[News] The Return of the Nicaraguan Contras, and the Rise of the Pro-Contra Left

[Anti-Imperialist News]

https://www.counterpunch.org/2018/12/07/the-return-of-the-nicaraguan-contras-and-the-rise-of-the-pro-contra-left/ 



  The Return of the Nicaraguan Contras, and the Rise of the Pro-Contra Left

by Dan Kovalik <https://www.counterpunch.org/author/dan-kovalik/>
------------------------------------------------------------------------

According to our nation’s paper of record, the /New York Times/, the 
Nicaraguan Contras re-activated some time ago in order to take on their 
old foe, Daniel Ortega, who had been re-elected in 2007 after a long 
hiatus of 17 years.  One may recall that it was the pressure of the 
Contras, and their brutal terrorist tactics, which were critical to 
unseating Ortega from office the first time back in 1990.

Just as a refresher, the Contras (short for “counterrevolutionaries”) 
were made up largely of the National Guardsmen of the US-backed 
dictator, Anastasio Somoza.  After the successful 1979 revolution 
against Somoza – a revolution led by Ortega and the FSLN (or, 
Sandinistas) — the CIA organized the Guardsmen into the Contras and 
trained, armed and directed them for the purpose of undermining the 
fledgling Sandinista government.  The Contras, with the direct 
encouragement of the CIA, carried out various terrorist acts which 
included the torture, rape and murder of civilians and the destruction 
of key civilian infrastructure.  All told, around 30,000 Nicaraguans 
died in the 1980’s as a result of the US-backed Contra War.

The Contras, after effectively exhausting the Nicaraguan people and 
extorting them into voting Ortega out of office in 1990, largely 
disarmed.  However, as the /Times /wrote back in March of 2016 in a 
laudatory piece 
<https://www.nytimes.com/2016/03/08/world/americas/ortega-vs-the-contras-nicaragua-endures-an-80s-revival.html> 
about the Contras’ return, this changed sometime after Ortega’s 
re-election in 2007. The /Times /piece begins as follows:

    He calls himself Tyson, wears tattered United States Army fatigues
    and carries a beat-up AK-47.

    He is a rebel fighter in the mountains of Nicaragua, setting
    ambushes against President Daniel Ortega’s government and longing
    for the days when covert American funding paid for overt warfare.

    Tyson and his men are contras — yes, like the ones from the 1980s
    who received stealth funding during the Reagan administration to
    topple Mr. Ortega’s leftist Sandinista government.   . . .

    The contras of today, often nicknamed “the rearmed,” are a shadow of
    what they once were. . . .

    Still, skirmishes in rural areas around the country as recently as
    last week have left police officers, civilians and soldiers dead, a
    violent expression of the broader anger brewing against the government.

In this same article, the /Times /acknowledges that “Mr. Ortega enjoys 
strong support among the poor . . . .”  And of course, this makes 
absolute sense given Ortega’s enlightened social policies.  As the 
website /Popular Resistance explains 
<https://popularresistance.org/correcting-the-record-what-is-really-happening-in-nicaragua/>/,

    these policies have yielded the highest growth rate in Central
    America and annual minimum wage increases 5-7% above inflation,
    improving workers’ living conditions and lifting people out of
    poverty. The anti-poverty Borgen project reports poverty fell by 30
    percent between 2005 and 2014.

    The FSLN-led government has put into place an economic model based
    on public investment and strengthening the safety net for the poor.
    The government invests in infrastructure, transit, maintains water
    and electricity within the public sector and moved privatized
    services, e.g., health care and primary education, into the public
    sector. This has ensured a stable economic structure that favors the
    real economy over the speculative economy. The lion’s share of
    infrastructure in Nicaragua has been built in the last 11 years,
    something comparable to the New Deal-era in the US, including
    renewable electricity plants across the country.

Still, according to the /Times/, the Contras re-emerged in response to 
what they viewed as Ortega’s over-consolidation of power.

Meanwhile, the /Times/was not the only one writing about these rearmed 
Contras.  Indeed, over the years, there have been a number of reports 
about these Contras.  According to a 2013 article in /Insight Crime/, 
for example, “estimates of the
numbers of rearmed contras have varied from dozens to hundreds, and even 
thousands . . . .”   This article explained that eight people had 
recently been killed as a result of Contra activity in northern 
Nicaragua near the Honduran border.

For his part, Tim Rogers, a viciously anti-Sandinista journalist, has 
been writing for years about the phenomenon of the rearmed Contras.  For 
example, in a 2014 piece 
<https://splinternews.com/the-return-of-the-contras-massacre-of-sandinistas-stir-1793842127>, 
Rogers wrote:

    A deadly midnight ambush targeting government supporters in northern
    Nicaragua has stirred the sleeping dogs of war and raised new fears
    of a pending military campaign against rearmed guerrillas hiding in
    the mountains.

    Five people were killed and 19 injured early Sunday morning in what
    appears to be a coordinated series of attacks against Sandinista
    party members traveling by bus through the mountainous
    coffee-growing region of Matagalpa, one of the main battlegrounds of
    Nicaragua’s civil war in the 1980s.Video

    The buses, filled with pro-government supporters returning from
    Managua after a day of celebrating the thirty-fifth anniversary of
    the Sandinista Revolution, were fired on indiscriminately from the
    darkened shoulder of the road by unidentified men armed with AK-47s.

