[News] Homage to Nicaragua
Anti-Imperialist News
news at freedomarchives.org
Fri Jul 27 10:52:52 EDT 2018
https://www.counterpunch.org/2018/07/27/homage-to-nicaragua/
Homage to Nicaragua
by Dan Kovalik <https://www.counterpunch.org/author/dan-kovalik/> - July
27, 2018
------------------------------------------------------------------------
When the smoke finally clears, if it ever clears here, the coverage of
the recent events in Nicaragua will be looked upon as quite possibly the
most effective, and equally sinister, misinformation campaigns ever
waged upon a nation. The good news is that the Nicaraguan people,
while initially confused by this campaign, have quickly caught on to
what is really happening. Hopefully, we in the Global North will catch
on soon.
Max Blumenthal, Thomas Hedges and I travelled to Nicaragua during the
week of the annual celebration of the overthrow of the US-backed Somoza
dictatorship on July 19, 1979. As we were reminded during our stay in
Managua, 50,000 Nicaraguans
<https://nacla.org/article/interesting-times-nicaragua-revolution> (out
of a total population of about 2.5 million) died in the struggle to
overthrow Somoza in the late 1970’s. However, this was of little
concern for the US, or the OAS which the US has always dominated.
/Nicaraguans Celebrate The 39^th Anniversary of the Sandinista Triumph
(Kovalik, 2018)./
Thus, in 1978, even as Somoza was attacking major cities with advanced
weaponry supplied by the US, UK and Israel – weaponry which included
<https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/1978/09/25/nicaragua-counts-losses-as-somoza-wins-first-round/b9709f11-1646-44d8-829f-0ebb27389449/?utm_term=.2d415dec34ef>
“armored personnel carriers, Sherman tanks, U.S.-made troop transports
and light observation helicopters equipped with machine guns and
rockets, several two-engine, rocket-equipped Cessnas, artillery, and an
awesome assortment of automatic weapons”– the most the OAS would do is
agree to a US proposal
<https://history.state.gov/milestones/1977-1980/central-america-carter>
for a political mediation in Nicaragua between Somoza and the “moderate”
(i.e., non-Sandinista) opposition.
Similarly, as Noam Chomsky has noted <https://chomsky.info/unclesam08/>,
Nicaragua under the brutal Somoza regime warranted little coverage by
the mainstream media. As he explains, “[i]n the ten years prior to the
overthrow of the Nicaraguan dictator Anastasio Somoza in 1979, US
television — all networks — devoted exactly one hour to Nicaragua, and
that was entirely on the Managua earthquake of 1972. From 1960 through
1978, the /New York Times /had three editorials on Nicaragua. It’s not
that nothing was happening there — it’s just that whatever was happening
was unremarkable. Nicaragua was of no concern at all, as long as
Somoza’s tyrannical rule wasn’t challenged.”
However, this all changed when the Sandinistas took over the Nicaraguan
government and when the US began funding the Contras (largely former
Somoza National Guardsmen) and their terror campaign against the
Nicaraguan population. Then, the mainstream media worked hard to
undermine the legitimacy of the Sandinistas and to downplay the criminal
nature of the Contras. According to Fair & Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR)
<https://fair.org/extra/nicaragua-and-the-us-media/>, analyzing media
coverage of the Contra War:
In many ways the media have functioned as a sieve for what Abraham
Brumberg, former editor of the USIA journal /Problems of
Communism/,described as a “flood of distortions, exaggerations and
plain unvarnished lies about the Sandinistas that issue forth almost
daily from the administration.”. . .
From the beginning, this administration has sought to focus media
attention on every (real and imagined) peccadillo of the Sandinistas
while downplaying the far worse human rights records of other
Central American nations. Even after the signing of the regional
peace plan, the media continued to reflect Reagan’s obsession by
focusing primarily on Nicaragua. . . .
Meanwhile, Contra abuses were whitewashed by a propaganda blitz that
hit America’s three most influential dailies . . . .
Fast forward to today, and the media, little concerned about Nicaragua
since the end of the Contra war in 1990, and little impressed with the
Sandinista government’s remarkable achievements
<https://www.counterpunch.org/2018/07/13/correcting-the-record-what-is-really-happening-in-nicaragua/>
in health care, poverty reduction, community policing, infrastructure
development and economic growth since re-taking power in 2007, is now
again covering Nicaragua on a daily basis. The media’s current interest
has been piqued by the prospect that the Sandinista government might be
overthrown, and the media is hell-bent upon helping such a process along
with coverage even more one-sided than it gave to the Contra War.
