As our small boat entered the bay, I heard a series of clacks as the Sandinista military unit accompanying us checked their weapons. Everyone working in Nicaragua in 1987 knew of the murder of Ben Linder by contra rebels earlier that year and we were acutely aware of the risks of working in a war zone.
On April 28, 1987, at the age of twenty-seven, Benjamin Ernest Linder, was killed in a contra attack while working on a dam project to bring electricity to the people of San José del Bocay, Nicaragua. This weekend, commemorations are being held there to mark the thirtieth anniversary of his death.
Shortly after the 1979 triumph of the Sandinista revolution to topple the dictatorship of Anastasio Somoza Debayle, the newly elected U.S. President Ronald Reagan began a program of arming a rebel force known as the contras. Many of the leaders were former members of Somoza’s brutal National Guard. The funding and training was halted by an act of Congress, only to be restarted secretly by members of the Reagan administration in an elaborate scheme that eventually was exposed and led to the Iran-Contra hearings. As many as 50,000 Nicaraguans were killed in the ten-year-long armed conflict.
Ben Linder was a caring and committed person from the time he was very young. Madison peace activist Ilse Hecht remembers Ben as a “cheerful, wonderful fellow.” Ben Linder’s mother Elisabeth Linder says she did not bring up Ben to be an activist. “We never told our children what to do,” she said this week from her home in Portland, Oregon. “He graduated as an engineer and figured he could do something good,” she said.
Hecht remembers visiting Nicaragua with a group of nurses around 1984. She witnessed the advances being made by the Sandinista government at that time: “Here was a popular movement that put on programs that were very exciting because they reached the normal people—like the literacy and health programs—it was very inspiring.”
While she was in Managua, she saw Linder who was working for the electric utility INE. “He was excited about the work he was doing as an engineer,” she recalls. His parents visited him there as well, as well as his brother John who spent some time working with a brigade picking coffee. At the time, Ben wrote in a letter to a friend: “It's a wonderful feeling to work in a country where the government's first concern is for its people, for all its people.”
Besides being an engineer, Ben Linder was also a clown. He loved riding his unicycle and entertaining kids and adults alike. He sometimes assisted local health-care workers in gathering children for vaccination programs as the newly developing country sought to eradicate many preventable diseases.
The Nicaraguan president’s office published a small booklet in English and Spanish of Daniel Ortega’s funeral address for Ben Linder.
Anita Hecht, Linder’s distant cousin, notes “he was a joyful person and was known in Nicaragua as a juggler and a unicyclist.” “My daughter has been fortunate to learn the unicycle here in school,” she continued, “and the other day we were talking about Ben and being a clown and a juggler and it is important to recall that is as much part of his identity as his political activism.”
“Being both jugglers, that was the origin of our friendship, and it was some time before we did any work together,” remembers Don Macleay, a Canadian-born machinist who was one of the thousands of international volunteers in the country in the 1980s.
“The work in El Cuá started with him recruiting me as a machinist, then reversed itself as I became the project director and his boss,” Macleay recalls. El Cuá was Ben’s first big project. As an internacionalista he worked for INE – the electric utility – initially in their offices in Managua, but eventually he took on the project of bringing hydroelectric power to the small northern village of El Cuá, completing a project that had been started earlier but was never finished. The project in Bocay grew out of that work, and it was while planning the location of a dam for this project that Linder and two Nicaraguan co-workers, Sergio Hernández, Pablo Rosales were ambushed and murdered by a group of contras near the village of La Camaleona.
“We really cannot spare more Americans like Ben Linder, who built dams and made children laugh,” wrote Mary McGrory in a column about Linder’s killing in The Washington Post in 1987.
Marc Becker
Ben’s gravestone in Matagalpa:“La luz que encendió brillará para siempre.” “The light he lit will shine forever.”
Linder’s death sent shockwaves through the international community in Nicaragua and here in the United States. Three hundred Americans working in Nicaragua signed a letter calling for an end to U.S. funding of the contras. Nicaraguan president Daniel Ortega spoke at Linder’s funeral in Matagalpa saying: “He did not come on a flight carrying arms, nor with millions of dollars; he came on a flight carrying the dreams which were born of his conviction.”
