María Teresa Blandón or the women's revolution

By Wilfredo Miranda Aburto
San José, Costa Rica

Saturday, 03 august 2024

Born in 1961 into a large family in Matiguás, a town where there was not even electricity at the time, Tere Blandón was nourished by the countryside since her childhood: she witnessed the peasants’ misery during the Somoza dictatorship and that led her to advocate for agricultural workers during the Sandinista Revolution. It was then, in the midst of a violent and sexist reality, that she discovered the defense of women’s rights, a path that led her without return to feminism. Activist and politician, she became a key feminist intellectual for Nicaragua and Central America from La Corriente, the NGO that, after being confiscated and closed by the Ortega-Murillo regime, she still leads from her exile in Costa Rica

The apartment is comfortable and modest at the same time. A few paintings were hung on the white walls just a few months ago, some second-hand furniture, and pots and pans that one of her nephews sent her from Nicaragua. María Teresa Blandón’s house in exile now looks better. In the small room that is her office, there are some boxes, also recently brought from Nicaragua. Inside them are papers, pamphlets and feminist documents, memories? When you are suddenly banished, uprooted from your country, your home taken away from you, it is very difficult to call home again a place where you don’t want to be.

I think, and this is just my guess, that this is what happened to María Teresa Blandón… or, with more familiarity, to Tere Blandón, an irreplaceable Nicaraguan feminist leader and intellectual who, after a lot of rage, still finds it hard to accept this forced exile. Although she has had a house since she arrived in Costa Rica, when she took over this apartment with large windows that let in the cold Costa Rican air, furnishing it, decorating it, giving it her touch, was not a priority, perhaps out of pure denial or mere daily protest. Protesting, be it a small or a big protest, would not surprise me coming from someone who all her life has protested against what she considers unfair and inhumane, specifically against gender violence. After she pours me a cup of coffee with rosquillas (unmistakable characteristic of her hospitality) I ask her how she has coped with this exile, after seeing the apartment full of life. A white orchid blooms on the small dining table.

– I'm going to tell you something– she tells me energetically, emphatic as she is – it made me very angry. So much anger.

End of June 2022. Tere Blandón had avoided traveling since the end of 2018 to avoid the trap that the Ortega-Murillo regime uses against critics and opponents: preventing them from returning to the country, closing the door of their homes and leaving them in forced exile. But she traveled: she was returning from Chile, where she was participating in a meeting of the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC). She had a layover in El Salvador and was told that Nicaraguan Immigration and Foreign Affairs was forbidding her to enter the country. That was when she got “ really angry”, but to be honest, it was when -in good Nicaraguan terms- she got “encachimbada”. She spent several weeks in El Salvador with an idea fixed by her well-known stubbornness, the one that makes her frown when she is determined about something or an idea: to return to Nicaragua, to her country, any way she could, by foot or clandestinely, no matter what. There were plenty of people who tried to discourage her. She ignored everyone (family, friends and acquaintances). She wanted to go back because she felt -with certainty- that it was her right.

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But it was when the circumstances of an evil dictatorship softened her stubbornness, especially because they made her understand – I say she understood – that her voice was more valuable in freedom, that she got sick. A fierce tonsillitis made her lose her speech for weeks. She had just arrived in Costa Rica and was still furious. Then came the responsibility of the apartment. And reinventing her work with La Corriente, that obsession that has always been there for her: her activism, her life commitment.

***

Before becoming a revolutionary, activist and regional feminist, María Teresa Blandón was a girl who, until she was 17, had barely left her family environment. But make no mistake, she always instinctively resisted norms and conventions, the obvious and the taken-for-granted. She was a child in a large family: six sisters and four brothers. She is the second to last of the clan. They were raised in Matiguás, a rural municipality in Matagalpa. The town was founded in 1920 and when Tere Blandón was born, in 1961, there was not even electricity.

One of the few entertainments that existed in Matiguás were the movies that the Franciscan priests projected in a small hall, thanks to a small electric generator. It happened on Sundays and, the next day, Tere Blandón would put on her rubber boots -either because of the mud or the dust- to attend the José Santos Zelaya elementary school that her mother, María Josefa Gadea, directed.

