Humberto Ortega

Humberto Ortega Saavedra (born January 10, 1947 in Juigalpa ) is a former Nicaraguan guerrilla , politician and military . From 1979 to 1994 he was Minister of Defense and at the same time Supreme Commander of the Sandinista People's Army . During the Nicaraguan Revolution , Ortega was head of the military operations of the Frente Sandinista de Liberación Nacional (FSLN). His older brother Daniel is the incumbent President of Nicaragua. Their common brother Camilo (* 1950) was murdered by the Guardia Nacional de Nicaragua (GN) during the revolution on February 26, 1978 in Masaya .

Life

Family and education

Ortega's father was the teacher Daniel Simeón Ortega Cerda (* 1905 in Los Rincones, Masatepe , † April 21, 1975), his mother the graphic designer Lidia Albertina Saavedra Rivas (born August 8, 1908 in La Libertad, Chontales, † 2005). His paternal grandfather was the teacher Marco Antononio Ortega, who was a member of the Conservative Party in the 1920s and worked at the Instituto Nacional de Oriente in Granada a . a. the later president and dictator Anastasio Somoza García taught.

In 1934 Ortega's father was arrested and ill-treated by the GN based on a published letter in which he criticized the circumstances surrounding the murder of Augusto César Sandino and the role of Somoza. He was alleged to be shot, but was released at the request of relatives with ties to the GN. In the 1950s he became a commercial agent for foreign companies, especially West German companies.

Humberto Ortega's political activity began in 1963 when he took part in a protest in Juigalpa. Apparently he entered the Frente Sandinista in the same year . In July 1966, the State Security Service OSN ( Oficina de Seguridad Nacional = National Security Office) made the first arrest in Managua for preparing an armed attack on a motorcade of General Somoza Debayle together with two friends. He was released in August and did his Abitur ( bachillerato ) at the Instituto Maestro Gabriel that year .

A second arrest took place in late January 1967 in Juigalpa in the wake of protests against the planned election fraud in the presidential election on February 5, 1967. Ortega was transferred to the Managua police prison, La Homiguera , where he was held in a cell with Pedro Chamorro , albeit briefly amnestied on it.

In Cuba and North Korea

Apparently a few months later he traveled with a false passport via Toronto , Ireland , Brussels and Prague to Cuba , where he received military training. In Havana , in October 1967, he took part in the public memorial service for Che Guevara's death . In March 1968, Ortega flew with Oscar Turcios Chaverría to North Korea , where both received four-month military training in the border area with the People's Republic of China , which Ortega judged very positively in retrospect:

In four months we completed the course for the brigade and battalion . The rigid and exemplary military discipline, as well as the order of the Koreans due to their Asian culture, is one of their most important lessons. [...] In the cold and high mountains on the border with China [...] they taught us the strategy and tactics very similar to that of Mao Tse-tung and his concept of the protracted people's war in China [...]

(Durante cuatro meses recibimos el curso de Brigada y Batallón. La rígida y ejemplar disciplina militar, así como el orden de los coreanos propio de las culturas asiáticas, es una de sus principales enseñanzas ... En las frías y altas montañas fronterizas China ... nos enseñan la estragia y táctica muy similar a la que Mao Tse-Tung conceptuó sobre la Guerra Prolongada en China ...)

Ortega, Epopeya , p. 192.

Because of his good relations with North Korea, Ortega, as Nicaraguan Defense Minister, received a weapons shipment with 100,000 AK-47 rifles in addition to other aid deliveries in 1981 after a conversation with Kim Il-sung .

In Costa Rica 1969/70

In early 1969, Ortega traveled via Cuba, Geneva and Panama to San José in Costa Rica , where the clandistine cadre of the FSLN prepared the guerrillas in Nicaragua. In April 1969, he was arrested by police officers in downtown San José. In June he was to be extradited to Nicaragua with other FSLN members, but they managed to escape during the transport with the help of Costa Rican sympathizers and Ortega went into hiding in Carlos Fonseca's hiding place in San José.

On August 31, 1969, Carlos Fonseca was arrested in Costa Rica for a bank robbery to finance the FSLN and imprisoned in Alajuela . There the FSLN, u. a. Humberto Ortega, who was himself suspected of the same bank robbery by the Costa Rican authorities, attacked the prison there on December 23, 1969 in order to free Fonseca. The operation failed and Ortega was seriously injured and arrested in an exchange of fire with the police. He was in danger of bleeding to death from his wounds, but his life was saved by transfusions in a hospital in San José. A Costa Rican police officer was shot while attempting to rescue him.

On October 22, 1970, a seven-man squad led by the FSLN hijacked a plane carrying four members of the United Fruit Company in Costa Rica and forced the release of the prisoners, including a. Ortegas who were flown to Mexico .

Back in Cuba, the Tendencia Insurreccional was founded

From this point on, Ortega lived in Cuba, but returned to Nicaragua temporarily incognito in 1973. At the operation Comando Juan Jose Quezada , which was carried out with 13 FSLN members on 27 December 1974 in Managua, Ortega was not involved. The hostage-taking of high-ranking members of the Somoza government led to the release of various prisoners, including a. also Ortega's brother Daniel, who had been imprisoned since 1967.

