U.S. Nun Embraces Sandinistas’ Cause

Almost three decades ago, Mary Hartman, an admittedly naive Roman Catholic nun with a master’s degree in English literature, went to Nicaragua to teach and do missionary work in a part of the world she had never visited. Reared in a sheltered, working-class home in Altoona, Pa., Hartman spoke no Spanish and was ill-prepared for work in the Third World. Politics was the furthest thing from her mind.

“I didn’t know anything about it,” Hartman said in a recent interview in a church hall here shortly before giving a presentation on Nicaragua. “I just thought that the U.S. was the best and could do no wrong.”

Things have changed. Today, the 59-year-old Hartman is a committed social reformer, an unabashed admirer of the Sandinista regime--on whose controversial human rights commission she serves--and a proud practitioner of so-called “liberation theology,” the social activist philosophy that has come under criticism from the Vatican. She reserves her harshest criticism for Washington, which has branded the Sandinista regime as an outlaw totalitarian government that stands as a security menace to the United States.

“The problem is not Nicaragua or Costa Rica or El Salvador or Guatemala,” Hartman told an audience of more than 100 mostly sympathetic listeners gathered recently in the church hall here. “The problem is our (U.S.) foreign policy. That is the crisis in Central America.”

While Hartman maintains that the Sandinista government represents a “people’s democracy,” President Reagan has expressed a quite different point of view. “Nicaragua is a Marxist-Leninist dictatorship, a communist dictatorship, trying to consolidate power,” a State Department spokesman said in a telephone interview from Washington.

Currently, Hartman is in the San Francisco Bay Area, concluding a whirlwind three-week speaking tour of California that has included weeklong stops here and in Los Angeles. Her air fare and expenses have been met by cultural, religious and other groups generally sympathetic to the Sandinista government.

Hartman’s goal is to counter what she contends are the Reagan Administration’s “propaganda”and “lies” about the Nicaraguan regime.

To her critics, Hartman, who is well-known in Managua, is no more than a zealous propagandist for a repressive communist regime.

“I think her remarks are totally superficial and she should stick to religious works,” said Ernesto Palazio, a Nicaraguan who is the Washington representative for the contras, who are waging the U.S.-backed war against the Nicaraguan regime. “She is totally identified with the (Nicaraguan) government, and I think she has become a fanatic.”

But some independent observers, while conceding that Hartman closely identifies with the Sandinista regime, describe her in less critical terms.

“I feel that she’s a sincere person, but I also feel that she’s very much a part of the government,” said Juan Mendez, director of the Washington office of Americas Watch, the independent rights-monitoring group that has criticized abuses by both the Sandinista government and the contras. “She decided to take the side of the Sandinistas, and I think that choice is a legitimate (one). I don’t see her as a propagandist.”

Hartman’s comments reflect the sharp divisions among Roman Catholics in Nicaragua, where some segments of the clergy, notably Cardinal Miguel Obando y Bravo, have harshly criticized the Sandinista government, while other clerics have lent their strong support to the regime. Despite her political activities and her often-critical comments, Hartman retains the support of her religious congregation, the Sisters of St. Agnes, based in Fond du Lac, Wis.

“We are allowing her to follow her conscience,” said a spokeswoman for the congregation. “I think that Mary Hartman truly believes that this is the way of living the Gospel in a country like Nicaragua.”

A thin, almost frail woman who speaks in subdued tones, Hartman’s schoolmarmish appearance belies the intensity--and provocativeness--of her comments about Nicaragua, the United States and the Roman Catholic Church.

A ‘Yankee Sandinista’

She is one of the many church people in Latin America and elsewhere who have actively taken up the role of social reformers, sometimes blurring the distinctions between religion and politics. She is also one of the “Yankee Sandinistas” who have worked in Nicaragua and become proponents for the regime.

“Every time the people in Latin America have cried out for justice,” Hartman told her audience at the First Unitarian Church in Hillcrest, “they have been dubbed as communists, they have been repressed and killed.”

Describing official U.S. policy toward the region, she says: “No country, absolutely no country, no people in Latin America has a right to be free and sovereign. . . . What I am shouting about most is our (U.S.) foreign policy in Central America, because I see that it has brought nothing but death and destruction to these people.”