––She was a teacher and I loved her,” Tere Blandón told me.
That love explains why she was always close to her mother. In Matiguás, life was, to a certain extent, uneventful. Everything changed when she finished first grade and the family moved to Matagalpa, a more developed city, where there was a high school for the older siblings.

–It was a big change,” Tere Blandón recalls. Her mother took her children with her because her father stayed in Matiguás working on the farm. My father came to Matagalpa from time to time, when he had the chance. But my mother was the one who took care of us every day. She continued teaching there in Matagalpa, in a nuns’ school, a school for girls, but I never wanted to study there. It was an environment I didn’t like. And so it was: I graduated from high school in one of the most prestigious public high schools in the country, one of the first that Somoza built. I had extraordinary teachers.

One of them was professor Yolanda Tellería, who taught Tere Blandón literature. A good teaching because, to this day, she still reads literature, apart from texts specialized in feminism. When I interviewed her, she was reading “El infinito en un junco” by Irene Vallejos, a work that goes back to explain the origin of the book, the alphabet, libraries, readers and bibliophiles. Tere Blandón is a woman, agree those who know her, of wide margins, against dogma and very much in favor of rationality.

In 1978, Tere Blandón was a 16-year-old girl and in Matagalpa, in September of that year, the Sandinista insurrection exploded. The mother decided to take the Blandones back to Matiguás to protect them. However, she could not prevent her older children from developing sympathies with the Sandinistas. The family was divided: the fathers’ family never had anything to do with Somocismo and the other side, the mother’s, was conservative. The closest the family had to do with Sandinismo was when the Sandinista Front did not even exist as a guerrilla or partisan organization. Mrs. Úrsula Gadea, Tere Blandón’s grandmother, was a messenger for General Augusto C. Sandino -the founding figure of Sandinismo- in those northern parts of the country.

In 1979, following the example of her older brothers, Tere Blandón had her first “very punctual link” with Sandinismo: a strike at school that had no major repercussions in Matiguás. It was the time of the final insurrection against Somocismo and her older brothers had gone to Managua and Matagalpa to participate in the uprising. Tere Blandón stayed behind to be with her mother.

–I was left with a bit of a bad taste in Matiguás for not having participated in something more relevant.
Then with the triumph of the Sandinista Revolution I decided to join the work. At that time everything was in a sea of confusion and there was flexibility, that is to say, there were no rigid structures yet. I worked in Matiguás organizing the first groups of peasants.

Rural life in Matiguás marked Tere Blandón forever. From very early on, it developed in her a social conscience that characterizes her not only in feminism, but also in the political and social spaces in which she participates. She does not reject the elites, but sees them under a very critical lens. It is very difficult to understand society and its configuration from another perspective when you grew up seeing a feudal system in Matiguás.

–I grew up seeing a very poor peasantry, very poor communities with zero notion of their rights. The only presence in Matiguás was the Catholic Church. The peasants were organized around religious tasks. So we formed a working group with them.

–Was it political work,” I asked.

–It was a mix, although I don't think it was exactly political work. We talked to them about what Somocismo had meant to maintain poverty in the countryside, but most of the discourse had to do with telling them that the peasants had rights: that they had the right to have a salary, to have land or to sell it... The people did not understand how much hope the Sandinista Revolution awakened in the countryside, in circumstances in which almost feudal structures predominated. That is to say, the possibilities for a poor peasant to succeed were non-existent. Either they went to the feudal estates or to the coffee companies where the working conditions were miserable. And the owners of those farms and plantations took advantage of that. I was 18 years old and I began to become aware of that unfortunate Nicaragua, of those barbarities.

The Sandinista Front transferred Tere Blandón to San Ramón, in Matagalpa, a year after the work group began in Matiguás. San Ramón was a coffee-growing area, with large farms and thousands of agricultural workers. The young revolutionary found that in the countryside the word “union” was unknown. So the task she was given was to create a union of agricultural workers and peasants.

–That was a monumental task. We had to go from company to company. In the state companies there was no problem because we were the revolution, but in the private ones it was terrible. The businessmen looked at us as enemies. In other words, they said, here come these Sandinistas to organize and raise up the workers. The truth is that I never did political work as such, I was always involved in organizing.

