Danny Ortega's American Janissaries

...Christopher Dodd, in town as, inex'Fortunately, Koch's stay was short enough to allow him to regain his senses when back on U.S...

...The next morning Gurdian told me: "That's the trouble with the foreign press...

...Others donned simple red and black wrist bands...

...He had been there a year ago, ona Witness for Peace tour, and assured me I would be amazed to see the new Nicaragua...

...Am I more supportive of them than before I came here...

...The CBS Managua bureau is not known for subtlety...

...The second part got cut...

...In addition, the comandantes are said to be convinced that the U.S...

...soil, where he has since done some backtracking, even calling the contras "patriots with a general concern for their country...

...Several dozen Sandinistas coached to display revolutionary euphoria—including most of the women in the crowd—surrounded the press, waving red and black Sandinista National Liberation Front flags and running frenzied circles around one another...

...But these pyrotechnics of peace were after all of marginal import...

...Never...

...These expatriates, who understand well the American political system, are engaged in an international campaign of deception to choke off supplies to the contras and to ensure peace—on Sandinista terms...

...About 200 foreign reporters had been given credentials by the government's Interpren office to cover the event, paying $25 each in their national currency...

...they made human pyramids, smoked marijuana, and began trailing off soon after Ortega started speaking...

...And such unseemliness is not the sole province of CBS: Rod Nordland, the author of a highly critical Newsweek story on the contras in June, was keeping house at the time with a woman reporter for Barricada, the official FSLN daily...

...They are easily pleased...

...The Americans are a particular source of pride for the Sandinistas, allowing them to argue that only Ronald Reagan, not the U.S...

...Gone, one supposes, are the good old days of adversarial reporting so dutifully practiced when Anastasio Somoza ruled...

...He approves the itineraries of foreign visitors so that he may dispatch police to neighborhoods on the agenda to lock up "potential enemies" and form "casual encounter teams"--police posing as content local residents...

...support of Nicaraguans has long been a testament to the inherent weakness of his Marxist-Leninist project...

...Sandinista cooperatives, which attract many American volunteers, serve a dual purpose: many members are armed and receive military training, making them legitimate targets for the contras...

...contributions for the Sandinistas from their friends...

...Never...

...Nor do they seem to want to talk about the few bookstores in Managua, all of which display large portraits of Marx, Lenin, Castro, and Qaddafi and offer no books published outside the Communist bloc...

...The New York Times's Stephen Kinzer put the best face possible on Ortega's speech the next day, describing his proposal to negotiate a technical cease-fire as a "dramatic reversal...

...THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JANUARY 1988 17 3,000 Americans to Nicaragua...

...The Americans also are used to undermine U.S...

...The next night, NBC aired a report on Ortega's invitation to Miguel Cardinal Obando y Bravo to mediate the cease-fire talks...

...Robert Vargas of the Sandinista Department of Agitation and Propaganda...

...Lucy Siegel, a reporter for CBS News, told me flat out: "Personally, I think the contras are worthless...

...would not contemplate pulling a Grenada in Nicaragua so long as there are so many Americans here—from 1,000 to 2,000 at any given moment...

...The press stood on a platform directly in front of, but somewhat below, Ortega's...

...I will be softer, as it relates to my criticism...

...They are already converted to his cause...

...A "mass rally" had been convened, though most all of those gathered were Sandinista Popular Army soldiers, appearing very much the wild-eyed, grisly guerrillas of San-dinista lore...

...Theupper echelons of the Sandinista Front are full of such people—Miguel d'Escoto, the foreign minister...

...And what are they to make of the large contingent of Russians, East Germans, Bulgarians, Cubans, and Libyans one is likely to encounter shuffling through government offices and hotels...

...That Ortega's prospects are contingent more on the vagaries of international opinion than on the popular David Brock is a writer for Insight magazine...

...They come under the sponsorship of groups like Witness for Peace, formed in 1983 with the explicit endorsement of Borge, and spend up to three weeks teaching in schools, working on state-owned farms harvesting coffee and sugar cane, painting revolutionary murals on the sides of buildings, and holding vigils alongside Sandinista soldiers to repel contra attacks...

...The press was gently nudged by Comandante Tomas Borge's secret police (officially "the sentinels of the people's happiness") to photograph this unrepresentative spectacle and record their chant: "Fight against the Yanqui, enemy of all humanity...

