¿Til Death do us Part

CONSPIRACY THEORIES AND OTHER JOBS

At the beginning of 1991, I was asked by some Jesuit friends of the family if I was interested in being a home-schooling tutor for the children of a North American family who had recently arrived in Nicaragua and had contacted the university for help and referrals.  I was between jobs, so what the heck.   I met with the father, an entrepreneur who said he had arrived in Nicaragua with his wife and three boys, aged five, seven and eight, in order to explore the development of a coffee, lumber and “other types” of export business for some unnamed Texas investors.  He was a big man, well-fed and well over 6’5” tall.  His wife was unassuming – a born-again Christian housewife dedicated to the raising of their children and determined to keep her children out of the evil, witchcraft-infected world of public education through home schooling.  The boys were being educated using an accredited fundamentalist Christian study course and they just wanted help to lead the boys through the curriculum.   I figured that I could do that – the pay was good.  The father had rented one of the most opulent houses in an upper class neighborhood of the capital city of Managua – 7 bedrooms, two kitchens, an open central courtyard filled with trees, plants and gently flowing fountains, tile roof, ornate ceramic flooring – you get the picture.  As had happened with  many of these mansions that had been abandoned by rich owners fleeing the country in the first years of the Sandinista revolution, it was a bit run down, but still impressive.  To one side of the courtyard was a two floored recreation room where I was to provide the tutoring for the children.

The job was more than a bit strange.  Leaving aside the fundamentalist Christian content of the curriculum, the mother of the children turned out to be a bit wacko.  She really did believe that exposure of her boys to any sort of mainstream culture or public education was going to lead them straight down the slippery pathway to HELL!  There was witchcraft being promoted out there!  Satanism!  Rock and Roll!  The boy’s character, obviously, was a bit influenced by this, but boys are basically boys and there were glimmers of hope.  Their father..?  Well, I had never before and never quite since come across quite such a classic picture of an absentee father - one who entered a room, patted his young progeny affectionately on the head, pecked his wife on the cheek and went on with his dutiful business of ignoring them while generating the income that would keep them all remotely, very remotely, happy.

The “business” of the this guy was another of the strange aspects.  He was throwing money around quite liberally, hiring temporary helpers, commissioning specially-designed coffee sacks, putting together little samples of different types of lumber available in Nicaragua, buying cars (he generously gave me use of one his Indian-made “Mahindras” – basically a domestic tank made to look like a car and marketed cheap to consumers.  He once even offered to pay for a hot water tank for my house “How barbaric you don’t have hot water in your home.”).  The strange part was that he never really generated any concrete business – never an actual gathering of coffee, never a piece of lumber for export.  He also had an outspoken penchant for buying firearms…from a collector’s perspective, he said.  He had said to me that prior to coming to Nicaragua, he had been “in and around Saudi Arabia” and that part of the world, doing “business”.  I had my suspicions that he might be more than he appeared to be.  There was an awkward, but thought provoking moment when one of the boys said to me, during an unguarded moment in a tutoring session, that “my daddy has a lie detector.”  He quickly shut up after that, appearing to realize that he had said a no-no.

Which leads me, finally (well, almost), to where this story is going.  But first, a bit more of Nicaraguan history:

The U.S. sponsored Counter-Revolutionary (Contra War) against the Sandinistas generated a number of military leaders, operating out of either Honduras or Costa Rica (with frequent time in the U.S.)  One of these was “Commander 3-80”, Enrique Bermudez – the Contra’s top military officer, moving from exile in Miami to lead the “Nicaraguan Democratic Force” in Honduras.  His leadership was controversial, and there were frequent allegations that he was well-involved in cocaine trafficking through his tenure as contra head.  At the signing of the peace accords in 1990, with the Sandinistas voted out of power, he continued to be controversial as he criticized U.S. policy and jockeyed for power in Nicaragua in the post-Sandinista years.  And then, in February 1991, he was lured to the Inter-continental Hotel in Managua for a meeting that never occurred, and was shot and killed in the parking lot as he exited the hotel.  The shooting was of maximum precision, through undetected sniper fire from somewhere within the hotel.  The crime was never resolved.  Bermudez’ daughter at the time told The Miami Herald:  “There were a lot of people who would have benefitted from having my dad put away – the Sandinistas, the Chamorro government, the United States.  My dad died with a lot of information.”

So, to tie this in to my tutoring experience:.  Along with many others, I have often wondered about that assassination.  Remember the father, my employer?  Coming to Nicaragua to throwing tons of money around, “collecting weapons”, never really starting up any real business, shady past somewhere in the Middle East?  Shortly before the Bermudez shooting, I had a parting of the ways with the family.  That woman was just too wacko for me.  We argued about her children’s grades and progress in the home-schooling curriculum and decided that it just wasn’t going to work out.  I left their employment in the middle of the week.  The coming weekend, they had programmed a general insecticide spraying of the house they were living in, and were going to spend the weekend…at the Intercontinental Hotel.  That was the weekend the Bermudez was assassinated.  A couple of weeks after that, I learned that the entire family had packed up and left Nicaragua.  No business left behind, just a few coffee sacks with a parrot design and a display of wood samples.

Yes, I’ve often wondered…