Los Angeles, CA – April 10 marks the one-year anniversary of the passing of Florentina Pérez Calderón, a champion of internationalism, a staunch defender of the Sandinista People’s Revolution and a beloved leader within the peasant community of El Lagartillo, Nicaragua. With her steadfastness and sacrifice, Tina (as she was known by those who loved her) left a model of life for those of us who struggle for revolution and liberation.

Tina was born on June 20, 1948, and grew up in the mountains of northern Nicaragua, the region where Augusto César Sandino and his peasant army had waged a guerrilla war against the United States about two decades before. Her childhood and the experiences of her family reflected the intense poverty, lack of healthcare and broken educational system that Nicaraguan campesinos endured under the U.S.-backed Somoza dictatorship. When she was one, Tina fell into an oven for processing sugar cane, burning her feet and barely surviving. Due to this accident, she would be the only child to have shoes in her family. Like her parents, she was unable to attend school and was illiterate during her youth.

At 15, Tina met José Ángel Pérez, her “compañero for life.” In 1963, the couple married and the following year they had their first child, Maria Zunilda, who contracted polio at two-and-a-half years old. Maria Zunilda survived but had a leg impairment for the rest of her life. Her second child Osmar passed away from an overdose of anesthesia when he was six years old. After the births of Maria Zunilda and Osmar, Tina and José Ángel went on to have four more children: José Maria (or Chema), Osmar (named in honor of his deceased older brother), Julia Marina, and Aracely de la Concepción. In total, Tina also suffered five miscarriages.

The lives of the Pérez family, other campesinos, workers and students across Nicaragua began to change in the late 1970s. Of course, this revolution was of their own making. José Ángel started attending consciousness-raising workshops led by a young priest named Gustavo Martinez in Achuapa, the closest town to their village. He would bring back to Tina what he learned about Carlos Fonseca and the Sandinista National Liberation Front (FSLN). Before these conversations with Martinez, Tina and her family had been persuaded by Somoza-owned radio broadcasts, which had taught them that the FSLN “were very bad, sent from Cuba where they ate children and killed old people.” Soon los Muchachos, as campesinos referred to the young guerilla fighters of the FSLN, penetrated deeper into the mountains and identified the Pérez family as potential collaborators. In the face of increasing repression by Somoza’s Guardia, Tina and José Angel made the life-threatening decision to support the FSLN and take a stand for the liberation of Nicaragua.

At first, Tina sent food or prepared coffee for the Muchachos, being careful to immediately clean up their cigarette butts so that the Guardia wouldn’t suspect the Pérez family’s allegiances. With the Somoza dictatorship fighting for its survival, the Guardia conducted limpiezas, clean-up operations to torture and often kill FSLN supporters. Next, Tina and José Angel made armbands for the guerillas out of black and red cloth, a clear symbol of revolutionary commitment if the Guardia had ever discovered them. The Pérez home became a safehouse for the Muchachos as they waged attacks on the Guardia throughout the mountains and towns of the region.

The sacrifices and risks taken by peasants, workers and guerillas throughout Nicaragua bore fruit on July 17, 1979, when Anastasio “Tachito” Somoza Debayle, the third member of his despotic family to rule Nicaragua, fled the country. Two days later, the Sandinistas claimed Managua and began constructing a sovereign government, a state that would actually benefit the Nicaraguan people. Tina and her family devoted themselves to the creation of a new Nicaragua.

In her biography, Tina noted that the National Literacy Campaign in 1980 was particularly important for campesinos. Nearly 60,000 high school and university students, 30,000 adults and teams of Cuban teachers spread across the countryside and previously neglected urban neighborhoods to raise the literacy and political consciousness of common Nicaraguans. Ismael Fernandez, a Cuban educator, stayed with and taught the Pérez family while his countrymen built the first school in the community. Tina said of the experience, “The Literacy Crusade lifted us out of the darkness in which we were submerged.” In five months, illiteracy plummeted from 50% to 15% and the political education helped consolidate the country to FSLN’s vision for Nicaragua.