To Hartman, the contra war against Nicaragua is just the latest example--a U.S. proxy effort to unseat a legitimate government committed to social reform and redistribution of income. U.S. officials, of course, see things much differently.

“If they (the Sandinistas) would liberalize society and allow the freedoms to exist that their revolution stood for, they probably would not have the contras, “ said the State Department official in Washington, who declined to be named. “The contras have tried to participate in a Sandinista-style revolution, but they have become frustrated and taken up arms.”

Political Transformation

Hartman has come a long way from the naive, sheltered nun who came to Managua in 1962 to teach at a Catholic school. Since then, she has worked with impoverished rural Miskito and Sumo Indians and urban slum dwellers, lived through a devastating earthquake and a cataclysmic revolution--and, in the process, been transformed from an unquestioning missionary to an ardent reformer. She offers no apologies.

“I would say that politics enters into everything, even into our religious life,” the bespectacled Hartman explains in her steady, low-pitched voice. “We have to take a stand. If we are silent, if we say nothing, we’ve already made a political commitment. . . . We must speak out, I think, for those who have no voice. . . .

“As church people, we’re supposed to be working for justice, right? . . . We have a right to criticize.”

She traces her political awakening to her work with a Christian community in Managua’s poor Barrio Riguero, beginning in 1971 and lasting until the Sandinista victory in 1979. Hartman recalls the “disappearances” of former students, presumed to have been murdered by the forces of former dictator Anastasio Somoza. In subdued tones, she talks of finding the mutilated bodies of her friends. She recounts how the troops of Somoza’s National Guard sold the food and clothing that was donated from around the world after the earthquake that leveled much of Managua in 1972.

In the midst of such tumult, she notes, the activist tenets of liberation theology were spreading to the churches of Latin American cities from Managua to Rio de Janeiro, from Mexico City to Santiago. There was a shift, she noted, from the traditional Roman Catholic concept of stressing the spiritual rewards of the afterlife to a pronounced policy of attempting to improve people’s lots today.

“When I first came down to Nicaragua, the church’s teaching was that the poor would always be with us, that God loves them, and if they hold on, someday they will get their reward,” Hartman recalled.

“With the theology of liberation, we were taught to look around and see what is the cause of poverty, . . . that if we all share, there should be enough for all of us, . . . that God is a God of life, not of death. . . . (liberation theologians) told us that we should incarnate ourselves into the life of the poor . . . to work for people’e liberation, not only spiritual, but everything that touches their lives, because people are made up of body and soul. . . . It is through working with people and spending years suffering with them that one begins to understand.”

Hartman, who had become acquainted with many revolutionary leaders during her time in Managua, was appointed to the new Sandinista government’s National Commission for the Promotion and Protection of Human Rights, of which she is director of social services. Among other things, she has worked on reform of the government’s prison system and assisted dozens of delegations touring Nicaragua from around the world. She said the government pays her the equivalent of $16 a month for her work.

The commission is one of several groups in and outside Nicaragua that monitor suspected human-rights “abuses” there. While Hartman’s group tends to portray the Sandinistas in a positive light, other panels with links to the contras and the U.S. government have been harshly critical of them.

Hartman acknowledges that Nicaragua is not a haven for human rights--there has been extensive curtailment of freedom of the press, the right to strike and the right to travel, among other things.

Like Sandinista officials and other sympathizers, she blames such abuses on the toll of the ongoing contra war against the government--and she stresses that the abuses have not been on the scale of the political murders seen in El Salvador and Guatemala. She cites “wonderful” advances in health care, education, land reform and other areas since the revolution, although she acknowledges that the war has slowed the pace of improvement.

“You just wish that the country could be at peace, so that it could be judged more accurately,” Hartman says.

Critics of the Sandinistas say she has it all backward.

“They (the contras) have gone to war because their freedoms were suppressed,” said Palazio of the Nicaraguan opposition. “I feel that the situation of the Nicaraguans at present is worse than ever before.”

Palazio and other supporters of the contras see an eventual toppling of the Sandinista regime. But Hartman envisions a different scenario in Nicaragua.

At the end of her address to the San Diego church group, Hartman concluded: “These people who have won their independence, who have tasted liberty, who have lived democracy. . . . They’re going to give their lives as need be so that the country can remain free.”