1 September 1974
Managua, Nicaragua
Pablo Diaz Cardenal, motorcycle mechanic and resident of Barrio El Riguero, was exhausted. Despite the declaration from the Junta that Election Day would be a national holiday, he had woken up early and hauled his ass to the garage. Whatever the government said, he needed to eat, and his kids needed new shoes for the winter. So, like every day around 4pm, Pablo felt deader than a false Lazarus, although with a certain sense of satisfaction.
The same thing could be said about the country. The previous two years had been grueling. The Managua earthquake had only been the beginning. For Pablo, the quake had meant a speedy exit from the family home; fortunately, no one was hurt, and flimsy corrugated iron and wood structures weren’t all that difficult to dig through for valuables, so the family hadn’t lost much. In the days afterward though, the shock of a natural disaster had turned to anger. The politicians and their cronies, the National Guard and the police, even the Church here and there had wrung every last drop of profit out of the gringos’ generosity before tossing it to the people like a bone to a dog. Even then, what had been sent was often unusable. A well-meaning Canadian church group, for example, had sent a dozen crates full of thick winter coats, useless in the sweltering Nicaraguan air.
In those days, when it seemed like they had nothing left to lose, Pablo had joined the protests. Masses of angry, cursing people stormed the city center, men, women and children all screaming for bread and justice and order. Fernando Agüero, the stiff, doddering chairman of the so-called Liberal-Conservative Junta and the de-facto President, had attempted to address the people. Instead, he was faced with hurled garbage and rocks. That particular protest had escalated into a riot. Domingo Negro, as it was called, left fifty people dead and the city in an even greater shambles than before. Pablo, who fortunately for his family had skipped that eventful day’s demonstrations, was almost relieved when Agüero resigned in favour of General Montiel and the mixed civilian-military Emergency Junta of National Reconstruction. At least the colonels would know how to keep the peace.
Montiel was not much better that his predecessors. The Somozas, busy with their own little family intrigues between Tachito’s boy Anastasio and his brother-in-law, Foreign Minister Guillermo Sacasa, still had time to interfere with the country’s politics. Each time one of them made a proclamation or wrote a newspaper editorial, politicians would fall all over themselves to praise their ‘wisdom’ or denounce their idiocy. Montiel was a lame duck from the moment he stepped into office. Meanwhile, the Sandinistas only grew and grew, issuing communiqués from their mountain hideouts and raiding National Guard posts. Montiel tried to play up his low origins and act the populist, promising land reforms that never quite came and handing out free flour and cooking oil to the needy.
All the chaos made sure that the economy, tanking ever since the earthquake, never quite woke up again. The government, desperate for funds after international aid in the wake of the disaster, began to print money. Pablo saw the price of fuel first double, then triple, then go up by a factor of ten. He lost count after that. Abigail, his wife and moral compass, had a surprisingly good business sense; she had exchanged the
córdobas they kept under the mattress for American dollars only a week before the inflation really kicked off. Pablo had heard rumors that, during the worst of it, the government had stopped printing new bills, instead just stamping extra zeroes onto old ones collected in the garbage.
All that, and the humiliating end to the drawn-out hostage situation at the American ambassador’s house, left Montiel in a tough position. While he had flirted with running on his own ticket for the Presidency, Montiel instead ruled himself out, pledging ‘strict neutrality for the Nicaraguan security forces’. So, now, there was an election, the first free election in Nicaraguan history, almost by accident.
The line was moving slowly. Pablo guessed that they had nowhere near enough clerks for the polling station Too many of the college students had run off to the hills to fight, and many of the rest were campaigning for one party or another. That left too few educated people to run an election properly, even with the gringos and blue-hatted UN personnel lending a hand. Pablo spotted the olive-drab hats of the National Guard standing outside the polling station; while the UN had thrown a fit about their involvement, too many of the leftist splinter groups had boycotted the proceedings and threatened violence, as had the young Anastasio Somoza Portocarrero after he had been disqualified from competing, for the elections to go unprotected. Surely, some arm-twisting by the United States helped as well.
After what seemed like an eternity, Pablo reached the front of the line. He handed over his voting card to the aging clerk, who checked his name off of a list and dunked his finger in purple ink. He then smiled and handed Pablo a ballot, which appeared several pages long. The clerk jerked his head towards an empty voting booth, and Pablo walked in.