...Then, with a Democrat in the White House, "you can do anything you want...

...Gorbachev, Honecker, Jaruzelski, and Castro gathered atop Lenin's tomb in Red Square to celebrate the 70th anniversary of the revolution that brought the Bolsheviks to power, and Nicaraguan strongman Daniel Ortega, with not inconsiderable energy, set about consolidating his...

...Bias is one of the few abundant commodities in Managua, though among Americans it manifests itself in more politically acceptable anti-contra, rather than pro-Sandinista, sentiments...

...On the plane from Miami to Managua, a student from the University of Oregon told me he was about to spend a few weeks in Nicaragua working for the Sandinistas as part of a class project...

...Despite this, most visitors get a dose of reality when they see the massive hard-currency mall and elaborate nightclubs frequented by Sandinista officials, as well as their lush residential suburb, reached by driving past ten miles of the shabbiest housing one is likely to see in Latin America...

...On the flight back to Miami, my seatmate, a middle-aged Nicaraguan woman off to visit her children who have gone to Miami to live, asked me, "When are you Americans going to help us...

...Clements also identifies himself as a consultant to Rep...

...Ortega, of course, is not so firmly ensconced as his eminent mentors...

...With inflation at 1,000 percent, the government won't accept its own cordoba...

...Ortega, though, had not moved a bit from the slogans on FSLN banners that had festooned the city days before: "Political Dialogue: Never...

...Solidarity with the New People's Army...

...Dodd, as well as scores of foreign aid officials from so-called neutralist countries like the Netherlands, Sweden, and Switzerland, have descended upon Managua, frantically advising Ortega on the minimum steps he must take to remain in their good graces...

...Then, lapsing into Spanish, she said, "Rambo es bueno...

...On November 4, the night before the Arias plan's deadline, ABC's Richard Threlkeld filed a breathlessly enthusiastic story on steps already undertaken by the Sandinistas to comply with the plan, even though only the reopening of the opposition newspaper La Prensa could qualify as a positive move...

...There was the rotund Canadian television reporter in a red 16 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JANUARY 1988 and black polo shirt and the svelte Australian magazine writer in a red jumpsuit and black tank-top...

...More than one quarter of the press had chosen to express its support for the Sandinistas in this fashion...

...Readers of Kinzer's report would not know that Ortega had also rescinded the government's declared cease-fire, giving the contras 48 hours to lay down their arms or "we are going to go after them with sticks and lead," or that he had reactivated the turbas divinas, thugs paid by the government to harass the internal political opposition...

...Hizzoner was leading a tour of nine New Yorkers, and they seemed to do a better job than most of getting past the government's staged events...

...his position, in fact, was so precarious that the Corn-andante de la Revolucion was compelled to leave his comrades in Moscow two days before the climactic event, the November 7 parade of tanks and missiles, to deliver a speech on peace in Managua that he would later call a watershed in his political career...

...Ramiro Gurdian, identified as "one of Ortega's most uncompromising critics," was shown praising this "positive step...

...David Bonior, the Michigan Democrat who has received $5,000 in campaign contributions from Pax Americas...

...The Exchange also tells them how to raise tax-deductible (Spitz, are you blushing...

...the bureau producer, Courtney "Cookie" Hood, has acknowledged entertaining Borge, the interior minister, in the hotel room where she resides...

...Later in the day, after what must have been a metaphysical encounter with Ortega, Koch hailed him as a "brilliant leader who will find peace in an expeditious way...

...So when he ascended a wooden platform at dusk to exhort a throng of 30,000 Sandinistas in Revolution Plaza, the stage had been painstakingly choreographed for external consumption...

...Paul Atha, a special assistant to Borge...

...Ortega's gambit was to announce concessions that would have a niggling effect on his hegemony at home but a titanic resonance on the world scene, generating enough momentum to Contadoraize the peace plan of Costa Rican President Oscar Arias...

...Charles Clements, chairman of Pax Americas, a pro-Sandinista lobby...

...In the end, Koch turned out to be like most fact-finders here, favorably disposed to the Sandinistas at the outset (he threw a cocktail party for Ortega in New York after the 1979 revolution) and even more exuberant, despite ghastly contrary evidence, upon departure.' Also in this category falls Sen...

