Should it come as a surprise that Nicaragua has outlawed abortion? I don't know what to say. I feel though, this is the last nail in the coffin of the Sandinista revolution.

I don't believe for a moment that people in Nicaragua are so pious as to need to have a theocratic government in place. It's more like this is the way they defend the institutional mysogyny that allowed them to laugh-off one of the biggest scandals to come out of the underbelly of the Sandinista revolution : Zoilamérica Narváez, stepdaughter of Daniel Ortega, the former sandinista president of Nicaragua, accused him of making her his sexual slave from the age of 11.

The case of one woman who has said no has now become a cause celebre in Nicaragua. Exactly a year ago, Zoilamérica Narváez accused her stepfather of systematic sexual abuse. She is now 33. The abuse, she said, began when she was 11. The allegations would have been shocking under any circumstances. But the fact that Zoilamerica Narvaez's stepfather is Daniel Ortega, the former president and Sandinista revolutionary hero, made it into a national scandal.

Zoilamérica's case was front page news again in Managua on the first anniversary of the day she made them public. I met her in the thinktank where she now works and she talked of the pain and difficulties of the past year. Perhaps the most painful thing, she said, was the fact that her own mother had denounced her. But despite that, she had no regrets about what she had done. "I had to do it, because I had to get him to stop. He was still abusing me by telephone," she told me.

Daniel Ortega is now the leader of the opposition and hopes to be the Sandinista presidential candidate in the next elections. I had interviewed him several times in the eighties, while he was Nicaragua's president, but never imagined that one day I would have to ask him about allegations like these. I went to see him in the National Assembly in Managua. He strenuously denied the charges, and told me he saw them as a political plot; but Daniel Ortega refuses to give up his parliamentary immunity to let the charges be tested in court. Now Zoilamérica is trying to bring charges in the Central American Court of Human Rights.

The Sandinista revolution once promised equality for women. Now, many women have left the Sandinista movement to campaign separately against violence and sexual abuse.

That last paragraph is what's emblematic of the problems of Latin America. Revolutions and insurgencies have been created on the shoulders of women; yet political equality is denied to us once the men are in power.

What is tragic about Zoilamerica's story is the women power plays at work. Her mother publicly repudiated her --she was after all the First Lady of Nicaragua and the alleged accomplice to her husband's abuse of her own daughter.

Yet the symbolism of this repudiation should not be lost on anybody. As long as she is serving Power, Woman has a seat at the table of Equality. Rosa Murillo, Condoleeza Rice, they work under the same premise : They are the powerful-submissives who push forth the agenda of their masters.

Nicaragua: Crisis and Rebirth of Sandinismo

From an ethical standpoint, this case is the most serious faced by Ortega and the top FSLN leadership. As noted by the Nicaraguan poet Gioconda Belli, it underscores “the handiwork of our native Machiavellian Prince Daniel Ortega.” In March 1998, Daniel Ortega's adopted daughter, Zoilamérica Narváez (daughter of Rosario Murillo, Ortega's wife), publicly accused the FSLN leader of incest, declaring that he had sexually abused her for 19 years. Zoilamérica's disclosure sent shock waves throughout Nicaragua and among the Sandinista faithful, but failed to faze Daniel Ortega or his wife, while the Sandinista machinery ranks around him. A Sandinista veteran, Alejandro Bendaña, confirmed the accusation and apologized: “Today, as a man, I apologize to you, Zoilamérica, for not having done enough to stop Daniel Ortega in his aggression against you, an aggression that I even witnessed ... I apologize on behalf of all the men and women who also knew of this situation and did not have the courage, either then or today, to speak and side with justice.”

Sandinista men and women, including professed feminists, supported Ortega. The FSLN lashed out at his accuser, charging her of doing the enemy's bidding and being part of a CIA-led conspiracy. Gioconda Belli said that if the FSLN was incapable of listening to Zoilamérica, “it will have become a party at the service of the political career of one man.”

The case was ignored by much of the left in the continent, perhaps because they considered it a private issue and because they believe that Daniel Ortega is a comrade facing the enemy who constitutes a real alternative to neoliberalism rule in Nicaragua. Much has been made of the corruption of the top Sandinista leadership following the piñata, which allowed the party's leaders to become affluent entrepreneurs. And much criticism was made of the Alemán-Ortega pact, through which Sandinismo gained control of important levers in the State machinery. But little, if anything, is said of the Zoilamérica case.

