#Almost impossible synonym series#

Having been warned off the roadside juice in polyurethane bags, I was deranged with thirst and exhaustion by the time the bus pulled into Managua. The temperature was in the nineties, a fierce paralysing heat of which even a globally warmed Europe remains in comfortable ignorance. 'Desculpeme ,' he would say each time I wrestled his hand out, before immediately plunging his pilfering fingers back into my trousers in a vain search for the cash I'd wisely stored in my boots. It was packed inside and out with people, animals and a determined thief who spent half the journey with his hands in my pockets. The first time I arrived in the evening, having journeyed overland from Costa Rica on an old American school bus that never seemed able to shift into the correct gear. My two entries to the Nicaraguan capital of Managua, two decades apart, made for a novelistic contrast. I knew I had changed and the world had changed, but what had become of the volcanic little country on which a whole world of idealists and ideologues once hung their hopes? Nineteen days ago I returned to Nicaragua in the middle of the presidential campaign that will be decided at the polls today. Overnight the Sandinistas seemed like a fleeting anachronism, a minor historical footnote destined to be forgotten. With the collapse of the Soviet Union, left-wing revolutions went quickly out of fashion. Not long after I returned to England, the war ended, in 1990 the Sandinistas lost an election, and Nicaragua disappeared from the headlines.

All in all it seemed like a good idea, a sort of gap year for lefties, a veritable holiday in a war zone. I was having an off-again off-again affair with a woman who'd gone off to Nicaragua.

Added to which there was the dim flicker of doomed romance. I'd gone for genuine reasons of solidarity but also because, as a 25-year-old graduate working as a despatch rider, I felt alienated by the yuppie world that was taking shape in London. Afterwards I stayed on in Nicaragua for six months, working on a project for refugees from El Salvador, building latrines and generally drinking in the heady, rum-filled atmosphere of revolution. Thus 19 years ago I became a coffee brigadista for six weeks in the Matagalpan mountains. As befitted the generation that would give the world the triple grand skinny latte, it was less Homage to Catalonia, more Homage to Cappuccino. We didn't take up arms, we picked coffee. But of course the international brigades that went out to Nicaragua were nothing like their counterparts 50 years earlier. More than 30,000 Nicaraguans died in the Contra war, a figure that, relative to population size, approximates to the death toll in Spain. In one respect, at least, the often cited analogy of the Spanish Civil War was all too pertinent. Hundreds of British volunteers made their way to Central America to offer their support. Concerts and benefits were held to raise funds. It was the Third World David standing up to the superpower Goliath.

#Almost impossible synonym series#

And when Ronald Reagan's administration enforced a trade embargo, mined the Nicaraguan ports and funded the remnants of Somoza's hated National Guard that made up the Contras, artists and writers like Julie Christie and Salman Rushdie came out in support of the Sandinista cause.Īt home the left had suffered a series of humiliating defeats at the hands of Margaret Thatcher's government but Nicaragua represented hope, or revenge, or a chance to teach Thatcher's bellicose friend Reagan a lesson.

As if to confirm this new status, the following year the Clash, those poets of vicarious rebellion, named their fourth album Sandinista!. Then in 1979 a revolution led by the Sandinistas overthrew Somoza and suddenly a country that was known previously only as the birthplace of Bianca Jagger was the height of radical chic. After an earthquake devastated the capital Managua in 1972, he diverted tens of millions of dollars of international aid into his personal bank account. But even by regional standards, Somoza's son, also called Anastasio, was an exceptional piece of work. In Latin America the capitalism the US endorsed tended to go hand in hand with dictatorships and death squads.