The Contras Could Have Won
Evans-Pritchard, Ambrose
Ambrose Evans-Pritchard THE CONTRAS COULD HAVE WON How U.S. policy snatched defeat from the jaws of victory. A t the beginning of this year there were signs of insurrectionary conditions in...
...Indeed, hunger can induce obedience where the government has a food monopoly...
...The lesson is that insurrectionary conditions are not always obvious...
...chose the worst option...
...In the past, life was unbearable for a worker who did not have access to the CAB, and many told me they defected from the opposition unions to the Sandinista union just to get a CAT card...
...They were not ruthless enough to crush all resistance—the regime is too dependent on international goodwill to risk Guatemalan-style massacres—but they went far enough to embitter thousands of families, and probably had the net effect of enlarging the support base of the contras...
...By using the military option immediately the Administration gave the Sandinistas a pretext for totalitarian mischief, and undercut its own attempts to portray the regime as illegitimate...
...None of the imposters gained credibility...
...Last January a group of youths at a village baseball game in Carazo—an area not known for contra sympathies—told me they were nearly all draft-dodgers...
...Next comes a barrage of recriminations about everything...
...said one...
...Even so, the motley coalition has held together, and advanced...
...All you have to do is drive along Managua's Carretera Sur, for example, and therewill be the pathetic sight of thirty, fifty, perhaps even a hundred people trying to hitch a ride...
...The Sandinistas have nothing against profit...
...To do so would be to admit that in cutting contra aid their party snatched an American defeat from the jaws of victory.^ Only a fanatic can still maintain that poor Nicaraguans live better now than during the last years of Somoza...
...I believe he truly doesn't understand how close the contras came to paralyzing Nicaragua...
...Nearby, Willson, standing on prosthesis, was gesticulating to a small rapt audience...
...The Sandinistas have periodically tried to close this seething labyrinth of free enterprise, and lost at least one of their inspectors to a lynch mob of market women...
...The Sandinistas have cut the incidence of smallpox and polio with the enthusiastic and well-publicized vaccination campaigns...
...Discipline is lax...
...In some neighborhoods people don't even know who their block captain is, and they certainly don't care...
...The shortage of food was becoming serious by the beginning of this year...
...Nobody moved for hours on end because power cuts had put the pumps out of action...
...The 500 or so prisoners who were being convicted each year by the Anti-Somocista Tribunals, where the judges were party activists from the block committees, were just the tip of the iceberg...
...They fell from $646 million in 1978 to $292 million in 1987...
...They also have a naive faith in American power: they tend to assume that if the United States intervenes its client will ultimate-ly win, and Nicaraguans like being on the winning side...
...Government economists, engineers, and technicians are paid dollar bonuses worth more than their salaries...
...This is not difficult to do...
...In 1977 he was able to fill the Plaza de la Republica with tens of thousands of seemingly enthusiastic supporters—more than the Sandinistas are able to turn out now...
...The regime can no longer pretend to have the blessing of the church...
...Perhaps...
...Comandante "Franklin" of the Jorge Salazar II regional command has almost legendary stature in his home province of Chontales, where he has outfoxed much larger Sandinista forces for year after year...
...Some foreign firebrands have been recalled by their orders in Europe, others have toned down their sermons...
...It would have made for unpopular diplomacy if the United States had renewed military aid to the contras two weeks after the Central American presidentshad signed a joint peace accord in San Jose...
...Then came the near total breakdown of Managua in late January when Soviet supplies were delayed...
...His presence startled me...
...They don't stop either, because they already are jammed full...
...Before the revolution Nicaragua was a rice exporter...
...The result is a dual economy in which anyone with dollars is fabulously rich...
...The problem has been selling their success in the U.S...
...I discount the polls that indicate a majority opposes the Administration's Nicaragua policy...
...It made a commitment without following through...
...The Sandinistas would have had longer to build an army and indoctrinate Nicaragua's youth...
...Taking a leaf out of the Sandinista textbook of vanguard mythology, local contra commanders have emerged as popular heroes...
...In June the government announced an end to wage and price controls...
...The country had the best educated managers and technocrats in Central America...
...The Sandinistas fixed the ration at four pounds per person permonth...
...He jerked his thumb over his shoulder, lit a cigarette, then returned to his empty screen...
...Pete's statement was a bellwether...
...No f------ way will I do it...
...I met several villagers who told me they had been arrested, usually for periods of two to eight weeks, and had been beaten up, ducked under water (el submarino), and threatened...
...Some still insist that the Sandinistas could have been co-opted, forgetting that Jimmy Carter tried it...
...Half the doctors have left the country...
...But they have to spread their dollars around to lubricate a system that is clotted by worthless cordobas...
