Nicaragua

from Talk to Action

In their avid thirst for the blessing of the Christian right, GOP presidential hopefuls such as Mitt Romney, Mike Huckabee and Sam Brownback lined up last fall to prostrate themselves before James Dobson and Tony Perkins. Now, in the grip of his own presidential fever, John McCain publicly joins them in pandering to the anti-woman agenda of the religious right.

The New York Times reminds us that McCain once played harder to get.

In his unsuccessful run for the Republican nomination in 2000, McCain called [the Christian right] "the agents of intolerance." ... For a taste of their views, you can visit the Web site of Concerned Women for America (C.W.A.), which bills itself as the "nation's largest public-policy women's organization." Its mission is "to protect and promote biblical values among all citizens," the Bible being "the inerrant Word of God and the final authority on faith and practice." As for dissenters from C.W.A.'s stand on issues like the "sanctity of human life," a handy link to Bible passages explains "why you are a sinner and deserve punishment in Hell."

A woman who dissented from that narrow view of godliness by having an illegal abortion might get to hell sooner than most. That's the only thing that criminalization of safe and legal abortion ever has accomplished through all of recorded time, and all it ever will accomplish  -- killing women before their time. That's the dirty little secret that no one wants to talk about, because saying such a thing out loud dirties the Christian right's whited sepulcher of religious purity.  And that truth doesn't matter when power-hungry candidates are selling their souls to be anointed as the chosen one.

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.