sandanista

From The Guardian:

The woman who epitomised the 1979 Nicaraguan revolution that overthrew the dictator Anastasio Somoza has been denied entry to the US to take up her post as a Harvard professor on the grounds that she had been involved in "terrorism".

The decision to bar Dora Maria Tellez, one of the best-known figures in recent Latin American history, who has frequently visited the US in the past, has been attacked by academics and writers.

It comes at a time when President George Bush has appointed as his new intelligence chief a man associated with the "dirty war" against the Sandinistas in Nicaragua.

So Bush appoints a former contra, John Negroponte, as his chief of intelligence overseeing terrorism, and the U.S. subsequently blocks a former sandanista from obtaining a visa? Tellez was a student who got involved in the ousting of a fascist dictator...that's a terrorist act? What's more threatening to Bush, that she *was* a sandanista or that she *is now* an academic?

Ward Churchill. Tariq Ramadan. Now, Dora Maria Tellez.

I remember my Aunt Minnie claiming in the early-80s that she was being watched by shadowy figures, presumably as a result of the money she was sending to the sandanistas (who W's hero Ronald Reagan, of course, despised for their leftism, even though they revolted against a tyrannical fascist and installed a democratically elected government--a democratically elected government that the U.S. paid the contras to overthrow). I also remember developing an affinity at the beginning and end of same decade for two of the finest pieces of radicalism ever recorded: The Clash's Sandanista, and Kris Kristofferson's Third World Warrior--both inspired by the movement that Tellez helped to lead.

Here's to Dora Tellez, Aunt Minnie, The Clash, and Kris Kristofferson!