...Some still insist that the Sandinistas would win an open election in Nicaragua if it were held tomorrow...
...The Sandinistas tried the Nazi trick of creating party-affiliated replicas to mirror and undermine every institution in Nicaraguan society...
...Either he is bluffing, or he is going mad...
...Somoza's National Guard never numbered more than 15,000...
...There was never enough emphasis on political organization, particularly creating an urban front for insurrection...
...In 1983 they went into a nose dive when the Sandinistas temporarily suspended supply flights across the Gulf of Fonseca, after the U.S...
...Imagine the uproar if the contras tried that...
...The Sandinistas received $118 million in U.S...
...Mexico has its own separate rhythm, and a gaggle of bankrupt Albanias on the isthmus would threaten nobody but their own people...
...What we are discussing is how the mercenary forces, who are already defeated, can lay down their weapons," said Daniel Ortega recently...
...The contras themselves are partly to blame, for setting unreasonable expectations and failing to define a strategy of prolonged popular war...
...Take health care...
...On a visit last January, I was surprised to find that the note was back in circulation with 50,000 clumsily printed 24 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR AUGUST 1988 over the old 50...
...It was an astonishing achievement that had little to do with the strategic foresight of the contra leadership, or of the CIA...
...The original nucleus of the contras might have dispersed, leaving the Administration with little to work with...
...But the prices did not keep up with inflation...
...The producer wrapped his hands around his chin and stared as if studying a carry-out menu...
...THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR AUGUST 1988 25 street, then add that nobody much bothers with the CDS anymore...
...security which variety of oppression it chooses...
...Nicaraguans on the whole are exceedingly pro-American, or gringuista as they say, and many see El Norte as the promised land...
...If so, their credulity is unpardonable...
...The structure of the economy is a key to understanding the political vulnerability of the regime...
...The first grievance was food confiscation by the Ministry of Internal Commerce...
...Because the contras are not seizing towns and developing a visible system of dual power, they are said to be losing...
...In poor barrios, where residents share taps, the women were getting up at one in the morning to line up for water with buckets...
...He's resurrecting the whole Tercerista project of tactical compromise...
...Food ration cards have lost their clout...
...Last year a large delivery of Soviet rice found its way into the Oriental Market before it reached the government rationing posts...
...There's not a square foot of El Salvador that the army cannot occupy, yet the rebel FMLN is causing havoc nevertheless...
...ragged, listless campesinos stare from unpainted shacks, spotted incongruously with new FSLN government posters...
...The effect is profoundly subversive...
...He calculated correctly that a Leninist core, catching the imagination with a deft use of symbolism, could set off insurrection if all the right conditions came together...
...The Sandinista Youth can usually put together a turba of street hoodlums and send them out with crowbars to kneecap reactionaries...
...It is not surprising that the Sandinistas have failed to bring prosperity...
...Hours before the first words of peace were ventured publicly by Sandinista or contra, Kristofferson had been ushered into the tin-roofed pavillion reserved ostensibly for the working press...
...In the field the contras did better than almost anybody, including the Sandinistas, ever expected...
...Tempers were frazzled...
...The private sector has become adept at evading oversight, and it has given protective cover to an exploding black market that is by some estimates bigger than the official economy...
...It published an amazing interview with a senior army defector, Major Roger Miranda, who accused President Daniel Ortega of betraying his fellow guerrillas before the revolution...
...The benefit of the doubt cannot be extended, however, to Sandinista military repression...
...But Ortega sensed that the foundations of Somocismo had become so rotten that a few well-judged jolts would bring the edifice tumbling down...
...The post-mortems span the spectrum...
...Arias in particular concluded that accommodation with the Sandinistas would be a more stable option than an interminable war on the border...
...Ortega admits that he never controlled the urban sans-culottes who manned the barricades and bore the brunt of the fighting...
...It involved a Machiavellian campaign of distortion to present the Sandinista Front as a disparate movement with a few Communists on the fringe, but mostly made up of nationalists and social democrats...
...After seizing power the Ortegas continued to make all the right noises, even as a secret party document, the September 1979 "analyYou are entering Sapoa, Nicaragua...
...They have also suffered unfair criticism in the U.S...
...Hank, a beefy middle-aged cameraman for another network, stood up from his nearby seat...
...They have demanded power sharing and a fusion of the opposed military forces...
...A plausible case can be made that the collapse of Central America would not have significantly affected the U.S., provided Washington kept out of it altogether...
...I usually ask about the rice ration first...
...So if you pull over to offer a ride, these desperate creatures will fall like animals on your car, piling in from every door until you shout "basta ya," and heartlessly push the stragglers back into the dusty street...
