Nicaragua Interviews

Mónica Baltodano, born in 1954, began her activism with the Sandinistas as a student and continued her efforts through underground mobilization, surviving imprisonment and torture. She was awarded the title of Commander Guerrilla for her service, and has held a number of political offices including Vice Minister of the Presidency and Minister of Regional Affairs. Upon leaving the FSLN in 2005, Ms. Baltodano helped to found the Movement to Reclaim Sandinismo (known as El Rescate).
Keywords: education, gender-based violence, imprisonment, politics and the law
Media: Transcripts (English, Spanish), Video (English, Spanish), Bibliography, English YouTube Video, Name Pronunciation Audio

Born in 1981, Tamara Dávila is a Nicaraguan feminist political activist and human rights defender. She graduated with a psychology degree from Universidad Centroamericana in Managua and holds two master’s degrees in Gender, Identity, and Citizenship from the Universidad de Huelva, Spain, and another in Public Policy, Rights and Youth Leadership from Universidad Centroamericana in Managua. Since 2004, Tamara has worked extensively with women’s organizations and other civil society groups that promote sexual and reproductive rights and advocate on behalf of survivors of violence against women and girls. Dávila has been an active participant in demonstrations and initiatives regarding gender-based violence in Nicaragua, such as the staging of the performance “Un violador en tu camino” (A Rapist in Your Path) in downtown Managua. 

Since 2014, Dávila has been a member of the political party Unamos (previously known as Sandinista Renovation Movement, MRS). During the student-led mass protests in 2018, which included more than 500 assassinations at the hands of the police and paramilitary groups, she denounced, and continues to denounce, the Ortega-Murillo government and works with UNAB, Articulación Feminista, and UNAMOS, among other political and civil movements, to achieve a democratic transition in her country that allows justice, equality, equity, and freedom. Because of that, government-sponsored intimidation and persecution increased, as she was being followed and her house was placed under surveillance. Due to her advocacy in defense of human rights and her leadership in the widespread opposition movement, Tamara was illegally and violently arrested at her house by the Ortega Murillo regime on June 12, 2021, in the presence of her five-year-old daughter. After the police raided her house and denied knowing her whereabouts for several weeks, Tamara officially disappeared into the hands of the Nicaraguan authorities. She was placed in solitary confinement for twenty months at the new prison built by the regime for political prisoners known as “El Nuevo Chipote.” There, and in clear violation of international law on the prevention of torture and treatment of prisoners, she faced several forms of torture that included dietary restrictions, interrogations in the middle of the night, irregular family visits, denial of access to reading and writing materials, and solitary confinement. Her case was emblematic because the regime prevented Tamara from establishing any form of contact with her daughter for over a year. On February 9, 2023, she was sent into exile alongside 221 other Nicaraguan political prisoners and granted humanitarian parole status in the United States. Currently, she is the 2023-2024 Human Rights Fellow at the Arcus Center for Social Justice Leadership in Kalamazoo College, Michigan. She continues to advocate for Nicaragua’s freedom and works to build a united and diverse movement in exile in coordination with people inside Nicaragua and around the world. She was recently elected spokesperson of the new political movement of leaders in exile, Monteverde.  

Keywords: military work in Nicaragua, imprisonment, reproductive rights

Media: Transcripts (English, Spanish), Audio

Juanita Jiménez was born in 1967. She is a lawyer, a leader in the Women's Autonomous Movement, and a longtime activist focusing primarily on women's health and reproductive rights. In recent years, she has become particularly active in protesting the 2006 law that outlawed all forms of abortion in Nicaragua. She has faced political persecution for her work in favor of abortion, and in particular for her support of a 9-year-old girl who had an abortion after being sexually abused.
Keywords: gender-based violence, politics and the law, reproductive rights
Media: Transcript (English, Spanish), Video (English, Spanish), Bibliography, YouTube Video (English, Spanish), Name Pronunciation Audio