...The Nicaragua Exchange—the source of the "come join the harvest" ads in the Nation—has sent about That Ortega's prospects are contingent more on the vagaries of international opinion than on the popular support of Nicaraguans has long been a testament to the inherent weakness of his Marxist-Leninist project...

...Though production here is less than three-quarters what it was in 1978, these well-heeled volunteers, paying up to $2,000 each to make the trip, enable the economy to limp along, replacing the young men who have been drafted in unprecedented numbers into a Sandinista army that is larger than the armies of all the other Central American nations combined...

...The rest of the crowd was far less engaged in the matter at hand...

...Such tours are carefully coordinated with the government to show what it wants seen: model cooperatives, model schools, and model hospitals as well as sites of alleged contra atrocities...

...Beware, then, reports issued by groups like Koch's, filled with selective perceptions of the political scene or so-called abuses by the contra rebels...

...In the wicker-laden lobby of the famed Intercontinental Hotel, known as the media bazaar, one might spot Warren Beatty or Richard Gere being escorted by a free-lance tour guide like Dr...

...Not on the schedule are local supermarkets where people wait all day to scan nearly bare shelves, or the underground solitary confinement prisons that house 10,000 political dissenters, or the burned-out villages of Miskito Indians...

...Disillusioned with the Soviet Union, China, Vietnam, andmaybe even Cuba, foreign correspondents and political pilgrims the world over now head to Managua, clad in the latest camouflage gear from Banana Republic, in the hope of finding a genuinely liberating people's revolution, a nation searching for self-determination and social justice...

...nother large contingent of visitors in Nicaragua does not attempt to create the semblance of objectivity...

...For the most obvious and distressing revelation on a Nicaraguan tour—more than what Nicaraguans call la razzia, the ravaging of bodies, minds, and spirits that the Sandinista revolution has wrought, more even than the extent of the toilet paper shortage—is that most foreign visitors here need none of Ortega's petulant preaching...

...William LeoGrande, the oft-quoted Latinist of American University, was recently overheard at poolside at the Intercontinental, advising the comandantes to stall through negotiations until Reagan leaves office...

...foreign policy more directly...

...A group called Quest for Peace has already raised $50 million in aid that inevitably is put to military use...

...This week in November neither Gere nor Beatty was to be found...

...and "No General Amnesty...

...An estimated 100,000 Americans have taken such political tours of Nicaragua, and thousands more have come in international labor brigades from Canada, Sweden, Finland, West Germany, and Spain...

...Koch met with Violetta Chamorro, the editor of La Prensa, and held a press conference with anti-Sandinista activists of the Democratic Coordinating Committee...

...and scores of Maryknoll nuns...

...Political parties are not allowed to function otherwise, but they may hold press conferences...

...The only hunk in town was New York Mayor Ed Koch...

...I said it was a positive step, but that the Sandinistas had not complied with any of the other parts of the plan...

...but they politely choose not to talk about it...

...A rriving at the air-conditioned offices of Interpren, where the foreign press corps had gathered for an appropriate snack of animal crackers and cherry soda before being taken to hear Ortega, one instantly spotted the de rigueur attire for covering an FSLN rally: red and black...

...But when an American is killed—as was Benjamin Linder, himself armed with a Soviet AK-47 rifle, last spring—the Sandinistas cynically turn it into a propaganda coup...

...The answer is yes...

...public, has a beef with them...

...Upon returning, they are asked to "please get your story, whatever it may be, into the papers, on the radio, on TV...

...plicably, the chairman of the Senate's Central American Negotiations Observer Group...

...Borge, the Sandinista disinformation wizard, receives journalists in a modest house used only for this purpose and religious delegations in a special office adorned with crucifixes...

...L ender was one of a growing num- ber of "sandalistas," Americans who go to Nicaragua not to visit, but to live and work and even fight...

...Several of those not in uniform wore T-shirts with the internationalist epigram: "Aquino is not the answer...

...And amazed I was, at the wide chasm between this American's stunning misapprehension of Sandinista Nicaragua and the feelings of every Nicaraguan I talked with who actually lives here, composing the one group not disposed to spontaneous self-deception, Sandinista manipulation, utopia-seeking, or just plain hatred of America...