Ortega also evoked the names of eight other Europeans who had been murdered by the contras, but Linder was the only U.S. citizen killed during the war. “He is the smile of the children who saw him in his clown costume,” Ortega continued, “illuminating the future that we are making together in the new Nicaragua.”
Ben Linder’s parents David and Elisabeth, along with his brother John and sister Miriam, travelled to Nicaragua for the funeral. When the Linders returned, they were asked to testify before Congress about their son’s death.
“It was horrible,” Elisabeth Linder recalls three decades later. “We went to Washington, DC, on the way back from Ben’s funeral. Connie Mack, a U.S. Representative from Florida, essentially said that we asked for it because Ben knew that he was in a danger zone, so that was pretty awful.” Anthony Lewis writing in The New York Times called the hearing “The Most Cruel” and compared Mack’s actions to the shameless actions of Senator Joseph McCarthy. Representative Connie Mack (R-FL) responded with a letter to the Times: “As I told the Linders, the foreign policy of the liberals is one of appeasement, to obtain peace whatever the cost. But the policy I subscribe to, the one I feel this nation should follow, is the conservative approach—the one that seeks freedom.”
Ronald Reagan had famously called the contras “freedom fighters” and the moral equivalent of our founding fathers. Ilse Hecht’s son Tom, who at the time was an aide to U.S .Senator William Proxmire, Democrat of Wisconsin, wrote in a guest column in the Wisconsin State Journal, “Democracy means building dams for the poor people you love. . . . Ben Linder was a freedom fighter.”
President Reagan never spoke directly of Linder, But Vice President George H.W. Bush was confronted by Ben Linder’s brother John at an event in South Dakota. Bush said to him: “You see, the policy of the United States Government is to support the contras, your brother was supporting people . . . on the other side. . . . So he made his choice.” But perhaps history has shown that that “other side” was the correct one to be on.
Today Ben Linder is remembered as a hero who gave his life to help the everyday people of Nicaragua rebuild. “ In the region he is something of a patron saint for being an “Internacionalista” and for rural electricity,” remarks Don Macleay who is attending this week’s commemorations in Nicaragua. “There is a hydro plant in San José de Bocay, where he was killed, that bears his name. There is a project that continues the small scale hydro work that is also named after him [ATDER-BL, the Association of Rural Development Workers–Benjamin Linder]. The leader of ATDER is Ben's friend and housemate Rebecca Leaf.”
Outside the region, there has been a book, a movie and a play made about Ben, all discussing what he means to activists. “He is something of a symbol of doing ethical, technical volunteer work in the third world, which I think he deserves,” says Macleay.
Ben Linder is honored in a song by Dean Stevens, “The Children Knew Ben” which celebrates Ben the clown, and another called “Fragile” by Gordon Sumner, better known as Sting. Barbara Kingsolver dedicated her 1990 novel Animal Dreams “in memory of Ben Linder” and a recent play and a 2008 documentary film commemorate his life and work. The most thorough story of his life, his work, and his death can be found in the excellent book The Death of Ben Linder by journalist Joan Kruckewitt who knew Linder in Managua.
Today at Portland Community College there is a scholarship in Ben Linder’s name, and in a recent column in the The Register-Guard of Eugene, Oregon, Bryan Moore wrote of taking a group of high school students to visit Linder’s grave in Matagalpa. “I was truly moved by their tears and joy, feeling their commitment as young people — a new generation inspired by Ben’s legacy, to work to make a positive difference in the world.”
This inspires Elisabeth Linder as well: “His work continues,” she said. “It is great to hear these stories, like the high school students, to see how they feel about Ben’s life and are inspired to do something good.”
Anita Hecht agrees: “He is example of somebody who just did the work, against huge odds. He was up against the whole U.S. government funding of the contras and yet he was fighting for a cause he believed in. I think we need more people like that who are willing to really stand up for what they believe.”
Elisabeth Linder concurs,“the lesson is that it is possible to do good things personally, singly, if one can figure out where and how.” And perhaps Ben said it best himself: “Anything you can do needs to be done, so pick up the tool of your choice and get started.”