Holidays in Hell: In Which Our Intrepid Reporter Travels to the World's Worst Places and Asks, "What's Funny About This" (35 page)

We sat in a drab and cluttered boardroom. An ancient,
wounded air conditioner sputtered and 40-watt light bulbs winked
as Managua underwent its daily electricity shortage.

Hernandez and his commissioners presented us with a neatly
organized horror of figures and cases. The Commission has been
tallying about one hundred and thirty "severe violations of human
rights" per month. Each complainant must provide identification
and be fingerprinted and otherwise get serious about his or her
allegations. The commission estimated there were about seven
thousand political prisoners in the country not counting between
thirty-five hundred and forty-five hundred former members of the
Somoza National Guard, mostly enlisted men serving jail sentences
of up to thirty years for having backed the wrong horse.

According to Hernandez, most of the political prisoners are
campesinos accused of giving some kind of aid and comfort to the contras. "Attempts against the state" is the cover-all charge. The
campesinos are usually grabbed by the military and always handed
over to the DGST, which stands for "General Department of State
Security," just as KGB stands for "Committee of State Security"another one of those commie fashion statements. The prisoners are
held incommunicado under less than delightful conditions and
interrogated with the usual Latin American light touch. So far, said
Hernandez, only one political prisoner, the head of a labor union,
had failed to sign a confession. Not bad, out of seven thousand.

After confession and about nine months of waiting around in
jails without counsel, the guilty parties are tried by a "People's
Anti-Somoza Tribunal," made up of two Sandinista-block committee members and one lawyer from the Sandinista lawyer's association. The regular Nicaraguan court system has no jurisdiction over
these trials. No copies of charges or confessions are made available
to lawyers, press or defendants. "If a person is under control of
State Security, all we can do is ask and wait," said Hernandez.

"And despair," piped in another member of the Commission.

The StaffDel scribbled furiously, taking down names and
numbers, probing each statement, asking for more precise translations. I doodled. I was drawing little pictures of mobile homes. It
must have been something subconscious to do with "workers' paradise." I was drawing the workers paradise we have back in the
States-cars up on blocks and broken toys in the crabgrass and a
nasty dog chained to the satellite dish. These workers' paradise
things just never seem to pan out.

Hernandez and the Commission members looked exhausted.
Hernandez himself had just gotten out of jail, where he'd been put
for observing an anti-Sandinista protest. Maybe they were all lying.
But to what end I can't imagine. All sorts of other lies are available
that would be easier and more profitable to tell.

After the Permanent Commission of Human Rights began
reporting Sandinista human-rights violations, the Sandinistas set
up their own human-rights commission, the National Commission
for Protection and Promotion of Human Rights, the CNPPDH. One
of its members is a U.S. nun, from the Agnesian order, named
Mary Hartman. She has spent twenty-five years in Nicaragua and
bears no resemblance to the character once played by Louise
Lasser.

Sister Mary Hartman, carrying a large Souvenir of Cuba key
ring, ushered us into the CNPPDH headquarters, which looked
like it had once been someone's middle-class house. The walls
were decorated with Sandinista slogans. "I want this to be a
dialogue," Hartman said and then didn't shut up for forty-five
minutes. She was an intense, fidgeting, tall and alarmingly skinny
woman with hatchet face and lantern jaw. She spoke against the
United States with considerable venom, tacking a disconcerting
little north woods "huh?" to the end of each sentence. "..
violators of international law, huh?"

One of the StaffDel members asked Mary Hartman about the
unusually high rate of confessions among prisoners appearing
before the People's Anti-Somoza Tribunals. Hartman said it was
only 95 percent. "I don't find that surprising," she said. "Because
they were captured, huh?"

"You mean," said the staffer, "that because the government
has them in custody, it stands to reason that they're guilty?"

Hartman answered by saying there are only fourteen thousand
contras. Six thousand of them are ex-Somoza National Guardsmen,
and the rest are "kidnapped or fled and then were somehow
convinced to fight or something."

"This afternoon," said Jim Denton, "we're going to talk to a
group called Mothers of Political Prisoners."

