph of life, contrary to us.
Even the ridiculous "denouncements" of people infected or killed supposedly by COVID19 have a purpose well prepared beforehand, which is to blame the government for such infections and deaths, besides generating, as part of the collective hysteria, rejection by people of those infected instead of promoting solidarity with them, because solidarity gets in the way when the objective is to instill irrational anger and hatred. The key to this is to link the term "denouncement" with the figure of crime and delinquency, even though becoming infected or dying is neither of these two things, neither on the part of the victim nor on the part of the government, although it is, at least indirectly, on the part of the coup promoters who are hindering the great efforts being made by the government, by heroic health personnel and by Nicaragua's people in general.
Another lie, one of Doña Gioconda's most blatant, is that relatives are not informed of the patients' health situation or even of their death. In fact, not only are they informed of everything, but they are given careful attention and all the necessary medication, something that rich countries where health is privatised cannot boast about.
And a desire that was impossible to conceal: that Comandante Daniel and Compañera Rosario be exposed to contagion, when she says "we have not seen them visit neighborhoods, or hospitals." Well, that's quite a perverse pleasure this lady would like to give herself.
Each leader, each political cadre, each militant of the Sandinista Front knows their duty in each time and place. We Sandinistas also know how important it is for the lives of our people that our two leaders carry out their responsibilities, who instead of going around micro-managing, as other leaders do with disastrous results for their countries, instead work tirelessly to ensure that the impact of the pandemic in lives lost and in economic problems for our people's humble families is minimal.
I must thank Doña Gioconda for her recognition that our Political Secretaries are taking risks; What she does not recognize is that they do so in order to fulfill their duty carrying out indispensable missions under the current circumstances, such as supporting the work of MINSA, accompanying mapping the population's health, strengthening the immunization of children, the elderly and the chronically ill, as well as developing emergency plans to ensure that people with symptoms of COVID19 go to hospital in time, countering the criminal campaign against them doing that, currently being waged by coup leaders like Doña Gioconda. In other words, our Political Secretaries are taking risks to protect the people from the pandemic and from the coup campaign making the pandemic even more dangerous, but also from the even greater tragedy that would be the paralysis of the country. That paralysis that is, at this point, just another of Doña Gioconda's dreams she will see come true. And on this point, we see the exemplary Comrade Fidel Moreno, going from neighborhood to neighborhood bringing all kinds of benefits and works of progress to our people, taking care of victims of the heavy rains, and being received with great joy by people receiving all their rights restored by our Revolution.
Doña Gioconda asks, with infinite cynicism, that if the country was not prepared for the pandemic due to the economic damage caused by the coup leaders themselves, "why weren't more precautions taken?" As I said, I am not going to repeat for the thousandth time all the measures and precautions implemented under guidance from our government, before the pandemic took hold and now, which are quite different moments, because different measures applied at the wrong time are counterproductive. What the country was not prepared for was not the pandemic itself but the measures the coup promoters, including Sra. Gioconda, wanted us to take from the beginning in order to damage the economy which they could not and will not be able to achieve with failed calls for national strikes like those made by COSEP on successive occasions during the attempted coup of 2018; adding this to the other reasons that prevent the application of quarantine in our country and which we have already mentioned on other occasions.
Another thing Dona Gioconda says is that we are copying the Swedes (her idols, although of course she doesn't say so), and that this is madness because they are rich and we are poor. The Swedes managed the pandemic, using the model called "herd immunity" and largely failed. It consists of allowing the healthiest and youngest population, less exposed to the severe form of COVID19, to create immunity and then protect the population most exposed because of their age and illnesses. The model did not work well for them because before creating immunity, the mild and asymptomatic patients infected the population at risk, which in that country is a big part of the population because the average age there is high. Sweden is a typical example of the application of the wrong model, since precisely because of its wealth and other characteristics (including the aforementioned high average age of its population), it was actually one of the most suitable countries to apply quarantine. This is precisely not the case with us because, among other things, we are an impoverished country.
Our model, as we have already said, is not the Swedish one, but the one seeking the point of balance, which consists of combining the greatest possible social distance with maintaining the highest possible level of functioning of the country. On that score, by the way, there is something that has not been said, namely that with the economic paralysis resulting from an eventual quarantine, as it drastically affects the income of the great majority of people (even with the aid that is given in some countries, much lower than those available here, even without COVID19), not only would there be an economic situation that for many families would be more tragic than the direct consequences of the pandemic itself, but there would be even more direct victims of the pandemic itself, as a result of reduced access to the inputs people need to be able to take precautionary measures and to get adequate nutrition to resist the onslaught of the virus.
But our model, which is Nicaragua's, not Sweden's, also has other components, based on the principle of not waiting passively for the virus to attack and burn itself out, but rather to anticipate the early detection of cases via preventive and education campaigns, which include ensuring the highest possible immunological level with vaccination campaigns to prevent other conditions from aggravating COVID19 induced conditions. That was done in addition to confining patients with symptoms, providing controlled contact care to prevent the spread of the virus, and health control of entry into the country. And this model, our model, which is appropriate to our national reality, is possible given the level of organization of our people and the characteristics of our health system, thanks to this Revolution which Doña Gioconda no longer sees as "romantic and vital", but which remains revolutionery nonetheless.
