The Fall of Somoza
This time, the fall of Anastasio Somoza seems inevitable and imminent. It will likely have happened already by the time this article is published. It is an event that can only produce joy and relief around the world, since it embodies a satrapy that has been one of the most abject in a story that, as is well known, is full of them. Somoza’s dictatorship was already an anachronism in our day, full as it is of institutional and ideological dictatorships, a somber manifestation of modernity firmly rooted in Latin America, as can be seen with a quick glance, for example, at the Southern Cone. The regimes of a Pinochet and a Videla, of the Uruguayan military or that which was presided over by Banzer in Bolivia, are of a different nature than those of the “brutal caudillos” described by Alcides Arguedas and Francisco García Calderón and who gave the shameful image of our countries to the rest of the world as little republics governed by gunmen. The institutional and ideological dictatorships are not, incidentally, less bloody or less prone to corruption (inseparable from any system made immune to criticism) than the folkloric ones.
The difference is that they commit their crimes in the name of a philosophy, of a social and economic project they seek to carry out, albeit through fire and blood.
Somoza’s regime has been more rudimentary, less brutal and abstract, than the technological dictatorship of our time: its troglodyte predecessor. It belongs to that variety of whose prototypes were a Trujillo, a Papa Doc, a Pérez Jiménez, and of which we still see a Stroessner and a Baby Doc. In other words, individual dictatorship, the crooked, uniformed kind, lacking in pretensions and historical alibis, whose motives are simple and clear: stay in power by any means and ransack the country until it is bled dry.
The New York Times estimates that the Somoza family fortune in land, agrarian, maritime, commercial, and urban businesses, in Nicaragua, amounts to about five hundred million dollars. It’s not bad at all, as an operation, if you consider that the country is one of the poorest on the planet, that without a doubt the family has a similar amount in safekeeping abroad, and that the first one in the dynasty to take power—Tacho Somoza, the current Somoza’s father—was a poor devil half a century ago, scraping by in the picturesque job of latrine inspector in Managua, something that earned him the pompous nickname “Toilet Marshal.”
The history of the dynasty follows a model that has turned out to be classic. Like Trujillo in the Dominican Republic, Tacho Somoza began his political career in the shadow of U.S. military intervention, serving first as a translator for the Marines, and later as an officer and head of the National Guard, created by the occupying forces to implement the policy they imposed on Nicaragua. Somoza the elder was a diligent executor of this policy and his first notable exploit consisted of the treacherous murder of Sandino, when the latter had agreed to disarm the forces with which he confronted, over the course of six years, the occupying troops. Shortly after, in 1936, he deposed President Juan Bautista Sacasa and, in grotesquely rigged elections, was elected in his place. From then until 1956, when he was assassinated by four bullets at a dance, Tacho Somoza was the absolute lord of lives and ranches, and he used those twenty years, relentlessly, to tyrannize the former and take over the latter. His heirs—Luis, for a period of eleven years, and Anastasio, from 1967 until now—were worthy followers of his villainous acts and, besides holding power, they continued to increase the family’s spoils.
The responsibility of the United States in the martyrdom that almost half a century of Somozas has represented for Nicaragua should not be downplayed by those who, like this writer, want democratic regimes for Latin American countries, based on elections, in which political parties and freedom of the press are respected. Washington’s policies vis-à-vis Nicaragua were exceptionally petty and obtuse. Satisfied with their ally, who supported them unquestioningly in international bodies, seven U.S. presidents—three Republicans and four Democrats—maintained a friendship with the Somozas, to whom, in exchange for obsequiousness, they lent financial assistance, whom they armed, decorated, and even educated at West Point (of which the current Anastasio and one of his sons are graduates). In those same years, by contrast, Washington broke the nonintervention principle—which was respected to Somoza’s favor—by intervening in Guatemala, in 1954, to depose the Arbenz government, and in the Dominican Republic, in 1965, to squash the popular uprising against the military dictatorship that overthrew Juan Bosch. These policies were petty because they placed the advantage of a guaranteed vote in the United Nations on all matters and the certainty that, in that country, the interests of a few U.S. companies would not be affected above the interests of a people tormented by a regime of malfeasants above basic norms of justice and ethics. And it was obtuse because when you roll around in the mud, sooner or later you end up dirty. And that’s what has happened to Washington in Nicaragua.
