NICARAGUA, CIVIL LIBERTIES & U.S. POLICY
Bromwich, David
In mid-October the Nicaraguan government announced a suspension of civil liberties, including the rights to free expression, free assembly, and privacy in the use of postal services. With...
...What is left of the resistance can only regulate the flow of $27 million, into the pockets of counterfeit democrats with a proved appetite for killing and plunder...
...Let them appeal to international law in the World Court, and at once we refuse to recognize the court's jurisdiction...
...Let them stagger from the effects of a trade embargo, and we are morally piqued ("shocked, shocked") that they now receive more trade from the Soviet Union...
...foreign policy has placed Nicaragua...
...Even their former director of public relations, Edgar Chamorro, admitted, in a widely discussed article, that he feared their victory more than their defeat...
...The moral character of the Contras, after all, is no longer in doubt...
...As the Reagan Administrations' instruments of policy grow more brutal and its statements of policy more treacherous, the Nicaraguan government answers in kind...
...had enough sense to take him up on this, it could begin the work of joining Nicaragua to the large and varied company of nations we regard as imperfect but not unconscionable: such nations as South Korea, Saudi Arabia, and the Philippines, which our policymakers would never dream of calling totalitarian...
...Let them offer to negotiate through the Contadora process, and we declare our contempt for the Contadora process...
...Since 1982 Ronald Reagan has been rewriting the story of Nicaragua, to his own specifications...
...If the U.S...
...In the days since these were first announced, Ortega has offered to restore civil liberties as soon as acts of sabotage under Reagan's patronage are halted...
...As democrats we are obliged to condemn the government's action: we believe that such measures can only be justified, by a legitimate government, under a threat to the very survival of the country itself in time of war...
...His pretext instead was the discovery of a bomb plot that suggested a larger but as yet unconfirmable design of urban terrorism against the government...
...What inducement have we ever given them to practice what we preach...
...This much ought to be said by any non-Communist who sympathizes with the dreadful crisis in which U.S...
...And this much is not cant...
...But politics is a world of causes and consequences, and not only of good and evil actions to be judged...
...The latest tactic of the Nicaraguan government was a predictable response— a response, indeed, predicted in these pages—to the strategy of harassment and terror that America has pursued in Nicaragua...
...By Ortega's own account, his defensive war against the Contras is proceeding successfully in any case...
...Congress, a brake that was lost with the spree of panic conversions after Ortega's trip to Moscow...
...This justification was not, however, invoked by President Ortega...
...No one therefore who supports the Contras can pretend to judge innocently the new repressive measures of the Nicaraguan government...
...With these measures has come a new stringency in the censorship of the press...
...Its one hope always lay in the slow, stubborn, pragmatic resistance of the U.S...
...Finally, and under immense pressure, that country is beginning to play the role in which he cast it from 14 the start...
...Had the government responded to the threat by strengthening the police, without greatly impairing the liberties of the people, it would have commanded respect...
Vol. 33 • January 1986 • No. 1