For its part, the OAS, still dominated by the US, has also been
activated into overdrive, lending a hand in the regime-change effort by
blaming all of the violence happening in Nicaragua on the government
while ignoring the violence of the opposition. At the same time, the
OAS, and the press as well, also ignore the violence committed by US
client states such as Colombia which is engaging in the wholesale
slaughter
<https://www.telesurtv.net/english/news/500-Organizations-Decry-Colombias-Human-Rights-Record-20180405-0008.html>
of peace advocates, human rights leaders, land rights activists and
indigenous and Afro-Colombian leaders. In this way, one is given the
impression that it is the Nicaraguan government which is somehow a
unique evil in Latin America.
In many ways, the story being put forward by the mainstream media and
the OAS is the exact opposite of what is really happening in Nicaragua.
Thus, far from the mainstream media tale of peaceful protesters being
mowed down by a brutal regime, what we heard on our trip to Nicaragua
more closely jibes with the analysis of Atilio Boron, acclaimed
Argentine intellectual and winner of UNESCO’s International José Marti
Prize, <http://www.atilioboron.com.ar/>who explains that, when they
perceived a weakness in the Sandinista government after the initial
announcement of mild social security reforms in mid-April, the
right-wing “threw themselves with all their arsenal into the streets to
overthrow Ortega. They transferred many of the mercenaries that staged
the ‘/guarimbas’ /in Venezuela to Nicaragua and are now applying in
Nicaragua the same recipe for violence and death taught in the CIA
manuals [for the Contras].”
Of course, given that the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) – the
successor to the CIA’s regime-change operations abroad – has provided
millions of dollars to the groups leading the anti-government operations
in Nicaragua and has indeed admitted to “laying the groundwork for
insurrection
<https://grayzoneproject.com/2018/06/19/ned-nicaragua-protests-us-government/>,”
this should be none-too surprising.
The case of Monimbo — a historic neighborhood in the town of Masaya,
Nicaragua, and the last major area cleared of the opposition street
barricades (or, /tranques/) — is quite instructive. While the
mainstream media has invariably portrayed the /tranques/
<http://time.com/5341544/nicaragua-unrest-protests-monimbo-seige/> in
such areas as being set up and manned by brave youths who were trying
desperately to protect their neighborhoods from imminent police attack,
residents tell a very different story.
We spent an hour with one resident of Monimbo, a former local Sandinista
official, who had just come to Managua for the celebration of the 1979
Sandinista Triumph. She asked not to be named because she still fears
reprisals by opposition forces in her town who have been targeting
Sandinista loyalists for harassment, assault and even murder. This
woman, who we shall call Maria, wept uncontrollably as she recounted how
her neighborhood had been terrorized by those on the /tranques /who
paralyzed the local economy, prevented free movement, burned down public
buildings, ransacked shops and destroyed residents’ homes.
Every day, as Maria, a wife and mother of two children, went through the
/tranques /to go about her day, she was harassed, intimidated and put in
fear for her life and physical integrity. As she explained, “I was not
afraid that they would kill me. I am not afraid of dying. What I was
afraid of is that they would rape me.” Here, she was referring to
other incidents in which rapes were carried out by people manning the
/tranques/. As just one example, we learned of a female police officer
who was kidnapped and raped by these forces over a three-day period.
Maria referred to those on the /tranques /as criminal elements who were
well-supplied with water, food, weapons and even drugs. She then
explained how she cried tears of joy when, on July 17, she saw
government forces approaching her neighborhood to remove the
/tranques/. She indeed referred to this act as one of “liberation”
which finally brought her neighborhood relief after three months of
virtual imprisonment.
And, far from fearing police activity in her neighborhood, she and her
husband (who also wishes not to be named) felt frustration that the
police had not acted more swiftly and resolutely to deal with the
/tranques/. But, they explained, it was President Ortega’s orders for
the police to remain in their barracks, and for residents not to take
matters into their own hands, in order to avoid unnecessary bloodshed.
And so, for three months, the police were locked down in their barracks,
surrounded by the right-wing opposition forces who prevented water and
food from reaching them. Indeed then, as Maria explained again with
forceful tears, it was the police who were being laid siege to, and not
the well-supplied protesters.
While Maria and many of her friends were prepared to fight the
protesters destroying their town, and others like it, they heeded
Ortega’s orders. In the end, they believe that Ortega was right to urge
such restraint; that it was indeed such restraint, led by the
disciplined Sandinistas, which saved many lives, preventing what has
turned out to be possibly 300 dead from becoming possibly thousands
dead. But you will never hear this in the mainstream press.
