Nora Astorga - A Revolutionary

A Revolutionary

"...Revolutions are not exportable like Coca-Cola or paperbacks or something like that... You don't produce it internally and send it away. Revolutions are made in a country when the conditions in that particular country are for a process of change."

Astorga later returned to Nicaragua and studied law at the Universidad Centroamericana in Managua. Her association with Nicaragua's Sandinista revolutionaries began during her years as a university student. From 1969 to 1973, she was responsible for finding safe houses and transportation for the revolutionary leader Oscar Turcios.

At age 22, she married Jorge Jenkins, a student activist. The young couple spent the following year in Italy, where he studied anthropology and she studied banking law and computer programming. They had two children and separated after five years of marriage. During this time, Astorga led a double life as a mother of two and a corporate lawyer for one of Nicaragua's largest construction companies, while clandestinely aiding the Sandinistas.

After the assassination of newspaper editor Pedro Chamorro in 1978, Astorga decided to take up arms against the Somoza regime. "I finally understood that armed struggle was the only solution, that a rifle cannot be met with a flower, that we were in the streets, but if that force didn't get organized we wouldn't achieve much", she said. "For me, it was the moment of conviction: either I took up arms and made a total commitment or I wasn't going to change anything."

She gained national attention for her participation in the botched kidnapping and murder of General Reynaldo Pérez Vega (nicknamed "El Perro," or "the dog"). Pérez Vega was deputy commander of Anastasio Somoza’s National Guard. On March 8, 1978 (International Women's Day, ironically) Astorga invited the general to her apartment in Managua, hinting to him that the sexual favors he had long sought would be granted. When he arrived, however, three members of the Sandinista National Liberation Front (FSLN) — Hilario Sánchez, Raúl Venerio and Walter Ferreti — burst out of her bedroom closet and seized the general. The plan was to ransom him for jailed Sandinista revolutionaries, but Pérez Vega put up a struggle and was murdered. Later, with his throat slit, he was found wrapped in a Sandinista flag. Astorga said of his murder, "It was not murder. He was too much of a monster."

In an interview shortly before her death, she described her feelings about her role in the Pérez Vega murder this way:

...Sometimes people ask me why I don't have any guilty feelings in regard to "the dog." They want to know how I could do something so fierce without feeling guilty. I believe I don't feel guilty for three reasons. First, we were supposed to kidnap him, not kill him. Second, I wasn't there at the moment of his death. And third, he represented repression. He was practically Somoza's second in command, the one who conducted all those murderous operations in the north, the one who massacred so many in Masaya. He really was a monster. I understood his death as part of the liberation struggle...

— Nora Astorga

She became the subject of a national manhunt and next appeared to the Nicaraguan public on the pages of La Prensa, the nation's opposition newspaper. She was wearing jungle fatigues and carrying an AK-47 assault rifle. Astorga had escaped to the jungle and joined the Sandinista revolutionaries. There, she became pregnant with her third child by José María Alvarado, a leading Sandinista.