Description
On the seventeenth of July, 1979, the dictator Anastasio Somoza left Nicaragua after forty-five years. In the end, the circle of relatives that had ruled and owned the country used to be gone. It took its money, which used to be much of the money the country had. The dictator left. The generals left. The colonels. They fled by helicopter and airplane, by car and on foot. By the nineteenth they were, almost all of them, gone. But the soldiers remained. And in San Juan del Sur, on the Pacific coast of Nicaragua, the riot Commander Zero, Eden Pastora, used to be facing the most productive of the dictator’s remaining soldiers: Bravo, Montenegro, “the Rattlesnakes,” “the Wild Geese,” “the Black and White.” Ultimately the guardias fled too – some of them, including a tough, murderous sergeant from “the Rattlesnakes” (referred to as Suicida by his men), making their way to El Salvador, from where, as the Contras, they waged sporadic war against the Nicaraguan leftist forces. Christopher Dickey used to be the first American newspaperman to enter the mountains of Nicaragua with the Contras and come out alive, and his account of the “secret” war that may be being waged against the Sandinista government reads like the most productive fiction. Yet it is as factual as the following day’s headlines.