Adiós Muchachos: A Memoir of the Sandinista Revolution

13. Saturn’s Jaws

13 | Saturn’s Jaws Sooner or later, it would be time to sit down and hold talks with the Contra Directorate. Our political strategy previously centered on intransigence as we sought a military victory. Now everything was leading us to try to negotiate. After a decade of armed conflict, we were exhausted. The economy was in turmoil. With inflation in a continuous upward spiral, we had increasingly less foreign currency for imports . Agriculture continued to decline due to the lack of soft credits and supplies, and there was a growing scarcity of the basic commodities on the ration card. The national political sphere was always critical, and we were approaching upcoming elections in 1990, which would again have limited credibility. Most importantly , however, was that there was practically no one left who was eligible for military service, and we could no longer send new recruits to replace those who had completed their mandatory two years. What’s more, the constant desertions were taking their toll. Patriotic Military Service (smp) became that decade’s most traumatic element, and it ultimately led to the fsln’s electoral defeat in 1990. There had already been too many deaths. During that campaign, I attended a rally in Malpaisillo that was held in the town plaza in front of the church. While I was there, I received a note asking me to mention a boy from the area who had died in combat the day before. I asked for a minute of silence during my speech, and when I walked off the stage, I told the local activists 192 | CHAPTER 13 that I wanted to visit his mother at her home. They were surprised and advised me against it, but I insisted. The naïve idea that every mother viewed the death of her child in the war as a necessary sacrifice had been disappearing. The activists certainly knew it. They had to do the recruiting and take responsibility for the impact that the deaths were causing in their region, besides trying to win votes. Those were irreconcilable extremes, as the election results would end up demonstrating. The entrance to the humble home was through a yard with a barbed wire fence. It was full of neighbors who stopped talking when they saw me arrive. I found the mother in the kitchen. She was not an elderly woman, but the years of hardship had taken a toll on her, and thin and hunched over, she seemed old. Her reaction was bitter, a strong, painful bitterness. Her other son was studying to be an agricultural technician in Cuba. Without interrupting her work, stoking the fire, moving something from one place to another, she told me that she needed her son to come for the funeral. I tried to explain to her that it was not so easy with so little time, but she would not budge. ‘‘You can do anything,’’ she told me. So I made a promise, and I kept it. The boy came to the funeral, and he stopped by the Government House to thank me before returning to Cuba. That was just one case out of thousands, though. The war itself would prove to be the great electoral adversary, and we could not defeat it with its absences, its separations, its misery, its death, and the inability to imagine its end for the people who suffered under its fatal weight. The first attempts at talks with the Contra Directorate took place in the Dominican Republic in December 1987, and then early in 1988 in Costa Rica and Guatemala. Cardinal Obando acted as the intermediary each time, carrying messages between the two representatives because we still refused to meet face to face. Then again, the Contra Directorate, based in Miami, was not an easy counterpart. Its infighting made its positions less coherent, despite the significant weight that the cia exercised over its members, and the members did not have real influence over the military forces on the ground. Early in March 1988, the Sandinista Popular Army (eps) carried out a massive operation baptized ‘‘Danto 88.’’ It aimed to destroy Contra Headquarters on Honduran soil. Tensions worsened and the United States mobilized the Eighty-Second Airborne Division. With that, we convened SATURN’S JAWS | 193 the un Security Council. Yet it was precisely in that tense climate when the first direct negotiation with the Contra Directorate began...