NACLA in Nicaragua-"Reagan Hype Shuns Reality"
Burns, Bradford
Four years ago this month when the triumphant Sandinistas entered Managua nobody expected the future to be easy. Decades of struggle against home grown oppressors as well as foreign...
...Collins confirmed that since 1978 corn production has risen by 10%, bean production, 45% and rice production, 50...
...The impressive building, about half finished, was to replace a grossly inadequate 80-year-old structure...
...He has written eight books on Latin America...
...Most who passed by seemed as delighted as they were surprised to read our long banner: Somos Americanos- Amigos de Nicaragua Libre...
...Our tour sought to give us a grass roots familiarity with the revolution, providing interaction with ordinary citizens who support the process...
...For the first time in generations, he told us, the country stood on the threshold of being self-sufficient Somoza pocketed 1972 earthquake aid...
...The overwhelming majority of the people we talked with during our two-week stay enthusiastically endorsed the revolution...
...Embassy to denounce Reagan's bellicosity...
...When we first approached the main gate, it clanged shut and remained padlocked during our two hour demonstration...
...They admitted mistakes...
...We could have bought three hospitals for the price of what all these delays have cost us," he lamented...
...A high political consciousness and a welldefined sense of nationalism affirmed our suspicion that large numbers of the population will, when necessary, defend the revolution...
...Decades of struggle against home grown oppressors as well as foreign interveners had made Nicaraguans painfully aware of obstacles in the path of a poor people attempting to chart their own history...
...Jesuit working with the land reform ministry, pointed out the impressive achievements of Nicaragua's agrarian reform...
...While Nicaragua more than doubled its number of schools in four years, El Salvador, according to a report from the Faculty for Human Rights in El Salvador and Central America*, closed more than one-third of its schools...
...Embassy...
...With a friendliness seemingly endemic to Nicaraguans, the locals patiently deciphered our Spanish and shared their opinions, hopes and concerns with us...
...Reagan Hype Shuns Reality" by E. Bradford Burns Those of us on NACLA's fourth tour of Nicaragua had the mixed blessing of hearing Ronald Reagan's Central America speech before Congress in Nicaragua...
...Consumption of these three staples climbed between 30% and 40...
...Our group visited the hospital under construction in the Atlantic *The faculty was founded by U.S...
...Shortly after the demonstration began, a police car pulled up and a young Sandinista officer jumped out...
...Their direct access to Reagan's message impressed me...
...previously he was there in 1964...
...The State Department charged he would use the vist for "propaganda purposes...
...La Prensa Remains Silent Meanwhile, outside the Embassy, our group marched, chanted and carried signs affirming our support for the revolutionary process...
...We made our point: not all Americans are bamboozled by Hollywood hype...
...support of the contras...
...government and the sentiments of the American people...
...This was his second visit to Nicaragua since the victory...
...Albrecht Pflaum, the West German volunteer murdered by contras with 13 other health and agricultural workers...
...Most authorities agree that land reform in El Salvador has been halted if not reversed...
...Two Anniversaries, too, are a time for participants in NACLA's last tour, reflection...
...We learned that the 14 physicians serving the 80,000 inhabitants of the Southern Zelaya region in 1979 had now become forty-four...
...Members of our group questioned everyone within earshot wherever we went...
...Universally the people discussed the speech in detail...
...doctors who recently visited El Salvador on a fact-finding mission stated in the New England Journal of Medicine that health care in that unhappy land had almost completely broken down...
...The group sent a fact-finding mission to El Salvador last January, coastal city of Bluefields...
...Nationalistic pride in their revolution and its many achievements pervaded their remarks...
...2 a July/Aug 1983 41update * update . update . update in food...
...Those two officials had little to say that was positive about Nicaragua, believed that few supported the Sandinistas and labeled the land reform a "failure...
...Yet could the Sandinistas have envisioned that July 1983 would find them poised dangerously on the precipice of a conflagration threatening to engulf the entire region...
...Three delegates from our tour group met with Roger Gamble, deputy chief of mission, and Ken Rosenberg, who described himself as "in administration," within the confines of that formidable bastion...
...Where were we headed...
...Their remarks confirmed our feeling of how removed the Embassy was from reality...
...Could he possibly have described the country in which we were so deeply immersed...
...The hospital director told us that completion of the new facility was dependent on whether the InterAmerican Development Bank came through with promised funding...
...A few days later, the "internationalists" living in Managua, several hundred strong, also marched on the U.S...
...The U.S...
...Other policemen directed traffic-intent NACLA Reportupdate * update . update . update on keeping things moving as driv- ers paused to gawk...
...His information doubtless comes from exiles in Miami and the U.S...