Margaret Randall, an American feminist who came to Nicaragua in the 1980s to support the Revolution, has authored, among others books, Sandino's Daughters: Testimonies of Nicaraguan Women in Struggle. After looking into this case, she concluded that there will be no social change in Nicaragua without an examination of power from a women's perspective. “I have come to believe,” she says in a January 2000 article in Envío “that the failure of revolutionary movements to listen to all social groups, analyze their potential, and assure their full agency has been in great part responsible for the inability of these movements to remain in power. The enemy from the outside was certainly overwhelming. But the enemy from within contributed to revolutionary demise in ways we are only now beginning to understand.”

The enemy from within was first denounced in 1995 by Sergio Ramírez (former vice-president of Nicaragua) and Ernesto Cardenal (Nicargua's former Minister of Culture), when they left the Sandinista party in protest. They had accused Daniel Ortega of caudillismo, of being a corrupt, money hungry dictator-wannabe.

What is emblematic of their split with the party is who they really represent : The artists, intellectuals and Theology of Liberation activists who were the heart and soul of the sandinista movement. That they left the party goes to show how the capitalists and caudillos had successfully coopted a revolution that was supposed to be of, for and by the people of Nicaragua.

Which leads me to say this about the abortion ban: It makes sense given the institutionalized corruption in Nicaragua. This is a quote I got out of one of the hundreds of articles on the subject:

Orlando Tardencilla, one of the members of the sub-committee which proposed the bill, said: "Unless abortion is made a crime, then people can simply come out and say: 'I have the right to an abortion, this is my body and I can decide.'

Source

Even though the Sandinista political revolution was supported on the shoulders of the Theology of Liberation cultural revolution, one of the most controversial aspects of la teología was its position on sexual and reproductive rights : Depending on who you ask, it either had or did not have one.

As a former Catholic who contemplated being a nun, Liberation Theology to me was the missing ingredient of John XXIII's Second Vatican Council. It was the praxis to the Council's theory. It was the materialization of the catholic faith through social and political works.

I became a feminist through Liberation Theology, not Gloria Steinem or the Second Sex. Seeing how many of the nuns (most of them Maryknoll), were revolutionizing the church from within, I was fascinated by defiance to the Pope and their eagerness to do what may to get action and results to happen.

Many feminists or proto-feminists flocked to Liberation Theology in part due to it's foundational belief that women and men can equally serve Christ and the Catholic Church. At the time, reports of nuns being ordained as priests by LT bishops were coming in fast and furiously. Both nuns and laity women were given the right to celebrate mass in places like El Salvador, Nicaragua, Bolivia or Perú; areas were all the men were either killed or part of a warring militia.

Reports were coming in of nuns helping build sewage systems, healing the sick and managing farm collectives all the while taking confesion, officiating marriages and administering last rites. And then, some of them, started a mini-sexual revolution : They got married, most of the time to Catholic priests.

The idea you could serve god, push forth a political movement and have a healthy sexual lifestyle was ... in my country and at the time, it was revolutionary. Too revolutionary to even some of the most revolutionary of politicians.

Abortion was not the cornerstone of the reproductive rights movement in Latin America. It has really never been. Access to better sexual education and contraception has been the #1 reproductive right issue in Latin America. Prevent the pregnancy, avoid the abortion.

During my 12 years of Catholic school and all the time I lived in Puerto Rico, depending on which kind of religious order managed the school, contraception and sexual education would be pushed almost fanatically by the laity.

My elementary school, Academia Inmaculada Concepcion de Mayaguez, had Dominican priests and Maryknoll sisters. My high school was part of the Universidad del Sagrado Corazón. At that point there were almost no clergy or nuns on campus, BUT, the university had a strong Jesuit spirit that focused on science and philosophy.

At both schools, I was taught reproduction as part of science and biology classes. At both schools we discussed the advantage of contraception over abstinence. At both schools the sexual segregation of the Catholic Church (along with St. Paul's almost gleeful mysogyny) was discussed from a historical perspective and not just from the biblical one. And at some point one of my theology teachers mentioned Marx's fascination with early Christians and how that was discussed by a little known priest called Gustavo Gutierrez and, well, the rest is history.

Abortion would be completely contrary to Liberation Theology. There is no question about it. But for liberation theologists to push for a complete ban on abortion? That's completely unheard of. I find it hard to believe that Liberation theologists would go on a full attack of women's sovereignty. I believe the case is more about the corruption of the revolutionary movement, a corruption that is symbolized by Daniel Ortega's 20 years of sexual domination and raping of his stepdaughter, Zoilamérica Narváez.

Ortega has been granted a lifetime of immunity after becoming president. What does that mean? Unless the Nicaraguan government lifts the immunity he cannot be prosecuted for any crime he commits. It's not just he abused his power as the political leader of the Sandinista movement. He was given a license to abuse his power by the Nicaraguan government and power machine.

And that's how the culture of mysogyny thrives in Nicaragua --aided and abetted by its people.