The true interests of the U.S. people do not consist of having henchmen of Somoza stock, tyrants hated by their people, who, logically, will extend this hate to anyone associated with their goons, but rather in fomenting the establishment of regimes that put into practice the principles of freedom, tolerance, equality, and representation enshrined in the Constitution of the United States. Governments in this spirit that truly represent their people are the only efficient alternative to the proliferation of Marxist theses, for whom tyrannies turn out to be excellent breeding grounds. These governments need to be treated as equals, respected in their decisions, listened to. But Washington has almost always preferred a servile gorilla to a sovereign and democratic ally.
The Somoza regime would’ve fallen long ago, as desired by the overwhelming majority of Nicaraguans, without the damages of this civil war, if the United States had, simply, withheld the financial, diplomatic, and military support that served to sustain it. For many years now, the country’s finest men tried again and again to replace the tyranny with a civilized regime and they never had the support Washington gave to those—Tacho, Luis, or Anastasio—who imprisoned them, exiled them, or—in the case of the journalist Pedro Joaquín Chamorro—murdered them. Now it’s true, what could have been done with help from the United States has been done by the Nicaraguan people on their own (and, clearly, with the help of other countries), and it is not strange that many of the combatants who defeated tyranny believe that they have also defeated those who supported it and whom it served. It is not difficult to piece together the political consequences of this.
What will happen to Nicaragua with the fall of the dictatorship? The Frente Sandinista de Liberación Nacional is an alliance of many, with tendencies spanning from liberal and social democratic to different variations of Marxism, and it is obvious that, once the dictatorship has been defeated, a goal that made possible their union, these different options could battle with one another and perhaps enter into open conflict. In the end, once again, these will be reduced to the inevitable alternative of all people who free themselves of their gorillas: authoritarian socialism or representative democracy. What we can say at least is that, with its policies, the United States has made the task extremely difficult for Nicaraguans to defend the second option. And it has facilitated the work of those who will maintain that the only true defense against imperialism and the quickest way to reconstruct a country flattened by tyranny is the Soviet, Chinese, or Cuban model.
In any event, the important thing is that the Nicaraguan people—with all freedoms—be the ones to decide what to do with their country, the way to heal its wounds, and how to undertake the enormous task of defeating the still lingering beasts: hunger, ignorance, unemployment, inequality. Its decision, whatever it may be, must be respected by others, starting with Washington.
Even more disastrous than the mistake of having supported the Somozas for forty-three years would be, in the interest of freedom and democracy on the continent, for the United States to once again give in to the temptation of intervening militarily in Nicaragua to impose a custom solution of its own, in other words, a new Somoza …
Madrid, July 1979
Toward a Totalitarian Peru
The decision by Alan García’s government to nationalize banks, insurance, and financial companies is the most important step taken in Peru to keep this country underdeveloped and in poverty, and to ensure that the incipient democracy it has been enjoying since 1980, rather than perfecting, devolves, becoming a lie.
According to the regime’s reasons for this divestment, which will turn the state into the owner of credits and insurance, and allow the state to use the shares of the nationalized entities to extend its tentacles through innumerable private industries and businesses, it is being carried out to transfer those companies from “a group of bankers to the Nation,” and begs the response: “That is demagoguery and lies.” This is the truth. Those companies are seized—against the letter and spirit of the Constitution, which guarantees property and economic pluralism and prohibits monopolies—from those who created and developed them, to be entrusted to bureaucrats who, at some point, as happens with all bureaucracies of all underdeveloped countries without a single exception, will manage them for their own gains and those of the political power under whose shadow they operate.
