Enrique Schmidt

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Enrique Schmidt Cuadra (* 1949 in Chinandega ; † November 5, 1984 in Camoapa in the Boaco Department ) was a Nicaraguan revolutionary and politician.

biography

family

Schmidt's great-grandfather was the East Prussian artillery captain Wilhelm Schmidt Rauchhaupt. This had after the Franco-German War of pacifism known and was therefore with many other Germans to America emigrated . After a stay in El Salvador , he moved to Nicaragua.

Enrique Schmidt was born the son of a lawyer ; he grew up in Corinto . His parents were killed on December 23, 1972 in a severe earthquake in Managua .

Education, profession and politics

At the express request of his father, Schmidt traveled to the Federal Republic of Germany in 1967 to study . After learning the German language for over two years , he enrolled at the University of Cologne in 1969 with a grant from the German Academic Exchange Service for Economics and Social Sciences . He became a foreign affairs officer for the local AStA and after Augusto Pinochet's Chileputsch he became a member of “Children's Aid Latin America”. Already at that time he was very interested in politics and appeared as an opponent of the Nicaraguan Somoza regime . He also organized, for example, support for the Movimiento de Izquierda Revolucionaria in Chile and for the National Front for the Liberation of South Vietnam and founded the Tricontinental Student Union with fellow students from Latin America, Asia and Africa. This entered into a close cooperation with the Socialist German Student Union . During his studies he met the Spaniard Maria Victoria (Mariví) Urquijo Nuño, who was working as a spokesperson for Deutsche Welle at the time. The couple married and in 1974 their daughter Maité was born - the son Enrique Evenor was born around 1980. Also in 1974, Schmidt completed his diploma thesis and returned to his home country - in the meantime he was a member of the Frente Sandinista de Liberación Nacional (FSLN) and had completed military training with the Palestine Liberation Organization in the Middle East .

In the following years Schmidt worked for Siemens and as a lecturer in economics at the National Autonomous University of Nicaragua . Accused of illegal trade union contacts, he was arrested by the Guardia Nacional de Nicaragua in December 1975 and imprisoned in the notorious Tipitapa prison. There he was subjected to torture for weeks , but he also got to know Tomás Borge , a co-founder of the FSLN. Schmidt's determination caused an international stir. His friends from Cologne founded a group of supporters and numerous SPD politicians and officials of the Evangelical Church in Germany - Schmidt was an active member of the International Working Group of the Cologne Evangelical Student Community at the time - campaigned for his release. This pressure finally led to his release in 1977, after which he and his wife flew back to West Germany. The couple moved to Bremen , where he wrote a dissertation on the subject of economics and colonial heritage - opportunities and perspectives for economic and political development in Central America at the university there , and finally received his doctorate summa cum laude . Appointed by the FSLN as its official representative in Western Europe, Schmidt was instrumental in founding the first solidarity groups in Germany and the subsequent rapid expansion of the work to, for example, the Netherlands , Scandinavia , France and Italy . He was responsible for the fact that by 1978 45 groups of supporters had already been established in West Germany. Even in the GDR some initiative groups came together, but these were only reluctantly tolerated in the local political system.

At the end of March 1979 Schmidt returned to Nicaragua again - this time to take part in the decisive FSLN march on the capital Managua. He joined the troops in the south of the country and ended up being a tank driver when the revolutionaries finally took power on July 19 after years of guerrilla warfare . While the state structures were being re-established, he was given the task of reorganizing the Ministry of the Interior, led by his friend Tomás Borge. He then served as Managua Police Chief before being appointed Minister of Post and Telecommunications in 1982. Schmidt was good friends with the Austrian journalist Leo Gabriel and maintained very close contacts with the SPD and the Socialist International . At his invitation, leading social democrats traveled to Nicaragua to demonstrate their support for the policies of the Sandinista. In May 1984 the SPD invited him as a representative of his country to the federal party congress in Essen , where he gave a much-noticed speech in the presence of Willy Brandt .

Death in the operation "Ciclón"

In the steadily intensifying contra war , in which paramilitary organized counterrevolutionaries with US support tried to overthrow the internationally legitimized left-wing Sandinista government again, Schmidt stood in solidarity with his friend Borge. For reasons of power politics, he set up a number of special battalions , and Schmidt was appointed subcommandante commander of the Tropas Pablo Úbeda (TPU), which obtained its uniforms and equipment from the National People's Army and carried out its training. a. Received from Vietnamese and North Korean military specialists.