...They are, of course, Leninists...
...A braless, barefoot young woman wearing a slogan-imprinted T-shirt had begun jogging in place on the hot sidewalk outside...
...But he harnessed them...
...He looked away...
...n February 3, Congress voted down new aid for the contras...
...It would have been much easier to sell the idea in Washington if there'd already been rioting inthe streets, like Haiti or the Philippines...
...Patriotic producers" can prosper...
...Instead, the U.S...
...The apparatus of control would have made it much harder to get an uprising going," said one of the architects of the policy...
...For some they will never be obvious...
...By early afternoon, shortly before General Humberto Ortega mounted the dais to announce the contra-crushing cease-fire, Kristofferson and the rest were escorted away by Sandinista personnel...
...They were not Sandinistas...
...Are you going to get a statement from Kristofferson...
...T he contras face a formidable mili- 1 tary machine...
...Indeed, the government became more and more rapacious as the economy went into a tailspin, andthere came a time when prices fell below the cost of production...
...The Sandinistas have lost their grip on their primary tool of totalitarian control: economic coercion...
...In the markets and on buses people openly cursed the government...
...The momentum of months sputtered out within days...
...It is the consequence of hyperinflation in an economy with fixed exchange rates...
...intervention...
...But the Sandinistas are vulnerable to an insurrection induced by a skilled vanguard party (to use the terminology of Marxist revolutionaries) that erodes the authority of the government and provokes it into blunders...
...Officers drink on combat missions...
...In the end it was the semi-autonomous field commanders,many of whom were renegade Sandinistas, who took the initiative and adapted to the imperatives of guerrilla warfare...
...Like most of the press corps in Central America, I was slow to realize what was happening...
...Willson, you may remember, had sacrificed his legs to an on-coming munitions train in Concord, California last summer...
...Jimmy Carter's ambassador, Mauricio Solaun, was reading the riot act on human rights...
...I'm losing it...
...In El Salvador the rebels are relatively self-sufficient, but even they need Nicaraguan supplies...
...I don't bother with them anymore," says Coco Lopez, a Managua cook...
...They had to create their mass organizations almost from scratch, without being able to draw on an army of cadres seasoned by years of struggle...
...Those who believe that the United States defeated the Tet Offensive in 1968, but didn't realize it and lost the will to fight, may see a parallel in Nicaragua...
...The contras have been negotiating terms that amount to a graceful surrender...
...reasons for being there seemed concluded, as all sideshows eventually are...
...I dare not repeat some of the amazing remarks I have heard, for fear of losing credibility...
...T f the war is lost, it was lost in Washington...
...In the early 1980s Nicaraguans went to committee meetings in the evening because it was a way of getting government hand-outs, like a waterpump for the community...
...Living standards had been rising rapidly for a generation, labor laws were relatively progressive, and even farm workers could afford transistor radios...
...Union, it makes scant difference to U.S...
...On the other hand, enemies of the state, like Enrique Bolanos from COSEP, wake up one morning to find that peasants armed with AK-47 rifles have taken a fancy to their land,and to their tractors and trucks...
...Exports tell the tale...
...111 KRIS KRISTOFFERSON IN SAPOA THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR AUGUST 1988 27 sis of the situation and tasks," outlined puppet pluralism to neutralize international opinion...
...You are now minutes from the customs complex where leaders of the country's Marxist and Resistance armies will discuss peace for the first time ever—and where Kris Kristofferson, the movie star, awaits the momentous opening of the Sandinista-Contra Peace Talks...
...Once they saw that the United States had abandoned the contras, many Nicaraguans concluded that Sandinismo would be their future after all...
...This crap is spooky," he said...
...In others, they point lazily down the I believe that if the contras had received American military aid for another two years the country would have become ungovernable...
...The CDS still have the informal function of recruiting for the army...
...The Sandinistas can no longer threaten to sack workers in state industries if they get out of line because wages are so abysmal that they are already leaving in droves, hoping to turn a quick buck as buhoileros (hustlers) on the streets...
...But politically it would have made more sense to have waited...
...The movie star had arrived from Sheldon Kelly is a staff writer for Reader's Digest...
...Their...
...Congress, eager for instant results, has turned this on its head...
...All had doubts whether a divided Washington would ever give the contras the wherewithal to win...
...Many Americans find this impossible to understand...
...Too many contra leaders saw their force as the spearhead for direct U.S...
...It suffered opprobrium in the world forum for the exercise of imperial power, without putting that power to much effect...
...It intervened, but not decisively...
...The opposition umbrella group, La Coordinadora Democratica, organized a march on January 10 in which demonstrators openly chanted, "viva la resistencia...