In April 1976, Ortega took part in a trip from Costa Rica to Nicaragua via the Río San Juan . In June, the so-called Tendencia Insurreccional (TI = insurgent tendency , also called the Third Tendency or Terceristas ) was formed here, which took over the coordination of the three FSLN wings during the Sandinista Revolution. One of the most important protagonists of the Terceristas was Edén Pastora Gómez , who became known worldwide as Comandante Cero during the attack of the Sandinistas in 1978 . Presumably because of his knowledge acquired in North Korea, Ortega became the military leader of the revolution and launched the final offensive in the spring and summer of 1979 by radio from San José.

As Minister of Defense

In 1979 Ortega became Minister of Defense. As commander-in-chief of the Sandinista People's Army EPS (= Ejército Popular Sandinista ) , he held a key political and military position in the Contra War , one of the hotspots of the Cold War in the 1980s. In contrast to Interior Minister Tomás Borge , who stayed several times in the GDR with a request for support , Ortega apparently never sought logistical help from East Germany personally, although a good 300 officer candidates of the EPS at the officers' college for foreign military cadres "Otto Winzer" in Prora were trained.

On January 23, 1988, the first direct negotiations between the Sandinista government and Contra leaders began in Sapoá near Rivas on a peace agreement. It was a few days later by Ortega for the Sandinista government and Adolfo Calero Portocarrero for the Nicaraguan resistance ( Resistencia Nicaragüense ), d. H. the contra, signed. Cardinal Miguel Obando Bravo played an active role in these negotiations, according to Ortega .

Ortega retained his key politico-military role in Nicaragua after the election of the Frente Sandinista and his brother Daniel in February 1990. He was confirmed as defense minister by the new president Violeta Barrios de Chamorro , widow of Pedro Chamorro, who was murdered in 1978 (see above). Former Vice President Sergio Ramírez said:

[...] he [was] the first to understand the need to put the army under the umbrella of institutionality, the only way to survive. He left the national leadership of the FSLN because under these new conditions no one would have understood that he would be the head of the army and the political head of a party at the same time, much less the Sandinista party. Eager to prove his independence, he often contradicted Daniel and became enemies with the cadres of the FSLN, whom he called terrorists because they fomented street battles.

Ramírez, Adios, Muchachos! P. 254

In 1994, Ortega resigned from office at Violeta Chamorro's request after he had succeeded in transforming the EPS as a quasi-party army into a professional army .

Author, personal life

In 1984, a German translation of his 1977 article Theory and Practice of the Insurrection in the Revolutionary People's War , in which Che Guevara's focus theory is de facto declared obsolete, without openly criticizing Guevara. The decisive factor in the revolution is the masses, even if they need to be led by a military elite. Although the guerrillas are important in the countryside, the decisive militarily is the struggle in the city, especially in the urban periphery . Ortega established himself alongside Abraham Guillén and Carlos Marighella as another theoretician of urban guerrilla .

Ortega has a pronounced interest in history and early history . His work La epopeya de la insurreción (The Epic of the Insurrection), published in 2004, is a montage of autobiography , the history of Sandinista and historical-philosophical considerations.

Ortega is married to the Costa Rican Lidia Ortega, has several children and is also a Costa Rican citizen.

Fonts

• 50 años de la lucha sandinista , Havana 1980.
• Sobre la insurreccion , Havanna 1981, German translation About the uprising , Frankfurt a. M. 1984 (Zambon Verlag). ISBN 3-88975-010-9 .
• Nicaragua: revolución y democracia , Mexico, DF 1992.
• La epopeya de la insurreción (The Epic of the Insurrection), Managua (Lea Grupo Editorial) 2004. ISBN 99924-830-5-9
• La odisea por Nicaragua , Managua (Lea Grupo Editorial) 2013. ISBN 99924-77-32-6 . ISBN 978-99924-77-32-8

literature

• Sergio Ramírez : Adios, Muchachos! A memory of the Sandinista revolution , Wuppertal (Peter Hammer Verlag) 2001. ISBN 3-87294-871-7
• Michael Rediske: Change in Nicaragua. The emergence of the revolution from the collapse of bourgeois rule , Berlin-West 1984. ISBN 3-923020-04-X
• Jesús Miguel Blandón: Entre Sandino y Fonseca , 2nd edition Managua 2008.
• Klaus Storkmann: Secret solidarity. Military aid of the GDR in the "Third World" , Berlin (Ch. Links Verlag) 2012. ISBN 978-3-86153-676-5
• Francisco José Barbosa Miranda: Historia militar de Nicaragua. Antes del siglo XVI al XXI , Managua (Hispamer) 2010. ISBN 978-99924-7946-9
• Roger Miranda Bengoechea / William E. Ratliff: The civil war in Nicaragua. Inside the Sandinistas , 2nd ed. New Brunswick, NJ a. a. (Transaction Publ.) 1994. ISBN 1-56000-064-3

Web links

• Broadcast by the Nicaraguan television station Canal 15 on March 22, 2013 on the occasion of the 25th anniversary of the Sapoá peace agreement in 1988 with Humberto Ortega on youtube video on www.youtube.com
• (Spanish) website of retired General Humberto Ortega
• Humberto Ortega with Fidel Castro, Havana 1979