Lesther Alemán (right) is a member of the Electoral Commission of the Civic Alliance for Justice and Democracy in Nicaragua. Alemán studies communications at Universidad Centroamericana and is a leader of the Nicaraguan University Alliance.
Nicaragua: The 40 Year Revolution - The People
Alejandro Bendaña, served as Deputy Ambassador to the United Nations and Secretary General of the Nicaraguan Foreign Ministry during the first Sandinista Government (1979-1990). He started the Centro de Estudios Internacionales in Managua, serving there between 1991and 1997. In 1992-93, Dr. Bendaña was Tinker Professor of Latin America History at the University of Chicago. From 2002 to 2016 he worked for the United Nations and other organizations in peace-building programs in Africa, Asia, and Latin America. Between 2014 and 2015 he served as Senior Mediation Advisor in the UN Department of Political Affairs. Holding a PhD from Harvard University in History, Bendaña is the author of Power Lines: US Hegemony in the New Global Order (Interlink, New York, 1996). He is the author of Sandino, Patria y Libertad (Anama, Managua, 2016), considered by the American Historical Review to be the “definitive biography of Sandino.” His most recent book is Buenas al pleito, mujeres en la rebelión de Sandino (Anama, Managua, 2019).
Luis Carrión Cruz has been a member of the FSLN since 1972 and was a member of the National Directorate from 1979 to 1995, when he resigned. Cruz was Vice Minister of the Interior from 1980 to 1988 and was Minister of Economy, Industry, and Commerce from 1988 to 1990. He was head of the electoral campaign for Herty Lewites, 2005–2006, and has been a member of the Executive Committee of the Sandinista Renovation Movement (MRS) since 2000. Cruz is a member of the Board of Instituto para el Desarrollo y la Democracia (IPADE), whose operations have presently been suspended by the Nicaraguan government.
Douglas Castro (left) is a professor and researcher at the Universidad Centroamericana. He is also a member of the Political Committee of the Civic Alliance for Justice and Democracy and member of the Nicaraguan University Alliance. Castro earned a degree in economics from the Universidad Autonoma de Nicaragua and in sociology at the Universidad Centroamericana.
Cristiana Chamorro Barrios is the founder and director of the Violeta Chamorro Foundation, a non-profit organization for the defense of freedom of expression, access to public information, and the promotion of initiatives that foster democracy, social development, education for change, and excellence in national journalism. She is a board member and Vice President at La Prensa, Vital Voices, Clínica Verde and Funides. Chamorro was a member of a group of advisors to President Chamorro and special advisor on political and social issues, communication, civil society, project management, strategic planning, research, speech writing and editing, event planning and public relations. From 1979 to 1990 Chamorro was the Director and a journalist for La Prensa.
Richard E. Feinberg, a professor at the University of California, San Diego, has traveled frequently to Nicaragua over the last 15 years and has spoken, in informal conversations and more structured interviews, with many of its principal figures in business, political, and academic circles. His most recent visit was in December 2018. While serving with the State Department’s Policy Planning Staff, he met with General Anastasio “Tacho” Somoza in 1978, and while serving with the National Security Council traveled with First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton to Managua in 1995. Feinberg joined the Carter Center elections- observation mission in 2006 and attended the subsequent 2007 inauguration of Daniel Ortega Saavedra. His two most recent studies are Nicaraguan Tragedy: From Consensus to Coercion (Wilson Center, Latin American Program, 2019) and Nicaragua: From Revolution to Restoration (Brookings Institution, 2018).
Mateo Jarquín, originally from Nicaragua, received his BA in History from Grinnell College. A PhD candidate in Harvard University’s Department of History, he is particularly interested in revolutionary movements, international relations, and the history of development agendas in Latin America during the Cold War. His dissertation, based on archival and oral-history research in several countries in Central America and the Caribbean, provides a history of the Sandinista Revolution (1978-1990) from the perspective of its foreign relations in the region.