The Sandinista Revolution also improved the economic status for the Pérez family and other Nicaraguan campesinos when the FSLN undertook the process of agrarian reform. In 1983, the FSLN distributed the land of former Guardia lieutenant, Antonio Palacios, in El Lagartillo to the Pérez family and other once-landless peasants. That same year José Angel traveled to the sister republic of Cuba to study cooperatives, and the peasants around El Lagartillo formed la Cooperativa Santiago Arauz Reyes. Cooperative members began working the land collectively, receiving the harvests of their labor for the first time.

To undo these breakthroughs, U.S. imperialism, former Guardia, large landowners and the Nicaraguan bourgeoise – those who benefited from the previous system – started organizing the Contras. These paramilitaries killed civilians, raped women and targeted health care clinics, cooperatives and other forms of social progress supported by the Sandinista government. In November of 1984, they started terrorizing the areas around El Lagartillo, kidnapping campesinos and leaving death threats. “The Contras were very close, moving like a pack of bloody dogs, wanting to kill all of the campesinos,” wrote Tina.

In the morning of December 31, 1984, the feared attack arrived. 150 Contras encircled El Lagartillo and fired off bombs and heavy artillery at the village. With few arms at their disposal, 14 community members stayed to allow the women and children to flee through rocky terrain. “It was like hell – women and children screaming, crying,” described Tina. “We didn’t know where we were going. There were drops so steep that we had to drop the children to people waiting below.” However, Tina’s daughter Zunilda – 20 years old, a muralist who found dyes in the woods around her home and a survivor of polio – remained. She grabbed a rifle and occupied her combat position in the southern part of the village.

It took three hours for the group to descend the mountain. They waited all day for news of what had happened in El Lagartillo. Eventually, a truck made its way down to leave cadavers at the health clinic. Tina wrote, “There were six dead from the cooperative: three adults, José Ángel, Ramiro Bravo and Encarnación Palma; two 14-year-old boys, Reynaldo Ramirez and Javier Pérez (my nephew); and my daughter Zunilda, 20 years old. We laid all of our dead out in the church. It hurt my very soul to see little Javier with his head split open.”

As Tina mourned the loss of her loved ones and the cooperative attempted to rebuild itself, brigadistas traveled to the community to observe both the Sandinista Revolution and the impact of U.S. imperialism.

Tina transitioned into her role as a solidarity activist, hosting hundreds of visitors and keeping the memory of José Angel and Zunilda alive. In 1986, Witness for Peace helped Tina tour the United States and expose the atrocities that Reagan’s government had committed against her family and the Nicaraguan people. She wrote, “We did all we could in the interest of stopping the war so that we could live in peace and dignity. The trip helped me very much emotionally. Telling my story, sharing my tragedy over and over again was helpful. It also helped me feel that their deaths would not go unnoticed.” Tina eventually published her own autobiography, La Vida de Tina and her story is a central part of Nicaragua: Surviving the Legacy of U.S. Policy by Paul Dix.

Despite the best efforts of the Sandinistas to construct a new society, U.S. imperialism’s atrocities eventually wore down the Nicaraguan population, which elected the U.S.-backed Violeta Chamorro in order to stop the war. “For me, this was the worst blow in the entire struggle for liberation,” wrote Tina. “It was even worse than when I lost my family, because their deaths were my personal loss; the loss of the revolution was the loss of freedom for my entire country.”

The neoliberal government of Violeta Chamorro rolled back the victories of the revolution, privatizing public resources and restoring large landowners to their previous positions within Nicaragua society. In El Lagartillo, this counterrevolution meant having to sell land to afford university tuition, long hikes to obtain potable water, and a general halt in social progress. In the early 2000s, responding to worsening economic conditions, young people within El Lagartillo – essentially the cousins of Zunilda – founded the Hijos del Maiz language school, using a cooperative-based model inspired by their parents’ example from the 1980s.

