At the end of December 2023, sociologist José Luis Rocha died in a hospital in Guatemala City. With his death, Nicaragua lost an independent thinker without whom it is difficult to imagine the country's future.
Translated with DeepL.
Original language: Deutsch
On the last day of the old year 2023, Nicaraguan sociologist José Luis Rocha died in a hospital in Guatemala City. He was 57 years old and, according to the doctors, he died unexpectedly of pneumonia. Without the extreme strain of his forced exile from Nicaragua to Guatemala, José Luis would not have been prematurely torn from the middle of a full and highly creative life.
In 2022, José Luis was a fellow at Böll-Haus Langenbroich, a refuge for persecuted writers and artists. After his undaunted support for the protest movement of April 2018 against the authoritarian regime of Daniel Ortega, José Luis continued to live and work in Managua. As his situation in Nicaragua became increasingly threatening, a scholarship from the Heinrich Böll Foundation in Germany gave him some respite. He was able to work at the Böll House in Langenbroich/Düren. From here, he returned to his family in Managua in spring 2023, but the regime struck in early June. When he wanted to return home from a working trip to Guatemala, he was met with the same fate as many other members of the opposition: He was denied entry to Nicaragua at the airport counter.
Since then, he has been indefinitely exposed to the burdens of exile: the separation from his wife and teenage son, the hassle over his residence status, the pressure of working as an intellectual with high international recognition but no prospect of a permanent position. Crisis-ridden Guatemala was anything but a safe haven for an exile from Nicaragua. A further blow followed with the official closure and destruction of the Universidad Centroamericana UCA in Managua in July, which meant that his wife lost her management position there and also had to flee abroad. What pain, what a feeling of powerlessness the exile from the beloved homeland must have meant, and at a time when the hope of an imminent regime change had sunk to a low point.
Central American migration as "civil disobedience"
After completing his university studies, José Luis initially decided to train as a priest. He joined the Jesuit order and worked for many years as a pastor on the Atlantic coast of Honduras. He later resigned from the priesthood, returned to Nicaragua and decided to do social science research at the UCA. However, he maintained a special human and social commitment in all the topics and projects he worked on. He was involved in the founding of the Jesuit Order's refugee service for Central America and led the service for many years. This led to the development of one of his most important areas of work, migration research. He interpreted Central American migration to the United States in a comprehensive study with a highly original approach as "civil disobedience".
This work was accepted for a doctorate in sociology by the Philipps University in Marburg in 2016 and was published as a book with the Spanish title "La Desobediencia de las Masas" (San Salvador 2017). His study on the politicization of Nicaraguan youth in the run-up to the protest movement of 2018 ("Autoconvocados y Conectados") was eagerly received internationally and became a much-discussed standard work. This book and the account of the cruel repression that followed the protest ("Tras el telón rojinegro") could only be published in Guatemala in 2019 and 2021, and it was probably these two books that earned the author the particular hatred of the Ortega regime.
There is a long list of academic honors that need not be repeated here. For example, José Luis had just been appointed a member of the "Academia Nicaragüense de la Lengua". Over the last thirty years, he has written an immense number of articles that have appeared in all the relevant academic and political journals. José Luis Rocha was also an important player in the Heinrich Böll Foundation's work on Central America. He has helped to ensure that Nicaragua has remained a topic in America and Europe despite its descent into tyranny. Many German readers know his name from REVISTA ENVIO, where he worked for decades as an author and member of the editorial board.
His articles were not an exercise for the academic curriculum, but will long remain a refreshing and lively read. His captivating Spanish contributed to this, revealing his literary talent, his journalistic training and his philosophical horizon from the very first word.
In José Luis Rocha, Nicaragua has lost an independent thinker, without whom it is difficult to imagine Nicaragua's future. When the time comes to rebuild the country, highly gifted and incorruptible intellectuals like him will be sorely missed. In the meantime, we must live with the bitter realization that every death in forced exile is something of a small triumph for the ruthless regime.