Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

July 23, 1959: Student Protest and State Violence as Myth and Memory in Leoón, Nicaragua

2005; Duke University Press; Volume: 85; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1215/00182168-85-2-187

1527-1900

Francisco Jaime Lopes Barbosa,

Politics and Society in Latin America

At about noon on July 23, 1959, students from the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de Nicaragua (UNAN) presented themselves before the departmental military commander of León, Colonel Juan César Prado. Prado was the ranking local member of the Nicaraguan Guardia Nacional (GN); as the country was under a government-declared “state of siege” that included the imposition of martial law, he had authority over what occurred in the city. At the colonel’s request, the students had come to ask for permission to conduct their traditional desfile de los pelones, a boisterous ceremony in which male first-year students (pelones) had their heads shaved and paraded through the streets in drunken, costumed merriment to celebrate their arrival at the university. The colonel acceded to the request on several conditions, including that the parade not come within two city blocks of GN headquarters, located in the central plaza across from León’s cathedral, and that it take place between three and six o’clock.The students gathered in the street in front of the university and began their march shortly after the appointed hour, in the full heat of the afternoon. Rather than wild costumes, however, the men wore long-sleeved white shirts, black ties, and black pants, while the women wore dark-colored dresses. They carried the national flag and that of the university, marching in complete silence. As they made their way in the direction of León’s central square, and thus toward GN headquarters, the students were confronted by a platoon of guardsmen under the command of Major Anastasio “Tacho” Ortiz, the city’s GN police chief and one of Prado’s subordinates. After nearly half an hour, during which the students shouted insults at the soldiers, Ortiz came to an agreement with student leaders and both sides agreed to withdraw.As the students headed back toward the university, they were joined by other young people and students from the secondary schools, technical schools, and business schools clustered near the center of town. Attempting another route toward the central plaza, the main group of students were again forced to retreat. They encountered a person they identified as an off-duty guardsman and proceeded to harass and beat him. Another group of students chased off a former GN auxiliary with a hail of rocks. Major Ortiz sent a platoon to investigate these incidents while he positioned guardsmen at the intersections that led into the plaza. His men returned after a short time with the guardsman’s attackers in custody. The mass of students, now numbering several hundred, attempted a third route to the plaza, attracting crowds of bystanders who gathered both near the students and in the central plaza behind the GN soldiers who were blocking the intersections. The size of the crowds and the growing chaos prompted Prado to dispatch two jeeps into the plaza to arrest bystanders indiscriminately and ferry them to the GN jail, “La 21.”1 Meanwhile, a delegation of student leaders was sent to speak with Colonel Prado to secure the freedom of the arrested students. In exchange for promises that the assembly would disperse, Prado had those students released; they rejoined the demonstration. Attempts by student leaders to break up the protest failed, and at about six o’clock in the early evening (the time at which the permission for the parade expired), Prado ordered Ortiz’s detachment of soldiers to disperse the crowd with tear gas. Within minutes, four students lay dead, and close to 40 were wounded.Mauricio Martínez, Erick Ramírez, José Rubí, and Sergio Saldaña were mourned that night and buried the following day—most of León presenting itself for both the wake and the funeral. Almost immediately, a GN tribunal convened in León to sort out responsibility for the tragedy. This gesture notwithstanding, the people of León took matters into their own hands four days later, on July 27, when a crowd numbering in the hundreds gathered at the house of Major Ortiz and for three hours tried to set fire to it. They were deterred only by Ortiz’s sons, who fought off the blaze from inside the house as the crowd held city firefighters at bay. Ortiz’s wife and family finally fled, leaving the house to be looted by the assembly. The GN investigation then expanded to include the very personal attack on the major. On September 17, the members of the investigative junta released their report, giving a narrative of the events and assigning appropriate blame. These findings mark the first official inscription of July 23, 1959, into Nicaraguan history, but certainly not the last.2This paper explores the meanings of July 23, 1959, by examinating both the protest itself and how that day has become a symbol embedded in varying political discourses, both popular and official.3 The protest, and the events leading up to and following it, must be understood within the context of student and popular culture, and the symbolism of the protest and its aftermath must be read closely for its echoes of both. An analysis of the symbolic forms utilized by the students, and the crowd that sought to avenge them, suggests that both groups meant to articulate a moral critique of the Somocista state through the language of class and gender. July 23 has since become important, and often fundamental, to several narratives of Nicaraguan history, and it has been appropriated by various constituencies into what I shall call myths of virtue, subversion, and revolutionary origins. Indeed, in the days and decades following, memories of the protest were put into service not only in a popular critique of the state but also in advancing the political agendas of Somocistas and Sandinistas