Nicaragua
White, Robert E.
Books: VILLAINS & RECIPES TO KILL THREE years after the fall of the Somoza government, Shirley Christian accused her fellow reporters of naivete and worse in their reporting on...
...They also began to display disturbing anti-democratic tendencies and move closer to Cuba...
...The Sandinistas claim these measures were forced on them by the United States intervention, a plausible case...
...After nearly five decades in which power rested in one last name, there was now no understanding about who had a mandate to do what...
...The daring exploits of the young Sandinista revolutionaries fired the valor of the Nicaraguan people who went into the streets to fight the guard...
...This is roughly the equivalent of writing an account of the activities of the Bulgarian Communist apparat without discussing the role of the Soviet KGB...
...The guard disintegrated The rebels triumphed...
...She then proceeds to indict the Sandinistas for plotting to install a Marxist-Leninist totalitarian state which would turn quickly and willingly to Moscow and Havana...
...Books: VILLAINS & RECIPES TO KILL THREE years after the fall of the Somoza government, Shirley Christian accused her fellow reporters of naivete and worse in their reporting on the Sandinista movement...
...Without the threat of a foreign-sponsored invasion, the Sandinista junta would lack any pretext to suspend civil liberties and tighten security...
...From the outset the Nicaraguan revolutionaries had just cause to fear the United States would attempt to overCommonweal: 612 throw their government...
...Yet in the many pages of reporting on the counter-revolutionary force, its origins, personalities, and development, there appears no discussion of the role of the Central Intelligence Agency in creating, guiding, and maintaining the contras...
...The Sandinistas have committed their share of follies and excesses, and continue to do so...
...When threatened they tend to think of the Nicaraguan people as an army which must have discipline and direction if they are successfully to defend their revolution against its enemies...
...Reporters demonstrate their commitment to objectivity and detachment not only by what they put into their writing but by what they leave out...
...In 1981 the Reagan administration confirmed their worst fears with the creation of the contras...
...The people of the United States may not remember but the people of Latin America will never forget the CIA-sponsored counterrevolution in Guatemala in 1954, the attack against Cuba at the Bay of Pigs in 1962, the invasion of the Dominican Republic in 1965, and the destabilization of the Allende Government in Chile 1973...
...Leaders of that key sector found the courage to join the drive to oust the Somozas in part because of their perception that the dictator no longer enjoyed uncritical Washington support...
...She counterpoints various actors in the unfolding Nicaraguan tragedy and has each one speak for himself...
...The chapter entitled "The Challenge to the Church," is particularly informative and contains good description and sound analysis of the conflicts within the Catholic church in Nicaragua...
...In order to make the sins of the Sandinistas stand out in bold relief, the author first mutes and softens the grim record of the Somoza dynasty...
...Not only did the Sandinistas lack any semblance of a plan to seize total control, they were willing to give command of their combined armies to a declared anti-Marxist...
...Christian found these journalists so obsessed with the evils of the Somozas that they failed in their duty to inform their readers of the MarxistLeninist bent of the Sandinistas...
...1 November 1985: 613...
...There is much that is valuable in this book...
...Shirley Christian writes wonderfully well...
...Robert E. White the line...
...Drawing on selected pieces, primarily from New York Times correspondent Alan Riding and Washington Post reporter Karen de Young, Ms...
...all it has is a recipe to kill people...
...Yet in Nicaragua: Revolution in the Family, Shirley Christian concentrates so relentlessly on building a prosecutor's case against the Sandinistas that she must now stand in the same dock where she placed her colleagues...
...The author does not even attempt to resolve the contradiction between her claim that the Sandinistas intended to exercise absolute power in the Leninist sense of the phrase and their willingness to place all military forces in the hands of the prodemocratic, anti-Communist, bourgeois Catholic Eden Pastora...
...The epilogue discusses United States policy and its effect on Nicaragua and concludes that, "In essence, while it is true that without the contra, circumstances in Nicaragua may have been marginally better in economic terms, its existence — along with all of the external and internal pressures — represented what little hope there was to force the Sandinista Front into accepting major structural changes toward an open political system...
...Eliot Abrams, Assistant Secretary of State for Inter-American Affairs, is only the latest to confirm this attitude when he said it was "preposterous" to think we could deal with the Sandinistas...
...In fact, the fullest treatment of this key subject will be found in a footnote on page 200...
...In the early years violence was selective, but as the revolutionary movement gathered strength, torture, rape, arbitrary arrest, murder, and bombing of civilian targets became indiscriminate, as reports by Amnesty International and other respected human rights groups bear out...
...After a year-and-a-half of confusing and contradictory signals from the Carter administration, Ronald Reagan became president and within weeks had a program under way to overthrow the revolutionary government...