Stephen Kinzer is an award-winning foreign correspondent who has covered more than 50 countries on five continents. He made his first trip to Nicaragua as a freelance journalist in 1976, covering the Sandinista uprising for the Boston Globe. In 1983 he became chief of the newly opened New York Times bureau in Managua. He spent the next six years reporting on war and upheaval in Nicaragua and elsewhere in Central America. His book about that experience, Blood of Brothers: Life and War in Nicaragua, is a social and political portrait that the New Yorker called "impressive for the refinement of its writing and also the breadth of its subject matter." Kinzer is also the co-author of Bitter Fruit: The Story of the American Coup in Guatemala. Columbia University awarded Kinzer its Maria Moors Cabot Prize for outstanding coverage of Latin America. After his six-year posting in Managua, Kinzer became chief of the Times bureau in Berlin, where he covered German unification and the wars in the former Yugoslavia. In 1996 he became the first Times correspondent in Istanbul, from which he covered Turkey and the newly independent countries of the Caucasus and Central Asia. After leaving the Times, Kinzer taught journalism and international relations at Northwestern University and Boston University. He is now a senior fellow at Brown’s Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs. His tenth book, Poisoner in Chief: Sidney Gottlieb and the CIA Search for Mind Control, will be published in September 2019. He writes a world affairs column for the Boston Globe.
Peter Kornbluh is a senior analyst, at the National Security Archive in Washington, D.C., where he has worked for 33 years. He currently directs the Archive's Cuba and Chile Documentation Projects. He was co-director of the Iran-Contra documentation project and also director of the Archive's project on U.S. policy toward Nicaragua. From 1990 to 1999, he taught at Columbia University as an adjunct assistant professor of international and public affairs. Since 1985 he has written widely on U.S.-Latin American relations for The Nation magazine, and other publications such as Cigar Aficionado, the New York Review of Books, The New Yorker, The Washington Post, and Politico. His most recent book, co-authored with William M. LeoGrande, is Back Channel to Cuba: The Hidden History of Negotiations between Washington and Havana (UNC Press, 2014), a Foreign Affairs Best Book of the Year. He is the author/editor/co-editor of a number of Archive books among them The Cuban Missile Crisis, 1962 and The Iran-Contra Scandal: The Declassified History. His first book on the contra war, published in 1987, was Nicaragua: The Price of Intervention. He is also the editor of the Archive’s major collection of 3000 declassified documents on the Sandinista revolution and the contra war, Nicaragua: The Making of U.S. Policy, 1978-1990; and co-editor of a comprehensive collection of over 5000 documents on the contra and Iran operations, The Iran-Contra Affair: The Making of a Scandal, 1983-1988.
Hugo Meneses
Sergio Ramírez Mercado graduated as a lawyer from the University of Nicaragua in 1964. He served as Secretary General of the Confederation of Central American Universities from 1968 to 1973, and again from 1976 to 1979. Between 1973 and 1975 he was resident artist in West Berlin through the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD). In 1977, he headed the Group of Twelve, formed by intellectuals, businessmen, and priests united against the Somoza regime. In 1984 he became Vice President of Nicaragua. In 1995 he participated in the founding of the Movimiento Renovador Sandinista (MRS) and was the presidential candidate of that party for the 1996 elections. Among his books, translated into more than 16 languages, are:
- De tropeles y tropelías (short-stories, 1971), Revista Imagen Award, Caracas;
- Castigo Divino, (novel, 1988), Dashiel Hammet Award in Spain;
- Un baile de máscaras (1995), Laure Bataillon Award in France ;
- Margarita, está linda la mar (novel, 1998), Alfaguara International Novel Award in Spain;
- Adiós muchachos (1999), his personal memoir of the Sandinista revolution;
- La fugitiva (2011), Bleu Metropole Prize in Montreal; and
- Ya nadie llora por mí (2017).