alike. Almost immediately, the populace of León mourned the students as martyrs to a repressive regime, and subsequently both the Somoza dictatorship and the revolutionary government of the Frente Sandinista de Liberacíon Nacional (FSLN) sought to use the protest to undergird their political legitimacy. Analyzing popular and official memories of these focal events provides a useful window into the political and symbolic role of Nicaraguan students in the second half of the twentieth century.My broader purpose is not to prove or disprove any of these myths by presenting an opposing historical narrative that is somehow more authentic. Rather, I wish to use the protest and what followed to call into question all historical narratives, while showing the efficacy of such myths for negotiating power and granting political legitimacy to previously silenced renderings of the past. My use of the word myth is not meant disparagingly—indeed, by myth I mean a particular kind of public or collective memory. Within my discussion of public memory I will examine two separate sites—the archive and the street—and the emblematic artifacts associated with each—the report and the monument. These sites and their artifacts offer clues about the articulation of power and memory: the attempt by states to gain political legitimacy through an appropriation of meaning.I rely here in part upon Roland Barthes’s conceptualization of myth as a discursive practice that attempts to reinforce a particular ideology. Elsewhere, Michel Foucault has theorized power as diffuse within social formations rather than the property of a given social institution such as the state; this allows for multiple and overlapping terrains in which unequal relations of power might be contested. Foucault’s is a symbolic power, a contest over the meanings attached to signs, and by extension a struggle over whose collection of myths—whose historical narrative—will become dominant, although such struggles are necessarily ongoing and contingent. Taking Barthes and Foucault together, I argue that it is in the realm of symbolic meaning that political domination might be most effectively contested.4Similarly, but proceeding instead from the work of Alessandro Portelli, Luisa Passerini, Daniel James, and others, I view the individual process of remembering as an equally significant social and political act, and memories of July 23 as specific instances of creatively reimagining the past.5 I explore popular memories of July 23 in post-Sandinista Nicaragua for what they might suggest about the limitations of official appropriations and the relationship between individual memories and dominant historical narratives. I treat memory, in the form of oral testimony, not as a repository of “facts” that can be put to use in reconstructing the past but rather as a valuable, although complex and problematic, glimpse into the shifting, subjective meanings of historical change within individual lives and collective communities. Collective, unofficial myths, as well as individual stories about particular events, are lived ideology and living texts, and in turn necessarily exert pressure on dominant historical narratives. They thus become a symbolic weapon of great importance, especially for those without formal political power. As Alessandro Portelli tells us, referring to the reliability of oral testimony, “errors, inventions and myths lead us through and beyond facts to their meanings.”6 I will argue that it is precisely the efficacy of myths— their political usefulness—rather than their accuracy, that should be used to assess their significance. In the end, it is most important not to recover precisely what happened on July 23, 1959, but rather to understand its role in the memory of its survivors and in the collective memory of the inhabitants of León.The students of León were heirs to a long history of political activity, much of which had centered upon the desire for university autonomy from the state.7 Throughout the mid- to late 1940s, university and secondary school students played a significant role in the opposition movements against Somoza. Students led a major protest against the dictatorship in June of 1944 and supported the short-lived reformist government of Leonardo Argüello in 1947, even offering to defend it through armed resistance against the GN should the need arise. However, the ideological differences among oppositional factions, as well as the considerable barriers created by Somocismo, which only served to magnify them, ultimately undermined any potential for cooperation and diluted the effectiveness of student mobilization in this period.8Several factors combined during the 1950s to revitalize and strengthen the Nicaraguan student movement. According to Robert Arnove, “The relatively rapid growth of the economy during the 1950s and 1960s, coupled with substantial foreign aid . . . triggered a rapid expansion of schooling [in Nicaragua].”9 Indeed, total university enrollment more than doubled in the 1950s, rising from 897 in 1951 to 1,718 in 1961.10 The 1960s and 1970s would show equally high levels of growth, as the university student population rose to 4,000 by 1966 and 24,000 by 1978.11 Many of those newly admitted to Nicaragua’s universities were members of a middle class dissatisfied with the status quo, joined by an increasing number of students from working-class families. Heightened state repression also encouraged the growth of student political movements, and student participation in armed resistance against the state actually increased. After the 1956 assassination of Anastasio Somoza García and the subsequent rise of his eldest son Luis to the presidency, the regime became more willing to use brute force to subjugate its political enemies. By 1959 Nicaragua was becoming a police state under the watchful eye of the GN, headed by Anastasio Somoza Debayle, the president’s ruthless younger brother. By the end of the decade, many university students were involved in some form of oppositional political