by Rod Hughes

A recent blog mentioned that former Sandinista guerrilla leader Dora Maria Tellez was engaged in a hunger strike to underscore what she perceived as the danger that the Nicaraguan regime of President Daniel Ortega is turning dictatorial. The current edition of The Nica Times reports that she ended her strike on doctors’ orders after 12 days.

She has not changed her mind, however, and vows to go on to phase two of her protest. She was known in the late 1970s as “Comandante Dos” and conducted with her colleague, Eden “Comandante Cero” Pastora the daring Sandinista raid on the government “National Palace” that held many Nicaraguan congressmen captive for some days, revitalizing the revolution in danger of stagnating.

The raid made headlines around the world, showing that the revolution against 42 years of dictatorship of the Somoza dynasty was very much alive. Guerrillas cannot stay out the the headlines for long, The daring raid underscored the need for media attention if an uprising is to succeed, for without foreign support the Sandinistas could not have attracted money for arms and supplies. And succeed they did, marching into Managua triumphantly in 1979.

But the Sandinistas installed a repressive Marxist regime that mishandled the already weak economy, a victim of neglect for years by the Somozas. This led many former revolutionaries such as Pastora, to oppose them and resulted in a long civil war where counter-revolutionaries, backed by the U.S. Civil Intelligence Agency, attempted to topple the regime led by the same Daniel Ortega who was elected president in 2006.

Tellez and Pastora differ whether the bad old days are about to return, however. The Nica Times journalist Tim Rogers reports in the current edition of his paper that surprising number of young people support Tellez on YouTube and Facebook on the Internet—surprising because only an estimated 3% of Nicaraguans have access to the Internet.

(Editor’s note: Some readers may be puzzled by our quoting both The Tico Times and its offspring, The Nica Times. The Nica Times is an eight-page newspaper inserted inside the parent Tico Times when sold in Costa Rica. In Nicaragua, the parent paper is circulated inside The Nica Times. The Nica Times is written in Grenada, Nicaragua, and its editor, Tim Rogers, is given wide editorial latitude.)