Edén Pastora
Sandinista poster boy who turned against the revolution
EDÉN PASTORA, who has died aged 83, was once the darling of the Sandinista revolution in Nicaragua; a notorious womaniser known as “Commander Zero”, who claimed to have fathered more than 20 children, he was the most dashing of the anti-somoza guerrilla leaders.
In 1978 with just 25 followers, he stormed the National Palace in Managua and took hostage the entire National Assembly, along with members of family of the Nicaraguan dictator Anastasio Somoza, and kept the National Guard at bay for two days.
Somoza eventually agreed to pay a $500,000 ransom and release 59 Sandinista leaders, including Daniel Ortega, who would lead his Sandinista National Liberation Front (FSLN) guerrillas to victory in 1979.
After Somoza’s fall Pastora was named deputy defence minister, but he soon fell out with what he described as “a Marxist-leninist junta of a Stalinist cut”, and in 1982 took up arms against them. Pastora set up his base in the jungle border between Nicaragua and Costa Rica and, to begin with, accepted assistance from the CIA.
But he refused to join forces with the mainstream Contra opposition, the FDN, many of whom had served with the “Somocista” National Guard which had murdered his father when Pastora was seven years old. For a time Pastora’s Arde (Democratic Revolutionary Alliance) guerrilla force prevented the opening of a FDN front in the south.
So when, in May 1984, a bomb exploded during a press conference at his jungle outpost there was debate as to whether the device had been planted by the CIA or an agent of the Ortega regime. The blast blew Pastora out of the war, and from 1986 to 1990 he survived mostly by fishing for sharks in Costa Rica.
The Contra War in Nicaragua ended in 1989 with a peace agreement, and the following year Ortega allowed Pastora to return. Later the same year Ortega was replaced in democratic elections by Violeta Chamorro.
Pastora decided to launch himself into democratic politics, but his moment had passed. He ran for president in 2006 but scored less than 1 per cent in the polls.
By this time Pastora was struggling financially. In 2001 he had put an advertisement in a local newspaper offering to sell his revolutionary trophies, including a gold Rolex watch said to have been stolen from Somoza himself and a pet lion he could no longer afford to feed. With the money, he bought a small fleet of boats and returned to fishing.
Daniel Ortega, in the meantime, had reinvented himself as a democratic socialist, and after failing in his 2006 presidential bid Pastora made peace with his old comrade. In 2007, after Ortega was voted back into power, he appointed Pastora to oversee Nicaragua’s part of the San Juan River region, a disputed territory bordering Costa Rica.
Pastora made headlines in 2010 when, exploiting an error on Google’s internet maps, he led Nicaraguan troops across the river and planted a flag on Costa Rica’s Calero Island. In 2015 the International Court of Justice ruled that Costa Rica had sovereignty over the disputed territory.
Edén Atanacio Pastora Gómez was born on January 22 1937 in Ciudad Darío, western Nicaragua, into a well-to-do rancher family. Educated by Jesuits, he studied Medicine at the University of Guadalajara, but did not graduate.
He returned to Nicaragua in 1959 to run his family ranch and to join the recently formed Sandino Revolutionary Front. In the mid-1960s he allied himself with the FSLN. But he was never comfortable with the revolution’s Marxist elements.
Pastora once said: “In four marriages and six affairs, 10 women have given me 21 children,” but this may have been an exaggeration. Some accounts claim that his surviving spouse, Yolanda, was his second wife.
Edén Pastora, born January 22 1937, died June 16 2020