activity. The passing of the Law of Educational Autonomy in 1957 and its implementation the following year further bolstered student politics and its engagement with national political issues by reducing government intervention and oversight. While some students joined guerilla movements, student political organizations such as the Consejo Universitario de la Universidad Nacional (CUUN), the Juventud Democrática Nicaragüense, and the Juventud Patriótica Nicaragüense worked to build opposition to the dictatorship within Nicaraguan universities.The reasons for the protest of July 23 are not difficult to locate. A month before the protest, GN forces and the Honduran army had ambushed a band of guerillas in the mountainous region of El Chaparral, Honduras, near the border with Nicaragua. Carlos Fonseca Amador, future founder of the FSLN, was wounded and captured in the ambush, along with several others; he languished in a prison hospital in Tegucigalpa. Several other young revolutionaries (some former university students) were killed. The students of León were outraged and organized several vigils and protests for the slain students throughout the last week of June and the first weeks of July. They then decided to voice their opposition to the Somoza regime through a more elaborate demonstration on July 23. The GN had halted a previous attempt to hold a mourning vigil for the victims of the El Chaparral massacre, and so the representatives of the CUUN (the university’s leftist student council) presented themselves before Prado to ask for permission for a traditional parade.According to several testimonies, the freshman parade had, in previous years, consisted of students from the entering class marching through the streets inebriated, costumed, and playing crude music on anything they could find, including pots and pans. Elaborating on the tradition, one witness told the junta that the students usually paraded “in costumes and makeup, or more like buffoons.”12 What the populace of León saw that afternoon was very different, however. One witness noted that “instead of being all painted up and with music, like it’s been all the other years, they had two flags, the Nicaraguan flag and the university’s flag, and they were all dressed in black ties, and it seemed to me that it was a political demonstration and not a demonstration or parade of university students.”13 A prominent local doctor stated that there “were about two or three hundred students” and noted that the pelones “usually [wore] disguises, but this time they were dressed normally.”14The planned demonstration—part of the ongoing protests over the El Chaparral ambush—had been common knowledge for several weeks, and thus the students’ attire did not surprise those associated with the university. One student claimed he did not attend because he didn’t participate in “subversive activities,” while another said that he “found out by word of mouth that there wouldn’t be any liquor or makeup; he also heard from some classmates that it was going to be in memory of El Chaparral.”15 Several professors at the university saw a posting a week before the march indicating that the pelones, “instead of going around like they had before, in an inebriated state and made up [pintados], were going to march through the streets in proper attire, without drinking and accompanied by the rest of the student body.”16 Even students in the professional schools of law and medicine knew that the undergraduates “didn’t attend like previous years because they were in mourning. They weren’t going like in previous years, painted and making music, but rather in black ties, white shirts, and dark pants, this owing to the comrades fallen at El Chaparral.”17 Thus for many the political nature of the day’s activities came as no surprise.The reasons for the protest do much to explain its form, one that resonated with popular religious culture as well as student culture. Funerals and religious processions for saints, as well as public student rituals such as the desfile, were commonplace in the life of León and had marked the streets as a site for collective, but often intimate, cultural expression. Although white shirts and dark pants were similar to the school uniforms most boys wore, the long-sleeved shirts, black ties, and dark dresses of the women reinforced the somber, funereal tone of the march—a symbolic burial of the students killed at El Chaparral. Witnesses’ descriptions are also of a tradition transformed, as a cultural practice that had previously centered upon frivolity became a serious political statement. The traditional parade, marked by mayhem implying student immaturity, could only provide a standard against which a more militant identity could be constructed. By creating an alternative form that resonated with popular religiosity as well as student culture, the students changed the parade into a performance of political dissent.Several witnesses testified that the students called for the death of the Somozas as they marched and invoked the names of Augusto César Sandino and Rigoberto López Pérez (the young poet who had assassinated the elder Somoza). Sandino and Pérez were both powerful symbols of a distinctly popular, nationalist struggle against the Somoza dynasty. The Nicaraguan flag marked them as representatives of the nation, and the university flag designated them representatives of the newly autonomous national university. Like students elsewhere in Latin America during this period, the students saw themselves as a legitimate voice of political dissent in Nicaraguan society and as nationalists struggling against a dictatorship they saw as a political aberration. As the afternoon progressed, however, the protest turned into a moral critique of the regime articulated through the discourses of class and gender.Both physical and symbolic violence were an inherent part of the protest from the first student confrontation with the GN. The initial confrontation with the GN involved not only yelling but also spitting and