Mary Hartman said the group was funded with U.S. money
and that many of the mothers were not women of good character and
that they had been bribed "with things like Camel cigarettes,
huh?"

"No doubt you've investigated hundreds, if not thousands of
these cases," said Jim. Hartman nodded vigorously. "Could you
give us specific cases where the mothers had been bribed or were
otherwise found to be untrustworthy?"

Hartman said she could, she certainly could.

"Well . . ." said Denton.

"I don't have the files right with me, huh?"

"If you could give us just one or two specific cases, even just
the names," said Jim. "That way we'll be able to respond to these
women this afternoon, when they complain to us about how their
chidren are being treated."

"I've investigated many, many of these cases," said Hartman.

"Actually," said Denton, "just one would do."

"Why, yes, I have one right here," Hartman looked at a pile of
file folders on a desk and pulled one off the top. She searched
through it, but it seemed to be the wrong file. "Nicaragua has an
excellent record on speech, assembly and property rights, huh?"
she said.

"But could you give us one example of unreliable or suspect
testimony from one of the members of the Mothers group?" said
Denton.

Hartman's eyes darted momentarily to the spot where she'd
laid her souvenir key ring. "I can't right now, huh?" she said. "My
office is locked."

The StaffDel members had never seen a whole bunch of
Mothers of Political Prisoners before, which group-as such groups
usually do-also included wives, girlfriends, sisters, grandmas
and diaperless, dirty-faced, crying infant children of Political
Prisoners. It wasn't something that exactly brightened the StaffDel's
day. Or mine. I peeked at this angry, indignant and impoverished
assemblage and slid for the door. There is a certain look these
women have-a mix of love lost and one atom of hope that you,
because you're an American and clean and well-fed and rich, can
somehow help. They are all over the world, those ladies, in South
Africa, the Middle East, Indochina, Russia, Northern Ireland,
Cuba, Chile-all bearing the same expression and all coming at
you singly or in groups, publicly or on the sly, as the political
climate of the time and the place allow. What possible damned
thing can you say to them? The only real answer would be to load
up and start shooting dictators, juntas, ayatollahs, politicians and,
of course, every communist you can get in your peep sights because the commies are the top-seeded players in the twentieth
century political prisoners cup match. But the Congress of the
United States doesn't approve of anybody doing this sort of thing
anymore, especially not when accompanying a congressional staff
delegation and, besides, I didn't have a gun.

The StaffDel emerged from the Glum Mums confab looking
like they'd been in an emotional Cuisinart. From there we were all
stampeded into a meeting with the anti-Sandinista civil opposition.
Actually, in our thirty-six hours in-country, we met with three
groups of opposition politicians plus an opposition priest and an editor from the muffled opposition newspaper. After the real
human-rights commission and the other human-rights commission
and the mothers and the general mess in the streets, we should
have been ripe for propaganda picking. We should have come back
to the States loudly parroting the opposition line. The trouble is, I
don't think any of us can remember what it was, not even the most
dutiful of the note-takers. My own notes from the civil opposition
meetings look like one of those cocktail napkins where you've
written a drunken, coked-up, middle-of-the-night, brilliant movie
idea. "Fr last 150 yrs Nic sit. nt ben conumdrs t. Nic people
advismisng any po1. stabil," I have one opposition figure stating.
These guys were so boring that I'm amazed they haven't all been
hired as George Bush speech writers.

Each member of the opposition had a long rhetorical set piece
blaming all of Nicaragua's past troubles on American intervention
and all of Nicaragua's present troubles on a lack of it. This was
always followed by a detailed account of the quarreling and infighting among the opposition parties, which seem to divide and multiply faster than salmonella bacteria in warm tuna salad-Liberals,
Liberals With Hats, Christian Democrats Under 59", Conservatives Who Sing In The Shower, etc., etc., etc. Only the priest
was amusing. He talked about S. Brian Wilson, the U. S. peace
activist who got run over by a munitions train. "I wish the peace
groups in the United States would also demonstrate in Red
Square," said the priest, "and see if they don't run a train through
there."