In 2011 he received the Literary Award “José Donoso” in Santiago de Chile; in 2014, the Carlos Fuentes International Prize in Mexico; and in 2017 the Miguel de Cervantes Prize in Spain – all of them for the whole of his literary work. He is a recipient of the International Prize for Human Rights awarded by the Bruno Kreisky Foundation in Vienna; the Order of Arts and Letters, France; the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany; the Order Isabel la Católica, Spain; Doctor honoris causa of the Blaise Pascal University, Clermont-Ferrand, France (2000); and the Guggenheim Fellowship for creative writing, 2008. He has been a visiting professor at the University of Maryland, College Park, and the University of California, Los Angeles, with the Regents Program. He has also held the Robert Kennedy Professorship in Latin American Studies at Harvard University. He is a member of the Friends of the Inter-American Democratic Charter, a group of scholars and former public officials presided by former U.S. President Jimmy Carter. He is a member of the board of the Gabriel García Márquez Foundation for Journalism, based in Cartagena, Colombia.
Anthony Quainton is currently Distinguished Diplomat in Residence at American University in Washington, D.C., in the School of International Service. He has held this appointment since September 2003. Prior to joining the faculty, Ambassador Quainton spent 38 years as a member of the United States Foreign Service. He held posts as Ambassador to Peru, Kuwait, Nicaragua, and the Central African Republic. He had earlier posts in Australia, Pakistan, India, Nepal and France. He also served as Director General of the Foreign Service, Assistant Secretary of State for Diplomatic Security, and Coordinator of the Office for Combating Terrorism. He retired from the Foreign Service in 1997 and subsequently was President and CEO of the National Policy Association from 1998 to 2003. Ambassador Quainton received his BA from Princeton University and a B.Litt degree from Oxford University as a Marshall Scholar.
Jaime Wheelock Román is a Nicaraguan academic, researcher, and politician. As a member of the National Directorate of the FSLN, he was one of the nine commanders who led the revolution that overthrew the Somoza regime. In the government of National Reconstruction, he was Minister of Agrarian Reform and Agriculture. He graduated in Law and the Social Sciences from the Universities of Nicaragua and Chile. He holds graduate degrees in Sociology from the Facultad Latinoamericana de Ciencias Sociales in Chile, and in Public Administration from Harvard University. He has published several books, translated into different languages, which have had an important influence for the Nicaraguan revolution. He is currently Chairman of the Board of Directors of the Institute for Development and Democracy (IPADE) in Nicaragua.
Armstrong A. Wiggins serves as Director of the Washington, D.C., office of the Indian Law Resource Center. Born in Nicaragua, Wiggins is a Mískito Indian from the village of Karatá, La Moskitia. At the age of eighteen, he became President of his Karatá community, and in 1972 he became a founding member of AIPROMISU, the first Indian regional organization in La Moskitia that works to defend Miskito rights to self-determination, land, territories, environment, natural resources, sustainable development, and their cultural survival. In 1977 Wiggins and other indigenous leaders from the Americas and from around the world traveled to the United Nations headquarters in Geneva, Switzerland, to demand that the international community hold countries accountable for taking away their lands, natural resources, and children, and violating their rights of self-government and self-determination. The result of this international effort was the eventual birth of the United Nations Declaration. After the Sandinista Revolution of 1979, Wiggins became the national representative for MISURASATA, a regional Indian organization in Nicaragua. Owing to his human-rights work in La Moskitia and the ways in which his education and influence as an indigenous leader made him a threat to national political interests, Wiggins was arrested and taken as a political prisoner during both the Somoza and Sandinista regimes. Soon after, in 1981, the Nicaraguan political situation forced him into exile. Now in the United States, Wiggins began working for the Indian Law Resource Center and served as Director of its Mexico, Central, and South America Program in its Washington, D.C., office. For the past two decades, Wiggins has been actively involved with numerous human-rights cases involving indigenous peoples of the Americas at the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights and the Inter-American Court of Human Rights. Wiggins played a leading role in the Center’s standards-setting work with the United Nations and the Organization of American States, particularly during the adoption of the U.N. Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples on September 13, 2007, and the adoption of the American Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples by the OAS on June 15, 2016. Since 2004, Mr. Wiggins has supervised the Center’s international efforts towards standards-setting in international bodies such as the UN, the OAS, and multilateral development banks, as well as the management of legal cases for the protection of the human rights of the indigenous peoples of the Americas.