Dora María Téllez, the guerrilla emblem of the Sandinista revolution that Daniel Ortega keeps isolated in a disciplinary cell

This Tuesday Oscar Téllez saw and heard for the first time her sister who had been isolated for 79 days. She was very thin and pale. She has always been a thin woman, but when he saw her she weighed 12 pounds less. He said that he is in a totally isolated cell. That she gets the sun once a week and that she hasn’t spoken to anyone other than the police who question her every day.

“She was not mistreated, but she is not treated well either, because she is totally isolated like the rest of the political prisoners. They can’t see or talk to each other, ”Téllez said of her sister.

Who is this woman that Daniel Ortega’s regime condemned to prison and solitary confinement?

Dora María Téllez was captured on the morning of Sunday, June 13, in the company of Ana Margarita Vijil, during a police operation worthy of the bankruptcy of a drug gang. From the early hours of the day, drones flew over the farm where the two women were, several patrols besieged the surroundings and finally the police entered with extreme violence. Téllez and Vijil are both members of the opposition political group Unión Democrática Renovadora (Unamos), formerly known as Movimiento de Renovación Sandinista (MRS).

Both were charged with “treason”According to the recently approved Sovereignty Law or 10-55, which the Nicaraguan government uses to imprison opponents.

This weekend, the Ortega regime arrested five members of Unamos, including three who They shared a guerrilla struggle with the dictator and have been politically opposed to him for over 20 years.

Dora María Téllez, 65, is a legendary guerrilla in Nicaragua. At the age of 22, she entered as one of the command chiefs of 25 guerrillas who attacked the National Palace and kidnapped the deputies who gathered there to demand the release of the Sandinista political prisoners. Seven months later, she was the military leader of one of the most important war fronts in the fight against the dictatorship of Anastasio Somoza and during the years of the revolution. was Minister of Health, MP. Since 1977, Dora María Téllez was a person close to Daniel Ortega.

He was born on November 21, 1955 in Matagalpa, a northern and semi-rural town at the time. Coffee from the plantations was carried by mule, and farmers dried the beans in the patios of their own homes. The town’s shops had hooks on the street for their customers to tie up the animals they arrived in.

Those who knew the daughter Dora María at that time remember her as vivacious and unruly. “I was a stupid girl. Restless. To read a lot, and that made me abstract when I read. She was jinca (fool) the mare at school. Very difficult. Very rebellious. At home it was not seen as a problem, but at school it was. Above all, in a school for nuns. She was then vivacious, stupid, sharp, ”she said in an interview for my book The days of Somoza.

His life changed abruptly at the age of 17 when he began his rapprochement, through a friend, with the then underground guerrilla movement Front Sandiniste de Liberation Nationale (FSLN), after having started studies. of Medicine at the University of León, Nicaragua.

In 1975, she left for Cuba to train militarily and in “war surgery”, but the internal conflicts experienced by the Sandinista Front caused her to remain stranded in Mexico for a year and finally arrive in Cuba in mid-1976. A year later she returns to Nicaragua and In a camp on the southern border of Honduras, he meets someone who would be very close and, paradoxically, 44 years later, his jailer: Daniel Ortega Saavedra.

Téllez admitted that in this camp his perception of the revolutionary struggle had completely changed. “At the Front, what I saw were the sacrificial eyes. Here we are going to fight, they are going to kill us and we are not going to see the triumph, that was what was said, but in the Valle del Ángel group there was a spirit of victory ”, he said. -he declares.

From then on, his life will follow the rhythm of vertigo. In October of the same year, he took part in his first fight against the National Guard, in San Fabián, a community near the town of Ocotal, in the north of the country. It would also be the first and only fight in which Daniel Ortega would participate as a guerrilla. She wields an M30 machine gun with which she sweeps a caravan of military vehicles, and Ortega directs operations at an altitude of 300 meters.

At that time, the Sandinista Front was already divided into three groups, and Téllez, due to its situation, was integrated into the “Tercerista” or “Insurrectional” faction led, along with others, by the brothers Humberto and Daniel Ortega.

“Dora María was one of the icons of the act against the previous dictatorship of Anastasio Somoza. She abandoned her medical studies to go underground, and at 22, in 1978, she was the second in command in the takeover of the National Palace, and in charge of negotiations with Somoza for the exchange of more than 60 political prisoners against the deputies of the National Congress retained by the command. A year later, he led the capture of the city of León, block by block, at the head of the guerrilla contingents, and drove the five-star general, military commander of the place, ”, sums up the writer Sergio Ramírez. .

Colombian Gabriel Garcia Marquez tThe young guerrillas did not go unnoticed either. In the chronicle of the capture of the National Palace, he wrote in 1978: “Number ‘Two’, the only woman in command, is twenty-two year old Dora María Téllez, a very beautiful shy and absorbed girl, with an intelligence and good judgment that would have served her for something great in life. She also studied medicine for three years in León. “But I gave up out of frustration,” he says. “It was very sad to care for malnourished children with so much work, so that three months later they returned to the hospital with even more severe malnutrition.” He comes from the Carlos Fonseca Amador North Guerrilla Front. Since January 1976 he had been living in hiding”.

During the Sandinista government in the 1980s, Téllez received the honorary degrees of “guerrilla commander “ and She was vice-president of the Council of State, Minister of Health and deputy. He did not belong to Daniel Ortega’s close circle of friends, but he had a close relationship, both politically and personally. He occasionally did morning exercises with Ortega.

Following the electoral defeat suffered by Daniel Ortega in 1990, the distancing began when the Sandinista Front again split into two tendencies: the so-called “Orthodox” led by Daniel Ortega and who insisted on maintaining the hard line, and the “renovators”, Led by the former vice-president, Sergio Ramírez, who proposed a democratization of the Sandinista party.

Dora María Téllez made lines with Ramírez and other Sandinista dissidents who formed the Movimiento Renovador Sandinista (MRS) party in 1995. Téllez was president of this party, at one time he allied himself with the Sandinista Front, then came the final divorce, his party was banned and she even went on a hunger strike to protest the actions of her former comrades in arms.

He went into hiding again. After the 2018 rebellion, her name became the target of speech by the regime and its supporters who held her responsible for leading the protests. For three years it was kept underground. She did not want to leave the country and her capture on Sunday June 13 took place, according to people close to her, because she decided to let herself be captured. He returned home safe from what would happen, they say.

“This form of (peaceful) struggle is presented as new in the history of a country eternally troubled by civil wars”, explains Sergio Ramírez. “When she was hiding in safe houses during Somoza’s time, Dora María would never have been captured alive. It has happened several times. Solitary guerrillas who faced entire military contingents, and their sacrifice was the example ”.

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