In all underdeveloped countries, like in all totalitarian countries, the distinction between the state and the government is a legal mirage. It is a reality only in advanced democracies. In those countries, the laws and constitutions, as well as official rhetoric, aim to separate them. In practice, they are as interchangeable as two drops of water. Those who hold positions of government take over the state and use its resources at will. What better proof than that of the famous Sinacoso (Sistema Nacional de Comunicación Social/National Social Communication System), built by the military dictatorship and, since then, a docile ventriloquist for the governments that have followed? Does that chain of radio stations, newspapers, and television stations by chance in any way speak directly to the state, in other words, to all Peruvians? No. That media publicizes, flatters, and manipulates information exclusively in favor of those who govern, colossally ignorant of what the rest of Peru thinks and believes.
The inefficiency and immorality accompanying them, as a twin, to the state takeovers and nationalizations mainly come from the servile dependence in which the company transferred to the public sector finds itself in political power. We Peruvians know it all too well since the time of Velasco’s dictatorship, which, betraying the reforms we all longed for, through expropriations and confiscations, managed to break industries—such as fishing, cement, or sugar mills—that had reached a level of notable efficiency, and made us importers of even the potatoes that our industrious ancestors created to the world’s joy. Extending the public sector from fewer than 10 to almost 170 companies, the dictatorship—alleging, as justification, “social justice”—increased poverty and inequality and gave an irresistible boost to the practice of bribery and illicit business. Both have proliferated since then like a cancer, becoming the greatest obstacle to the creation of wealth in our country.
This is the model that President Garcia has made his brand on our economy, with the nationalization of banks, insurance, and financial companies, a level of state control that places us immediately after Cuba and almost on a par with Nicaragua. It is clear that I have not forgotten that, in contrast to General Velasco, Alan García is a legitimately elected leader at the polls. But I have not forgotten, either, that Peruvians elected him, overwhelmingly, as we are aware, so that he would consolidate our political democracy with social reforms; not so that he would make a quasi-socialist “revolution” that would do away with it.
For there is no democracy that could survive with such an exorbitant accumulation of economic power in the hands of political power. Just ask the Mexicans, where a nationalization law will grant the American Popular Revolutionary Alliance (APRA) government vast control over the public sector if approved.
Its first victim will be freedom of expression. The government will not need to proceed as Velasco did, attacking, gun in hand, newspapers and radio and television stations, although we cannot rule it out: we have already confirmed that their promises are gone with the wind, like feathers, echoes … Converted into the country’s premier announcer, it will be enough for it to blackmail them with advertisements. Or, to bring them to their knees, to close off the lines of credit without which no company can operate. There is no doubt that faced with the prospect of dying of consumption, many in the media will choose silence or submission; the dignified will perish. And when criticism disappears from public life, the full-throttle congenital vocation of growing and becoming eternal has the means to become reality. Once again, the ignored silhouette of the “philanthropic ogre” (as Octavio Paz has called the PRI) can be made out on the Peruvian horizon.
The progress of a country consists in the extension of property and freedom to the greatest number of citizens and in the strengthening of the rules of the game—legality and customs—that value effort and talent; stimulate responsibility, initiative, and honesty; and penalize parasitism, rentierism, apathy, and immorality. All of this is incompatible with a multiheaded state in which the main actor in economic activity is the government official instead of the businessman and the worker; and where, in the majority of its fields, competition has been replaced by a monopoly. A state of this kind is demoralizing, crushes any business initiative, and makes the traffic of influence and professional favors more desirable and profitable. This is the path that has led so many third-world countries to drown in stagnation and to turn into ferocious satrapies.
Peru is still far from this, fortunately. But measures such as the one I criticize could catapult us in this direction. We must say so loudly so that the poor—who will be its scapegoats—hear us and try to prevent it through all of the legal means within our reach. Without being frightened by the tirades launched currently against government critics by mercenaries in the press or by “the masses” that the APRA party, speaking through its secretary-general, threatens to bring to the streets to intimidate those of us who protest. Both things disquietingly foreshadow what will happen in our country if the government concentrates absolute economic power in its hands, which is always the first step toward political absolutism.
As citizens, institutions, and democratic parties, we should try to avoid letting our country—which already suffers so many misfortunes—become a pseudo-democracy led by incompetent bureaucrats where only corruption will prosper.
Lima, August 1987
Copyright © 2009 by Mario Vargas Llosa
Translation copyright © 2018 by Anna Kushner