...We wandered the side streets and main thoroughfares of towns and cities...
...government had denied Minister of the interior Tombs Borge entry into the United States, where at least three universities had invited him to speak, among them Harvard...
...Nicaraguan radio transmitted the speech live with simultaneous translation and the text was printed in full the next day in the press...
...sions reached by our extremely diverse group...
...An impressive array of Nicaraguans and "internationalists," as foreigners working in the country are called, addressed us: Sandinista Youth representatives, a neighborhood Sandinista Defense Committee, laborers, union leaders, doctors, peasants, agrarian reform officials, a variety of leaders from the women's movement, a social worker, representatives of the Council of State, regional government officials, religious workers, both Protestant and Roman Catholic, and many more...
...On April 27, Reagan echoed the sigh of that formerly privileged, tiny minority...
...Horns honked, the victory sign flashed and fists raised...
...State power was theirs, but in many ways the struggle was only beginning...
...university professors in 1980 seeking to educate the public about conditions in Central America, the role of U S. policy and specifically about academic freedom in El Salvador...
...Peasants in the cooperative we visited, for example, carried rifles...
...They searched for solutions...
...These events make one wonder who has freedom of access to information...
...We tramped through the countryside to spend part of a day on a rural cooperative in Matagalpa...
...42 Somoza...
...We visited hospitals, cooperatives, day care centers, a working class barrio, libraries, a vocationNACLA Reportupdate * update . update . update (/2 Bluefields hospital--"a grossly inadequate 80-year-old structure"-is soon to be replaced by a modern facility...
...Despite a serious shortage of medicine, Nicaragua opened clinics throughout the country, increased the number of doctors and all but eliminated measles and polio through a national vaccination campaign carried out by the mass organizations...
...many support the revolution...
...downtown Managua remains in shambles...
...Miraculously, the Sandinista process of social change in the interests of the majority has progressed, despite incredible resources that 40 must be pumped into defending we going...
...He has never been to Nicaragua...
...Our expression of solidarity became a fraternal interaction between Nicaraguans and North Americans, well covered by the press (the opposition La Prensa, however, remained silent) and television...
...The Embassy, isolated by high walls, fences, barbed wire and imposing gates, has so succeeded in insulating itself from its environment that it might just as well be in Iceland...
...Seeing the country first-hand and listening to the Cold Warrior's characterizations afforded our group an indelible lesson in how rhetoric can shun reality...
...Death squads roam the countryside terrorizing peasants...
...Our hotel staff in Matagalpa had gathered to hear Reagan's speech transmitted live on Honduran TV...
...It introduced us to expanding health care facilities, a remarkable concern for education, a functioning agrarian reform that puts food on the table and efforts to provide social welfare services to ever larger numbers of people...
...We heard some complaints and even an occasional sigh for "the good old days of A Matagalpa cooperative farmer with his rifle...
...A few added Le6n and Granada to their travels...
...I recalled reading Joseph Collins' excellent study, What Difference Could a Revolution Make...
...Greeting us with a smile, he expressed the Nicaraguans' appreciation for our gesture...
...Their moonlight vigil followed a memorial service--the popular mass of Latin America's campesinos and workers-for Dr...
...New Hospital for Zelaya Inevitably we contrasted what we saw and heard in Nicaragua with what we had read about El Salvador...
...Socialism with an active private sector written into it," he called it, "a productive private sector...
...Realistically they recognized the many problems and challenges still facing Nicaragua...
...In a fascinating talk laced with statistics, Peter Marchetti, a U.S...
...People Hold Weapons Nor did we ignore the people in the street...
...Our delegates handed him the resolution we wrote protesting Reagan's speech as misinformed and calling for an end to U.S...
...Nothing the Hollywood actor read from his script reflected any of the concluE. Bradford Burns is a professor of Latin American history at the University of California, Los Angeles...
...al training center and a union hall, among other places...
...Still, anniversaries are a time for celebration, and the Nicaraguans have much to celebrate.The last four years have brought impressive gains in health care, education, popular participation...
...April 22-May 6, added their own where have we been...
...Gamble characterized Reagan's address to Congress as "one of the most balanced speeches I've ever heard a president make...
...We traveled from Managua to Esteli, Matagalpa and Bluefields to witness the impact of the revolution on differing geographic and cultural regions...
...The people hold the arms to do so...
...support of the contras, as counterrevolutionaries are known, disturbed them, but they generously differentiated between the actions of the U.S...
...After all, only the week before the U.S...
...Hunger stalks El Salvador...
...Still, we also encountered the disgruntled...
...where are reflections, which we offer here...
...These are the topics of these gains, debate in today's Nicaragua...
Vol. 17 • July 1983 • No. 4
