Dora María Téllez: ‘We must act for Nicaragua once more’

In 1973, at 20 years old, Dora María Téllez quit medical school to join the armed struggle against the Anastasio Somoza dictatorship. Three years later, she was enrolled in guerilla combat and medic training in Cuba. Riding the wave of revolution in the late 1970s, Téllez rose to the top of the guerilla command structure, leading FSLN cadres into battles across the country. By 1978, she was known as “Comandante Dos” of the insurrectionist Terceristas — the “third way” popular front forces — and was one of three Sandinista commanders to lead the famous and pivotal assault on Nicaragua’s National Palace, dubbed Operación Chanchera, or Operation Pigsty.

With Téllez and fellow guerilla commanders Edén Pastora and Hugo Torres leading the charge, a small cadre of Sandinista fighters disguised as members of the National Guard ambushed the Palace during a joint session of Congress, taking some 2,000 government officials hostage in hopes of leveraging the release of Sandinista prisoners. The daring attack marked a turning point in the revolution, exposing Somoza’s fragility and inspiring a popular uprising that toppled the dictatorship less than one year later.

“The plan seemed too simple to be sane,” Gabriel García Márquez wrote in a chronicle recounting the assault. So simple and insane, in fact, that it worked. And thanks in no small part to Téllez, who at just 22 years old led the negotiations with Somoza. The dictator caved, releasing 59 political prisoners and delivering $500,000 in cash to the rebels. In the months to come, Téllez would lead the Sandinista units that fought, block by block, to capture the city of León — the first major urban center to fall to the revolutionary forces. “Dora María Téllez was beautiful, shy, pensive,” García Márquez observed, “with an intelligence and good judgement that would have served her in many great paths in life.”

The year before the assault on the National Palace, Dora María was stationed at the Carlos Fonseca Guerilla Front near Nicaragua’s northern border with Honduras. There, she met a man who would haunt her for life — a man with whom she would fight side by side for years, through revolution and bloody counterinsurgent war; a man with whom she would govern the country during the decade of Sandinista rule in the 1980s, when Téllez served as Minister of Health, overseeing programs that cut the country’s child mortality rate in half despite U.S. sanctions, destabilization, and war; a man whose campaigns for president she would support again and again, even after she split with the FSLN in 1995, and a man who, some 45 years later, would become her incarcerator, and Nicaragua’s new dictator: Daniel Ortega Saavedra.

In the mid 1990s, Téllez joined Nicaraguan writer Sergio Ramírez and other ex-FSLN guerillas in breaking from the party to form the dissident Sandinista Renovation Movement (MRS, now called Unamos). The MRS spent years organizing to dislodge Ortega, whom Téllez and many Nicaraguans had come to see as a pro-business megalomaniac who had betrayed the revolution for the sake of power and prestige.

In 2018, a militant, student-led civil rebellion erupted across the country. Some forty years after the revolution, masked youth were in the streets once more, ripping up cobblestones and defending barricades against paramilitaries, soldiers, and police. But the repression came hard and swift, and this time, the rebels lost. It was the deadliest conflict the country had seen since the civil war, with more than 350 people killed, upwards of 2,000 injured, and thousands more imprisoned, disappeared, or exiled.

In 2021, Téllez was one of dozens of Nicaraguan dissidents rounded up and sentenced to prison for “crimes against the nation” in sham trials ordered by Ortega and his wife, Rosario Murillo. After surviving 606 days of solitary confinement in the dungeons of El Chipote prison, in February 2023, Téllez was taken out of her cell, loaded onto a plane, and sent into exile in the United States along with 221 other political prisoners, including her partner.

Today, Dora María Téllez is a historian with an honorary doctorate from the Sorbonne and is currently a visiting researcher at Tulane University, where she studies Nicaraguan history and is writing her memoirs. Despite her current vocation, however, she says that she doesn’t dwell too much on the past. At 68 years old, her spirit is firmly grounded in the present: “Once again, we are trapped in a dictatorship, no different than the Somozas: a family dictatorship with dynastic ambitions… This is a moment in which we must act for Nicaragua once more,” she says in an interview with EL PAÍS.