pushing, as students made clear their contempt for the state by belittling its agents. Some of the insults predictably identified the soldiers with the unpopular regime, labeling them “thieves and murderers like the Somozas.”18 However, students also questioned the guardsmen’s masculinity, calling them cowards and even “cochones,” a derogatory term for homosexuals.19 These insults foreground what is perhaps the most intriguing feature of the clash between students and state, yet one of the most difficult to access—its gendered dimension. Although the evidence is fragmentary, incidents such as this suggest that gender was an important feature of the cultural substrate on which such political struggles were waged and that gendered understandings of power and identity were crucial to making those struggles culturally intelligible.A hegemonic middle-class masculinity, fundamental to a broader patriarchal gender regime, underlay these insults, and despite the participation of women in the protest, the confrontations that afternoon played out as contests between men over the ability to claim masculine identity and privilege. Although at least one contemporary noted that women had traditionally been excluded from the desfile de los pelones and argued that their participation attested to the depth of student outrage over El Chaparral, both archival and oral sources suggest their participation was marginal.20 The female students’ assigned role in the spectacle was to evoke the mourning sister, widow, or even mother—much as the male students’ role was to suggest the grieving brother or father.21 As the tension increased and the clashes between students and guardsmen became more heated, however, women receded to the background, and the conflict over masculine identity came to the fore. This conflict suggests the general contours of hegemonic, Nicaraguan middle-class masculinity: heterosexuality, bravado in the face of danger, morality, respectability, and honor, as well as the ability to threaten, and if necessary execute, physical violence.22 By physically pushing the guardias while accusing them of cowardice and questioning their heterosexuality, the students were implicitly claiming for themselves the privileges of this hegemonic masculinity.23The majority of the insults, however, were meant suggest that the students were morally superior to the soldiers because they had not been bought by the regime. The students called them “muertos de hambre” (“dying of hunger”) and “lambeplatos” (plate lickers), signifying a humiliating state of poverty and degradation in common discourse, as well as “needy dogs.”24 Along these same lines, the students flashed money, suggesting that the individual guardsmen were so desperately poor they could be bought for a few córdobas.25 As Private Eduardo Pérez recounted, they yelled that the guardsmen “only earned five córdobas like wretches and [the Somozas] had them around like stray dogs.”26 Private Julio Martínez told the junta how the students encouraged the guardsmen to join them, saying “that they were going to pay them with dollars, not with filthy pesos like the Somozas did.”27 GN private Benigno López testified that students offered money, saying it was “so we could go get something to eat and not be starving,” while Antonio Baca testified that these actions were meant to show that the students “earned more money.”28 These insults illustrate the articulation of class and gender ideals within hegemonic masculine identity in that they called into question rank-and-file guardsmen’s ability to financially support themselves and their families, another characteristic of respectable, middle-class masculinity.In addition to declaring the guardsmens’ masculinity suspect and calling them corrupt and immoral for having abandoned their principles for a few coins, at least a few of the protesters were perhaps also highlighting their own social position through this class-based verbal abuse. Although some working-class families could send their children to the university on scholarships, their numbers were still quite small; the majority of the students were from middle-and upper-middle-class homes. Thus, the students were of the few fortunate enough to attend the university as a means of social mobility, instead of having to join the GN like the majority of their working-class and peasant contemporaries.29Several incidents of violence attest to the students’ heightened level of anger and resentment. Enrique Martínez, a former GN auxiliary, was on his way home from the train station when he was recognized and attacked by a group of five or six students. He was beaten and kicked; he later testified that he would have been stabbed had Ortiz’s men not come to investigate and rescued him.30 Testifying before the junta, Private Dolores Prado, an off-duty guardsman who happened to be bicycling by a crowd of students that afternoon, recounted the following story:This story highlights the character of student violence, as well as their concern with government informants, or “orejas.” Lacking significant power, student violence was mostly directed against solitary individuals; if a human target for popular justice was lacking, property would suffice.The symbolism of the protest, finally, can be glimpsed in the response of several students to the arrest of their fellow protesters for the attack on Mar-tínez. When the GN arrived to save Martínez, they took five students into custody. As they were being taken away, a group of their fellow students demanded that they, too, should be taken into custody. When the soldiers ignored them, they raised their hands and chanted “we’re being taken prisoner” as they followed the detainees to GN headquarters.32 Besides showing solidarity, the playful tone of the act—the performance of victimization that mocked the very real repression of political dissent in Somoza’s Nicaragua—suggests the students meant to ridicule the state and flaunt their assumed privilege. Only the perception that they were untouchable would allow the