...In 1979 the Ortegas led a faction known as the "Terceristas" that formed a tactical alliance with business leaders and centrist parties...
...As I write this piece the talks have stalled...
...In Nicaragua the sense of common purpose that makes such sacrifices tolerable has completely broken down...
...They should be grateful that we are not offering them the guillotine or the firing squad...
...Looking closer, you see the paint is fresh, and covers the boarded-up entrance...
...The result is a party base with the militancy of a suet pudding...
...At the time Tomas Borge, seeing no signs of insurrection and disappointed in the mettle of the proletariat, was pushing a Maoist strategy of "prolonged popular war" in the mountains...
...They still have tools of control, above all the DGSE (political police) which has penetrated the opposition organizations and unions, and strikes pre-emptively...
...Frankly, I'd like to ask him something," he said...
...While inequalities in Honduras are ugly, in Nicaragua they are grotesque...
...On one of them is a barefoot old man in a straw hat, slumped motionless...
...I asked, looking at the star a scant few feet away...
...The actor looked back at me with seeming ingenuousness, his locks lifting like a gray veil in the wind...
...I had just crossed the plains of Costa Rica's hot, desolate northern Guanacaste, was interrogated humorlessly at a Sandinista checkpoint, then escorted through Sapoa...
...the drippings form a nebula on the bare earth...
...The counter-insurgency units, known as BLIs, are made up of recruits with only a few weeks training...
...Yet they gobbled up Nicaragua without flinching...
...The perception of betrayal undoubtedly saps the militancy of the contra base...
...Nicaragua has a very high rate of draft evasion...
...There is another layer of Nicaraguans who do not necessarily handle dollars, but who service the dollar elite and expect to be paid a fee that reflects the black market rate...
...They do not do a good job...
...The U.S...
...for their dependence on outside support...
...I have watched Salvadoran guerrillas on shopping trips buying sacks of beans and sugar in village stores...
...By nine in the morning we just can't keep going, we're too weak from hunger...
...The peasants were forced to sell their produce to the state at fixed prices...
...They have even begun bombing hamlets from Antonov aircraft with 500-pound bombs, a sure sign of military sclerosis...
...Opportunists and turncoat Somocistas filled many of the slots...
...Defense Minister Humberto Ortega boasts of building a 600,000-man reserve army...
...Managua's maternity hospital is filthy and understaffed...
...That will be difficult...
...My neighborhood had no water for five days, except for nocturnal trickles...
...According to Dr...
...This gives legitimacy to the contras but at the same time it smacks of personalismo...
...Half-empty Ladas and Toyota landcruisers race past, carrying the party apparatchiks...
...The reporter turned to cast a glance, then answered loudly: "F--- him...
...Nicaraguans have seen Adolfo Calero and Humberto Ortega standing side by side on television singing the national anthem...
...It's like deja vu...
...They rarely stop...
...Meanwhile, Kristofferson remained perched on the table-top a few feet away from the speaker's dais and mounted TV cameras...
...Lately, the Ministry of Internal Commerce seems to have given up the struggle...
...The difference is that the Sandinistas, enjoying greater resources, practice a more extensive pre-emptive repression...
...The problem for the Sandinistas is that they control less and less...
...There are no polls in Nicaragua...
...He launched a se-ries of daring raids against the National Guard in October 1977 which had no military impact, but radically altered the war of perception...
...They have expropriated landowners who tried to cooperate, turned credit on and off capriciously (all banks are nationalized), and pursued lunatic state pricing policies...
...But Kristofferson and this whole damned bunch being here makes me want to vomit...
...But it is possible to make them talk, provided you travel alone, without an interpreter, and don't wear Sandinista sympathies on your sleeve...
...Gas was almost unavailable, except by bribery...
...Could the Reagan Administration have crafted the policy more skillfully...
...The contras became the favorite godchild of the far right in this country, and that was the kiss of death," says a State Department official who enthusiastically supports the resistance...
...La Prensa, back in circulation without censorship, was openly ridiculing the regime to undermine its authority...
...I do not understand how Americas Watch, the New York-based human rights organization, could conclude that Sandinista abuses during that period were not systematic...
...Humberto [Ortega] is brilliant," says Arturo Cruz, Jr., a former Sandinista who now advises the contras...
...My education was a solitary ten-day walk in early 1985 through the mountain provinces of Jinotega, Matagalpa, and Boaco...
...Before Christmas they launched the two biggest operations of the war, one of which nearly succeeded in cutting the Rama road that links the Atlantic Coast to the Pacific...
...The Sandinista methods of subjugating the recalcitrant peasantry were badly calibrated...
...D ankruptcy alone is not life...
...The Sandinistas themselves had sanctuary in Costa Rica, and got arms from Venezuela, Panama, and of course Cuba...
