Who wrote the letter?

Yesterday, B****PhD posted a story from her new home in Orange County about a letter that was mailed to 14,000 foreign-born Latino voters who were registered as Democrats. The letter was in Spanish, and the brief AP story quoted it as saying that immigrants who voted would be commiting a crime. Much discussion ensued in the comments section and on other blogs about the difference between illegal alien, immigrant, naturalized citizen, ID requirements in different states, voter intimidation, etc, but most of the discussion was based on a brief AP story that did not cite the original Spanish text. Today, this story is big news in California because it turns out that the letter was sent by a Republican candidate for office, Tan Nguyen, that it was even more clearly intimidating than the brief quotation had suggested. Not only did the letter state (falsely) that it is illegal for an immigrant to vote (immigrants who are naturalized citizens and registered to vote have every right to vote), it said that they could be deported, that a computer tracking system was being set up that anti-immigrant groups could use to track them down, and not to believe any politician who claimed otherwise. Now even the California GOP is calling for Tan to withdraw from the race. Fortunately, recipients of the letter complained, the case was investigated, and the effort has been publicly denounced. (UPDATE: GOP CALLS FOR CANDIDATE TO LEAVE THE RACE) But it does go to show why the stories about voter intimidation and fraud that I wrote about in earlier posts are still relevant.

But that's not why I had to write about this story. As we scholars know (ahem!) one should never work from a translation, if possible. So today, when I was finally able to find pdf files of both the Spanish letter and the English translation posted by the liberaloc , I discovered that the letter was signed.....Sergio Ramirez! Whoa! Did someone pull that name out of a hat, or was the author of this vicious political hoax a fan of the Nicaraguan novelist and former Sandinista leader?

Seriously, here is an essay in English by Sergio Ramirez about the upcoming elections in Nicaragua, a country once much in the news in the US, but now almost completely absent. And here is an essay in Spanish, one of the many articles archived on his web page, in which he looks back on Nicaraguan history on the occasion of the death of Ronald Reagan in 2004, and talks about what has been accomplished and what still needs to be done. I saw Sergio Ramirez give a talk about Ruben Dario in Managua when I attended a conference on Central American literature. I have a picture of him standing next to Ernesto Cardenal that I should dig up and scan so I can post it here. Now I must go read that novel I've had sitting on my shelf for years.