From Ojalá
Mónica Baltodano was a guerrilla commander in Nicaragua’s Sandinista National Liberation Front (FSLN) and participated in the country’s 1979 Revolution. She has a powerful presence and a gentle demeanor, she speaks quietly and with conviction. She describes herself as “in love with popular power.”
Baltodano joined the FSLN in 1972 and, in 1974, she went underground and participated clandestinely in the armed struggle. Five years later, when the Sandinistas triumphed over dictator Anastasio Somoza, she was named a “guerrilla commander” of the FSLN. She worked on building the revolutionary state in the 1980s and won election to Managua’s city council in 1990 and to congress in 1994. She also wrote a four-volume history of the Sandinista struggle.
Voters ousted the Sandinistas from government in 1990. For Baltodano, this was less a consequence of the failures of the young militants then running for office than of Ronald Reagan’s support for the Contras, the right-wing opposition. But scandals, such as the Piñata Sandinista affair in which party leaders—including Daniel Ortega—took for themselves properties and goods acquired through expropriation when they left office, created a legitimacy crisis for the FSLN.
“When Eduardo Galeano learned about all of that, he said that he was surprised that young people who had once been willing to die for the cause now lived in terror of losing what they’d acquired,” Baltodano told me over lunch in Quito, Ecuador in October. By the 1990s, Ortega, she said, was using social organizations focused on land reclamation to consolidate his power and wealth, creating what she calls a “red and black bourgeoisie” (these are the colors of Sandinismo).
She participated in the massive uprisings in 2018, during which police and paramilitaries killed at least 355 people. Over the following years, smaller protests have continued despite the fact that authorities have annulled the freedom of speech and assembly. Baltodano fled Nicaragua clandestinely in August 2021.
Her commitment to her ideals has never wavered and she continues fighting for her country, though today she does so from exile in Costa Rica. She is one of nearly 500 Nicaraguans whom the Ortega regime formally stripped of their nationality.
This fall I had the chance to sit down with Baltodano in a café bursting with leafy plants. Our conversation has been translated and edited for length and clarity.
Dawn Marie Paley is an investigative journalist interested in the confluence of neoliberalism, organized crime and violence.
This interview first appeared in Ojalá.