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<div class="header reader-header reader-show-element" dir="ltr"> <font
size="-2"><a class="domain reader-domain"
href="https://www.counterpunch.org/2018/12/07/the-return-of-the-nicaraguan-contras-and-the-rise-of-the-pro-contra-left/">https://www.counterpunch.org/2018/12/07/the-return-of-the-nicaraguan-contras-and-the-rise-of-the-pro-contra-left/</a></font>
<h1 class="reader-title">The Return of the Nicaraguan Contras,
and the Rise of the Pro-Contra Left</h1>
<span class="post_author_intro">by</span> <span
class="post_author" itemprop="author"><a
href="https://www.counterpunch.org/author/dan-kovalik/"
rel="nofollow">Dan Kovalik</a></span></div>
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<p>According to our nation’s paper of record, the <em>New
York Times</em>, 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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>The Contras, after effectively exhausting the
Nicaraguan people and extorting them into voting Ortega
out of office in 1990, largely disarmed. However, as
the <em>Times </em>wrote back in March of 2016 <a
href="https://www.nytimes.com/2016/03/08/world/americas/ortega-vs-the-contras-nicaragua-endures-an-80s-revival.html">in
a laudatory piece</a> about the Contras’ return, this
changed sometime after Ortega’s re-election in 2007.
The <em>Times </em>piece begins as follows:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>He calls himself Tyson, wears tattered United States
Army fatigues and carries a beat-up AK-47.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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. . . .</p>
<p>The contras of today, often nicknamed “the rearmed,”
are a shadow of what they once were. . . .</p>
<p>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.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>In this same article, the <em>Times </em>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 <em><a
href="https://popularresistance.org/correcting-the-record-what-is-really-happening-in-nicaragua/">Popular
Resistance explains</a></em>,</p>
<blockquote>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Still, according to the <em>Times</em>, the Contras
re-emerged in response to what they viewed as Ortega’s
over-consolidation of power.</p>
<p>Meanwhile, the <em>Times</em>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 <em>Insight
Crime</em>, for example, “estimates of the<br>
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.</p>
<p>For his part, Tim Rogers, a viciously anti-Sandinista
journalist, has been writing for years about the
phenomenon of the rearmed Contras. For example, <a
href="https://splinternews.com/the-return-of-the-contras-massacre-of-sandinistas-stir-1793842127">in
a 2014 piece</a>, Rogers wrote:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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</p>
<p>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.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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, <em>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.</em>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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, <a
href="https://theglobalamericans.org/2018/05/laying-groundwork-insurrection-closer-look-u-s-role-nicaraguas-social-unrest/">as
journalist Max Blumenthal explained</a>, 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) <em>“bluntly
asserted that organizations backed by the NED have
spent years and millions of dollars ‘laying the
groundwork for insurrection’”</em>which took place
over the summer. And, <a
href="https://www.elnuevodiario.com.ni/nacionales/480563-estados-unidos-ayuda-millonaria-crisis-nicaragua/">the
US AID just announced</a>that it will continue this
work by sending another $4 million to support opposition
civil society groups in Nicaragua.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>Thus, in his 2012 book, <em>The Manufacturing of a
President</em>, 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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p><em><strong>Daniel Kovalik</strong> teaches
International Human Rights at the University of
Pittsburgh School of Law. He is also author of the
newly-released, </em><a
href="https://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1510745009/counterpunchmaga"><u>The
Plot to Control the World: How the US has Spent
Billions to Change the Outcome of Elections Around
the World</u></a>.</p>
</div>
<p> <em><strong>Daniel Kovalik,</strong> the author of <a
href="https://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1510739343/counterpunchmaga">The
Plot to Attack Iran</a>, wrote this piece with the
significant help and encouragement of friends in Tehran.</em>
</p>
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