Post Trauma…?
Benito takes us to the fortín, the old fort up on a hill overlooking León. It was used by Anastasio Somoza’s National Guard as an “interrogation” center in ’78-79, when Nicaraguans were struggling to resist and overthrow the US-backed dictatorship that stole millions of dollars from the public sector with the help of brutal military repression. Benito had been part of the Sandinista resistance as a teenager; and at age 17 was kidnapped by the National Guard, taken to the fortín, and tortured every day for a week. He says he considers himself lucky because most prisoners of the National Guard were murdered and deposited on the streets of León to terrorize other resisters into silence.
Benito makes a point of saying that he and other torture survivors and veterans had to “overcome” their experiences themselves, that there was no treatment for Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder in Nicaragua in those days. He repeats it fifteen minutes later, with a smile on his face.
