MANAGUA, NICARAGUA — What was it that Nicaragua's greatest athlete heard from the president's envoy the night he shot himself in the chest?
After dark on June 30, a loyal lieutenant to President Daniel Ortega paid a visit to Alexis Arguello, the mayor of Managua and a world champion boxer three times over. A few hours later, the mayor was dead.
No one is sure why Arguello killed himself. If it really was suicide, that is.
He was only six months into his new job as mayor. But things were not going well. The old demons of drug abuse nipped at his heels. And then there was a new demon -- at least that's how some people saw it.
Arguello had been the candidate for Ortega's Sandinista party. But if ever Arguello truly considered Ortega an ally, the relationship had soured. Arguello was being stripped of any authentic power as mayor, a maneuver widely seen as orchestrated by the president.
It's not as though being mayor of Nicaragua's capital is such a desirable position. It has become a cursed job in what a Nicaraguan historian once famously called a cursed land.
Not just because it means running an impossible city, with no real center, seated on the lip of a volcanic lake and blighted, still, with ruins from an earthquake more than 30 years ago.
Cursed because recent mayors have had a tendency to drop dead, or drop into jail or, at best, drop off the political map.
The immensely popular Herty Lewites, a former Sandinista tourism minister who served as mayor from 2000 until he stepped down in 2005 to run for president, died of a heart attack in the middle of the campaign. A predecessor, Arnoldo Aleman, made it to the president's office, but that didn't go particularly well: He was sentenced to 20 years in prison for siphoning off millions of state dollars to furnish his hacienda and other crimes. (He has since been pardoned and released.)
In the small world that is Nicaragua, internecine political battles are almost always personal and familial. Former Sandinistas hate the current Sandinista leadership; the offspring of former Contras, the U.S.-backed rebels who fought the Sandinistas in the 1980s, are now married to onetime revolutionaries.
Family after family is divided in its loyalties to a left that promises prosperity for the poor (only to merely enrich itself) or to a right that promises foreign investment and jobs for all (only to merely enrich itself).
