Author Patricia Sitkin's love affair with Nicaragua, the land and its people, began with an Oxfam America tour of the country and of neighboring Honduras a few months after the overthrow of the Nicaraguan dictator Anastasio Somoza. Each year in the 1980's, Sitkin returned for a few weeks as a freelance reporter. Decades later, Sitkin, in Indio, masterfully orchestrates a harrowing and heartrending tale set in Sandinista Nicaragua.
In this intricately plotted novel, the president of the United States has labeled Sandinista Nicaragua a communist tyranny and hopes for an incident that will justify a direct American invasion. The U.S. ambassador to Honduras labors to create one for him. A kidnapping, a border massacre and an embassy explosion cement an unlikely friendship between a Nicaraguan musician, an American reporter and a CIA officer.
A brilliant work of depth and originality, the novel Indio resonates in our own decade. Sitkin has paid homage to a unique revolution.
About the Author
An Oxfam America tour of Nicaragua and Honduras a few months after the Sandinista overthrow of the Nicaraguan dictator Somoza brought the Sitkins, Elmer and Patricia, to Central America for the first time and began their love affair with Nicaragua, the land and its people. Patricia Sitkin returned for a few weeks each year during the eighties as a freelance reporter, watching an education program that increased national literacy from 55% to 92%, clinics springing up in villages that had never seen a doctor, and access to electricity and pure water spreading to remote areas. She watched too and twice found herself in the midst of the border attacks waged by the terrorists the American president called "freedom fighters."
