In my hometown of Granada in Nicaragua, the great radio show of the 60’s belonged to Julio Vivas Benard; his program began at 7 A.M. What spark in the man! But Don Julio’s real trick was his mastery of the English language. His morning commentary turned on what was said in Time magazine, which he would leaf through brazenly in the middle of his show, mumbling, “Let’s see what Mr. Yankee is up to.”
“Mr. Yankee” was the American ambassador, whose residence was established on a hill, high above the rest of Managua. For years, the American envoy had been more than a mere ambassador. In the endless days of the American occupation in the 1920’s and 30’s, the country would hardly breathe without consulting the American ambassador. As a prominent citizen of Granada used to exclaim: “Praise be to God in heaven, and to the Yankee who represents Him on earth.”
In Nicaragua, almost supernatural powers were attributed to the Americans. Before the Marines first landed in 1912, Nicaraguans had had seventeen wars in seventeen years, climaxing in a great civil conflict. Under the dictator José Santos Zelaya, Nicaragua was a country bursting with frustrated ambitions, seething with warlords for whom the rule of law and party loyalty meant nothing. What was done one day was undone the next. All that mattered was the triumph of the caudillo, a personal triumph. The watchword was: “Power is like a woman who should never be shared.”
Into this lawless demimonde, on a par with the ancient worlds of Florentine and Byzantine politics, the American Marines came to solve things. They expelled the seditious caudillos from the country, and sent the mysteries of Nicaraguan politics to the devil.
The Nicaraguan relationship with the Yankees was complex, in those twenty years of occupation. The Nicaraguans loved the Americans, and they hated them. To Nicaraguans everything foreign was better (except what was Honduran). They were convinced that nothing could work in Nicaragua. Exhausted by the public depravity and anarchy that had accompanied independence, their faith went out to a miracle, the deus ex machina who descended from on high, from the North, to rescue them from their own turpitude.
What counted most now was peace. Peace meant individual tranquillity, and personal welfare. And with the American occupation Nicaragua found calm: the wars ended—for a while.
But Nicaraguans also resented the Yankee: there were cantina brawls, affairs of passion, and baseball games. At the end of the day, the Nicaraguans got their revenge in bed—by seducing an American’s unfaithful wife. In the popular imagination, the first Somoza was the great avenger. In Granada they still talk about how this man, Anastasio Somoza Garcia, from the back country, with an obscure name, found the keys to the heart and bedroom of Mrs. Hannah, the wife of the American minister. On the same chain glittered the key to power: the guns of the National Guard, organized by the Americans to supervise elections and to replace the withdrawing Marines.
After the Marines went home in 1933, the country yielded to the power of the Somoza family for forty-three years. But the American ambassador was still Mr. Yankee, the neighbor who spoke for a sparkling and efficient empire. He was the agent between Managua and the remote corridors of the Department of State. For the Nicaraguans, the United States spoke with only one voice, the voice of Mr. Yankee, “my friend,” as the Somozas used to call the ambassador.
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In 1927, the American presidential emissary, Henry Stimson, had told General José Maria Moncada: “General, the United States does not make mistakes.” All Nicaraguans—those of us who would become Sandinistas, and those of us who would become contras, and even those, like myself, who would first become one and then the other—grew up believing in Mr. Stimson’s empire. Nobody could conceive of Nicaragua without the United States. Not even the most fever-brained Sandinistas then could imagine themselves in power. The unerring American empire would never allow it. If the Somozas left, the Marines would return, to manage the next crisis of succession.
But then one day the Somozas were history; the Marines never showed up; and the Sandinistas tumbled into power. They themselves could hardly believe it. What of intervention? Where were the Marines? Something had to happen. The vanquished, too, said to themselves, “This cannot be the empire’s fault.” It must have been Jimmy Carter, or Robert Pastor of the National Security Council, or Ambassador Larry Pezzullo.
We Nicaraguans could not come to grips with the fact that the old empire was no more. There was no single voice from the North. The Imperial Republic had fragmented in the clamor of over half a century. Thousands of new voices spoke for America. There was no Mr. Yankee.
But then, just as suddenly, Mr. Yankee reappeared in the person of Ronald Reagan. Surely he would now put everyone in his place as a good Granadine would wish. What mattered was to have faith. As long as Reagan was in the White House everything else was irrelevant: Congress, the Boland amendments, the Washington Post, Witness for Peace, the Europeans, and the Latin Americans—all counted for nothing: “St. Ronald will perform the miracle.”
And so the campesinos went off to the mountains to struggle and die by the thousands as contras, without the slightest guarantee that their supplies would arrive, but with their absolute and ultimately sad faith that as long as the American caudillo was overhead, reigning still on earth as in heaven, everything would work out in the end. Mr. Yankee had always delivered. He would do so again.
But in truth the empire was no longer itself. Everything had changed, and not even Ronald Reagan—let alone George Bush—could put things back together again. The clever Sandinistas were the first to find out: the empire no longer wanted to be an empire. Mr. Stimson was dead.
We Nicaraguans now can only face one another and blame or help ourselves. If Julio Vivas Benard had his radio show today and asked, “Let’s see what Mr. Yankee is up to?”—he would find that Mr. Yankee no longer knows.
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