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| Essay Archive | February 29, 2004 |
PRESSURE POINT
Nicaragua's Dominant Political Parties Reach Critical Temperature
Shelim Guadamuz pleaded into his father's ear, "Why? Why?" For the first time in his life, Carlos Guadamuz was at a loss for words. He could only reply innocently, "I don't know, I don't know". He fell silent.
Carlos Guadamuz' thick black rimmed glasses were pressed into the pavement. They were twisted off his motionless head, magnifying the pool of blood that grew around his heavy body. Holding his father's shoulder, Shelim paused gazing for a moment in shock at his distorted yet peaceful face, before yelling frantically for help.
The assassin was escaping and the 16 year-old Shelim Guadamuz bravely gave chase. William Hurtado stumbled and fell. Shelim and local neighbors fell on top of the 42 year-old. They tied his hands behind his back with a kitchen towel. William Hurtado was wearing two pairs of pants and two shirts, but he never had a chance to strip off the murder set of clothes. He chewed gum calmly and the crowd shoved his expressionless face into the pavement.
Shelim ran back to his father and with other onlookers lifted the rotund body of Carlos Guadamuz into the back of a pick-up truck. The truck sped off, tail-gate open, almost dumping Guadamuz onto the pavement. His son hung on to him, struggling to pull him deeper into the truck bed. In route to the hospital Carlos Guadamuz stopped breathing.
On February 10, 2004, Carlos Guadamuz' tragic and bizarre career as a rebel, terrorist, political prisoner, radio station director, journalist, mayoral candidate and propagandist was over. Nicaragua, which had not seen the murder of one of its journalists for 25 years (since January 10, 1979) was in a state of shock.
I last saw Carlos Guadamuz in the airport with his children and third wife while we were both waiting passengers to arrive from an afternoon flight in June of 2003. Guadamuz looked odd. I had seen him many times on television during the turbulent final years of his life and on his television program, "Darts on Target", a political monologue, a one man chat room, where he sat calmly in front of a TV camera and thrashed his ex-best friend Daniel Ortega and the cupola of the Sandinista Party (FSLN). Guadamuz taped all the Darts on Target shows seated behind a news desk positioned dead-center in front of a big rainbow colored shooting target. His children and wife are good looking, somewhat Americanized in dress, but Guadamuz stood out from the rest of the airport crowd that day. He wore his pants up high around his very round belly and his thick oversized glasses rested on a round, yet feminine face beneath a dark brown afro. He looked eccentric, simultaneously nerdy and cool.
While we waited together at the arrivals hall of the international terminal, María Alejandra Alemán, one of the adult daughters of disgraced ex-President of Nicaragua Arnoldo Alemán came inside to check on a flight arrival. Her father is serving a 20 year sentence for stealing all he could during his Federal term from 1997-2001. Alemán's face is reflected in the face of María Alejandra, it was a profile that no one in the airport mistook for innocent. Alemán's daughters have acted as both his defense and spokeswomen since he was arrested in 2002. Most Nicaraguans find them horrifyingly arrogant and have little doubt that they are willing accomplices to their father's crimes. No one could rightly imagine that a man like Guadamuz, someone who was for most of his life synonymous with the Marxist Sandinistas, someone who made a career out of criticizing the Sandinista opposition, would be seen embracing a proud princess of Liberal Party corruption, María Alejandra Alemán. To the crowd's amazement, Carlos Guadamuz smiled naturally when he saw María Alejandra and tenderly planted a kiss on her cheek. Nicaragua is nothing if not abnormal, and Guadamuz died bathed in ironies that are nothing but Nicaraguan.
Carlos Guadamuz was an early childhood friend of Daniel Ortega in Managua. They grew up with a common focus, the defeat of the right-wing Liberal Party Somoza dictatorship. They both joined the left-wing FSLN (Sandinista Party) and together they even spent time as cell mates while being tortured by Somoza's state security. A few say that neither one came out of prison totally right due to the horrors of their ordeal. However most point to Guadamuz as the one who was a little off center, not insane, but not entirely normal either. Some events even before Carlos Guadamuz' time in jail point to a man who was born with a gift for the bizarre.