...The revolution was not for sale, said Tomas Borge...
...They had transformed themselves from a Somocista raiding force into the biggest peasant insurgency in Latin America...
...Dust devils whip across the rutted road...
...I wandered from farm to farm, eating and sleeping wherever I was invited in, and conducting dozens of random interviews...
...Those who attend meetings of the opposition Conservative party, say, in the little town of El Carmen, may fear reprisals from the local office of the political police, but it is increasingly rare to find them worried about losing their tarjeta, as the card is called...
...At the same time wages in the private sector are finding their own level despite pay scales fixed by the state, making the CATs less relevant...
...the reporter repeated...
...The day was nearing when they would either have to risk losing control or use police repression in the streets of Managua, which could be televised and seen all over the world...
...More serious is the opinion among the American clerisy that the contras can't fight...
...But no guerrilla insurgency in Latin America holds territory in the strict sense...
...By the beginning of this year, the contras had reached a perception threshold inside Nicaragua...
...Why should I get my cojones blown off for the Ortegas...
...The stalls are better stocked than they have been in years, and even prohibited products like rice, intended for the government patronage machine, are being sold under the table...
...Jose Luis Medal, a Nicaraguan economist who runs a consultancy firm in Managua, estimates that over 60 percent of the workforce in the capital is beyond the government's economic control...
...The tree is the church's focal point and is encased in the brightly colored Sandinista posters...
...Occasionally buses come past...
...This system is familiar enough in the Third World...
...28 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR AUGUST 1988...
...To the extent that the Sandinista regime has made anti-Americanism its legitimizing principle and has become a military client of the Soviet...
...Wherever a sus-tamed effort was needed they have failed badly...
...True, Somoza had plenty of headaches...
...And the overwhelming majority of Americans who know the country would disagree with me vehemently...
...There is a critical shortage of medicine, and some of what is available (the part that has no international value and cannot be smuggled out for resale in Costa Rica by corrupt officials from the Health Ministry) is labeled in Cyrillic script, to be dispensed with an educated guess...
...Managua in an air-conditioned Mercedes-Benz bus, he said...
...In fact the reverse is true...
...An American with permed hair, fashionably dressed in khaki pants with many pockets, knit shirt and boat shoes, leaned close to the star's ear, talking in low tones as his eyes darted around the assemblage...
...While liberal commentators in Washington write claptrap about how the contras can never succeed as long as they are identified with the United States, the contras themselves see their interests differently: for six years they have been busy inside Nicaragua trying to reassure people that Reagan stands with them...
...You go to the dispendio and there's nothing there...
...It failed...
...The Sandinistas have not nationalized the means of production, as occurred in Cuba...
...Gambling on the Arias Peace Plan, the government had half-lifted the lid on repression, and the toxic fumes had escaped...
...These publicity coups came at a time when the Sandinistas already faced a political crisis in the cities...
...As a result they retained the structure of a conventional army, fighting in large units with long supply routes...
...But beyond inciting spasms of violence, the party has few effective instruments of social control...
...Though not enough to stanch a catastrophic brain drain...
...A t the beginning of this year there were signs of insurrectionary conditions in Nicaragua...
...more is dabbed thinly onto a pile of rocks near a scraggly tree...
...So do some contra units...
...Well, mate, it's everyone for himself, isn't it...
...And they would have rioted...
...One side is as brutal as the other...
...This better be a f------ movie," Hank said...
...They did not look very dangerous...
...Even if the people believed that American imperialism was the cause of their troubles, which the majority no longer do, it would be hard to rally patriotic support when the hardships are so unevenly shared...
...Could anything have been done to bring the Democrats on board...
...These were the people wearing Ho Chi Minh buttons when I came home from Vietnam...
...If you telephone Nicaragua you will notice that very few of the international operators speak English...
...Ernest Hollings aptly put it: "There's no education in the second kick of a mule...
...There has already been a mutiny by some field commanders...
...The Sandinistas are dollar kings because they have a monopoly on exports...
...The star smiled and smiled, seemingly following the directional beam of the frizzy man's eyes...
...rr he Sandinistas have not succeeded in establishing a totalitarian system in Nicaragua...
...Jaime Bengoechea, president of the Nicaraguan Chamber of Industry, the country used to export about $150 million in manufactured goods to the rest of Central America...
...It must be remembered that the Sandinista Front began as a military organization, and only turned itself into a political party after the revolution...
...F--- him...
...His long, trademark hair and funny, narrow little eyes could be seen from almost anywhere in the cordoned-off area...
...Pedro Joaquin Chamorro was publishing broadsides in his family newspaper La Prensa...