Diana Martínez was born in 1958, and became active in the Sandinista movement as a student, finishing high school in Guatemala and becoming a Marxist. After the Sandinista Revolution, she returned to Nicaragua and worked in the textile industry based on her belief in the importance of laborers, and in an effort to rid herself of her bourgeois past. She has been involved with feminist research in Nicaragua, and at last contact was a director at La Fem, a coffee cooperative for women in Estelí.
Keywords: gender and health, rural women and land reform, reproductive rights, academia and women's studies
Media: Transcript (English, Spanish), Video, Name Pronunciation Audio

Sofía Montenegro was born in 1954, spending her teenage years in the United States and joining the Sandinistas as a student in Nicaragua. After the Sandinista's triumph, she became editor of the official Sandinista newspaper, Barricada, and was responsible for the funding of the weekly supplement Gente. At last contact, she was the Executive Director of the Centro de Investigación de la Comunicación (CINCO), a Managua-based think-tank the focuses on communication, culture, democracy, and public opinion.
Keywords: politics and the law
Media: Transcript (English), Video, Bibliography, Name Pronunciation Audio

Sandra Ramos was born in 1959 and is a leader in the Women's Rights Movement whose activism focuses on women workers in the maquila. She is a co-founder and director of Nicaragua's María Elena Cuadra Women's Movement, which provides scholarships for nontraditional jobs, has a small credit program for unemployed women, teaches women about their labor rights, and provides training for negotiation techniques.
Keywords: gender and health, gender-based violence, politics and the law
Media: Transcript (English, Spanish), Video (English, Spanish), Bibliography, English YouTube Video, Name Pronunciation Audio

Dora María Téllez Argüello is a Nicaraguan historian, politician, and social rights activist. She was a prominent Sandinista guerrilla commander in the popular struggle against the Somoza military dictatorship in Nicaragua in the 1970s.  She served as representative, vice president of the Council of State, and as Minister of Health during Nicaragua’s revolutionary government (1979-1990). In 1995, she parted ways with the Sandinista National Liberation Front (FSLN) due to its authoritarian drift and co-founded the Sandinista Renovation Movement (MRS), now UNAMOS.  

 Téllez has since been a vocal opponent to the consolidation of a new dictatorship in Nicaragua led by President Daniel Ortega. She was imprisoned for twenty months, held in isolation, and total deprivation of rights for denouncing the authoritarian nature of the government and its human rights violations. In February 2023, she was banished and expatriated from Nicaragua to the United States as part of a group of 222 political prisoners who were also illegally stripped of their Nicaraguan nationality.  

 Her struggle for democracy, social justice, and defense of human rights has been internationally recognized. She has been awarded numerous accolades, including the 2022 René Cassin Prize in Human Rights awarded by the Government of the Basque Country, Spain. 

 Téllez has also developed an academic career as a historian. She is the author of books and academic publications, including ¡Muera La Gobierna! (1999), which documents the internal colonization of indigenous lands by the Nicaraguan state in Matagalpa and Jinotega between 1820 and 1890. She was co-author of the monograph El Café de Nicaragua (2014) on the impact of the development of coffee production in Nicaragua in the 19th and 20th centuries. She has also published various essays on the challenges of democracy and democratic governance, citizen security and the criminal justice system, the role and evolution of social movements, the social and political exclusion of indigenous and other minoritized communities, and the evolution of Sandinismo.  

Téllez was incorporated into Nicaragua’s and Guatemala’s Academies of Geography and History.  She has also received two honorary doctorates from the University of Helsinki (2011) and from the Sorbonne-Nouvelle (2022). In the summer of 2023, she was a Visiting Research Scholar in the Program in Latin American Studies at Princeton University. Currently, she is a visiting professor and holds the Richard E. Greenleaf Distinguished Chair in Latin American Studies at Tulane University in New Orleans, Louisiana.    

Keywords: academia and women's studies, activism during the COVID-19 pandemic, imprisonment, military work in Nicaragua

Media: Transcripts (English, Spanish), Audio