NICARAGUA:SENDING GUNS AND SERMONS
Brumberg, Abraham
It was all to be expected: a few days after 221 members of the House of Representatives voted to provide the Nicaraguan "freedom fighters" with $100 million in new aid (plus another $400...
...But La Prensa (whose editor, in March 1985, justified the contra attacks as "essential") has been, to all intents and purposes, an ardent ally of the forces trying forcibly to overthrow the government...
...WHAT OF THE FUTURE...
...Judging by the relatively mild nature of the crackdown, and by Ortega's behavior during his July trip to the United States, there is no reason to assume that the Sandinistas have given up hope of reaching an accommodation with Washington—or at least of winning more support in this country...
...Never mind, too, those benighted representatives, who appar393 ently thought that by providing more weapons to the contras they would hasten the advent of Jeffersonian democracy in Nicaragua...
...To be sure, there is not much chance for its approval as long as Washington's policy is to depose the Sandinistas rather than to negotiate with them, and as long as it keeps pressuring the Central American states to raise their ante as soon as the Sandinistas make new concessions...
...Nicaragua's dependence on the Warsaw Pact and the Council of Mutual Economic Assistance (CMEA) is likely to increase: shortly after the U.S...
...economic aid to Guatemala "was recently lowered from last year's $101 million to $77 million," clearly as a reprisal for President Cerezo's calls for "withdrawal of U.S...
...But it may happen—with disastrous political consequences...
...Let me be as clear as possible: It is bad that La Prensa has been shut down...
...Could anyone have expected them to react differently...
...it is, in effect, to stamp a seal of approval on Reagan's war...
...My profound reservations, criticisms, and suspicions about the Sandinista regime notwithstanding, I regard its response to the contra vote as altogether understandable...
...But why all this handwringing about the Sandinistas' actions...
...But the current climate is not likely to last...
...Bishop Antonio Vega, vice-president of the Nicaraguan Bishops' Conference, was escorted unceremoniously across the Honduran border...
...Perera reports that U.S...
...displayed their true colors...
...Congress vote, the Soviets began to supply more heavy weapons to Nicaragua, though thus far of a defensive nature only...
...But the prospects are grim...
...In France during the Algerian war, massive arrests and torture were commonplace...
...and the Somocista-led gangs outside and inside Nicaragua, fed, armed, and coddled by the American government...
...Six or eight months ago (see my article in the Summer 1986 Dissent) one might have legitimately wondered whether the idea of an "internal front"—used by the Sandinistas to justify the new state of emergency—had any substance...
...Why should Nicaragua...
...EVER SINCE I BECAME INTERESTED IN NICARAGUA, I have believed that in the conflict between the centralizing and authoritarian impulses of the Sandinista revolution and those that pull it in a more open and pluralistic direction, the latter might prevail—provided Nicaragua can be freed from the curse of war and is allowed to benefit from help, advice, and calibrated pressure from the West...
...The reactions of the American liberal community to these measures were, if anything, even more predictable...
...But the vast majority of the Nicaraguan people, and their friends in the West, have no cause for rejoicing...
...IF SUCH ABUSES can take place in prosperous and stable Western democracies, is it any wonder that Nicaragua—a country tottering on the brink of economic disaster, forced to divert its limited resources into the war effort, and faced (if the contras fail) with the prospect of outright American military intervention—resorts to drastic "emergency" measures...
...Were the Sandinistas supposed to prepare themselves for the expanded slaughter by liberalizing their laws...
...But who could doubt that the CIA, its powers vastly expanded, would now resort to sabotage and mayhem, using its allies inside the country for this purpose...
...The cries of outrage, no less than the pained silence, however predictable, are nevertheless remarkable...
...To criticize the Sandinistas for human rights violations—as has, for instance, Americas Watch—is right and necessary...
...A more serious criticism would focus on long-range implications: it is much easier to close a paper than to revive it...
...The National 395 Assembly still functions...
...Never mind the editorialist, whose ignorance spans Stalinism and Nicaragua...
...By now, however, Managua has been effectively deprived of any incentives to make concessions, or indeed to participate in the Contadora meetings: for what purpose is there in agreeing to the reduction and limitation of weapons and to an intricate panoply of verification mechanisms—as it did in June of this year—if the United States is in the meantime providing its enemies with those very weapons...
