to believe
Hardly, that this small country could anywhere develop in Central America, with its nearly six million inhabitants, is such a literary force. Especially given that forty years ago, two out of three “Nicas”, as the inhabitants of Nicaragua are affectionately called, were illiterate. Then, just before the Sandinista Revolution that swept the dictator Anastasio Somoza. However, Ernesto Cardenal is with his work “The gospel of the peasants from Solentiname, a” first country and then worldwide recognition, as well as far in front of him, Rubén Darío with “Profane poems”. Well-known Nicaraguan writer also Gioconda Belli and Sergio Ramírez, who won in 2017, the Cervantes prize, the most important prize for Spanish-language literature.
Tim Niendorf
volunteer.
F. A. Z.
That all four writers were also in the policy, is a Latin American phenomenon. Literature and politics are intertwined, often closely, even today. But times have changed. Also in Nicaragua, whose President Daniel Ortega since April of 2018 protests against him to knock down.
Cardenal, Belli, and Ramírez supported the Sandinista Revolution, which moved the end of the seventies, the interest of the whole world. Also in Germany there was a solidarity movement: “We donated money, helped as ,Internacionalistà’ during the coffee harvest, and cities established partnerships,” said recently the Journalist and author Reinhard Mohr in Germany, radio and criticized the “resounding Silence” of the German Left in the Here and Now to Nicaragua.
4533 persons and a minimum of 545 people were killed
violated The Nicaraguan writer niches, however, are still active: Cardenal, Belli, and Ramírez, who served between 1985 and 1990, as Vice President, criticize your former leader of the revolution, Ortega, after he had been voted out of office in 1990, peacefully, in 2006, the President again had become. In the fight against the current protests against him were injured until December 2018, according to the non-governmental organization “Asociación Nicaragüense Pro Derechos Humanos” 4533 persons and a minimum of 545 people were killed. Other human rights organizations to give you something vague, more than three hundred Dead.
“We live in a dictatorship,” says Ernesto Cardenal. The now 93-year-old author who left in 1994 from the so-called liberation front, FSLN, became in the nineties the critics of Ortega, whom he accused of corruption. The FSLN, he once said, has become a Caudillo-club. “We want to live in a democratic Republic,” he says now. He was suffering from the repression and pray for the people.
Gioconda Belli castigates the policy of the President: “We had to watch as someone who led the Sandinista Revolution of 1979 to the victory, has turned into a tyrant.” Sergio Ramírez is a right in your criticism with: “I think Ortega is never in the 21st century. Century arrived. The figure of the Caudillo, which is very rural, not fit to Latin America. Seventy percent of the population are younger than thirty years; and now you are doing what has made my Generation with Somoza.“