In 1969 the FSLN underground was suffering from divisions, imprisonments and exiles. According to Guadamuz in an interview he gave to the Nicaragua daily La Prensa in January of 2000, the anti-Somoza rebellion inside Nicaragua was down to a handful of men who were led by Julio Buitrago. Buitrago decided to send Guadamuz to Cuba, courtesy of an airplane hijacking, with a few rebels from León. That morning the arrivals from León did not show up. Guadamuz was left alone to hijack the domestic flight bound for Bluefields, with instructions to divert it by force to Cuba. Somoza's National Guard state security forces had been tipped off on a possible Sandinista hijack and Guadamuz was forced to fly in disguise. They had planned to dress Carlos as a priest, but the Guard happened to be trailing a priest at the time, so he dressed as a woman.
Wearing a wig, black dress and heels, Carlos Guadamuz pulled a 22 caliber pistol on the pilot when the airplane was finally in the air. A colonel of the National Guard, Bernardino Larios, was traveling to Bluefields that day. He remembered in a La Prensa interview given in July of 2000 that one passenger screamed out, "There is an armed woman in the cabin!" Yet when Larios returned to his seat another passenger informed him, "No… I saw her calves… it's a man!" Larios recalled that Guadamuz made the mistake of coming out of the cockpit to yell, "Viva el Frente Sandinista!" Larios took advantage of the moment and jumped him, a shot was fired, and other passengers also jumped and pummeled Guadamuz. Larios tried to wrestle the gun from his hand, but recalls that Guadamuz was too strong. The passengers lifted up Guadamuz off the floor and gave him a thorough beating, stripped off his dress, bra and wig and finally took the gun off him. Carlos Guadamuz had been hit by his own bullet and with a broken leg he was on his way to jail. Larios remembered with a bemused sense of respect that "Not for one moment did Guadamuz lose his cool".
After the victory of the war against Somoza in 1979 Carlos Guadamuz used his natural gift for publicity to run the state radio station "Radio Nicaragua" during the Sandinista reign in the 1980's. In the post-Sandinista rule 90's his unique and humorous take on the daily news to raised the renamed Sandinista AM frequency "Radio Ya" to the highest rated station in Nicaragua.
In 1996 Carlos Guadamuz was nominated by the FSLN as their official candidate for mayor of Managua, a very important post and a possible stepping stone for a presidential candidacy. During the campaign Guadamuz accused the Sandinista Party of favoring his competition from the breakaway MRS (Sandinista Renovation Party), candidate Herty Lewites. Despite leading in the poles before the election, Guadamuz lost by ten points to (Liberal Party) Alemán loyal Roberto Cedeño. Carlos Guadamuz used his Radio Ya to call for a popular uprising, claiming his loss to be the result of election fraud. The uprising found little support. He also criticized FSLN leaders and his old pal Daniel Ortega for lack of support; Carlos was walking on thin ice.
After continued attacks on party leadership, then Managua city council member Carlos Guadamuz was booted out of the FSLN in August of 1997. It was a political ex-communication that he found difficult to accept. Hadn't he been there side by side in the struggle with Daniel since the early days?
In 1999 the now infamous pact between supposed rivals and opposites Daniel Ortega and Arnoldo Alemán modified the constitution and powers of state to the benefit of both caudillos. Carlos Guadamuz used his pulpit of Radio Ya to rail the new partnership between Ortega and Alemán. Guadamuz was not alone in his criticism of his former "blood brother" Daniel Ortega. Respected Comandante Mónica Baltodano then a Sandinista Parliament member spoke out against the pact, calling it the "single most damaging decision ever made by the FSLN". Many long time party loyalists split with the dominant Daniel faction of the party over the backdoor agreement. Guadamuz' harsh critiques of the pact cost him his precious Radio Ya. The Sandinista Party repossessed what Guadamuz claimed to be rightfully his. After 16 years of having the number one radio station in Nicaragua as his forum, he was left voiceless.
Alone in a political black hole after decades of fervent support for the Sandinista Party which now rejected him, Carlos Guadamuz went a step beyond the pact he had so harshly attacked. He became a propagandist for the Alemán led Liberal Party. A party that was in the process of stealing more than US$100 million from state coffers thanks to increased maneuverability and confidence, courtesy of the Ortega-Alemán pact.
