Comment
Letters to the editor should be sent to NACLA, 475 Riverside Drive, Suite 454, New York, NY 10115. They may be edited for length and clarity. No Denial I don't mind being the correspondent...
...Nicaragua, as you correctly point out, is another matter entirely...
...To say in passing that the OAS censure of Somoza was historically important is hardly to deny the role of the FSLN in the overthrow of the dictatorship...
...Manuel Antonio Noriega by pointing out that the last time the OAS censured a foreign leader, it was Somoza, and HE was gone within a year...
...government's propaganda arsenal...
...Gonzdlez couldn't find anyone from The Communist Party of Peru (Sendero's real name) to interview...
...Tom Gjelten Latin America correspondent National Public Radio Unintended as it apparently was, Tom Gjelten's remark did indeed illustrate a common tendency among reporters and policy-makers to view revolution--and all Latin American politics for that matter-as an elite affair...
...And your claim that my one casual reference to Somoza shows that I deny the reality of the Sandinista Revolution and am manipulated by the U.S...
...I feel strongly that NACLA owes it to its readers to at least try to present "Sendero's" point of view, especially in light of the rapidly escalating U.S...
...It seems that Ignacio Mena never played for the Senators...
...He played for minor league clubs in Galveston, Havana, Orlando and Dublin, before ending his career with Greenville in 1954...
...For the dominant political culture of this country, the conscious overthrow of the established order by a grass-roots mass movement is an alien and dangerous notion-one which is actively denied...
...Statements such as "Peru's Huallaga Valley in the heart of the Amazon is the bastion of Sendero Luminoso, the country's largest guerrilla movement, CONTINUED ON PAGE 12 CONTINUED FROM PAGE 2 known for its ruthlessness," feed right into the State Department's attempts to use "the fight against communism" as a justification to fund counterinsurgency campaigns against indigenous movements...
...It is very common for ex-players to boast that they played in the majors when they really played for a minor league team affiliated with a big league club...
...The point of the column was that this denial colors not only the images of Nicaragua put forth in the media, but the design of U.S...
...Milton Jamail Austin, Texas Apologies from NACLA's factchecking department...
...the Americas, I was more than a little shocked and disappointed after reading "The Real Green Revolution" [March 1989...
...military involvement in Peru under the cover of "the war on drugs...
...The Sandinistas were, as they claim, the vanguard force in Nicaragua...
...By referring to the Somoza censure, I was only pointing out that the OAS knows a loser when it sees one...
...policy...
...But he is is not listed in the Baseball Encyclopedia...
...I can't understand NACLA falling into this trap...
...The isolation of the dictatorship inside and outside Nicaragua certainly was a factor in its demise...
...You quote me responding to a question about the OAS censure of Gen...
...Gjelten's efforts to provide a historical context in his letter show up why his off-hand comment was eminently quoteable...
...But I wasn't even making that modest argument...
...Thomas C. Mountain Hawaii Black History Committee No Record I was fascinated to read about Ignacio Rodriguez-Mena Castrill6n's baseball career ["A Talk With the Dean," September 1989], as I am writing a book about the experience of Latin American players in the United States (titled Foreigners at Their Own Game...
...I am not saying don't criticize "Sendero," just try and present both sides...
...The whole article has only two footnotes, neither of which gives us any background on where Mr...
...If Rodriguez-Mena Castrill6n did play major league ball or even if he only played in the minors, it would be a great story to include in my book...
...government strikes me as both absurd and unfair...
...But no serious analyst of the Revolution denies the importance of the political and diplomatic struggle in Nicaragua in 1978 and 1979...
...How come Mr...
...I did not analyze the political situation there in my reports from Panama...
...Particularly offensive was the anticommunist thrust of Radil Gonzilez's "Coca's Shining Path...
...In mass media reporting, nothing has a context, or the only context is the United States' pursuit of "our" interests, one of which is certainly to assure us that revolutions never really occur.-MF No Anticommunism As a long time reader of Report on...
...Leaders of the FSLN and its supporters may rightly argue that the Revolution would eventually have triumphed regardless of the international support it received, but it would have taken longer had not the Nicaraguan business class, Mexico, the OAS (and eventually the United States) turned against Somoza...
...But then you leap wildly to the conclusion that my observation meant that I had written the Sandinistas out of Nicaragua's history...indeed, that I "fail to understand that there has been a revolution in Nicaragua...
...Only policymakers sufferingfrom historical amnesia and imperial blindness could believe that with $9 million they can buy enough votes to turn back the clock on Nicaraguan society...
...No Denial I don't mind being the correspondent you use to make a point about media coverage in Latin America, especially if the point is an important one, but I fail to understand how my remark in Panama illustrated what you said it did ["Taking Note," July 1989...
...Noam Chomsky and Ed Herman's latest book Manufacture of Consent goes to great lengths documenting "anticommunism" as a major weapon in the U.S...
...Gonzalez got his information...
...I have yet to see an interview with a representative of the Communist Party of Peru (Sendero Luminoso) or even with someone from what has been described as their "all-but-official publication El Diario" in any Left/ liberal or anti-imperialist publication (other than the Maoist press...
...Your logic escapes me entirely...
...Noriega's days are probably numbered, I said, because he is isolated even in Latin America, and the diplomatic isolation of a dictator often predicts his demise...
...I would expect to find something like this in Time or Newsweek or some other ruling class mouthpiece...
Vol. 23 • November 1989 • No. 4
