This is public enemy No 1 in Nicaragua. His crime? Writing a novel…

Author Sergio Ramírez once fought to free his country from a dictator. Now his ex-comrade, President Daniel Ortega, wants him arrested

Sergio Ramírez, Nicaragua’s bestknown living writer, hero of the Sandinista revolution and former vice-president of the volcanic Central American nation, has lived through both tougher times and duller publicity tours.

Even so, the past few days have been – as he puts it, with a degree of understatement – “an odd experience”.

Ramírez always knew his latest novel, Tongolele no sabía bailar (Tongolele Didn’t Know How to Dance), would cause a stir in his homeland. But he confesses to feeling “surprised, bewildered and assaulted” when the regime of his erstwhile comrade, President Daniel Ortega, issued a warrant for his arrest last week, accusing him, among other things, of conspiracy, money-laundering, inciting violence and hatred, and undermining national integrity.

To banish any lingering doubts about the government’s extraordinary antipathy towards the 79-yearold author and his works, Nicaraguan customs officers also impounded all copies of the new book on arrival.

For Ramírez, who moved to Costa Rica in June and is promoting the new novel in Spain, the initial shock soon gave way to a familiar and unpleasant feeling. “When this kind of thing happens, you find yourself under an avalanche of memories,” he told the Observer.

The memories stirred by the charges – which Ramírez dismisses as risible – were of similar events more than four decades ago. In 1977, the writer was a member of the influential Group of Twelve, a collective of intellectuals, business-people and priests who threw their weight behind the Sandinista National Liberation Front’s efforts to topple the dictatorship of Anastasio Somoza Debayle.

The dictator’s regime responded by accusing the group of terrorism and criminal conspiracy. The charges, however, came to nothing and the triumphant return of the Twelve to Nicaragua from Costa Rica the following year proved one of the events that heralded the end of the Somoza dictatorship in 1979.

“All of this brings a certain feeling of deja vu, but then for me there’s always sense of deja vu when it comes to the entire history of Nicaragua,” said Ramírez.

“The abuses of power and the way power gathers – and structures – always repeat themselves. It’s a kind of circular constant in Nicaragua’s history throughout the whole of the 20th century and to the present day,” he said.

Today, 42 years after the revolution, the circle has closed and Ortega – once hailed as a liberator, a hero of the left and a scourge of tyranny – has dwindled into a despotic figure to rival the man he overthrew and a dictator prepared to resort to any means necessary to keep himself and his wife and vice-president, Rosario Murillo, in power.

Tongolele no sabía bailar is a detective novel that examines the brutally suppressed 2018 uprising, when tens of thousands of people took to the streets to protest and call for Ortega and Murillo to resign.

While Ramírez could do without the pressure and anxiety of the arrest warrant – “it’s really difficult to be facing exile at my age when the horizon’s narrowing” – he is pleased his book and his plight are helping to drag the world’s gaze towards the social and political realities of life in his homeland. But if impounding Tongolele no sabía bailar and issuing an arrest warrant for its author was intended to stifle dissent and criticism, the move appears more than a little bone-headed. Pirated PDFs of the book are already doing the digital rounds in Managua and beyond.

Ramírez – who was awarded the Spanish-speaking world’s highest honour, the Premio Cervantes, four years ago – has been inundated with offers of support from hundreds of other writers and artists, including the Nobel-prize winning author Mario Vargas Llosa.

He hopes that the situation will open people’s eyes to the “total and utter farce” of the forthcoming elections in November. To date, eight opposition candidates and about two dozen opposition leaders have been arrested on vague treason charges. “They aren’t elections in the proper sense of the word,” said Ramírez.

Ramírez split with Ortega in the mid-1990s after the Sandinistas’ shock defeat in the 1990 election and amid growing concerns over the movement’s post-revolutionary democratic direction.

Can he see any traces of his old comrade in the man clinging so desperately to power in the third decade of the 21st century? “None. None at all. I haven’t seen Ortega for maybe 25 years – we haven’t come face to face. But this person who’s consolidating his tyranny so obsessively – and, at the same time, so insecurely – is a person I don’t recognise.”

What he does recognise, though, are the similarities between Ortega and the dictatorial dynasty he defeated. “The two dictatorships look a lot like each other – they’re both family dictatorships based on personal power and the power of the military and the police,” said Ramírez. “Somoza had the support of the Guardia Nacional and Ortega has the army.”

And yet for all the shocks of recent days, and all the gloomy talk of tyranny, of fixed historical cycles, and of a revolution that began to spin the wrong way a long time ago, Ramírez refuses to surrender either his pen or his optimism.

“I’m going to keep writing for the rest of my life because that’s my trade – and I’ll keep doing it wherever I end up,” he said. “Nicaraguans need to keep our chins up.”

‘The abuses of power always repeat themselves. It’s a circular constant in Nicaragua’s history’ Sergio Ramírez