Gioconda Belli: “Daniel Ortega and Rosario Murillo are two unbalanced people who have lost all rationality”

Writer Gioconda Belli considers that Daniel Ortega and Rosario Murillo, President and Vice-President of Nicaragua, “they are two unbalanced people” and “this loss of rationality “with the power they wield makes them dangerous, even to themselves.”

Last month, the Nicaraguan regime unleashed a wave of repression that took 19 opponents to prison, including five personalities who had expressed their intention to run for the presidency of the country. Arrests usually occur with raids, without an arrest warrant, at night, and on charges of “money laundering” and “treason”.

Gioconda’s brother Humberto Belli avoided being detained at number 20 when he fled the country after an arrest warrant was issued against him.

Gioconda Belli, 72, poet and novelist, has been translated into several languages ​​and is the author of novels such as Sophie of Omens (1990), The land of women (2010) and Memory fevers (2018), among others. During the 1970s, she was tried and sentenced by the dictatorship of Anastasio Somoza Debayle, for her relations with the guerrillas of the Sandinista Front. The impending capture led her to flee the country and go into exile, where she coincided with who was then her friend and also a poet: Rosario Murillo.

Belli, a critical voice for the Ortega and Murillo regime, is in the United States and spoke by phone with Infobae analyze the situation in Nicaragua and talk about her personal plans in the face of the possibility, she said, of being arrested like other Nicaraguan opponents.

-Are you afraid of being arrested?

-Yes of course yes. Because I will not be afraid to see the arbitrary way in which they hold people.

– What is your situation at the moment? Are you in exile?

-I left Nicaragua in May because I was coming to see my daughters who live in the United States and I was planning to come back in July. Now I’m going to calculate my risks to see if I come back or not, but I haven’t considered going into exile yet. I don’t even want to imagine it.

-You were already exiled.

-Yes. During the Somocismo, I was sentenced by a military court to seven years in prison, but I managed to get out before they caught me.

– I understand that in this exile he coincided with Rosario Murillo, with whom he had a friendship. In recent years, have you had any contact with her?

-No, I am not friends with Rosario Murillo because during the revolution, when I was in the Sandinista Association of Cultural Workers, I had a lot of problems with her and I realized that she was a person unscrupulous, that she was able to do anything to achieve what she wanted. And since then, I no longer have any relationship with her.

-And knowing her as you know her, could you tell her about these problems?

-Not. She has already lost the ability to converse with anyone who thinks differently from her. Because he’s totally fanatic. You have no capacity for empathy, you cannot see someone else’s point of view.

-How do you explain what is happening in Nicaragua?

-They created a big lie to justify everything that happened in April 2018. They have a speech for their people, because I don’t think anyone else in the world believes them. Daniel Ortega’s speech is pathetic. He wants to situate himself as in another cold war, because it is his memory of being important and heroic, according to him, and he wants to reproduce a similar situation again, because in this situation he feels comfortable. He loves to feel like “the rooster in the wild”. I believe that the Nicaraguan people must understand that we are going to suffer because this man calls on Nicaragua to all international sanctions. I think the economic situation will deteriorate. There will come a time when the same survival situation will make the Nicaraguan people decide whether they want to continue with Ortega or prefer to risk it to end this dictatorship.

– One of the justifications that the Daniel Ortega regime has invoked to explain the arrests it made is that a “coup”, as they call it, is in preparation, similar to that of 2018.

-Yes, that’s the big lie. How is it going to be a coup if these people who stop publicly express their desire to participate in the elections? Who is going to conspire at the same time as he wants to participate in an election? It does not mean anything. They know it’s a lie.

– What do you think is the logic behind these arrests? They are well-known people, very much in the media, even his brother, Humberto, fled the country not to be arrested.

-It is a logic of brutal power. Say that there is no one here except that we fall on them, and we will fall with all our might; We have on our side the force of arms and the legal instruments which we wield at will to leave them imprisoned as long as we want and with the charges as we want.

-It turned out recently that Nicaragua asked for more weapons from Russia. Do you see this as linked or foreign to the wave of repression the country is experiencing?

-It’s a trellis. Daniel Ortega wants to become like the one who challenges the United States. He says he is with Iran, with China, with North Korea, that everyone has the right to have atomic weapons. A crazy speech. I see these two crazy people. They have already lost all sense of rationality. And of course, who has such power and loses the sense of rationality is dangerous. For themselves, it is dangerous. And for Nicaragua, it is extremely dangerous. For all of us who oppose it, it is dangerous.

-Do you see the end of Ortega and Murillo’s regime or the beginning of a more difficult stage of their dictatorship?

-Both. They will be harder because they feel weaker. It is precisely for this reason that I do not think that with this they will become stronger. Its base of support is shrinking. Since they no longer have the power of popularity, they want to replace it with the power of weapons and threats. And that in the end, the bill will come to them.

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