Juan Villoro
Comrades in struggle during the years of exile and the underground, Daniel Ortega and Sergio Ramírez were the architects of the Sandinista movement that put an end to the Somoza family dictatorship in Nicaragua. From 1985 to 1990, Ortega was president and Ramirez vice president of a country devastated by corruption and earthquakes, where vegetation and verses sprouted with the rhythmic impulse of Ruben Dario. In 1990, the Sandinistas lost the elections to Violeta Barrios de Chamorro. The dignified acceptance of defeat was a historic gesture. The revolutionaries set a double example: they had put an end to the dictatorship and accepted a democratic takeover of power.
There may be no two people who know each other as well as Ortega and Ramirez. Nicaragua’s dictator knows that his most uncomfortable witness is his former vice president, and on Wednesday, he had him arrested.
Born in 1942 in Masatepe, Sergio Ramirez is the only Central American writer to have received the Cervantes Prize. At the age of 17, he moved to Leon to study law, and there he discovered that the political temperature burned hotter than the air. On July 23, 1959, he participated in a demonstration against the Somoza dictatorship in which several of his friends died. As he would write years later, it was the most important day of his life: he discovered, with the force of what happens forever, that he was a survivor and decided to change the world in writing and deeds.
In the 1970s, he submitted a book to the Mexican publisher Joaquín Mortiz: Charles Atlas nunca muere (Charles Atlas never dies). The title was reminiscent of the famous bodybuilder who gave muscle-enhancing advice on the back cover of comic books. The deadlines for publishing in Mortiz were so long that the real Charles Atlas died while Ramírez was waiting for the publication. His book appeared as Charles Atlas also dies.
In 1998, he won the first Alfaguara Prize with Margarita, está linda la mar, consolidating a career that has taken him from the political chronicle (Adiós muchachos) to literary gastronomy (A la mesa con Rubén Darío), passing through continuous stops in the novel (from Castigo divino to La fugitiva). He left public office but continued his proselytism in the articles collected in Historias para ser contadas (Stories to be told). Invited to the world’s leading universities, he did not want to leave Nicaragua, where he coordinates, with odd generosity, Centroamérica Cuenta, a space for reflection in which writers dedicate themselves to the fertile art of disagreeing. When tempers flare, Sergio observes the controversy with the calm of someone who has seen major clashes and comments quietly: “This just got interesting”.
A defender of plurality, he has said that culture dies “if we do not learn to see ourselves as the other, to imagine that we are the other”. In the stormy waters of militancy, he understood that nothing is worth as much as diversity.
While he became one of the prominent authors of the language, Ortega conceived only one idea: to return to power. He achieved it by legitimate means in 2007. Ramirez then wrote a text entitled “Caminos que se bifurcan” (Paths that split), in which he acknowledged the triumph of his former friend and posed a dilemma: it could serve to exercise a democratic government or to perpetuate himself in power. We know what happened: Ortega became an autocrat.
In a country where fifty percent of the population lives on less than a dollar a day, Ortega travels in a chartered plane that costs four thousand dollars per hour of flight. Ramirez documented this, and in another article, he reported that Nicaragua’s eloquence, decisive for modernist poetry, is also embodied in a rich language of signs. One of the best-known consists of placing two fingers on the wrist, which alludes to the President’s gold Rolex.
Ortega’s office is presided over by a painting of a hand with an eye in the palm. Increasingly esoteric, the dictator is defined by that vigilant gaze.
When he was in Geneva, Sergio Ramirez visited the Reading Society and noticed a motto written on a door frame: Timeo hominem unius libri (I fear the man of one book). Attributed to St. Thomas Aquinas, the phrase is the best critique of single thinking.
Daniel Ortega has resorted to the vain attempt to arrest intelligence.
The ideas of Sergio Ramirez are still at large.
This was originally published in Spanish on September 10, 2021, by Reforma.