18 The New York Reviewhusband had made a habit of sneak-
ing into the room where her oldest
daughter, Zoilamérica, then eleven,
was sleeping. It took years of abuse—
variously condoned or ignored by her
mother, she told me in an interview—
before she felt strong enough to de-
nounce her abuser in public. At last, on
March 2, 1998, Zoilamérica, a tall, slen-
der, visibly nervous thirty- year- old with
a degree in sociology, sat down in front
of a crowd of reporters and announced
that the president of Nicaragua, Daniel
Ortega, her stepfather, was a rapist:From the age of eleven I was sex-
ually abused... [by the president]
repeatedly and for many years....
Recovering from the effects of this
long aggression, with the accom-
panying sexual assault, threats, ha-
rassment, blackmail, has not been
easy.In a painfully detailed forty- page
court deposition, given ten weeks after
the press conference, Zoilamérica re-
lated, among other things, that in Costa
Rica, when she was small, Ortega would
creep into the room she shared with her
little brother and grope her while she
lay frozen, pretending in shame and
horror to be asleep. Later, in Managua,
Ortega’s sexual predation continued in
the privacy made possible by their new
house’s many rooms. Zoilamérica was
given her own room, where he could
fondle her in relative privacy. She was
forced to spend many hours in the win-
dowless room in his office. He spied on
her through the keyhole when she was
in the bathroom, then took to walking
straight in. Eventually, she wrote, Or-tega “no longer simply watched me as
I bathed; he would... masturbate. It
was horrible at that age to see a man
leaning against a wall for balance and
shaking his sex as if lost, unconscious
even of himself.”
In time, Zoilamérica reached pu-
berty. Ortega walked into her room
one night, examined her, said, Ya está s
lista (You’re ready), and raped her.
In the first of Sergio Ramírez’s De-
tective Morales novels, there is a hid-
den detail. It’s tiny, but Nicaraguan
readers knew why it was there: Morales
spots a truck driven by an older man
who is enthusiastically telling a story
to a little girl in the passenger seat. She
listens with her eyes fixed solemnly on
the road. A grandfather and his grand-
child, Morales thinks in a rare senti-
mental moment. Then he sees the truck
drive into a sex motel. The second
Morales novel hinges on the story of a
young woman who since childhood has
been raped by her stepfather, a power-
ful businessman.
Zoilamérica’s case against Ortega
went nowhere: one of the many judges
with whom he had filled the judicial
system ruled that the statute of lim-
itations on his alleged crimes had run
out. The Inter- American Commission
on Human Rights ended up recom-
mending that the dispute be resolved
between the parties involved. Public
reaction would have been different
if Murillo had come out in defense of
her daughter, but instead, Zoilamérica
says, her mother had fits of jealousy,
accused her of seducing her stepfather,
ran her out of the house just as her own
mother had thrown her out, and then,
when the scandal finally broke, stoodweeping and sniffling beside Ortega
while he told a crowd, “Rosario said
to me that she wants to apologize to
the pueblo for having given birth to a
daughter who betrayed the principles
of Sandinismo.”
Afterward the couple’s physical
transformation began. Murillo used to
dress normally but with a certain snap,
an occasional extravagance. Today we
have the Murillo of the crazy makeup,
the pink or turquoise Indian- style dress,
and the dozens of good- vibration-
channeling rings, bracelets, necklaces,
and earrings she arms herself with
every day. She consults the spirit of
Augusto César Sandino’s brother on a
regular basis (why, one wonders, is she
not allowed to commune with the great
hero himself?) and paces about light-
ing incense sticks in a house filled with
plaster cherubim and images of the
Buddha. In her fluty voice she swerves
from preaching peace and love, as the
spirit of Sai Baba, her Indian spiritual
master, demands, to denouncingthose diminished brains that
work...receiving messages...from
other galaxies, really, from other
planets, that supposedly come to
elevate their fatherland- lacking
condition.... The abject condition
of people who do not know love for
the fatherland and are waiting for
the spaceships to activate their di-
minished brains.The scandal of Ortega’s systematic
rape of his stepdaughter subsided, but
its poison continues to seep through
Nicaragua’s history, because it forced
Sandinistas at every level to believe yet
more lies from their leaders: they did
not engage in small or large acts of cor-
ruption; they were really democrats at
heart, or they were really socialists at
heart; the majority of the population
really loved them; and of course Zoil-
américa was lying. (Even though, as a
canny Nicaraguan journalist observed,
in the anything- goes promiscuity that
followed the Sandinistas’ victory, it
was generally assumed among his
inner circle that Ortega’s good- looking
stepdaughter, all grown up, was in fact
his mistress: “What shocked everyone
was her revelation that he was also a
pedophile.”)
