A quest for peace turns personal

Carlos Mejia Godoy, Nicaragua’s foremost songwriter and folklorist, has been mixing music and politics for three decades. He’s served as cultural ambassador of the Sandinista revolution in the 1970s and penned a rebel anthem condemning the United States as “the enemy of humanity.”

But in the past few weeks, the 59-year-old performer has been surprised to hear a new rallying cry rising spontaneously from fans at peace demonstrations around Managua. People have started chanting the name of one of his adult sons -- Camilo Mejia, a mild-mannered vegetarian who by a twist of fate finds himself at war.

“Camilo! Camilo!” they shout in chorus. “El pueblo esta contigo.” (The people are with you.)

Camilo, 27, is neither a local star nor a Sandinista. In fact, until a month ago, he was largely unknown in Nicaragua, which he left as a teenager when his mother moved to Florida in the early 1990s.

This poet and student of psychology has gained notoriety in his homeland not as a musician but as a soldier in the U.S. Army, now doing duty in the war on Iraq. Instead of a guitar, he’s armed with a rifle representing the very government his father has so tenaciously opposed since before he was born.

“It’s even more heart-rending for a man like me who’s been a standard-bearer for peace,” Mejia Godoy said by phone from Nicaragua, where he’s been appearing at antiwar demonstrations. “With heart in hand, I’ve been saying for years that our people have suffered the erroneous expansionist policies of the U.S., which treats weaker nations like its own backyard....

“So even if my son were not involved in this war, I would always be adding my voice and my artistic energy for the cause of peace. And now that he is, well, that gives me just one more reason.”

The story of the old revolutionary and his soldier son is the talk of the town in Managua, where the Mejia Godoy family is a beloved cultural treasure. Though Camilo has not openly disavowed his father nor his beliefs, the circumstances that led him to the Persian Gulf hold powerful symbolic meaning for a country still deeply divided by the lingering effects of a violent civil war, U.S. intervention and the ensuing wave of exiles.

“A lot of people [from Nicaragua] are caught in this same paradox,” says Greg Landau, a San Francisco-based producer and guitarist, who toured extensively in the 1980s with Luis Enrique Mejia Godoy, the young soldier’s uncle. “In many families, people are caught on opposite sides of the political fence.”

Camilo did not go gung-ho into the conflict, says his mother, Maritza Castillo, a naturalized U.S. citizen who lives in Miami. The aspiring writer and single father of a 4-year-old daughter enlisted for military benefits to help pay his college tuition.

“He’s a pacifist,” said his mother. “He doesn’t eat meat. He won’t even eat turkey for Thanksgiving. He says, ‘Mama, I don’t want to participate in the massacre of the turkey population.’ He won’t eat tuna, and not even a single shrimp, because he has so much respect for living things. What an irony of life that he should now be participating in such a bloody war.”

His father rose to international prominence in the late 1970s during the revolution that overthrew dictator Anastacio Somoza, whose oligarchy was sustained for decades with U.S. support. After Somoza’s fall in 1979, the Sandinistas faced protracted opposition from the Contras, a counterrevolutionary force covertly backed by the Reagan administration.

The triumph of the revolution sparked a euphoric sense of liberation, similar to the popular rejoicing seen in Baghdad. But in Nicaragua, the Sandinistas saw Uncle Sam as an imperialist ally of their local tyrant.

To make their revolution complete, they also set out to overthrow what they considered U.S. cultural imperialism in popular music and the arts. Carlos Mejia Godoy spearheaded that effort to reclaim Nicaragua’s folkloric traditions.

His music is largely free of Sandinista sloganeering. Instead, it’s infused with storytelling charm, a sense of humor, rousing spirituality and populist spirit. In songs such as “Credo” (Creed) and “El Cristo de Palacaguina” (The Christ of Palacaguina), he elevated the common man to a place of reverence and won the hearts of many Nicaraguans, regardless of ideology.

Camilo is his fourth child, raised during this political and cultural upheaval. Camilo’s mother was also a Sandinista supporter, but she became disillusioned with the deteriorating economy and corruption within the regime, which was voted out of office in 1990. By then, she had long been separated from her husband, whom she describes as a “man of conscience.”

Camilo was just 17 when they immigrated to the U.S. after the Sandinista defeat. She also brought her older son Carlos Alexis, now a struggling heavy-metal musician living in San Francisco.

Not long after they arrived, she recalls, Camilo “fell into the trap” of military recruitment. It was peacetime, but his mother dreaded the risks.

“The moment he told me he had enlisted, I cried,” she recalled. “It’s a gamble, like playing darts with your own life. It was his error in judgment for being a boy. This is a country that is always at war -- in Panama, in Nicaragua, in Grenada. That’s why I cried, because I knew that war here is a way of life.”

The young recruit was still in the reserves when he was called up, just months ahead of his planned graduation from the University of Miami in May, which would have coincided with the completion of eight years of military service. The war extended his hitch an extra year.

The family story made front-page news in Managua, where the Mejia Godoy brothers, Carlos and Luis Enrique, appear weekly at a cultural center that bears their famous surname. (Yet another of the four Mejia Godoy brothers is the father of U.S.-based salsa star Luis Enrique.)

In an article in La Prensa of Managua, Carlos Mejia Godoy expressed sorrow over his son’s participation in what he called the U.S. aggression against Iraq. But not all readers were sympathetic, said reporter Eduardo Marenco.

Several wrote angry letters accusing the musician of trying to pass himself off as a victim, when the Sandinistas themselves drafted many young men to fight in the war against the Contras.

Marenco summarized the critics’ bitter response: “At last, Carlos Mejia will feel in his own flesh what it means to send a son to war.”

Mejia Godoy says he wants his music to be a force for humanism and healing. He is no longer active in the Sandinista party and continues to focus on rescuing his country’s cultural traditions.

Ten years ago, he crossed political lines by staging and setting to music the works of right-wing poet Pablo Antonio Cuadra, an outspoken Sandinista critic. And one of his most ambitious works, the populist “Misa Campesina” (Peasant Mass), which was once banned by the Vatican, has increasingly crossed denominational lines with translations in seven languages, with new ones due in Greek and Norwegian. There is talk of staging the Spanish-language folk Mass in Los Angeles later this year, when Mejia Godoy is expected to appear here.

As for new material, he is mulling a tune in the form of a friendly letter to his son, recalling his childhood and lifting his spirits.

Wherever he goes nowadays, Mejia Godoy says, well-wishers approach him with a greeting for Camilo. People stop him on the street and give him an encouraging hug. Old ladies say they’ve lighted candles for his safe return.

Mejia Godoy believes the people’s good vibrations are protecting Camilo. He hopes his son will be back in time for his planned 60th birthday celebration in Managua on June 27. He wants it to be an occasion to reunite all his eight children, scattered in the U.S., Spain, Nicaragua and now Iraq.

“One of my biggest dreams is to have them with me here at home, to come together and hug each other and share,” he says. “And we’d have even greater reason to celebrate Camilo’s escaping with his life from this dramatic situation.

“But,” he adds, “the war’s continuation would be cause to suspend all celebration.”