After addressing the Coronavirus, Sra. Gioconda moves on to another topic saying that "we are the country with the highest number of senior officials condemned worldwide for human rights violations in the 2018 massacre". For her, the United States and Europe are the world, the typical mentality of imperialism and its lackeys. Doña Gioconda forgets that the world has condemned the United States for the war it imposed on us in the 1980s (which she says was due to our "lack of democracy and authoritarianism"), and was sentenced to pay us $17 billion in compensation by the International Court of Justice in The Hague, a sentence that the United States did not comply with. Then came doña Violeta Barrios de Chamorro (whom this other doña idolizes) and forgave that debt, which in the end is invalid in international law, as if the gringos could care.
But that is not the only reason the world has condemned the United States; every year the UN General Assembly condemns it for the criminal blockade against Cuba, and that is, like the war imposed on us, a violation of human rights, as were the atrocities committed by the coup plotters in 2018 with the support of Doña Gioconda and, as always, directed and financed by the US government, with the only change being Donald Trump. It is a great honor for us to be the country whose officials have the pride of being condemned by the enemies of humanity, as the anthem of the FSLN calls the gringos in one of its verses, which, by the way, the "Renewalists" wanted to suppress at the beginning of the nineties, exactly when all of them, like Doña Gioconda, stopped being Sandinistas.
Doña Gioconda says that there are "political prisoners dying in jail,... people who are in jail just for raising a flag," and that "the police are watching us, those in the neighborhood are watching us..." After all that wildlife of criminal coup perpetrators has been released, they still have the nerve to say that there are political prisoners. There are indeed drug dealers and delinquents, publicly confessed criminals in the prisons, and they are not dying. "...People who are imprisoned for raising a flag," imagine for yourselves. How many opponents and Sandinistas have raised the blue and white flag in marches and acts without being harrassed for it. But there is one thing that I have to agree with Sra. Gioconda: "the people of the neighborhood" are indeed watching them and will continue to do so, of course. That's exactly right, so be very careful if you think you can repeat 2018 here. You'd better get ready for the clean sweep that we'll give you in the 2021 elections.
Almost at the end of her article, Doña Gioconda says that she, familiar with Sandinismo from other times, finds that "this cruel version inspires anger and pain". And wasn't it that in the 1980s, when she was a Sandinista, we had killed 30,000 "peasants... our own people"? Hypocrisy, they call it. What is cruel, then and now, is imperialist aggression, then with all out war, now with the attempted coup and the misnamed "sanctions". Doña Gioconda also says that "two people have taken over the country"... In fact, those who have taken over this country are those whom the bourgeoisie and their children at home call "ruffians"; those "barrio people" who have indeed kept a close eye on the coup plotters and will continue to do so. This country has been appropriated by the hundreds of thousands of women and men who have received their property titles, denied by the liberal-conservative mafias of which Doña Gioconda and "Renewalist" ex-Sandinistas like her are now mere camp followers and, moreover, despised for the mortal sin of having once been Sandinista from which she now believes herself to be exonerated after confessing it. What an illusion.
This country has been appropriated by the hundreds of thousands of beneficiaries of the Hambre Cero production incentives, of Zero Usury micro-credits, of the literacy campaign, of the health campaigns, of free housing, of the restitution of their rights to health and education, to recreation, to the joy that so disturbs the Nicaraguan bourgeoisie, which suffers at seeing the poor emerge collectively and stop being impoverished because there is a revolutionary project underway in which the power is theirs, because the rich exploiters hate to see the joy of humble families enjoying their restored rights with their children, for example in amusement parks and centers of healthy leisure and recreation activities.
Because all that makes the rich exploiters feel less privileged, and feeling privileged is their only source of self-esteem since they are spiritually empty, but also too those who want to be like them, that is, to have riches others do not enjoy. Moral indigence, it is called, something suffered by all the coup leaders, the rich exploiters defending their class interests assisted by the classless people they patronize, who defend class interests that are not their own. Something not true of a great many good and humble people among the population, who at one time or another may have been fooled by not having sufficient reliable information and political preparation, but whose inherent nobility ends up imposing itself so as to set them free from the virus of lies and the disease of hatred of the coup promoters.
But Doña Gioconda not only says with blind fury that "two people have taken over the country", but also affirms with infinite boldness that they have taken over "the conscience of so many good and self-sacrificing comrades". But isn't she no longer a Sandinista? What does she mean by "such a good and devoted comrades"? On the contrary, it is the right-wing and traitors to the Sandinista cause that have appropriated the conscience of some Nicaraguans prompting them to defend interests contrary to their own. We Sandinistas are so because our conscience belongs to us, because we are aware of the class interests that we defend, because we are guided by our revolutionary ideals and our ethical principles.