students to challenge so boldly the state’s authority to discipline them. When they arrived at headquarters, Colonel Prado (apparently still hoping for a peaceful resolution) ordered the students released, at which point they rejoined the growing crowd that now included secondary school students and townspeople as well.Taken as a whole, the attire, the flags, the insults, the violence, as well as the act of solidarity, point to an afternoon that was organized and yet chaotic, somber and yet carnivalesque, hopeful and yet cynical. The performance of mourning sought to associate the dead revolutionaries with the legitimate nation, in opposition to an illegitimate state; death served as a trope that allowed the protesters to condemn the Somozas and all they stood for. One can only imagine that students wanted not only to sacrilize their protest by evoking the funeral but also to safeguard it from state reprisal under the cloak of mourning. The students’ actions not only echoed the culturally specific rituals and practices of popular religiosity but also gave voice to a growing popular dissatisfaction with the state and its authority. However, the gendered and class-based insults of the protest also serve to foreground the ferocity of student hatred for the GN, a characteristic that has been obscured in subsequent appeals to the memory of July 23, 1959, that have cast the students as innocents or dupes.The evidence also suggests that student political mobilizations such as those of July 23 were quite heterogeneous, revealing the significant differences among students in a politicized university environment. Their interactions with the GN highlighted these differences. Second Lieutenant René Barbarena, second in command under Ortiz, described in detail a disagreement among the students during the first confrontation, concerning whether to proceed. An unidentified student leader urged the crowd to turn back and go a different way, reminding them of the promise to steer clear of GN headquarters and contending that the parade was not, and should not become, a political demonstration. In response, the crowd (again using language laden with gendered meanings) called him a coward. A scuffle ensued, in which the student and his detractors came to blows.33 Even as the student leader Fernando Gordillo characterized the protest as a peaceful one, he testified to sending one of his fellow students home for being drunk and rowdy.34 Rolando Avendaña, who would later write a memoir of the massacre, called his fellow students “intransigent” and “stubborn” during questioning by the junta.35 There are many possible reasons why some students would be cautious in their interactions with the GN, including political ignorance or disagreement, simple fear, or even their tenuous financial status as university students who relied in part on the state for their scholarships. Other students—perhaps those who were more politically engaged or ideologically dogmatic, who relied on other means to pay for their schooling, or who simply weren’t concerned about possible consequences—could be more radical in their actions. What remains clear is that most university students saw themselves as uniquely capable of legitimate political opposition, due to their status in society, and they felt a responsibility to act in what they saw as the interests of the nation.The second mass confrontation of the afternoon proceeded as the first had, but with an increasing level of intensity, according to those involved. Again the students yelled insults, although it is unclear whether these were similar to those deployed earlier. Two accounts of the incident itself (one from the GN report, the other by the student leader Fernando Gordillo) suggest the degree to which words can both illuminate and obscure. The GN account reads as follows:Gordillo’s account, not quite so clinical, tells the story from the other side of the street:In the aftermath of the “massacre,” the populace of León was first to lay claim to the students as symbols. For them, the dead students came to represent popular righteousness in the face of an unjust regime. The wake and the funeral of the four slain that afternoon indicate that the material bodies of the students served to legitimize mass political protest and that a collective response sought to mark the deaths as symbolic of the moral inferiority of the Somoza dictatorship. Similarly, the attack on the Ortiz home, like the student protest, sought to communicate a moral critique of the Somocista state and construct a myth of popular righteousness. The public display of the four dead on July 23 and 24 allowed people to condemn the state in a way that was safely shrouded in the legitimate act of grieving material bodies, rather than in a staged symbolic funeral, as had been the case in the student protest.Immediately after the shooting, the injured were taken to the city’s hospital, where a blood drive was quickly organized. Students and citizens of León eagerly donated, while offers of blood from the GN and the government (ironic in such a situation) were summarily rejected. The night of the 23rd, the bodies were displayed in open caskets in the university auditorium, a public space that drew attention to their membership in a small but privileged group. The display emphasized the violent nature of their deaths at the hands of the state. Throughout the night, Leoneses of all ages and social classes (and even some Somocistas) formed long lines to view the bodies in their caskets, holding vigil with the families of the deceased. In this way, the bodies of the students became public, belonging to all instead of only to their respective families.The following morning a mass was held at the Cathedral of León, after which the bodies were returned once again to the university. At four in the afternoon—after several speeches by university administrators and fellow students—the bodies left the university in a funeral procession, estimated at 12,000 people, through the streets of León, echoing the p