Edén Pastora

Edén Atanacio Pastora Gómez (born in Ciudad Darío January 22, 1937) is a Nicaraguan politician and former guerrilla who ran for president as the candidate of the Alternative for Change (AC) party in the 2006 general elections. In the years prior to the fall of the Somoza regime, Pastora was the leader of the Southern Front, the largest militia in southern Nicaragua, second only to the FSLN (Sandinista National Liberation Front) in the north. Pastora was nicknamed Comandante Cero ("Commander Zero").

His group was the first to call itself "Sandinistas", and was also the first to accept an alliance with the FSLN, the group that was to become more popularly identified by the name. At the end of 1982, a few years after the revolutionary victory, Pastora became disillusioned with the government of the FSLN, and formed the Democratic Revolutionary Alliance (ARDE) with the object of confronting the "pseudo-Sandinistas" politically and militarily.

As of 2010, he is reconciled with the FSLN and holds a ministerial post in the government of Daniel Ortega. His role in a border dispute with Costa Rica and allegations of environmental damage to territory claimed by that country has led to legal indictment by the government of Costa Rica.

When he was seven, Pastora's father was killed by the Chief of Staff of Anastasio Somoza Garcia's National Guard. While in high school with the Jesuits in Granada, he first learned about Augusto César Sandino through his Panamanian history teacher. He began his rebel career when he decided that the government of Anastasio Somoza Debayle was corrupt and formed the southern Nicaraguan ARDE from local peasant farmers (called campesinos) and aboriginal tribes living according to more traditional ways.

Pastora allied himself with the FSLN in the mid-1960s. He became a rebel guerrilla and was the mastermind behind the August 1978 standoff in the Nicaraguan National Palace, in which he and 19 FSLN commandos disguised as members of Somoza's National Guard stormed the Palace, disarming or killing the real Nicaraguan National Guard members. Among the hostages taken were members of the Nicaraguan Congress, which was in session at the time of the attack, and Somoza's half brother, José Somoza. Members of the commando used numbers as codenames, with Pastora as Zero, and Dora Maria Tellez as Commander "two" leading to a lasting identification of Eden as Comandante Cero and Dora Maria as Commander "two."

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