I visited El Lagartillo for the first time in 2017 as part of this program, attracted by the descriptions of the village’s cooperative history on the school’s website. I arrived in Nicaragua with some preconceptions about the country’s current state; while always skeptical of imperialism’s descriptions of the Global South, I had read from reliable left sources the typical narrative that the FSLN were back in power but had converted into President Daniel Ortega’s personal political machine. According to pretty much any U.S. news outlet, the FSLN was indistinguishable from their previous opponents and all true Sandinistas had left the party.

I spent one night in Managua, passing by the illuminated Hugo Chavez and Tree of Life statues that represent the current government’s vision, before taking a series of vans and buses to finally get to El Lagartillo. I initially stayed with Fermin and Rufin, an elderly couple who had survived the attack and lived a few houses down from the mural for the seven martyrs (the six who died at El Lagartillo as well as the Swiss internationalist Maurice Demierre who had helped the cooperative before being killed in a separate Contra attack). This spot also marks the location where Zunilda died protecting her family and cooperative. Lisbeth – my first Spanish teacher, Fermin and Rufin’s daughter, and Tina’s daughter-in-law – quickly dispelled any notion of a rupture between the struggle from the 1980s and the FSLN’s current project. During Spanish lessons in cabins a few feet away from that mural, she explained Nicaragua’s ongoing social transformations.

The return of Daniel Ortega to the presidency in 2007 had in fact commenced the second stage of the Sandinista Revolution. Progress has been incremental but substantial for ordinary Nicaraguans. A mobile clinic visited the community once a week, making health care possible for women and children from villages deep within the mountains. Students from El Lagartillo were attending – for free – universities in Leon and Managua to become doctors and engineers. Access to electricity, potable water and roofing significantly improved. The winding highway through the mountains to El Lagartillo had been repaved for the first time in a generation, simplifying travel and commerce.

To paraphrase my other professor Norma, whose 14-year-old brother Javier had died during the attack: Only those who have never lived without these basic necessities could not understand the difference they make. Contrary to the hit pieces in the Western press about high-profile “Sandinistas” who had abandoned the FSLN, those in the countryside, those who had shed blood to both win and defend the Revolution, continued with El Frente.

I moved into Tina’s house on October 30, 2017, my 25th birthday. I had met her a few times in passing during my first two months in El Lagartillo, keeping extremely quiet in fear of disrespecting a legend. As I had one month left, Lisbeth wanted me to have the opportunity to learn from her. On that first night, I explained that I hadn’t been able to sleep lately and Tina prepared me the remedy – a cinnamon and orange leaf tea – that she used to relax herself in the years after the attack as she grieved. During that time, José Ángel and Zunilda regularly returned in her dreams. As we sipped this tea, Tina began asking me all the necessary questions that build trust and friendship across cultures: Do you look more like your mother or your dad? Are you close with your brother? What’s New York like? Why aren’t you married yet?

A whole world flowed within and through Tina’s kitchen. With her black hair pulled back and most likely wearing her favorite color purple, Tina moved between her wood stove, sink and table, preparing breakfast, lunch and dinner. Every morning Radio Esteli publicized news updates, health tips and birthdays in the region. Her son Chema, grandson Gabriel and other agricultural workers brought milk, corn, vegetables and other harvests from the milpa. In the hands of Tina and the many women who helped her, those products became cuajada (a traditional cheese), tortillas, juices and gallo pinto (the national dish of Nicaragua) – the fuel for the community. Great-nieces and nephews ran through the front and back door playing tag while dogs and cats showed up to find a scrap of food. Elders from deep within the mountains arrived at her porch for a cup of coffee and to pay their respects.