...This is another contradiction which Shirley Christian fails to resolve as she poses the dilemma for the United States as a choice between national security and national conscience...
...The creation of the contras, far from aiding democracy, has done that worthy cause close to irreparable harm...
...The author captures the mood in this sentence: "An intimate dance began among all the elements that sought power, influence, and voice...
...The revolutionary government quickly carried out impressive programs of education, health, and land redistribution...
...Unlike the Mexican Revolution early in this century, the Sandinistas did not kill American citizens, did not expropriate foreign-owned enterprises, did not persecute the church...
...Unlike the Cuban Revolution of 1959, the Nicaraguans did not resort to peoples' courts and drumhead executions, did not repudiate the enormous debts piled up by the predatory dictatorship they ousted, did not quit the Organization of American States...
...Authority seemed up for grabs, available to whoever dared pronounce himself on a topic...
...A reasonably objective capsule summary of modern Nicaragua up to the Reagan administration would begin by noting that the Somoza family controlled Nicaragua for almost half a century and intended to go on ruling it as their personal fief...
...The problem with the Sandinistas is not so much that they are Marxists but that they are soldiers...
...Nowhere in the book will the reader find two consecutive paragraphs dealing with the connection between the CIA and the contras...
...They have censored the opposition newspaper, LaPrensa, introduced Marxism into the classroom, offended the hierarchy by keeping undisciplined priests in government posts, and brought the East-West conflict to Central America by giving large numbers of Cuban advisors a role in the new Nicaragua...
...The two political leaders of the contra movement with the best democratic credentials, Adolfo Calero and Arturo Cruz, appear throughout the book and provide important source material...
...One chapter is entitled, "The Contra and Ronald Reagan," and another, "Among Those Who Left...
...These voices of contra leaders, market women, and revolutionaries have an authentic ring...
...From the beginning, the Somozas and their National Guard exploited and corrupted the country...
...The weight of evidence presented by the author seems to demonstrate precisely the opposite...
...Yet in the end the judgment must be made that this is a book at war with itself, a schizophrenic work, where the conclusions of the author contradict the facts she herself presents...
...The suspicions mounted to near certainty when in 1980 the CIA openly lobbied Congress against a $75 million loan to Nicaragua on the grounds that the country was already lost to Communism...
...If victory is impossible and diplomacy is ruled out then this administration does not have a policy towards Nicaragua...
...The Sandinistas ignored Lenin's first rule which dictates that even before final victory the vanguard must seize and consolidate power...
...Cash payments from ruled to ruler constituted the principal nexus between citizens and their government...
...The Somoza dynasty invited its own end when, after the 1974 earthquake, official theft of international relief funds through self-awarded contracts alienated a previously compliant business and financial community...
...Yet at the same time the Reagan administration has made it clear it will not negotiate with the Sandinistas...
...The book tells how only six months before the final victory and with the revolution gathering strength each day, Daniel and Umberto Ortega, two of the author's worst villains, "offered to make Pastora supreme military commander of the unified Sandinista Front.'' Had the charismatic hero Eden Pastora accepted the proffered title and power, he could well have become the maximum leader of Nicaragua instead of going into exile and armed opposition...
...In the context of this record the Sandinistas understandably became suspicious when the Pentagon refused their request for arms and training...
...Leaders of Nicaragua's still independent, but diminished, free institutions could oppose the Sandinistas without the taint of being equated with those who took up arms against their government at the bidding of outsiders...
...Shirley Christian gives the contras substantial treatment...
...Shirley Christian presumably came to this most dubious judgment regarding the value of the contras on the basis of the research that went into this book...
...The last two commanders of the United States' military forces in Central America have both stated with or without our aid the contras cannot overthrow the government of Nicaragua...
...Contraband, prostitution, gambling, illegal immigration were all run for profit by the guardsmen with kickbacks up and down MICARAGUA REVOLUTION IN THE FAMILY Shirley Christian Random House, $19.95, 337 pp...
...The months following Somoza's downfall were marked by confusion, hesitation, and open disagreement among Sandinistas and non-Sandinistas / November 1985: 611 alike...
...The book's thesis is succinctly stated in the epilogue: "The leaders of the Sandinista Front intended to establish a Leninist system from the day they marched into Managua whether they called it that or not...
...At the last moment a divided Carter administration tried to frustrate a Sandinista-led military victory through a defective scheme to force President Anastasio Somoza into exile, create a new government of moderate civilians, and merge the revolutionary army with a purged National Guard from which the worst butchers had been expelled Somoza fled...
...It is not necessary to be an admirer of the Sandinistas to recognize that the overthrow of the Somoza tyranny ushered in one of the mildest revolutions Latin America has ever seen or is ever likely to see...
Vol. 112 • November 1985 • No. 19