"Only in Nicaragua", experienced onlookers sighed. Suddenly Guadamuz was an apologist for the Liberal Party. His new role utilized brilliantly his particular talent for attacking the Daniel Ortega faction of the FSLN. After all, who has more inside dirt than an ex-best friend? Until the day of his assassination on February 10th of this year, Carlos Guadamuz railed Daniel Ortega, his brother and party faithful like Dionisio Marenco. Guadamuz even claimed in the lead up to the 2001 presidential elections that Daniel Ortega and 2004 Sandinista Managua mayoral candidate Dionisio Marenco planned an assignation plot of Arnoldo Alemán in 1995; back in the days when Alemán was serving himself to municipal funds as the Mayor of Managua.
Carlos Guadamuz then allied himself with the Nicaraguan Evangelist Party, Camino Cristiano (or Christian Path) to run again for mayor in Managua. Once again he was up against Herty Lewites, who was now the official candidate for the FSLN. Guadamuz took only 2% of the municipal vote which was won easily by Lewites. The furor of Guadamuz increased and his attacks against the Sandinistas took on new vigor. When Herty Lewites was asked about Guadamuz in an interview with local news magazine Confidencial just after his election victory, he would only comment that Carlos was "in need of a psychoanalyst".
Carlos Guadamuz' "political commentary", a relentless attack on Daniel Ortega and the leaders of the dominate cell of the Sandinista Party, was moved to the traditional Liberal Party voice of AM station Radio Corporación. To supplement his radio spot on Radio Corporación Guadamuz rented half-hour spots on a tiny UHF Channel 23. His show was a monologue on what was wrong with the FSLN and Carlos undoubtedly had much material to work with. Many of the heroes of the revolution have either slowly faded away for not falling in line with the party rule of Daniel Ortega or have been booted out of the FSLN for daring to challenge Ortega in the public arena.
The assassin of Guadamuz was waiting for him outside the studio of Channel 23 with a Brazilian 38 caliber hidden in a folded newspaper. When Carlos Guadamuz arrived to tape his half-hour spot he was shot three times. The hit man was William Hurtado, a former member of Sandinista state security and his gun was bought in December of 2003 by another former member of the same agency. The locale media, and in particular the Nicaraguan newspaper La Prensa, has been investigating deep into the complex labyrinth of possibilities for the intellectual author of the crime. Carlos Guadamuz Jr. said bluntly to the Nicaraguan press that the orders for the crime came from Daniel Ortega and/or the remains of his 1980's state security apparatus and there seem sufficient indicators to make this conclusion more than plausible. Yet it remains unanswered why or how the normally savvy Sandinistas could make such a huge political blunder during an election year. Naturally the crime has been further politicized by Arnoldo Alemán's Liberal Party faction, who shamelessly threw party color roses on the grave of Guadamuz, while simultaneously trying to use the media circus around his death as a smokescreen to sneak through a parliamentary decree of amnesty for their corrupt leader.
Despite an unhealthy number of blindly faithful constituents for both the Liberal Party and the FSLN, the two dominant parties are feeling the heat of public disgust as municipal elections approach. The Sandinistas have been damaged by the murder of Guadamuz and their subsequent cold-hearted, seemingly pleased reaction to his death and the Liberals are stained by their endless maneuvering to free their corrupt leader that shows complete disregard for public opinion and the Nicaraguan constitution.
There has never been a better time for a third option to step forward, though mechanisms of the pact between Alemán and Ortega seem to be functioning (as designed) to not permit this to happen. The political stage in Nicaragua without any prodding is inherently fascinating and controversial, but now, with the weight of Guadamuz' death hanging around the necks of the Sandinista party and corrupt Liberal leaders trying to set free convicted party boss Alemán, some observers have yelled "crisis".
Viewers with interest in seeing Nicaragua move forward and prosper can only pray that the public will vote for new faces from new parties in municipal elections this November, a vote that would allow for some untainted and sincere Nicaraguan public servants to rise to the top, where God knows they would be welcome.
Copyright © Richard Leonardi