NICARAGUA - WHAT BECAME OF THE REVOLUTION?

Raimund Löw in conversation with Dora Maria Téllez

NICARAGUA - WHAT BECAME OF THE REVOLUTION?
(Interpreting Spanish-German)

As a young woman, Dora María Téllez took part in the armed uprising against the Nicaraguan dictator Somoza alongside the current President Daniel Ortega. She was a high-ranking commander in the Sandinista revolution in 1979 and was, among other things, Minister of Health in the Sandinista government of the 1980s. After the 1990 elections, in which the Sandinistas were voted out of office, numerous former fighters parted ways with the increasingly autocratic Ortega. Together with other Sandinista intellectuals, Dora Maria Tellez founded the Sandinista Reform Party, which also included the writers Sergio Ramirez and Ernesto Cardenal.

Daniel Ortega was re-elected President of Nicaragua in 2007. In 2008, he banned the Sandinista Reformist Party. In June 2021, Dora María Téllez was imprisoned and forcibly exiled to the USA in February 2023 after more than a year and a half in prison along with 222 other political prisoners. She now lives in Spain as a political refugee. She was unable to take up her position as a visiting fellow at Harvard University in the summer semester of 2025 due to the restrictive US migration policy.

45 years after the victory of the Sandinistas, the question arises as to what remains of a revolution that mobilised a broad international solidarity movement at the time. Young people from the political left and the Christian camp from Latin America, Europe and the USA took part in the reconstruction of the country - even when political freedom was increasingly restricted from 1985 onwards as a result of the so-called „Contra War“ supported by the USA and the human and economic burdens on the population became enormous. But isn't the dictatorship under the former guerrilla Daniel Ortega now just as repressive as Somoza's regime, which the Sandinistas had overthrown?

Greeting:
Claudia Thallmayer, Coordinator of WIDE - Development Policy Network for Women's Rights and Feminist Perspectives

Moderation
Raimund Löw, Journalist and creator of the podcast Falter Radio, former ORF correspondent in Beijing, Brussels and Washington DC.

The conversation will be interpreted from Spanish into German.

In co-operation with the Development Policy Network for Women's Rights and Feminist Perspectives WIDE