In the mid-eighties, with the war at its height, Tere Blandón together with other colleagues founded the Association of Farm Workers, “the ATC”, which became one of the largest unions in Nicaragua, and which still exists today, but under the current Ortega-Murillo dictatorship. In the meantime, it could be said, she discovered feminism very spontaneously, struck by reality…

–Working with the most abandoned, the most beaten, the most disorganized, let's say, opened my eyes. And as you got to know people, you saw that what was happening to women was terrible.

***

During those revolutionary years, Tere Blandón swears that she did not know “the word feminism”. She had not read a single book on feminism, nothing at all. However, the reality of women farm workers not only moved her, but “forced her to think”. She argues that male violence was rampant in the countryside: women were dying from preventable diseases, such as sexually transmitted infections and cancer.

–The issue was also that women, in addition to working in the coffee plantations, had to do the laundry and take care of the children. Let's say that's where my history with the recognition of women's rights began. It was an experience of great anger. There were also colleagues who first courted you and if you did not listen to them, they harassed you or raped you. It was a very common and silenced practice.

Tere Blandón took the defense of women’s rights very personally because, she stresses, no one in the Sandinista Revolution was really interested in defending them. The Sandinista Front created the Association of Nicaraguan Women Luisa Amanda Espinoza (AMNLAE) and had an initial line of work for women, but Tere Blandón says that soon the organization was controlled and subdued by the red and black party.

–From the ATC we had done research on the situation of women agricultural workers and the results were terrible,” recalls Tere Blandón.Women earned less than men, there was the issue of violence against them, or that the companies had no infrastructure for childcare. Women often did not even appear on the payroll and it was the men who received their salary, as if it were a family payment. And then the men went drinking and the children and the women did not have enough to eat. So with this research we saw the wage gaps, the violence and the multiple pregnancies in the absence of a prevention or contraceptive policy.

In the late 1980s, Tere Blandón was clear about one thing: that the perspective of the revolution was very different for those who were in the countryside compared to those who experienced it in urban areas. She laments that the shift to empowering the poorest was abruptly cut short due to the U.S.-funded war. All organizational work in the communities was subordinated to the needs of the war.

–Everything we had been doing for the poorest people to transform their reality was abruptly cut off. Everything we had been doing, which was so valuable and necessary to be able to change this country and these brutally unequal structures, was broken. We met to see how many people were going to fight and it was no longer to resolve demands, how to fix the roads or supply medicines to the health centers. It was to defend the revolution in a scenario that offered no hope. You could say: it is an achievement that the land reform has given titles to the poor peasants, but then they sent them to the military service and they came back dead. It was all very extreme, very painful.

From the ATC, Tere Blandón noticed that those who remained working in the fields were the women, because the men were sent to the war. She saw this as an opportunity to influence their conditions.

–That's when we, the Women's Secretariat of the ATC Union, took the opportunity to say to the employers and the State: well, if women are the ones who are raising the harvest, something must be done to reduce domestic work. Let's put in place day-care centers. For the first time in history, at least in the state companies, we managed to have day-care centers... but even in some private companies, where there were some conscious businessmen, let's say, some day-care centers were set up. There were even collective laundry areas so that women did not have to go to the river.

Those were times of many burials. Of burying the fallen in the war on a daily basis. Tere Blandón buried many acquaintances. It was when holding on to hope was impossible, unless you became cynical, she says. She was transferred to the area of Pantasma, in Jinotega, where the fighting was fierce. But she also learned of mass rapes of women by both sides in the war: Sandinistas and Contra. She saw torture and murder on both sides. The brutality of war: the limits of human rights crossed, violated. The absolute dehumanization.

-I was not only distant from the Sandinista leadership, but I was an opponent of that leadership- Tere Blandón tells me when I ask her about her involvement in the revolutionary structure. The Sandinista elite bothered me because they lived the romanticized version of the revolution. That is, they went around the world being the heroes of the revolution or received great intellectual leaders from Latin America, while the rest of us were making an enormous sacrifice in extremely difficult conditions. I do not have a romantic image of the revolution. I have a critical view. I never had a complacent view. I always had a very clear commitment to the people who were in conditions of great inequality, of great poverty.

In spite of all her criticisms, Tere Blandón tells me that she must be “honest”: when the Sandinista Front lost power at the polls to former president Violeta Barrios de Chamorro in 1990, she says that “it hurt her”. It took her by surprise. And then came those questions that a generation weighed down by the conflict, especially the Sandinistas, asked themselves: “What is going to happen now? How? Are the few rights achieved, because there were some, of land reform and women's rights, now going to disappear?

