Eden Pastora, aka “Commandante Zero,” the Nicaraguan guerrilla-revolutionary clad in his earlier years in combat fatigues and berets, had “the dark good looks of a young Robert De Niro,” according to the Washington Post. Pastora, who died last week in Managua at age 83, did bear some resemblance to De Niro, and he was certainly capable of heroism. But he was, at times, equally reminiscent of the new “El Presidente” in Woody Allen’s Bananas (1971), who, in military cap and fatigues, proclaims, “From this day on, the official language of San Marcos will be Swedish.”
Pastora was as responsible as anyone in his country for the overthrow of the Somoza family regime, which had ruled Nicaragua in corruption and cruelty since before World War II. But he was as mercurial as he was brave, and his good sense about what was good for Nicaragua was often sabotaged by a mammoth ego. It’s not for nothing that he was admired and distrusted, in equal measure, by both the Reagan administration and his Sandinista comrades.
Pastora’s father was a prosperous rancher who was murdered by National Guard troops when his son was eight. The pretext for the killing remains in dispute, but it inspired in Pastora a rage against “injustice, oppression, and regimes of terror” that later prompted him to drop out of a Mexican medical school and return home to run the family ranch and, in 1962, to join the Sandinistas.
Driven and seemingly fearless, Pastora adopted the nom de guerre of “Commandante Zero,” and his first major operation was not only his most ambitious but the summit of his personal success as well. On Aug. 22, 1978, he and a band of two dozen Sandinista guerrillas stormed the National Palace in Managua, killed a somnolent troop of guards, and took most of the members of Nicaragua’s Congress and two members of the Somoza family hostage. After three tense days, President Anastasio Somoza came to terms: Some 59 Sandinista political prisoners were released, and Pastora and his comrades were given passage to Cuba, mounting the steps of their aircraft clad in bloodstained fatigues and grenade bandoleers.
The effect was electric: A sleeping insurgency was reawakened, six cities rose in spontaneous revolt, and in the spring of the following year, “Commandante Zero” returned home to command the southern front of a nationwide offensive that soon enveloped the capital city. On July 17, 1979, when Somoza gave up power and flew into exile, it had been less than a year since the assault on the National Palace.
For Pastora, however, the revolution’s triumph, to which he had contributed so much, offered limited rewards. Vain, popular, and jockeying to be president, he was effectively sidelined by Nicaragua’s new strongman, Daniel Ortega, and kept off the ruling directorate. After two years languishing in the Defense Ministry, organizing Sandinista militia reserves, Pastora disappeared from the country and, surfacing in neighboring Costa Rica, denounced the regime as a new Marxist-Leninist tyranny, aligned strategically with Cuba and the Soviet Union. Two years later, having failed to ignite a political revolt, he gained secret American support to mount isolated armed attacks on ports and airports, to little effect.
The Sandinista government was not shaken but was sufficiently stirred to try to assassinate him, detonating a bomb during a 1984 press conference at his jungle encampment that burned Pastora and killed seven people, including three journalists. He retreated to Costa Rica and founded a shark-fishing business.
By the time Pastora returned home in the 1990s, in a post-Sandinista amnesty, he was largely a picturesque memory. In 2006, he ran for president, gaining 1% of the vote in the same election that returned Ortega to power, embracing his old rival as a fellow “anti-imperialist.” In 2018, Pastora regained his old job, organizing militias to fire on mass demonstrations against the government in Managua, killing dozens. “We must be willing to give our lives and do what the party says, whatever the party orders,” he declared.
Philip Terzian is the author of Architects of Power: Roosevelt, Eisenhower, and the American Century.