Question. What has your life in exile been like since you were expelled from Nicaragua?

Answer. Exile is always difficult. First of all, it’s not merely exile, it’s banishment, an uprooting, which is even worse, because you’re uprooted from where you belong and prohibited from returning. It’s a very difficult experience. You settle down, but one of the hardest parts of exile is that you inevitably refuse to settle down. And what’s more, it’s not easy living in another country, in another culture, and in the case of the United States, in another language. We came here, all 222 of us, with only what we had on us, only our passports. It’s a difficult experience, and I didn’t have it as hard as most of the others. I had my family in Georgia, so that made the transition a little lighter. I’ve been fortunate enough to have a job, to be able to somehow do what I want to do and have some stability, but it’s still been difficult, and most people have it much worse, with a lot of instability.

Then there are all the consequences of prison. In my case, from the isolation, which undoubtedly took a toll, emotionally, psychologically, physically... and above all, from the fatigue; one experiences a very exacting accumulation of fatigue in prison, which gradually fades away as you fill in the gaps from living in isolation for so long. In other words, you have to catch up, and it comes at daily cost. A really high cost, actually.

Q. The FSLN’s supporters claim that the Ortega-Murillo government enjoys broad popular support, largely because it has succeeded in reducing poverty (though Nicaragua remains the second poorest country in the hemisphere). What is your response to this claim?

A. If the regime had the popularity it claims to have, they wouldn’t have been afraid of holding clean elections in 2021. Instead, Ortega threw all the pre-candidates in prison and eliminated all competing political parties. They were terrified of the opposition. If they had the majority support they claim they have, if they had the popularity they say they have, they wouldn’t be afraid of holding clean elections, because they would win. But Daniel Ortega doesn’t win elections, Daniel Ortega steals elections.

Q. Are there still sources of resistance inside the country, despite the repression?

A. The resistance is like a river: there are periods when it’s forced to flow underground, then moments when it emerges back to the surface with the full force of its current. Right now, we’re in a moment in Nicaragua when this river of resistance, which is always advancing but sometimes goes underground, is about to explode to the surface again, because there’s no other way. The regime hasn’t been able to reestablish its balance of forces, to reestablish its power base, and not only has it not been able to reestablish these, but now the very source of its power is eroding: the judicial system, public employees... Every week you have announcements of new purges, and on top of all this is the issue of Daniel Ortega’s succession.

We need to remember that this is a family dictatorship. It’s not a dictatorship of the party, nor is it a military dictatorship, strictly speaking. It’s a family dictatorship, which controls the apparatuses of power and relies on the judicial system, the police, public employees, the Sandinista Front itself, the army—all these institutions that are being weakened, that are in crisis. And the clearest sign of the crisis is the purges, which are revealing an internal crisis tied up with the growing power of Rosario Murillo.

Q. Do Ortega and Murillo have any ideology, any political convictions?

A. No. Daniel Ortega and Rosario Murillo’s only ideology is political power. They are there to hold on to power. And they’ll do whatever it takes. I mean, they provided decisive support for the criminalization of therapeutic abortion in the National Assembly. They campaigned against the Central America Free Trade Agreement with the United States, but when Ortega came to power, he swallowed the free trade agreement like it was nothing. They’ll do one thing and then another contradictory thing in the same 24 hours, no problem. Whatever it takes to stay in power. That’s their ideology. They’re not right wing or left wing or centrists or anything else. They’re Ortegistas, plain and simple. Their ideology is to keep the Ortega-Murillo family in power, whatever the cost.

Q. How would you describe the nuances of the opposition’s political landscape?

A. There are different oppositions within the opposition. There are sectors that maintain that we can’t rely on elections with Ortega and Murillo in power, that we shouldn’t even think about elections and that first we need to focus on removing them from power, but they don’t explain how. There are others who say that yes, we have to work toward clean, free, fair, competitive elections, and furthermore, that the opposition has to prepare for that. There are those who are focused on building right wing power, or a center right or extreme right project. There are those who think that national unity is paramount, that we need a project that represents all the political currents in Nicaragua. This is a moment in which the opposition is looking for a path forward. I believe that we need to confront our adversary on the terrain that exists. Not in the hypothetical terrain that I want to exist.