It is our moral superiority that makes us indestructible, because that is what allows us to know that we are neither better nor worse than anyone else, it makes us feel proud to be part of the people and to be, precisely, the organized expression of their consciousness. Doña Gioconda should know this, but it seems that this is not the case, because perhaps she entered Sandinismo with the same criteria as some others, coming from sectors socially linked in the time of Somoza to the conservative bourgeois opposition, disenchanted (because they are forever disenchanted) with that political sector following the pact between Agüero and Somoza and dazzled by that romantic vitality to which Doña Gioconda refers. But the Revolution is more than just a "romantic and vital" emotion, Dona Gioconda.
Doña Gioconda continues, at the end of her article, rejecting "that they make us confront each other always", because "we cannot live as enemies forever", and that "whoever runs a country based on deception and pitting one against the other by threatening with firearms, does not deserve any loyalty". As I read this, except for the last word, which alerted me, I thought for a while she was referring to themselves, to the coup leaders: "always confronting each other," "living as enemies forever," "based on deception," "threatening with firearms" all of which accurately describes the attitude of the right wing coup leaders when they bared their fangs, in 2018, with the police withdrawn from the streets and the Sandinistas focused on dialogue, when the coup promoters attacked police stations and groups of unarmed Sandinistas, kidnapping, torturing and killing.
But when I came to the word "loyalty"... oh no, I said, she's talking about us, the Sandinistas, because that word identifies us. But we are not loyal to people, Doña Gioconda, we are loyal to principles, to a just cause, to our organized vanguard, to our sacred unity. And of course, we are loyal to our leadership, not for personal reasons, but because our leaders embody those ideals that you, Dona Gioconda, once may have professed, but never really shared. You only admired them in a "romantic and vital" way.
Finally, Dona Gioconda tells us with great concern that continuing along this path, "you Sandinistas will lose not only your rights as party militants - if you still have any - but you will be condemning the Sandinismo you believe in to the repudiation and rejection of all our people," In other words, first she surprises us with her concern that we, human rights abusers, as she and the coup plotters call us, will lose our rights as party militants (is she really concerned at that?). Look, Sra. Gioconda, the motivation for militancy is not to exercise rights, even though we have them and we do exercise them. Militancy is in itself a duty of every revolutionary. The reason for our being party militants is the fulfillment of the duty we have as revolutionaries to fight with clear consciousness, united and organized so as to make the Revolution.
But not content with her unusual concern for our rights as militants, Sra. Gioconda is also concerned that "that Sandinismo we believe in" will suffer the "repudiation and rejection of all our people". In other words, it now turns out that the former Sandinista, who calls us criminals, anti-democrats, authoritarians and other choice adjectives, is concerned not only about our rights as militants, but also about the fate of "that Sandinismo we believe in", that is, not even the Sandinismo that she felt was hers (that of the "romantic and vital" era of "dreams that never come true"), of the "arrogance of the leaders", of the "fear ... of saying what one feels and thinks", of the "more than 30,000 dead ... who were peasants, who were our own Nicaraguan people, who rebelled against the lack of democracy and authoritarianism"); no, she does not refer to that wonderful Sandinismo to which she confesses to have sinfully belonged, but to "that Sandinismo in which we believe", that is, the one that she has never felt as hers, nor the "other" Sandinismo of the 1980s, and which is yet the same as it has always been since Sandino himself. As a finishing touch, she speaks of the "repudiation and rejection of all our people"... of all our people! In other words, she speaks in the name... of all the Nicaraguan people! Remind me again what was wrong with "the arrogance of the leaders"...
In short, don't be so concerned, Sra. Gioconda, because in 2021 all doubt will be dispelled, when the entire Nicaraguan people will unite to defeat the virus of lies causing hatred and death, after having defeated the much less aggressive Coronavirus. But the virus of lies is also a threat to life, the very life we Sandinista revolutionaries continue to fight for, those Sandinistas of all ages, not the Sandinistas of one era but not another, or those of "romantic and vital" emotions, or those of show business, but the Sandinista revolutionaries of the movement's militancy, those with the same revolutionary mystique with which those who preceded us in the sixties and seventies joined the guerrilla war and the insurrection, that same mystique with which others went to the National Literacy Crusade, to the coffee and cotton harvests and to the armed defense of the Revolution in the eighties, the same mystique with which we went to the popular struggle against neoliberalism and with which we blocked the "Renewalist" right wing of the Sandinista Front in the 1990s.
This is the same mystique with which Sandinismo has fulfilled its duty all these years by providing literacy training, health campaigns, delivering benefits to our people by carrying out social programs, conducting censuses of people with disabilities, distributing food packages, mapping people vulnerable to COVID19, identifying from house to house people with symptoms, giving guidance on how to face the pandemic, bringing the light of hope and joy of life, always with young Sandinistas as the main protagonists. This is the same mystique with which Sandinismo as one red and black, blue and white fist, united across all its generations, resisted and defeated the attempted coup d'état in 2018 and the same mystique with which the heroic combatants of the Peace Caravan, historic Sandinistas and young Sandinistas alike, attacked the fetters of death and betrayal. And it is that same mystique with which the entire Sandinista militancy will march combatively, consciously, united and well organized as always, to each new battle for Good, for Life, for Peace, for the Nation and for the Revolution, which is virtue, freedom and justice, which is love and happiness, which is Light and Truth.