When the night would settle and the whole village had returned to their homes to watch novelas or beisbol, Tina’s family would keep conversing. Her son Chema, who had become a leader in a cooperative just like his father, asked me about geopolitics and the latest efforts by U.S. imperialism to roll back the people’s struggle. Her nephew Juan, the language school’s librarian and a paraplegic who had survived the attack by dragging himself in a tunnel, described all the brigadistas and backpackers who had come through El Lagartillo.

There was a special gravity as Tina recounted stories of El Lagartillo’s founding, balancing humorous anecdotes about unruly farm animals with the terror of expecting the eventual attack by the Contras. With a grin that exposed her silver tooth, she would always talk about how cold Michigan was! Once she came out with an album full with photos of internationalists from across the U.S. and Europe who had stayed with her. José Ángel and Zunilda and all the martyrs of the Revolution lived in her stories.

In April 2018, U.S. imperialism, and those from Nicaraguan society aligned with it, once again organized to undermine the FSLN. U.S. media published the state department’s reports of the government cracking down on protests while completely censoring how paid thugs were attacking and even killing Sandinistas. I quickly received Facebook and WhatsApp messages from my friends in El Lagartillo, perplexed and angry about this fabrication. I visited that July to see for myself, speaking with survivors of the bloody street blockades. For the first time since the war, community members patrolled El Lagartillo to keep it safe.

Most of all, I remember Tina’s confusion as she asked me what had happened to all the American and European activists who had visited El Lagartillo and learned from their struggle. Where was the solidarity now that Nicaragua was once again under attack? On that trip, I joined the Friends of the ATC, an anti-imperialist solidarity network that supports Nicaragua’s Asociación de Trabajadores del Campo (Rural Workers’ Organization or ATC).

The ATC had organized peasants against the Somoza dictatorship, helped implement land reform in El Lagartillo and across Nicaragua and continued developing agricultural cooperatives in the decades after the Revolution. Tina and the ATC revealed to me the importance of protracted struggle. Internationalism is not a single act but a life-long commitment to opposing imperialism. An internationalist must build solidarity in both upsurges and downturns, just as the ATC had continued to organize peasants during both revolution and counter-revolution.

On my third trip in December 2018 and January 2019, I accompanied Tina for the caminata, an annual re-creation of how the women and children fled during the attack to Achuapa. As the sun came up on December 31, Tina’s family, community members and dogs gathered outside her house. We then descended through the infierno – a hell of wild brush, boulders and unpaved path – before eating breakfast on the stones within a creek. Tina, with a walking stick and a big hat to protect her from the sun, led us to the cemetery in Achuapa where her husband and daughter reside. We then all squeezed into a pickup truck to get back to El Lagartillo. She sat in front of the mural with her husband and daughter’s portraits as El Lagartillo’s youth sang revolutionary music and performed traditional dance to commemorate the martyrs. As the New Year arrived, El Lagartillo ate nacatamales and shot off fireworks.

On April 10, 2024, at the age of 75, Tina passed away in Managua after a bout with an allergy. Following a caravan of pickup trucks, motorcycles, and a bus loaned from the local company, El Lagartillo laid Tina to rest in Achuapa alongside José Angel and Zunilda. Her life exemplified the truth that “The people, and the people alone, are the motive force in the making of world history.”

Just as Tina preserved the memory of her husband and daughter, her many loved ones carry forward her revolutionary legacy.

In the words of her granddaughter, Angélica Webster Perez, “The only consolation I have is that Mama Tina always taught us that our beloved deceased were always taking care of us: all of us grandchildren were raised with that love, knowledge of presence and respect towards Aunt Zunilda and Papa Chango, although none of us had met them in life. And well, at least the pain is relieved a little knowing that he has reunited with them.

 “Those who knew Mama Tina, or her story, know that she was a ‘complete legend’, and I feel so, so proud to carry her blood, and I know that we will ensure that the next generation will be too.”

 ¡Florentina Pérez Calderón – Presente, presente, presente!

#LosAngelesCA #CA #International #Nicaragua #Sandinistas #Remembrances