Who to vote for? Before today, Pablo had never had to ask himself that question. There were seventeen choices alone for President, although everyone knew it came down to two serious candidates. Sacasa was running on the Nationalist Liberal ticket, promising a return to ‘freedom, prosperity and order’. No one believed him, but there were plenty of
Somocistas around the country, all of who had a vested interest in the family staying in charge. On the other side was Pedro Chamorro Cardenal. From a long line of Conservative bigwigs, Chamorro had run
La Prensa, Managua’s largest daily newspaper, for twenty years. For that whole time, he had resisted the Somoza regime, calling for real democracy and reform. While he was no Communist, and the Left had remained formally neutral, many of the more moderate activists had fallen behind Chamorro as a man who could make real change happen.
Pablo thought for a long time. Eventually, he decided, marking his ballot based on the most important question he could think of: what would his wife do?
Stuffing the paper into the ballot box felt good. Pablo smiled.
Freedom felt good.
3 September 1974
Managua, Nicaragua
The old ambassador’s residence was quite modest, thought Colonel Donaldo Humberto Frixote. Had he been the representative of the most powerful country in the world, now with thousands of planes, tens of thousands of tanks, and thermonuclear fire at its fingertips, he would have asked for something grander. Instead, the dwelling was only two stories, made of simple, understated stucco. A wrought-iron gate and fence proved little barrier to entry: the guards outside, clearly former Marines by their demeanor if not their unmarked khaki fatigues and Israeli submachine guns, let Humberto pass without so much as a glance at his papers. Humberto knocked on the door three times. A few moments later, it swung open, revealing another plainclothes Marine. The man looked the General up and down before jerking his head to the right.
Humberto strode through the doorway, and entered the house. Its exterior modesty matched the interior, a modest splendor fit for a well-to-do lawyer or successful urban merchant, not the Ambassador of the United States. Perhaps the residence, disused since the construction of a real embassy compound, had been built for a different time and a different America.
Humberto, lost in his thoughts for a moment, was almost shocked to hear a familiar voice. “Colonel! Come sit with the rest of us!” barked Turner B. Shelton, former movie executive and U.S. Ambassador to Nicaragua, in his characteristic Virginia drawl.
Shelton was seated in an armchair. On his left was a military man that Humberto knew: Lieutenant-Colonel Federico Mejía, a capable up-and-comer in the National Guard who was popular among the enlisted me. On his right were Leonídas Morales, the aging chief of one of the country’s major pro-government trade unions, the
haciendado Marcelino Reyes, and a weedy gringo in a cheap suit that Humberto did not know. Humberto sat down, directly across from the Ambassador.
“Bourbon?” said Shelton, guesturing towards a half-empty bottle of dark amber liquid. Humberto shook his head. Shelton shrugged, and poured himself a substantial drink. “So, General, I’m sure you can guess why you’re here tonight?”
“Not in the slightest, Mr. Ambassador,” answered Humberto.
“Talk to ‘em, while I leave the room, Rich. I’m not supposed to know about this sort o’ shit.” Shelton joked, as he stood up. The man in the cheap suit grinned and sidled over, taking the place of the corpulent diplomat, who had left the building, followed by his armed guards. The collection of Nicaraguans turned to look at the skinny, sweating American, who began to butcher Spanish in a flat, Midwestern accent.
“You can call me Rich, I’m from a certain three-letter company with substantial interests here. Interests that would be threatened by any sort of instability or Red nonsense. You get my drift?” he said, ending with the English colloquialism.
The group was silent for a moment, before Mejía spoke up. “Our current government is at no risk of falling to Communism-”
“And pigs hate mud,” said the gringo, cutting the officer off. “There are students and peasants running off to the jungle to join the so-called Sandinistas every day. Not only that, we have evidence that the Reds have infiltrated the government to the very highest levels. You’re losing control of your country, and I’d suggest you gentlemen take it back.”
The man stood up, smoothing out the wrinkles in his suit. “Look, I love elections as much as any red-blooded American. Elections aren’t any good though when they put pinkos and fellow travellers in the big chair.”
The man stared around. “Any action to rescue freedom in Nicaragua from the threat of Red terror will be looked upon kindly by the government of the United States, President Nixon, and most importantly people like me.” After a few seconds of silence, he grinned and said, “We’ve got the house for another couple of hours, I’d suggest we start making plans.”
Humberto smiled wryly.
Perhaps the residence had been built for a different time, but this was the same America.