At least the priest had been an anti-Somoza fighter. He had a
couple big scars across his skull, courtesy of Somoza's National
Guard. The Sandys did fight Somoza. You can't take that away from
them. After forty-five years of the Somoza family's sordid bloodsucking and murderous buffoonery, it was the Sandinista front, not
the civil opposition, who pulled the plug. And in 1980, when
Anastasio Somoza had bolted and was living the life of a rich swine
in Paraguay, it was probably a Sandinista operative who put a
bazooka shell through the window of his armor-plated Mercedes
limousine and sent the fat bastard to hell in small pieces. But it's
one thing to burn down the shit house and another thing entirely to
install plumbing.

The real argument against the Sandinistas isn't made by the civil opposition or the human-rights do-gooders, much less by the
contras or Ollie North or the Great Communicator his own dumb
self. The real argument is made by invisible chickens. There are no
chickens, no chickens at all in the Eastern market, the largest
market in Managua.

It doesn't matter what kind of awfulness happens in Latin
America-and practically every kind of awfulness does-there are
always chickens. No Peruvian mountain village is so poor that you
can drive through it without running over a chicken. No Mexico
City slum is so urban but dawn comes in with rooster crows as loud
as Los Lobos live in your breakfast nook. No oppression is so
thoroughgoing that there's not a cockfight on Sunday with the loser
fried up, muy gusto!, with the feet still on. But there were no
chickens in Managua.

And there was plenty of nothing else besides. In the vast
market sheds, the government-allotted stalls with governmentdetermined prices were empty. In the spaces between the sheds
vendors had set up illegally with scanty piles of bruised fruit and
little heaps of rice and maize. Every now and then, the vendors
said, officials from the Interior Ministry cleared them out. For
misunderstanding the Labor Theory of Value chapter in Das Ka-
pital, I guess. Some people had tried to make something, anything,
to sell-crude kitchen utensils pounded out of old tin, charcoal
braizers made from cut-down mortar-shell cases, lumpy toys
hacked from palm wood and pathetic clay whistles in the shape of
birds, colored with something cheap and greasy that came off on
my hands. Others displayed rags and old clothes that might as well
have been rags. Many black marketeers really had nothing for sale.
Spread on the ground in front of them would be a dozen washers,
some screws and a broken light socket. Yet there was plenty of
money visible, fists-full of bank notes, which the dispirited crowd
handled like so much toilet paper. I take that back. There's a
shortage of toilet paper.

A pretty teenage girl asked me to marry her without seeing my
face. (Of course, somebody has pointed out that that's the only way
a pretty girl would ask me to marry her, but even so . . . . ) I had
my thumbs hooked in the back pockets of my jeans, and the girl
came up behind me, tapped the little crown trademark on my budget-model Rolex and asked our translator, "Will this guy marry
me?" A little later I got a rotten onion thrown at me. I wheeled
around, but there was nothing to see except a crowd of impassive
faces.

"What was that about?" I asked the translator.

"Oh," he said, "somebody thought you were an Interna-
cionalista, one of those Americans or Europeans who come down
here to help the Sandys."

If Manauga had been gloomy by night, it was positively
funereal in the sunshine. There were more of the orderly, silent
lines-one outside every store. The soldiers had caught that People's Republic trick of going zany when anyone takes out a camera.
"Prohibido! Prohibido!" yelled some AK-waving dork when one of
the StaffDel tried to take a picture of a tree in the Parco Central.

I didn't think you could wreck a Central American country. I
thought they came prewrecked from the time of the fall of classical
Mayan civilization in 900 A. D. I didn't think you could make things
any more depressing than they are in, say, El Salvador or the slums
of Colon, Panama. But the Sandinistas had done it. And the
Nicaraguans were losing that big, rude, cynical Latin American
laugh. They were starting to get the dry humor of perfect despair
that the Poles and Czechs and Russians have. We would pass by a
burned-out factory, and our driver would say, with deadpan face,
"This belongs to the people now."

I decided I could learn something from the Russians myself.
The Russians have been dealing with communism longer than
anybody else, and they know what to do in the face of it. They get
shellacked.