At the beginning of November 1984 Schmidt was in action with this unit in the Boaco department in the so-called "Ciclón" operation. A group of Contras from Edén Pastoras ARDE had previously attacked a village here. In his memoirs, the Guatemalan ex- guerrilla Julio Mácias ( aka César Montes) claims to have personally participated in the company. After that, the operation had been in preparation for months. The Contras were lured into an explosives ambush on the El Coroso hill, which belongs to the small town of Camoapa , and 80 Contras were killed. Schmidt was apparently accidentally shot by a member of his own troops from the second row after the battle.

The details of Schmidt's death are still controversial to this day, and it is also unclear why Schmidt, who did not have the necessary military training, led this operation at all.

Commemoration, honors

Schmidt's death caused great consternation in Nicaragua as well as in Europe and especially in Germany. After the news was published, many people spontaneously gathered for a vigil in front of the America House in Cologne . In the following days, several obituaries posted by his friends appeared in the Kölnische Rundschau and the Kölner Stadt-Anzeiger . 35 Social Democratic members of the Bundestag and the European Parliament , including Günter Verheugen , Hans-Jürgen Wischnewski , Karsten Voigt and Herta Däubler-Gmelin , also gave up one. Over 300 people came together on November 15th for a mourning and protest meeting in the youth center in Cologne-Sülz and decided to found a Nicaragua solidarity group there.

Due to Schmidt's close personal ties to Cologne, the city entered into a partnership with his hometown Corinto in 1988 . A year later, Bremen took the same step, but this partnership is currently suspended.

The Enrique-Schmidt-Strasse in Bremen - Horn-Lehe at the University of Bremen was named after him. In November 2014, the Enrique-Schmidt-Weg was inaugurated in Cologne-Lindenthal in the presence of family members. The application to name the path had been submitted by the CDU, the Greens and the Left Party in the district council. The SPD approved the motion.

His comrade-in-arms Tomás Borge, who in retrospect referred to Schmidt as “the red gift from Prussia”, awarded the then GDR ministers for state security and home affairs, Erich Mielke and Friedrich Dickel , the medal for internationalist services “Enrique Schmidt” on June 25, 1987 .

In Nicaragua, the Federación de Trabajadores de Correos y Comunicaciones "Enrique Schmidt Cuadra" is named after him because Schmidt was temporarily minister for telecommunications, but his office was under the borrowing of the Ministry of the Interior.

Trivia

  • Enrique Schmidt plays a central role in Wolfgang Schreyer's novel The Five Lives of Dr. Gundlach (1st edition Berlin, military publishing house of the GDR 1982). The protagonist, Dr. Gundlach, visits Schmidt in his office in Managua in early 1981 and tries to persuade the police chief to smuggle arms to the guerrillas in El Salvador . Apparently, Schmidt suspects that Gundlach is being blackmailed into this company by the US and initiates a counter-operation that prevents the United States from accusing Nicaragua of supporting the guerrillas.

literature

  • Tomás Borge , Hans Hübner a. a. (Ed.): Enrique presente. Erique Schmidt Cuadra. A Nicaraguan between Cologne and Managua. Schmidt von Schwind, Cologne, 2004, ISBN 3-932050-25-8
  • Julio César Macías: Wed Camino: La Guerrilla. La apasionante autobiografía del legendario combatiente centroamericano "César Montes". Presentación de Carlos Montemayor , Mexico, DF 1998. ISBN 968-406-811-5
  • Gerhard Ehlert / Jochen Staadt / Tobias Voigt: The cooperation between the Ministry for State Security of the GDR (MfS) and the Ministry of the Interior of Cuba (MININT) , Berlin (Free University, Research Association SED State, Series: Working Papers of the Research Association SED State No. . 33) 2002. ISSN  0942-3931
  • Carlos Arturo Jiménez Campos: Nosotros no le decíamos Presidente. Conspiraciones al Desnudo de la Nicaragua Sandinista , Managua (Amerrisque) 2008. ISBN 978-99924-0-705-9
  • Reiner Burger : Lindenthaler Revolutionäre , in: Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung of November 6, 2014, p. 2.

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Name according to Stadtrevue 11/2004 ( memento from September 3, 2014 in the Internet Archive ) and Kölner Stadt-Anzeiger from September 2, 2014, p. 19
  2. ↑ Kölner Stadt-Anzeiger, September 2, 2014, p. 19
  3. ↑ "Died - Enrique Schmidt" in Der Spiegel of November 12, 1984, 46/1984. Retrieved April 2, 2011 from Spiegel Online .

Web links

personal data
SURNAME Schmidt, Enrique
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Schmidt Cuadra, Enrique (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Nicaraguan revolutionary and politician
DATE OF BIRTH 1949
PLACE OF BIRTH Corinto , Chinandega Department
DATE OF DEATH 5th November 1984
Place of death at Boaco