Tomás Borge Martínez, Sandinista Rebel, Dies at 81

By ELISABETH MALKIN

Tomás Borge Martínez, the last surviving founder of the Sandinista rebel group that toppled Nicaragua’s dictatorship in 1979 and a former feared interior minister in the revolutionary government, died on Monday in Managua. He was 81.

His death was announced by Rosario Murillo, the wife of President Daniel Ortega. Mr. Borge was being treated for pneumonia at a military hospital in Managua when he died, she said.

The government declared three days of national mourning, and on Tuesday his body lay in state in the National Palace.

Mr. Borge was one of the student radicals who formed the Sandinista National Liberation Front in 1961 with the ambition of overthrowing the American-backed dictatorship of the Somoza family. The students, admirers of the Cuban Revolution, chose the name in tribute to Augusto César Sandino, the nationalist guerrilla leader who fought American Marines in the 1920s and 1930s. Mr. Borge had received training in Cuba.

He was jailed twice by the government, first in 1956 after the assassination of President Anastasio Somoza García, and then in 1977. He was freed in 1978 after a Sandinista raid took the entire Nicaraguan Congress hostage in the National Palace and won the release of 50 Sandinista prisoners, a half-million dollars and the publication of Sandinista communiqués in the newspapers.

Mr. Borge’s first wife was killed by the Somoza government’s National Guard just a few months before the government’s collapse in 1979.

Afterward, he became the interior minister and built up a feared power base. He was in change of the state security, the police and intelligence apparatus, the prison system, the fire department, the press censorship office and the nationwide network of Sandinista Defense Committees.

He also controlled elite Interior Ministry troops and was in charge of dealing with restive Miskito Indians on Nicaragua’s remote Atlantic Coast. Indian groups, appealing to the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, have accused him and other Sandinista leaders of ordering the killings of Miskito Indian rebels during the 1980s.

Mr. Borge, the oldest and most hard-line of the nine Sandinista comandantes who ran Nicaragua in the 1980s, was complex and often contradictory. A profile of him in The New York Times in 1985 said that his official biography listed the Bible as his favorite book. His collection of crucifixes filled an entire room. Yet “Mr. Borge deports priests whenever he deems it necessary,” the article said.

Still, he considered himself to be the “Sentinel of the People’s Happiness,” according to the slogan he had painted on the Interior Ministry. Once a week, and with feudal authority, he received ordinary citizens to hear their complaints, which he then dealt with through peremptory phone calls to other government ministries.

“Grandiose and unpredictable, he could be tough with one hand and extremely generous with the other,” the Nicaraguan writer Gioconda Belli, a Sandinista who later broke with the movement, told The Associated Press. “After 1990, I have the sense he gave up his revolutionary illusions. He ended up a tragic-comic figure.”

Many considered Mr. Borge to be a direct rival to Mr. Ortega among the Sandinista leadership. But he was outmaneuvered by Mr. Ortega, who came to dominate the party that was returned to power in 2007 and that he still leads today.

Mr. Borge was tarnished by allegations that he, like other Sandinistas, had helped himself to confiscated riches just before the Sandinistas were ousted in the 1990 elections.

But he remained loyal to the party, serving in Congress and proudly showing visitors a photo album with pictures of him posing with Communist leaders, including Fidel Castro and Kim Il-sung of North Korea. At his death he was ambassador to Peru.

He published several books, including a 1989 memoir, “The Patient Impatience.”

Mr. Borge, who was born into a poor family in Matagalpa on Aug. 13, 1930, is survived by his second wife, the Peruvian singer and actress Marcela Pérez Silva, with whom he had three children. He had three other children, according to Nicaraguan media reports, including a son he adopted after the boy’s father, a guerrilla fighter, was killed.

NYT