Similarly, while the mainstream press repeats the oppositions’ vague and
unsubstantiated claims about government press censorship, it is in fact
the extreme opposition which is censoring the press through
violence. Thus, during our stay in Managua, we met with the staff of
/RadioYa!/, a an independent, left-wing radio station which also happens
to be the most popular radio station in the country and the most popular
left-wing station in Latin America. The staff, now working out of a
makeshift studio, is still in shock after their permanent radio station
was burned to the ground by the right-wing opposition. Making it worse,
22 staff people, including a pregnant woman, were in the radio station
when it was set ablaze. They were lucky to get out alive, but still
live in fear of violent reprisals – so much so that some of them sleep
in the station overnight for safety’s sake. As the staff explained,
other left-wing media outlets have been similarly attacked, while no
opposition outlets have been attacked. Moreover, they explained that we
were the first Western reporters to bother to listen to their story.
We also visited the remnants of a credit union, named after Che Guevara,
which had served poor and working people with small loans and with
banking services which they would not otherwise be able to obtain
because of their inability to keep significant funds in their accounts.
This credit union too was burned down by the right-wing opposition,
along with the computers and paper files inside. They even managed to
destroy all of the vehicles on the property. Again, this was typical of
the institutions targeted for destruction by the opposition –
institutions which serve the poor and working class and which provide a
social good to the community.
As another example, the opposition forces (most of whom were not
themselves students) took over public universities, such as the National
Autonomous University of Nicaragua (UNAN), trashed these universities,
and prevented classes from being held. At the same time, the opposition
did no harm to private universities.
All this, never discussed by the mainstream media, demonstrates the
class nature of the opposition. It is aligned with the bourgeoisie
against the working class, and has spent three months in an all-out
assault upon working class institutions, individuals aligned with the
Sandinista revolution and Sandinista symbols. In other words, the
uprising by the opposition is not a revolution, but a US-backed
counter-revolution, just as the Contra movement was in the 1980’s. And,
the mainstream media has painted over the true nature of this opposition
and their brutal tactics, just as it whitewashed the brutality of the
Contras. That so many on the US left do not see this is truly disappointing.
The good news is that the Nicaraguan people are not fooled. After some
initial confusion, they have now rallied around the Sandinista
government. This was evidenced, as we witnessed, by the throngs who
came out on July 19 with their red and black Sandinista flags to
celebrate the victory over Somoza in 1979, and to celebrate the current
victory over the right-wing.
This was also evidenced by the ubiquitous playing of the new hit song,
“Daniel Se Queda” (Daniel Stays), a song written by Nicaraguan
/campesinos/
<https://www.tn8.tv/musica/453598-conozcan-autores-cancion-daniel-queda-nicaragua/>and
demanding that Daniel Ortega remain as President even if it may hurt the
opposition’s feelings. As the song’s chorus goes, /“Even if it
hurts! Even if it hurts! The Commander stays here. Daniel, Daniel, the
town is with him.” /
And, Nicaragua is undoubtedly better off with Daniel staying. For this
proposition, I leave you again with the poetic words of Atilio Boron:
Conclusion: the fall of Sandinismo would weaken the geopolitical
environment of the brutally attacked Venezuela and increase the
chances for the generalization of violence throughout the region.
While in the Forum of Sao Paulo that just took place in Havana, I
was able to delight in the contemplation of the Caribbean. There I
saw, in the distance, a fragile little boat. It was handled by a
robust sailor and, at the other end, there was a young girl. The
helmsman looked confused and struggled to keep his course in the
middle of a threatening swell. And it occurred to me that this image
could eloquently represent the revolutionary process in Nicaragua,
in Venezuela, Bolivia or anywhere.
The revolution is like that girl, and the helmsman is the
revolutionary government. There is no human work safe from error;
mistakes can be made that leave the helmsman at the mercy of the
waves and endanger the life of the girl. To top it all, not far away
was the ominous silhouette of a US warship, loaded with lethal
weapons, death squadsand mercenary soldiers. How to save the girl?
The helmsman could jump into the sea letting the boat sink, and with
it the girl, delivering it to the mob of criminals thirsty for blood
and ready to plunder the country, steal its resources and rape and
then kill the young girl.
I do not see that as the solution. More productive would be that
some of the other boats that are in the area approach the one in
danger and make the helmsman stay on course. Sinking the boat that
carries the girl of the revolution, or surrendering her to the U.S.
ship, could hardly be considered revolutionary solutions.
/*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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