...According to some observers, the renewed aid to the contras is a godsend for those comandantes in the Sandinista government who have long objected to "appeasing" the United States, and who now insist that the time has come to cleanse the revolution of all its "bourgeois illusions" and appurtenances...
...396...
...No more...
...Discussions about the constitution go on...
...Fifteen years on, during the Vietnam War, sundry police and National Guard forces showed precious little respect for the First Amendment...
...It was all to be expected: a few days after 221 members of the House of Representatives voted to provide the Nicaraguan "freedom fighters" with $100 million in new aid (plus another $400 million from the CIA's "contingency" coffers), the Sandinistas struck back...
...Another likely victim is the Contadora Treaty...
...Ten years later, a demagogue from Wisconsin created an atmosphere in which thousands of people were mortified at the thought that they may have possibly sat, once upon a time, next to a "cardcarrying" member of the Young Communist League...
...Some columnists lapsed into stunned and disillusioned silence...
...and Msgr...
...If there are food riots in the cities, they will no doubt be suppressed: the Sandinistas are painfully aware of this eventuality, and are trying to avoid it...
...Western Europe is still propping up the Nicaraguan economy...
...Bismark Carballo, press spokesman for Cardinal Obando y Bravo, was grounded in Miami, his reentry visa to Nicaragua canceled...
...Half a billion dollars, after all, buys a lot of war...
...So have Msgr...
...The closing of La Prensa and the ouster of the two churchmen, said a Times editorial, marks a quantum leap into pure "Stalinism...
...there have been no sweeping waves of arrests (as human rights organizations have attested), and most detainees are released within a short time...
...The war will surely escalate, and so will the Sandinistas' measures against their adversaries, real, potential, or imagined...
...Others pointed out that the Sandinistas had finally (what a relief...
...One hundred and twelve thousand Japanese were interned after Pearl Harbor, and kept in detention camps for four years...
...In the best of all possible worlds, human, civil, and political liberties flourish even under adverse circumstances...
...But when those who vote for or support the funding of the contra forces suddenly become pious about the repressive actions of the Sandinistas, it makes one a little sick...
...394 Yes, La Prensa is no more...
...aid to the contras...
...To use wildly inflated rhetoric (e.g., "Stalinism") in describing the Sandinistas' response to the new military threat is not only to lose sight of reality...
...And in the "Diplock" courts established by the British government in Northern Ireland, political defendants have been denied the right to trial by jury and sentenced only on the basis of their own confessions—the latter frequently obtained by coercion...
...There is, I suppose, no compelling reason to abandon that hope—not yet...
...Already Nicaragua is haunted by the specter of mass hunger...
...The emergency regulations promulgated in October 1985, said President Daniel Ortega, heretofore applied only "sporadically," would now be enforced with "full vigor...
...But in the real world such circumstances do matter...
...If outrage and indignation are called for, they should be directed at the worst perpetrators of human rights violations in Central America—the death squads in Salvador and Guatemala, which continue their grisly work without fear of retaliation (100,000 corpses thus far in Guatemala, according to Victor Perera in "Can Guatemala Change?," New York Review of Books, August 14, 1986...
...The prize goes to the New York Times, which in the past had published perceptive editorials on Nicaragua...
...Consistent defenders of human rights are entitled to criticize that...
...This may gladden the hearts of those besotted with the doctrine of "the worse, the better...
...A good part of the Catholic hierarchy, including Vega and Carballo, have come out openly against the military draft—a situation no country at war can tolerate...
...Indeed, given the fact (as I tried to illustrate in my last two articles in Dissent) that the Sandinistas are hardly intent on emulating a liberal or social democratic model, it is astonishing that those measures have not been considerably more drastic and "vigorous...
...political parties, their field of maneuver restricted more than ever before, nevertheless manage to publish their own bulletins and to broadcast daily on some of the country's fifty radio stations...
...The closing of La Prensa, we have been told, was not a wise thing from a "public relations point of view...
...Carballo and Bishop Vega (who at a press conference held on July 2 of this year opined that the "only aggression we are suffering from comes from the East...
...La Prensa was closed down "indefinitely...
Vol. 33 • September 1986 • No. 4
