San Jorge, Nicaragua
March 2011
I got a room that night in a flea bag hotel near the center of town for $15. Oddly, the United States dollar is an official currency in Nicaragua, and I gave the mulatto girl at the hotel counter a crisp five and a ten. The girl spoke English with a curious accent, and I knew she must have been from the Caribbean coast, where much of the population is black, and the first language is English.
For a country whose leader constantly bemoans the ‘interference in the internal affairs of Nicaragua’ by the ‘Empire,’ Nicaragua loves American dollars, and most vendors are ready at the drop of a hat to whip out hand calculators to figure out the exchange rate. It seemed there were money changers on every busy street corner of Rivas with huge wads of local currency, córdobas, looking to change them for dollars. I never figured out how the money changers were able to operate in the open, waving their money about so ostentatiously in a country with so much crime and theft.
The next morning I had a light breakfast of gallo pinto, sliced mango, and pineapple and walked out of the hotel. I stood stretching my back on the sidewalk in front of my hotel. The heat was already oppressive in the tropical early morning sun. A dilapidated car wash was open for business across the street, and a motorcycle repair shop next door called ‘El Chele’ caught my eye. The Nicaraguans call any light skinned foreigner ‘chele.’It’s not as offensive as ‘gringo’ but still gets the message across. A large green and red parrot in a steel cage at the entrance way to the hotel was jabbering away in Spanish.
“¡Que pendejo!” repeated the parrot over and over in a shrill, demented voice.
I smiled and wondered if Mako Sloane had stayed at the hotel and contributed to the parrot’s vocabulary. Sloane was constantly on my mind. What mayhem had he been involved in down here? Would I find anyone who knew anything and was willing to talk? What did the taxi driver mean last night when he warned me to be careful?
I had intended to pick up where I left off yesterday and continue canvassing the local San Jorge taxi drivers. I had already stepped into the street when suddenly a Toyota Land Cruiser and Hilux pickup truck with tinted windows careened around the corner, approaching at high speed. The Land Cruiser looked like it was passing to my right, and the pickup appeared to want to pass on the left. I had nowhere to go and froze in the middle of the street, unwilling to risk moving in either direction. The two vehicles screeched to a stop, bracketing me between them.
A large, fleshy Nicaraguan in his sixties peered ominously at me from the passenger seat of the Land Cruiser. “Sube, Chele…apúrate,” he said, inviting me to get in the vehicle and suggesting I be quick about it. Two armed thugs in dark glasses jumped out of the Hilux, grabbed me by the elbows, and briskly marched me toward the Land Cruiser. The rear door opened, and I was roughly deposited into the back seat between two other armed toughs with menacing scowls. We sped off, making a U-turn practically on two wheels, and both vehicles left at high speed in the direction they had come. The entire abduction took less than 15 seconds.
Nobody said anything for almost five minutes, as the nauseating fear in my gut gradually subsided, and my racing pulse returned to something akin to normal. We flew back toward Rivas, dodging deep pot holes and constantly honking at pedestrians, bicyclists, stray dogs, and the occasional horse or cow. My new friends looked like government security types, either currently employed or out of work. That much was obvious. The car was equipped with a CB-type radio as well as numerous cell phones which were constantly ringing. The heavy, middle-aged Nicaraguan in the front passenger seat was obviously in charge. He would bark a few words in rapid-fire, guttural Spanish each time he answered a call, accustomed to giving orders.
He glanced around at me curiously and asked, “¿Te hiciste?”
When I didn’t understand the colloquial Spanish, the thug next to me translated into heavily accented English. “Did you shit yourself, man?” They all guffawed as if their boss was a hilarious Nicaraguan version of George Lopez or somebody. I could see the humor in the situation, though, and almost mustered a weak smile. Almost.
I still had no idea where we were going, or why I had been abducted in broad daylight in San Jorge. Did it have something to do with my inquiries yesterday about Sloane? Who were these people? Were they working for the American or Nicaraguan government?
After the joke at my expense, my hosts made no attempt to engage me in conversation, but when we arrived back at the Pan American Highway in Rivas and turned south, instead of north toward Managua, I was utterly confused. If we’re not going to Managua, where in the hell are we headed? I thought helplessly. We passed the professional baseball stadium on the left and soon left the bustling city of Rivas behind, with its chaos of bicycle taxis, horse-driven carts, motorcycles, and frantic pedestrians. Each time we approached slower traffic, the driver, a silent, muscular brute in the ubiquitous backwards baseball hat and sunglasses, opened his window and affixed a flashing light to the top of the Land Rover, switched on a ear-splitting siren, and we accelerated past the mere mortals in the right lane, at one point causing a spooked horse on the shoulder of the highway to buck in terror, almost throwing the old woman who was running her daily errands on horseback.
My first hint at what was happening in this absurd turn of events came when we arrived at La Virgen, a small village on the shores of Lake Nicaragua, better known for the intersection at the southern end of the town with the road that leads to the Pacific resort of San Juan del Sur. Another Toyota Hilux with two more armed thugs that could have been identical twins of my own companions waved down our Land Cruiser. My host rolled down his tinted window and got right to the point.
“¿Que pasó?” he asked without ceremony. “What’s going on?”
“The comandante is leaving by helicopter in ten minutes. He says for Colonel Cerna to wait for him in his house.”
The leader of my group of hooligans graciously raised a forefinger in acknowledgement, and once again we were flying down the highway toward the coast at breakneck velocity sending pedestrians, dogs, livestock, and vehicles alike scurrying to the side of the road to avoid the speeding caravan. I no longer was paying any attention to our death-defying race into oblivion or the desperate antics of the animals and people in our path. I was staring at my host as if I was in the presence of the devil incarnate because that’s how most people, who weren’t die-hard Sandinistas, viewed ‘Colonel Cerna,’ who had to be none other than Lenin Cerna, the infamous, former head of the Dirección General de Seguridad del Estado, the General Directorate for State Security.
If you had to come up with a fictional portrait of the stereotypical, iconoclast Sandinista revolutionary, you couldn’t do any better than Lenin Cerna. With a brother named ‘Engels’ after Friedrich Engels, coauthor of The Communist Manifesto, and a sister named ‘Krupskaya,’ after Vladimir Lenin’s wife Nadezhda Krupskaya, it was unrealistic to expect that Cerna was going to conform to the demands of conservative Nicaraguan society. He was participating in Sandinista terror campaigns as an urban bomber when he was 14, and later, as head of Nicaragua State Security, oversaw most of the Sandinistas’ worst crimes including political assassinations, systematic torture, and kidnappings.
It occurred to me that his role as head of my group of abductors placed a certain level of doubt on the outcome of this involuntarily departure from my planned itinerary. Why would Lenin Cerna take an interest in me? Unless, of course, all the stories about Sloane were indeed true, and the Sandinistas were as interested in him as were the CIA and FBI. Whatever happened now, I knew I was on to a good story. I only hoped I survived long enough to tell it.