Throughout the long years of Zoila-
mérica’s abuse (she was divorced with
two children by the time she went pub-
lic with her accusation, in an attempt to
stop Ortega’s unremitting pursuit), Nic-
araguan politics unfolded in their cir-
cular way. In 1990 Ortega was defeated
at the polls by the fifth Chamorro to
become president: Violeta Chamorro,
a straight- backed, pious homemaker
and widow of the assassinated editor
Pedro Joaquín Chamorro. Jimmy Car-
ter, among others, persuaded Ortega
and the Sandinista party leadership to
recognize Doña Violeta’s victory. Five
years later Sergio Ramírez, Ortega’s
former vice- president, resigned from
the party and founded an opposition
movement with other dissident San-
dinistas, while Ortega spent the next
seventeen years attempting to get the
presidency back.
Fabián Medina reminds us that Or-
tega succeeded thanks to some skillful
constitutional meddling that allowed
candidates to win with as little as 35
percent of the vote. With further wran-
gling, Ortega returned to power in 2007with 38.07 percent of the vote and has
been president ever since. His corrupt
and dictatorial brand of Sandinismo
has destroyed the movement’s proudest
achievements. The stubborn journalist
Carlos Fernando Chamorro—a former
Sandinista, son of Doña Violeta and
Pedro Joaquín, and founder and editor
of the invaluable online magazine Con-
fidencial—put it succinctly:Ortega reestablished electoral
fraud as a practice, outlawed and
repressed the opposition, and es-
tablished a monopoly over the
estates—the Supreme Court, the
electoral authority, and the Office
of the Comptroller—transferring
the one- time jewels of the demo-
cratic transition, the Armed Forces
and the Police, to the political con-
trol... of the presidential couple.There is no way of knowing whether
Carlos Fernando Chamorro’s older sis-
ter Cristiana, one of Ortega’s potential
opponents, would have been elected
president on November 7 if she had not
been under house arrest since June.
But the ruling couple, with a network of
spying “people’s associations” and top-
notch private pollsters at their com-
mand, must have thought in panic that
Chamorro’s victory was indeed likely,
or they would not have risked the inter-
national opprobrium and renewed sanc-
tions that inevitably followed the move
against her—the might- have- been sixth
Chamorro family president of Nica-
ragua—and the equally outrageous
imprisonment of six other candidates
who might have run against Ortega and
honorary co- president Rosario Murillo.
(Ortega promoted her from her previ-
ous position as vice- president just be-
fore the election.)
However that may be, elections in
Nicaragua came and went, and noth-
ing happened that was not foreseen:
Ortega and Murillo remain in power
despite an estimated 40 to 80 percent
abstention rate, depending on who’s
counting. With the help of judges who
do the couple’s bidding, their victory
was certified as fair, even though the
seven arrested would- be candidates
have not been freed, nor have the doz-
ens of other activists, opposition lead-
ers, lawyers, journalists, and ordinary
citizens rounded up since June. Most
of the prisoners are elderly, and sev-
eral are being held under appalling
conditions of hunger and psychological
torture.
But the so- called elections are an
unimportant chapter in this dispiriting
telenovela. What matters is what hap-
pens next. Can renewed or stiffer inter-
national sanctions accomplish anything
more than increasing the privations of
the impoverished citizenry? Has the
terrible Ortega- Murillo assassination
spree against students and campesino
leaders in 2018 permanently terrified
the population into despair or indiffer-
ence? Will the plump and satisfied busi-
ness sector—so recently the regime’s
greatest ally—rebel now that police
have jailed two of its most important
representatives? Nicaraguans at home
and in exile are anxiously waiting to
find out. Perhaps nothing will happen.
Perhaps, in history’s unpredictable way
of jostling itself awake and taking off
at a canter, some enormous change will
come to ease the suffering of that trou-
bled land. Q
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