-We were sad, disappointed, and I thought: and for this I sacrificed myself in a way that was almost... I mean, too many times I almost lost my life. I mean, too many times I was on the verge of losing my life. How could this have happened to us? Of course, I did not have the knowledge to understand in depth, because we had a very ideologized discourse, with little critical sense of everything that was wrong with the revolution. We did know, but perhaps we had not been able to consider the seriousness not only of the war, but also of the economic crisis, of the authoritarianism that had already been installed in the State and of the abuses of the party.

What ended up distancing Tere Blandón from Sandinismo was the “piñata”, when the revolutionary leaders stole properties and plundered the State after losing the elections in 1990. From the ATC they lived it, she remembers: they “stole” the money they had to work with the agricultural women. That is, money coming from cooperation that was emptied from the ATC’s accounts.

-We had an extraordinary work with agricultural women, we held training workshops. Every year we held a National Assembly of Women Workers from which we came up with a very good plan of action. We had set up sexual and reproductive health clinics for rural women workers. We had training for union leaders, but they took absolutely everything away from us. And when we protested, they threatened us. They even threatened to kill me. A guy named José Adán Rivera, who is still in the ATC.

Three years before the defeat in the nineties, Tere Blandón began studying for a bachelor’s degree in Social Sciences. After watching the “Piñata” the “ grief” went away quickly. She began a period of personal and political reinvention, marked by critical stances.

-As I told you before, at that moment I decided to cut ties radically, absolutely and totally, with everything that had to do with the Sandinista Front. It was a conscious decision, very clear. I have no regrets. I think it was better for me to have been on that side of history. I don't see myself on any other side. I have always said it: the real defeat was the moral collapse of the Sandinista Front and all its structure. In other words, it was not having lost the elections, it was having lost decency, the initial project.... It was the building of a corrupt, elitist and cynical structure as well. On the one hand, they had revolutionary speeches, and when I arrived in Managua I learned about things that one does not find out in the countryside: the famous issue of the Diplotienda when the rest of the people, women for example, did not even have enough money to buy menstrual pads.

So many years later, Tere Blandón says this with a certain contempt, like someone who suffers an irreparable betrayal of principles. A betrayal that is not forgotten because in it are the keys to understand the current dictatorship that pushed the feminist leader to a forced exile in Costa Rica.

***

After 1990, the war left so many men dead that women made up the majority of Nicaragua’s population: 52%. The country was in full transition, a very complex one, and women decided to organize themselves. One of the first actions was to organize the “Festival of the 52”: women from different unions, those working on sexual and reproductive health issues, on community development issues, all those who were organized in Nicaragua: all of them. Almost 900 women. While the festival was taking place, the Sandinista journalist (now deceased, I mean murdered after criticizing Daniel Ortega’s authoritarian drift) Carlos Guadamuz, started to attack the women on Radio Ya.

-Carlos Guadamuz started saying that in the festival we were a bunch of whores, lesbians, imperialists, traitors... then we decided that we could not tolerate that and we went to take over the radio station. About 100 of us women went in and for an hour we said whatever we wanted in the radio station's booths. There are even photos of several of us giving speeches in response to Carlos Guadamuz, who was a misogynist.

In 1992, women organized another national gathering in which the feminist movement declared its independence in the face of the Sandinista Front’s attempts to instrumentalize their social capital. The women shouted “No more National Directorate!

-Nobody has to give us any orders. We are an autonomous, self-convened movement and from now on we are the ones who are going to decide where we are going. That was the beginning of the organization of thematic networks: the Network of Women against Violence, the Network of Women and Economy, the Network of Women and Sexuality... networks that began to work not only in Managua, but at a national level.

From there, different platforms were created. I, for example, with other women from Las Malinches, dedicated ourselves to creating a group that was the National Feminist Committee, which was the first feminist training school we had in Nicaragua. That was a project we did with women like Sofia Montenegro and among others.