...Nicaragua has the most regressive wage system I have ever seen...
...Perhaps a few even believed that the Sandinistas would fulfill their promises to "democratize...
...Malaria, dengue, and hepatitis have got worse since 1979...
...The Sandinistas, however, have been too undisciplined to make it work...
...They are soft numbers reflecting an instinctive isolationism...
...This is an area full of yeoman farmers, or kulaks, some with fifty head of cattle, others with little more than a horse, but united by rugged individualism...
...Air-conditioned offices without ventilation became furnaces...
...As Sen...
...An emaciated old peasant in the area of Rivas said that his cooperative was reduced to two- or three-hour workdays...
...26 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR AUGUST 1988 dio station, from Costa Rican stations, and by word of mouth...
...They were on the verge of becoming a revolutionary vanguard...
...While not enviable, it can admit a tolerably productive private sector so long as everybody knows the rules of the game...
...A TASS reporter, a Cuban TV crew, and a host of sullen-faced men and women in Sandinista uniforms with press badges drifted through Kristofferson's court...
...The canasta (basket) is two-thirds empty, and the social wage never got far beyond the drawing board...
...They are threatening to return to war...
...Several swaybacked horses stand in the shade of a fly-ridden tienda...
...We have to wait for three hours in the sun to get milk for our children and then they say it's run out...
...In El Salvador the FMLN have flatly rejected any peace that leaves the structure of the Salvadoran state intact...
...Incidentally, the Salvadorans pay for their groceries with money extorted from farmers, passengers on buses, or hostage families...
...Then you see the church, as sparkling white as bridal cloth...
...Harry Berghold, until recently the American ambassador in Managua, reportedly used to enjoy debating the comandantes on their own ideological turf, running rings around them with his superior grip on Marxist doctrine...
...Back in Managua I visited the opposition Permanent Human Rights Commission and began to look more thoroughly at their stack of testimonies (which are very limited because they depend on peasants coming all the way to Managua to make a deposition, and most peasants don't know the organization exists...
...This is impossible to prove...
...The CIA compounded this with its stubborn preference for men without revolutionary vision, Adolfo Calero in particular...
...Arturo Cruz, Jr., who wrote a biting critique of the contra strategy that enraged Oliver North and led to a rift between them, says that "the boys really blew it...
...tions were accusing each other of "putschist adventurism" and "petit bourgeois deviation...
...they used Calero as their foreman in Nicaragua but they didn't understand that his face was so big it hid the faces of the young peasants in the field...
...The church hierarchy, headed by Cardinal Obando, is accepted by the overwhelming majority of Nicaraguans as the only legitimate version of Catholicism...
...It doesn't last a week," scream the women from the back of the car, "and why isn't there any milk...
...Textbook doctrine holds that so long as guerrillas are not losing, they are ultimately winning...
...It is easy to forget how strong Anastasio Somoza looked two years before the revolution...
...Spontaneous insurrection is therefore unlikely...
...I believe that if the contras had received American military aid for another two years the country would have become ungovernable...
...The perception that he does not is fatal...
...But now the government's distribution system has so disintegrated that the CATs no longer have much to offer...
...Jose Luis Medal, who has written a treatise on the economic philosophy of the Sandinistas, believes it was simply a case of inept planning...
...While units of the National Guard were fleeing to El Salvador on rafts in July 1979, Jim Wright continued to stand behind Somoza and was puzzled that everybody was turning against a stalwart American ally...
...This was not intended...
...The city was a tinderbox, yet the Sandinistas had no reliable way of stifling unrest other than raw force...
...Their leader had been killed in 1976 and the quarreling facAmbrose Evans-Pritchard is the London Spectator's Washington correspondent and its former Central America correspondent...
...In any case, the Arias Plan and the subsequent Sapoa agreement never made a settlement contingent on a separation of the army and the party...
...Instead, the Sandinistas have increasingly copied the American dependence on air support in Vietnam...
...The contras have begun to define their concept of acceptable democratization, but so late in the day as to give the impression that they are merely obstructing...
...She buys her food at the Eastern Market...
...Gauging the mood in Nicaragua is difficult...
...There are exceptions...
...They came down off the fence where they had been sitting, waiting, wondering whether to risk throwing in their lot with the opposition...
...It's said they do not hold territory...
...Archbishop Obando y Bravo, accused of being a Communist by the chief of police, was issuing damning pastoral letters...
...Over the next two years I did a number of spot checks in remote villages where the commission had news of killings, and confirmed my suspicion that some Sandinista militias conduct death-squad operations...
...Why they signed it is no mystery...
...Around him scores of journalists, thrust into the maw of Hollywood by Sandinista planners, sat, stood, walked, or segued, as it were, from the touring North Americans...
