Edén Atanacio Pastora Gómez ‑ a Nicaraguan politician and guerrilla who ran for president as the candidate of the Alternative for Change (AC) party in the 2006 general elections – died in Managua on June 13, 2020 from COVID-19.
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 was reconciled with the FSLN and held 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 led to legal indictment by the government of Costa Rica.
Pastora had three failed marriages. Lamenting about the interpersonal strains that occur in the life of a revolutionary, Pastora said: “The first thing we revolutionaries lose is our wives. The last thing we lose is our lives. In between our women and our lives, we lose our freedom, our happiness, our means of living.”