21 de julio 2024
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From the beginning, the poetry that Rosario Murillo once wrote suffered from excess. She didn’t know when to stop with her images and metaphors, stringing them together one after another like an endless necklace.
Excess is the avalanche of abuses and follies that mark Nicaragua, which this July 19th commemorates the defeat of Anastasio Somoza in 1979.
There is excess in her trinkets, excess in her flower-adorned platforms, excess in her metal trees. Her excess, unfortunately, is not limited to that. She is excessive in her rages, in her personal animosities, in her desire for control, in her manifest cruelty against those who dare to have their own opinions and propose other alternatives for the country.
She is the puppet master, the sad and tense image of someone who came to power through unscrupulous deals, sacrificing her own flesh and blood. She would never have the country in her hands by her own right. As the wife of someone who needed her to organize his life and work, she created the stage to climb up as Daniel Ortega’s right hand and become the executor of plans they both may share, but which she knows how to carry out with her own excesses.
In these weeks leading up to July 19th, that celebration she has reinvented as the apotheosis of her family’s power, we have seen her in all the splendor of her verbal excess.
The newspaper La Prensa – which continues digitally after being stripped of everything by the duo – reports that on July 15th, in one single day, she used the following epithets to refer to those who opposed her: “soulless, obsolete junk, straw devils, soul gremlins, crooked, blind, deaf, disfigured hearts, defeated, full of evil, soured by hatred, decrepit, failed, slot machines of the Empire, crumbs.”
On the 18th, she continued with her diatribes warning the large group she sent into exile, which includes high-ranking Catholic Church prelates, not to “dare to touch our soil, our sacred geography,” declaring that, as “traitors and cowards,” we are part of the “enemies of humanity” who “sold out their people,” etc., etc.
One cannot help but wonder about this repeated, endless rancor against those who, according to her, are defeated, decrepit, and failed. Not a day goes by, in her daily midday addresses, without her lamenting and falsely accusing the massive demonstrations and protests that, since April 2018, have demanded her resignation. It could be that she, who knows how to manipulate, rigorously follows the precept of fake news that “a lie repeated enough times becomes truth.” However, her level of aggressiveness is revealing.
If we add it to this the constant ousting of ministers and people from her circles, known for their “loyalty” to the regime, we can speculate that Madame Murillo is increasingly aware that her power exists “on cockroach wings.” The sense of siege evident in her words is not only provoked by those of us who do not and will not stop denouncing the atrocious tragicomedy she and her husband stage but also by the growing doubts she seems to perceive among her followers about her peculiar style of exercising power.
As time goes by, it is obvious that she has not, nor will she ever, banish us from her mind and her nightmares.
It would be comical, if it weren’t for her destructive power, to see her becoming a fictional character, an exalted one whose excesses make her a captive and victim of her ambition.
This article was published in Spanish in Confidencial and translated by Havana Times. To get the most relevant news from our English coverage delivered straight to your inbox, subscribe to The Dispatch.