...The result is decapitalization as owners run down their farms and factories...
...It had to do with eight years of Sandinismo...
...Nor have the Sandinistas done much better creating the political apparatus of the one-party state...
...By early 1988 there were chunks of Nicaragua where the contras, known as "Los Primos" (the cousins), could move freely, confident that the villagers would not give away their movements, while Sandinista troops had the uneasy feeling of being an army of occupation...
...It quickly fell prey to partisan politics...
...In particular the Italian brand of Mussolini...
...Although food ration cards are still important in some rural areas, they are not decisive...
...I asked...
...Perhaps it could have been ignored...
...Drivers waited in long coiling lines outside gas stations in the hope of buying five gallons...
...Their writings before the revolution show little interest in the dynamics of wealth creation, not even in Communist economic theory...
...How did he get here, so sweatless and comfortable...
...In reality it hovers between one and two pounds...
...Oscar Arias overrated his own powers of persuasion...
...They have swallowed the cliche that Nicaraguans are anti-American nationalists...
...The British, however, were disposed to suffer...
...They hold power through a secretive and elite vanguard party, but their inspiration, a nationalist brew of martyrs, myths, symbols, and demagoguery, resembles that Marxist heresy we call fascism...
...Dukakis says it's "the worst fiasco of my lifetime...
...There is some debate as to whether this was a deliberate strategy to stamp out an independent landowning peasantry and force them into collectives and cooperatives where they could be controlled...
...Moreover, the contras are necessarily more dependent on hard supplies than the FMLN because they have been fighting a regime that extends social control more deeply than most...
...No longer...
...It was clear that the heaviest repression was happening in the pre-trial detention centers, to which the International Red Cross was denied entry, not in the formal judicial system...
...Once when I quoted a Nicaraguan family saying that it hoped for an American invasion, the editor of Private Eye insinuated in print that I had made it up...
...They manipulate the private sector through a system of licenses and monopolies in what is really an extreme version of Latin American mercantilism...
...In fact, their grounding in Marxism generally is thin...
...The leaders were always jockeying for advantage against each other in a game of what Nicaraguans call "politica electorera," instead of planning hellfire and revolution...
...Skilled mechanics, for instance, or plumbers can earn a relative fortune...
...The inflation rate was about 2000 percent, yet the Sandinistas were still holding the official exchange rate at 70 cordobas to the dollar, with a maddening ladder of different rates for other transactions...
...One can make allowances as to why the Sandinista proyecto of social justice has withered on the vine, but only a fanatic can still maintain that poor Nicaraguans live better now than during the last years of Somoza...
...He sat on top of a long wooden table like a wrinkled, 100-percent-cotton centerpiece, a California statement...
...The party faithful are rewarded with coupons to spend at Managua's dollar stores...
...The linguists have already gone to greener pastures in Florida...
...In private industries the government used to maintain influence through its puppet labor union—the Confederation of Sandinista Workers—which issues coupons to the subsidized state stores, known as CATs, where workers can buy shoes and clothes at a fraction of the free market price...
...But it matters inside Nicaragua...
...invasion of Grenada sent a shock wave through Managua...
...Nicaraguan industry is a carcass...
...We're one-third turtles, one-third rabbits, and one-third hogs," said a contra official candidly in a moment of despair...
...The contras were able to spread news of these attacks through their raThe structure of the economy is a key to understanding the political vulnerability of the regime...
...The Sandinistas have an army of over 70,000 men, backed by a network of militarized cooperatives, and equipped with terrifying Stalin Organs (for concentrated shelling) and MI-24 helicopter gunships...
...They have to try to conduct a guerrilla war that satisfies the sensibilities of a refined democracy, which is impossible...
...The people dissemble, particularly with foreigners, some of whom they abusively call "sandalistas" on account of their footwear and politics...
...The Sandinista Defense Committees (CDS), called the "eyes and ears of the revolution" by Sandinista Godfather Tomas Borge, have caused indignation abroad where they have been compared to the Nazi "Blockwart...
...It is a myth that other insurgencies in Central America are self-sufficient...
...This may be our finest hour," Hank said...
...The Congress was put in a delicate situation by the Arias Peace Plan...
...The star's entourage included a light-stepping Cape Cod group calling itself Veterans for Peace, at least one Harvard professor, many young women apparently preoccupied with looking round the dry, empty terrain, then putting notes in prettily covered little journals, and another California notable, Brian Willson...
...The accord gave doubting Democrats all the cover they needed to back away from the policy...
...Humberto Ortega understands this well...
...Honing their skills in the field, they have learned how to concentrate forces for big operations, then melt back into smaller units...
