"It Is Absurd"

Dora Maria Tellez was recently appointed as Robert F. Kennedy visiting professor in Latin American studies in the divinity department at Harvard and is also to be based at the Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies. She's even on Harvard's online list of faculty members for the spring semester. That may not be especially newsworthy. You may not even have heard of her. But besides being a well-known historian, Dora Tellez is a former Sandinista commander in the frontline of the overthrow of the Samoza dictatorship; and she was the health minister in the first post-dictatorship government in Nicaragua. And there's the rub.

According to this report, Dora Tellez has now been denied entry to the US to take up her post. Her misdemeanour? Why, she's been involved in "terrorist acts", of course. And the new US chief of intelligence responsible for dealing with terrorism is none other than John Negroponte, deeply implicated in the "dirty war" against the Sandinistas. "It is absurd", says one of Dora Tellez's friends. I could put it rather more strongly.