El Chipote, the prison in Managua where Nicaragua’s dictator, Daniel Ortega, locks up political opponents, is a grim place. Yet on many mornings last year, music could be heard along its corridors.
From within the cell where she was confined — alone — for 606 days, the voice of Tamara Davila, a 42-year-old pro-democracy activist, rang out. She was singing a song, by a popular Nicaraguan folk artist of the 1970s, about birds chirping in the mountains at daybreak.
It was her way of staying sane and hopeful in a place where the only daylight came in through a small aperture in the ceiling and where, most days, the only human contact consisted of police interrogation.
“I promised myself I’d leave one day”, Davila, who came to the United States on Feb. 9 as one of 222 political prisoners Ortega released into exile, told me, “and that I’d leave more committed than ever to the cause, a better person — and healthier — than when I went in”.
In my talks with Davila and six other ex-prisoners during the weeks since their release, it became clear they suffered terribly, and that, nevertheless, the net effect of imprisonment was to fortify them politically and spiritually.
Having entered El Chipote as members of ideologically diverse but politically aligned groups, they bonded on a deeper level. (Davila was the only one held entirely in solitary confinement.) The activists left “more united than before”, said Violeta Granera, 70, who, along with Davila, was one of 21 women among those released.
Ortega rounded up these dissidents in mid-2021 to prevent them from organizing a challenge in that year’s scheduled national elections. Having rigged that vote, and entrenched himself in power, Ortega, 77, seems to have calculated that releasing his opponents posed little risk — and could forestall new U.S. economic sanctions in addition to those that have been in place since October.
Biden administration officials say there was no quid pro quo; the sanctions regime has remained the same since Feb. 9. Some 37 political prisoners remain, including a Roman Catholic bishop, Rolando Alvarez, who refused to accept exile on Feb. 9 and received a 26-year sentence as a result.
The dictator might eventually discover that all he accomplished by locking up his opponents was to make them more determined.
That is certainly a lesson of recent history. Imprisonment for one’s beliefs is a common thread in biographies of change-makers ranging from the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. to dissident-turned-president Vaclav Havel of the Czech Republic.
Of the six 20th-century greats Henry Kissinger profiled in his recent book, “Leadership”, three — Anwar Sadat of Egypt, Charles de Gaulle of France and Konrad Adenauer of Germany — were affected by stints in political detention or, in de Gaulle’s case, as a prisoner of war.
Between 1967 and 1974, Ortega himself was imprisoned by Nicaragua’s Somoza family dictatorship. Unlike the civic organizing for which Ortega jailed Tamara Davila and others, though, the act of opposition that landed Ortega in prison was an armed bank robbery to fund the then-insurgent Sandinista National Liberation Front.
He was released in a swap for hostages taken by other Sandinistas under the command of Hugo Torres. Without Torres’s deed, Ortega might never have become president, as he did, after the Sandinista revolution in 1979.
Ortega lost an election in 1990 but regained power in 2007 with 38 percent of the vote. Following that election, he gradually dismantled democracy and engineered the domination he wields now.
Torres, as it happens, was also jailed in the 2021 crackdown, having turned against Ortega because of the latter’s abuses. Torres was not released on Feb. 9; he died last year, at 73, after collapsing in his cell at El Chipote.
There is an awful cyclicality to political repression and political incarceration in Nicaragua. Davila is the daughter of prominent ex-Sandinista guerrillas; her father, Irving, served as an army colonel during Ortega’s first presidency before he, too, became disenchanted.
The song about birds and other tunes she sang in El Chipote were originally composed as pro-Sandinista revolutionary anthems, and are indeed still performed at pro-Ortega events.
Davila told me that she changed the lyrics, plugging in Ortega’s name for other oppressors mentioned in the original.
The Ortega regime not only expelled Davila and the others but also stripped them of their citizenship and passports. She is trying to overcome bureaucratic hassles and reunite with her 7-year-old daughter, from whom she was separated by imprisonment — and who remains behind with family in Central America.
Yet Davila insists it is possible to wage an effective political campaign from abroad. On March 30, she addressed a meeting of the Organization of American States, calling on the assembled ambassadors to “act for a democratic transition in my country”.
Chile, governed by a leftist president, Gabriel Boric, invited her to the event — an important diplomatic signal given Ortega’s political pedigree.
With more solidarity, including targeted economic sanctions and other pressure, there is a chance to shorten Ortega’s rule and break the repressive cycle that has plagued Nicaragua for too long.
Charles Lane is a Post editorial writer and a weekly columnist.