...They probably get as much to eat as the British during the Second World War...
...Now huge donations come from Bulgaria and the Soviet Union and there is still a critical shortage...
...With hindsight they could have done even better...
...Congress spared them that dilemma...
...A network reporter and producer joined our small, voluble group...
...Random blackouts shut down factories...
...Until recently this would have been impossible in Nicaragua because the government kept a tight rein on the distribution system...
...A reporter looked up angrily from his Tandy 200 when I asked him...
...The more cynical presidents of Honduras and El Salvador got caught in the public relations trap of peace summitry...
...There was once some truth in this, but it is wearing thin today...
...The group mingled, held forth in the fashion of indignant victors of a game known only to themselves...
...They often bunch up together while on patrol, ignoring an elementary safeguard against ambushes...
...In fact they are a joke...
...Worse, the dependence on officers from Somoza's National Guard was a gift to the Sandinista office of Agitation and Propaganda (DAP...
...He didn't know, didn't care...
...Unlike the Salvadoran guerrillas, who are real revolutionary Marxists rather than putschists, the Sandinistas did not develop a support network before seizing power...
...Oliver North continued the CIA approach during the Boland affair, using "el private supply network" (as the contras call it) to channel money to the dependable troglodytes, cutting out the ex-Sandinistas who brought appeal, flair, and revolutionary praxis to the movement...
...He masterminded the Sandinistas' own insurrection a decade ago from his headquarters in Costa Rica...
...Militarism is the essence of Sandinismo...
...But the Sandinista People's Army is not all that it is cracked up to be...
...Left behind in the cordoba economy, and increasingly alert to the swindle, are farm hands on the state farms, who earn about a dollar a week, and factory workers, who make perhaps two...
...They were a catalyst for the Monimbo Indian Uprising four months later, the watershed of the civil war...
...Some officials now concede that they moved too quickly, though delay also entailed risks...
...Now it exports less than $20 million...
...The Sandinista Front would have had to sue for peace on terms that effectively dismantled the one-party military state, or risk eventual collapse...
...They are among the customers at Managua's French restaurant, La Marseillaise, taking their families out to lunch and blithely spending mountains of cordobas, which they leave on the table in uncounted wads of notes tied with rubber bands...
...In February a new currency was introduced as part of an austerity package, but it has left the fundamental distortions in place...
...Nicaraguan history is full of unlikely alliances, of deals cut across ideological lines, of co-option...
...But on the whole, few Nicaraguans look starved...
...Perhaps the poor showing of the Sandinistas' infantry (with the notable exception of the elite Pablo Ubeva forces) has led them to ignore the lessons of the successful counter-insurgency in Guatemala in 1982, which was conducted with foot soldiers...
...Daniel Ortega accepts that real wages have fallen but argues that this has been cushioned by a subsidized canasta basica of rice, beans, sugar, cooking oil, etc., and by the invisible "social wage...
...At the end of the day, the region is more or less back to square one, and attention is shifting again to the misfortunes of El Salvador, where the political center is collapsing...
...Once the munificence came to an end, so did the attendance...
...He came with these . . . these others...
...Their best cadres are in the army," says Virgilio Godoy, former minister of labor and now head of the Independent Liberal party...
...I shouldn't say this because I'm a by Sheldon Kelly black and these folks probably support black causes," Pete, a young network cameraman, said...
...At times even the grace is missing...
...aid after July 1979 (more than Somoza got in a quarter century), their debt was rescheduled on the softest of terms, and the rules of the Inter-American Development Bank were bent to allow them loans...
...Big coffee and cotton growers are paid dollar incentives...
...Least among Somoza's troubles was a band of student guerrillas with connections to the Granada aristocracy, calling themselves Sandinistas...
...There is no opposition movement like Solidarity that captures the imagination...
...A study by the private sector organization, COSEP, using the government's own figures, calculates that their buying power has fallen to the levels of the last century...
...It is a subject that evokes fury in this culture where many families traditionally eat rice and beans twice a day...
...The "popular church," which caused immense confusion abroad, lost a slow battle as the bishops plucked the liberation theologians one by one from their dioceses...
...threatening in a totalitarian system, provided the regime keeps control of what remains of the economy...
...By contrast, the rebels have gotten better...
...It is common knowledge what Obando thinks of Sandinismo...
...Those Democrats who do have an inkling can't easily admit it...
...I remember that in early 1984 the purple 50 cordoba note could buy you breakfast at the Intercontinental Hotel in Managua...
...Meanwhile the black market rate, remorselessly tracking the printing practices of the central bank, had reached about 50,000 to the dollar...
...La Marseillaise recently built an extra room to handle the brisk business...
Vol. 21 • August 1988 • No. 8