Q. Have the U.S. sanctions had any impact?

A. If they didn’t have an impact the regime wouldn’t complain about them. They accused me, during my trial, of supporting sanctions against the State of Nicaragua. But I didn’t ask for sanctions against the State of Nicaragua. I asked for sanctions against the Ortega-Murillo family. And as far as I know, the State of Nicaragua is a republic, not a monarchy. If it were a monarchy and Daniel Ortega were the king, and I asked for sanctions against Daniel Ortega, that would be asking for sanctions against the state. The sanctions cause them damage, and that damage is economic.

Q. Is there anything the anti-Ortega movement can learn from the Sandinista revolution and its aftermath?

A. We should always learn from our history. Studying history is like looking into a rear-view mirror: you have to drive looking forward, but you also have to keep checking behind you. The first lesson is that this is a moment in which armed struggle is not a valid option. It has to be a civil struggle. And secondly, this is a moment to remember that we need to continue pursuing a democratic vocation, not only on the part of the opposition leadership, but in general, among all Nicaraguans. We have an authoritarian and intolerant culture that still weighs on the opposition movement. Another lesson of the revolution is that the youth have decisive contributions to make to Nicaraguan society. I believe that part of the issue of confronting the dictatorship has to do with achieving the unity of the Nicaraguan people. You can’t divide everything up into pieces — these parts yes, these no, those no, I like these, I dislike these — because the regime is the only one that wins in those conditions.

Q. What future, or what possible futures, do you think await Central America?

A. Central America faces an enormous challenge right now. We are seeing a process of remilitarization across the region. There is a lot of money flowing to the military. The police are getting a lot of money. And all for purposes of social control, not for purposes of security. And this goes hand in hand with the clear authoritarian tendency that is plaguing Central America, with the exception of Guatemala. These are no longer military dictatorships. They are civil regimes in alliance with the military. And they use the gangs as their as alibis. That’s the truth. The gangs are the pretext for establishing authoritarian regimes. But you can confront gangs with a democratic government. You don’t need a dictatorship, an authoritarian regime, or militarism to confront gangs.

Q. In April, Nicaragua filed a lawsuit before the International Court of Justice accusing Germany of facilitating the genocide of Palestinians in Gaza. How did you feel when you heard the news of Nicaragua’s case before the ICJ?

A. Nicaragua’s petition to the Court regarding the slaughter in Gaza is a stunt on behalf of the Russians. It’s a strategic move on the part of the regime. It’s not a sincere act of solidarity with the Palestinian people. It’s a maneuver typical of the Ortega-Murillo regime, which just a few days ago was congratulating the Biden administration on its approach to the situation in Palestine. This is the kind of game they always play. Really, the Ortega-Murillo family should be brought before the International Criminal Court for committing crimes against humanity, which have been thoroughly documented. They aren’t defending the Palestinian people. They are guilty of genocide themselves, and want to hide behind the Palestinian people to pay political favors to Putin. They don’t care at all about what happens to other people, they only care about what they need to do to stay in power, and to stay in power, they need an alliance with Putin.

Q. What do you remember most about the years of revolution?

A. Well, I have a lot of memories. I’m writing my memoirs, so obviously I have to analyze those years, review my life in those years, take stock as well. But remembering is not exactly the vocation I dedicated myself to. I feel like this is a moment in which we must act for Nicaragua once more, with all the lessons learned over the years, with the experience one accumulates, and with an awareness of the changes in the political circumstances and what the country requires now, in the first quarter of the 21st century, forty-five years after the triumph of the Sandinista Revolution in the last quarter of the 20th century. That is, understanding what the Nicaraguan people expect, what the Nicaraguan people want, what the Nicaraguan people aspire to, what Nicaragua should be — those are fundamental things, and now, once again, we are trapped in a dictatorship, no different than the Somozas: a family dictatorship with dynastic ambitions, period. So, I see myself as taking action to contribute to facing the challenges that Nicaragua has now.