Tere Blandón never stopped moving, because, to this day, she does not know how to be still. In 1994, after the sixth Latin American and Caribbean Feminist Meeting, several Central American organizations created the Feminist Program La Corriente. The organization that to this day she leads in exile, and whose legal status was cancelled by the Ortega-Murillo regime in May 2022. At the same time, women succeeded in incorporating gender studies into higher education, specifically at the Central American University (UCA). The state universities were more than reluctant to do so. Tere Blandón herself studied a master’s degree in gender and development at the University of Barcelona thanks to the recognition that Spanish academics had for the Nicaraguan feminist movement. Another achievement of women in that period was the approval of Law 230, which established reforms to the Penal Code to recognize violence against women and domestic violence.

–We were the only ones who re-organized immediately after the 1990 electoral defeat, because we already had a network. In spite of everything, we had a work strategy. So we did not depend on the Sandinista Front, even if they made life impossible for us. We had a vision of what we had to do with or without revolution. It was our own revolution,” says Tere Blandón. But I think our most important achievement was to create awareness of a problem that the Sandinista Front never cared about, because they were also accomplices and perpetrators of that violence.

1997. A conference by Zoilamérica Ortega-Murillo shook Nicaragua, especially the Ortega-Murillo family. She denounced having suffered recurrent sexual abuse by Daniel Ortega since she was 11 years old. A very intense debate immediately arose within the feminist movement. The conclusion was clear: to create a strategy to support Zoilamérica’s denunciation.

-This support strategy was not only inside Nicaragua, but also outside. We began to ask for the support of other feminist organizations and networks to denounce. It was not the only denunciation, it was the most famous, because it was Daniel Ortega, who had been the great revolutionary leader and president of the Republic... but immediately afterwards, a German woman went to a meeting at La Corriente, to a feminist assembly we had there, and denounced that she had also been raped by Tomás Borge.

From the strong support for Zoilamérica, the current presidential couple, specifically Rosario Murillo, developed a bitter hatred against feminists. But she also unlocked the door of silence.

-The reaction of the leadership of the Sandinista Front was that it was a plan engineered by the feminists. First because we had already told them that we were not going to support them in the 1996 elections. That was also a blow, like a slap in the face for them, and then we supported Zoilamérica in her denunciation. Then they decided that this social movement was an adversary movement. And I am going to tell you something interesting: Arnoldo Alemán's government was very hostile to women's demands. The PLC (Constitutionalist Liberal Party) leadership was convinced that feminist organizations were allies of the Sandinista Front. In other words, they didn't understand shit!

There is another fact that should not be forgotten in the history of the country: Zoilamérica’s case was emblematic, a milestone in the analysis of the relationship between political power and machismo, mediated by violence. Although many cases did not come to public light, a lot of women from the Sandinista Front started talking in smaller groups about what had happened to them. They started talking about the abuses and rapes they were victims of by revolutionary leaders, Front leaders, military and police leaders, in other words, by all the Sandinista and state structures.

Another thing that Tere Blandón highlights was the level of complicity of many de facto powers with Ortega, after Zoilamérica’s accusation. She criticizes that there was not a single political leader who spoke out, neither from the left, nor from the right, nor from the center, nor conservatives, nor liberals….

***

-They all kept a complicit silence. Cardinal Miguel Obando y Bravo, who at that time was bishop, when he was interviewed by La Prensa, said he was not going to give his opinion because it was a family problem. That must be said because they were all accomplices.

Rosario Murillo was key to her husband’s return to power. After the political pact with Arnoldo Alemán, which lowered the limit to be elected president to 35%, the future first lady transformed Ortega. She took off his olive green jacket and dyed him with the colors pink and fuchsia. The electoral campaign had as central themes “reconciliation” and “love”. Sentiments that did not last long… The first to be attacked were the feminists, who openly criticized the repeal of therapeutic abortion in Nicaragua carried out by the incoming Ortega government to please the Catholic Church and, therefore, obtain political support and win the presidency in 2006.

In October 2008 the Police raided the Autonomous Women’s Movement (MAM) and the Prosecutor’s Office formulated an “investigation” of money laundering. It was a time of attack from the pro-government media against women, such as journalist Sofía Montenegro, who in February 2023 fled Nicaragua because she was declared stateless and all her assets were confiscated.