This very sort of attack against Sandinista rank and file members was 
played out time and again over this past summer during the 
three-month-long crisis which received significant media attention.  
Indeed, when I was in Managua this past July for the anniversary of the 
Sandinista Revolution, I was told that, contrary to traditional 
practice, there would not be buses sent to Managua from other parts of 
the country for the celebration for fear of such attacks.

And yet, while the mainstream press covered the crisis in Nicaragua this 
past summer with rapt attention, and while Tim Rogers himself published 
a number of pieces in the mainstream press about it, /there was not one 
whisper about the rearmed Contras, nor was there coverage of the regular 
assaults against Sandinista rank and file – attacks which included 
torture, rape and murder./Instead, we were told by the mainstream press, 
and by most of the “left-wing” press as well, only of peaceful 
protesters being attacked by an allegedly repressive Sandinista 
government.  And, when people were killed by sniper attacks, we were 
told that it had to be government security forces because the opposition 
used only peaceful means, and, in any case, did not have the capacity to 
carry out such assaults.

Just as the devil was able to do about his own existence, the greatest 
feat accomplished in this instance was to convince the public that the 
rearmed Contras did not exist.  Of course, this is not a difficult task 
given that most Americans’ historical memory is about 24 hours.

What is most deeply disappointing and frustrating, however, is that most 
of the American left, which presumably should know better, has also 
fallen for this devil’s trick, and has quickly leapt to join in the 
right-wing chorus calling for the removal of Ortega and the Sandinistas 
from office.  This despite the fact that, as journalist Max Blumenthal 
explained 
<https://theglobalamericans.org/2018/05/laying-groundwork-insurrection-closer-look-u-s-role-nicaraguas-social-unrest/>, 
there is clear evidence that the US itself has been behind the violent 
push to unseat Ortega.  As Blumenthal related, on May 1, 2018, a 
publication funded by the Cold War-era National Endowment for Democracy 
(NED) /“bluntly asserted that organizations backed by the NED have spent 
years and millions of dollars ‘laying the groundwork for 
insurrection’”/which took place over the summer.  And, the US AID just 
announced 
<https://www.elnuevodiario.com.ni/nacionales/480563-estados-unidos-ayuda-millonaria-crisis-nicaragua/>that 
it will continue this work by sending another $4 million to support 
opposition civil society groups in Nicaragua.

What’s more, as far back as 2012, former Navy intelligence officer and 
NSA analyst Wayne Madsen was not only writing about the rearmed Contras 
but also about the US and Israeli support for them.  While Madsen can 
sometimes be prone to conspiracy theories which do not always pan out, 
his claims back then about this particular subject seem spot on and 
indeed quite prescient.

Thus, in his 2012 book, /The Manufacturing of a President/, Madsen 
claims, based upon his numerous intelligence sources, that the CIA and 
Mossad have both been funding these rearmed Contras, and that they have 
been shipping these Contras arms over both the Honduran and Costa Rican 
borders.  He claims also that the Honduran government which came to 
power through the 2009 coup – a coup which the Obama Administration 
actively aided and abetted to unseat a leftist government which, by the 
way, happened to be friendly to Ortega – has been key to helping both 
support the Contras as well as to provide a staging ground for the 
covert operations to bring down the Sandinista government.  In other 
words, Honduras is playing the very same role it did in the 1980s, and 
the US-backed coup in 2009 – a mere 2 years after Ortega was elected – 
was crucial to this role.

And, just last week, in a further attempt to unseat Ortega, the US 
Senate finally passed the NICA Act which will cut Nicaragua off from all 
international financing – financing which the Ortega government has been 
using to effectively combat poverty in Nicaragua.  The NICA Act has been 
in the works for some time, and Nicaraguan opposition forces, including 
the Sandinista Renovation Movement (MRS), have openly been lobbying for 
this. This, however, has not stopped most of the left in the US, who 
obviously have not been impressed with Ortega’s successful social 
programs and his real support for the poor, from cheerleading and 
romanticizing these very same opposition forces.

The result of the NICA Act sanctions will be massive suffering for the 
poor of Nicaragua who support Ortega the most.  These sanctions will be 
particularly painful after the crisis this past summer in which the 
opposition managed to trash the economy along with substantial civilian 
infrastructure (just as the Contras had done in the 1980s).  And, should 
Ortega be unseated as a result of all this, it will most certainly be 
the violent and most right-wing portion of the opposition which will 
take power, for it is they who have the resolve and the means to do so.

But, guided by the new religion of “humanitarian interventionism,” the 
pro-imperialist left of the US is indifferent to the consequences of 
their support, whether explicit or tacit, of Western imperial 
aggression.  Just as many on the US left cheered on the NATO invasion of 
Libya – an invasion which inevitably left that country broken and with 
slaves being sold openly on the streets – they now applaud the 
counterrevolution taking place in Nicaragua.  This shows once again that 
the US left has a very high tolerance for the suffering of Third World 
peoples so long as they feel that this suffering is endured for the sake 
of their own abstract notions of human rights.

/*Daniel Kovalik* teaches International Human Rights at the University 
of Pittsburgh School of Law. He is also author of the newly-released, 
/_The Plot to Control the World:  How the US has Spent Billions to 
Change the Outcome of Elections Around the World_ 
<https://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1510745009/counterpunchmaga>.

/*Daniel Kovalik,* the author of The Plot to Attack Iran 
<https://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1510739343/counterpunchmaga>, 
wrote this piece with the significant help and encouragement of friends 
in Tehran./

-- 
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