Murillo’s resentment against feminists was evident in an extensive article published on August 27, 2008 by the regime’s official media. An attack against “low-intensity feminism”. “Feminism, which wanted to be the route of women’s rights, if it had proposed a humane and inclusive feminism, degenerated to the point of becoming just one more pawn of the Empire, which has it at its disposal in its coordinated programs and ‘perfect’ operations, of political chess, to discredit, divide, and supposedly win,” wrote the first lady.

Each paragraph of the article is loaded with insults and anti-imperialist arguments that, over the years, escalated in tone until the 2018 protests.

“Through their electronic tyrannies, these agents have unleashed an unprecedented political terrorism against leaderships, honors, reputations and against the most basic human dignity of people and entire families (…) In their disturbed eagerness for political destruction, family disintegration, the oligarchies’ agents are not stopped by anything. They have no conscience or heart, to be moved by innocent girls, or adolescent girls, whom they attack and violate, precisely in the name of their increasingly deceitful fight against violence (…) We are facing a political prostitution, with a macho voice and Uncle Sam’s hat”.

Before the social outburst of 2018, the Ortega-Murillo regime dismantled political parties, social and union organizations and established a corporatist alliance with businessmen. Women, says Tere Blandón, was the only social movement that the government never managed to neutralize.

-Feminists were the only social movement that they did not manage to corner. It is true that we could not influence the State or public policies, but many of the organizations took advantage of this to do something else: we developed strategies to work not only with young women, but also with young men, with groups of sexual diversity and rural groups. And I think that bothered them a lot: that organizations such as La Corriente, the Colectivo de Venancia, the Colectivo de Mujeres de Matagalpa, among others, developed strategies that gave us very good results. In other words, far from disappearing, we kept denouncing the violence. We kept up the demand for the reinstatement of abortion and that has been a heavy burden for them, because the Latin American left did not forgive the government of Daniel Ortega and Chayo (Rosario Murillo) for having criminalized abortion.

In an interview I had with Zoilamérica Ortega-Murillo a couple of years ago in Costa Rica, she told me how it annoyed Daniel Ortega and Rosario Murillo that in every trip to Latin American countries, feminists received them with banners calling the Sandinista leader a rapist. In 2019, during a trip to Bogota for the Gabo Festival of Journalism, an Argentine source, close to the Pink House, told me something else: that former President Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner despised Ortega for being a rapist.

I more or less summarize the long conversation with the Argentine source as follows: “Although Cristina was a disastrous and very corrupt president, the only authentic thing she has is her feminist commitment. That is why she always avoided meeting Ortega or greeting him very closely, although she could not always avoid it. For example, the hugging at CELAC was unavoidable because of diplomacy. But she called him a rapist”.

These stories, in a way, confirm what Tere Blandón says: that the feminist movement has always been undesirable for the Ortega-Murillo couple. That same feminism that joined the social protests of 2018 with a high degree of political maturity, even marching alongside Catholics and very conservative sectors.

-Daniel Ortega did not pay in court- regrets Tere Blandón, but immediately explains something that, undoubtedly, satisfies her-. But he paid a high cost in terms, let's say, of that stupid claim he had to continue being the great revolutionary leader. So, to call him a thief was nothing new, because they have all been thieves. That he has been a rapist, that he has criminalized abortion, and that he has regressed as he did basic women's rights, well, there it is. That is a lot.

April 2018. Protests against social security reforms soon became a self-convened national call for justice and democracy. Among the first groups to take to the streets were feminists. Ana Quirós was the first to be brutally attacked by Sandinista mobs on April 18 of that year. Although Tere Blandón recognizes the spontaneity of the civic uprising, she assures that the feminists responded to the emergency more quickly.

-And what did it mean to organize ourselves? To begin with, to formulate a discourse of denunciation, which was the first to circulate. We had no difficulty in getting feminists in Latin America, Europe and other parts of the world to speak out immediately, because they believed us; because they knew what we had already denounced before. We did not have to convince anyone. That did not happen with the peasant movement. The peasant movement continues to defend Daniel Ortega, for example... Some indigenous organizations in Central America as well. Some student organizations in Central America have supported the Ortega-Murillo regime.

After the Ortega-Murillo regime dismantled the protests with lethal violence, and began to criminalize social and opposition leaders, it was always clear to Tere Blandón that they could come for her. Even so, she remained firm in her activism in Nicaragua. However, everything turned into a dead end when in May 2022 La Corriente was confiscated and its legal status was cancelled. Before evicting the offices of the feminist NGO, located a few kilometers from the presidential palace, the women left the walls of the building marked with graffiti protesting the regime. Far from going into self-exile like many, Tere Blandón continued her activism from her home in Managua.

-I was 18 years old when I started this. I am a woman, like so many other feminists, with a lot of conviction: I have been willing to sacrifice myself.... I mean, I have paid the costs all my life and my thing is not to complain about it; my thing is to try to deal with it in the best way possible.

***

Costa Rica, June 2024. Tere Blandón loves the beach, but she has only been to one a couple of times since she has been exiled in Costa Rica. Her life is spent from meeting to meeting. Immersed in the work of La Corriente and in the political spaces in which she participates, as a strong voice that always advocates for women's rights. Those who know her closely, and who spoke with me for this profile, agree that “she needs rest and less work obsession to recognize herself in her humanity and enjoy life.”

“She enjoys her work but lacks more time for herself, although she doesn’t recognize it in that way,” another close friend of the feminist tells me. It is true that Tere Blandón enjoys her work. She is passionate about it and it is also not possible that they are going to make her work less. She is stubborn and determined with what she sets out to do. But she has an explanation for that, especially for what it has meant in exile.

-I was angry because they wouldn't let me go back to Nicaragua. But I know that anger, indignation, if it remains just that, it destroys you. If it transforms into action, it helps you resist. And that's what I did: I turned it into action. And then I didn't stop working for a single second. First to demand the release of political prisoners. I have taken advantage of any regional space to denounce what is happening in Nicaragua and here, in exile, we have taken advantage, with the support of Costa Rican feminists, to reorganize the work that La Corriente was doing. So I am grateful for that because I am here, but with my eyes set on Nicaragua.

About a year ago, when she took over the responsibility of the apartment, Tere Blandón kept it modest, with the basic things necessary to live. I believe that her rage for the imposed exile is fading and it shows in the space she lives in: the recently hung paintings, the furniture, the books and her pots and pans -which she missed so much- in which she cooks a gallopinto that deserves standing ovations. Nevertheless, I believe that for her the anger is still there… or has always been there for this incorruptible feminist. Outrage has moved her to foster and pass on a more equitable society for women.

I intentionally pause the conversation.

I ask her if she has achieved what they set out to achieve in the 1990s: their own revolution, the women’s revolution. And she does not hesitate to answer.

-In part yes, because it is an everyday revolution. There is now a generation of women, but also some men, not many of them, who have another way of seeing things, of seeing life, of seeing relationships, of seeing sexuality, of seeing paternity, of seeing politics, and that gives us hope.

-Hope but also a personal legacy that you contribute. That is Tere's revolution, or I could say something similar: women's revolution,” I tell her.

-If I were to die tomorrow, I can say that I have contributed to this revolution and that I feel very satisfied with it. Satisfied to have invested most of my life in this effort, which has been rewarding and which does not disappoint me, unlike the Sandinista Revolution, which was a revolution for the elites, because it was not the revolution for everyone that they promised. This is a real revolution! This one I believe has been successful. The other one was not successful, it had a monumental moral defeat. Our revolution is indeed very successful and that is why I am happy.

DEFENDERS is a multimedia series produced by DIVERGENTES.

Text by Wilfredo Miranda Aburto
Photographs by Carlos Herrera
English version by Alicia Henríquez
Graphic Conceptualization by Ricardo Arce
Development by News Lab Experience
General Direction by Néstor Arce

María Teresa Blandón or the women's revolution

María Teresa Blandón or the women's revolution

– I'm going to tell you something– she tells me energetically, emphatic as she is – it made me very angry. So much anger.

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DEFENDERS is a multimedia series produced by DIVERGENTES. Text by Wilfredo Miranda AburtoPhotographs by Carlos HerreraEnglish version by Alicia HenríquezGraphic Conceptualization by Ricardo ArceDevelopment by News Lab ExperienceGeneral Direction by Néstor Arce

DEFENDERS is a multimedia series produced by DIVERGENTES.

Text by Wilfredo Miranda Aburto
Photographs by Carlos Herrera
English version by Alicia Henríquez
Graphic Conceptualization by Ricardo Arce
Development by News Lab Experience
General Direction by Néstor Arce