EDUARDO GALEANO In Defense of Nicaragua

...We are forced to die and we are forced to kill," T6mas Borge, founder of the Sandinista Front has explained...

...Not all the carnival masks in the world are enough to cover up so much hypocrisy...

...they aren't Business Fighters, but Freedom Fighters, heroes of a threatened civilization, Western Civilization, which, on the eve of the Apocalypse, turns to God and to the Rambos it can pay...

...Everything that is happening in 9 Nicaragua has been reduced to the geopolitics of blocs, a game of East versus West: the blame belongs to Moscow, which is sticking its nose in where it doesn't belong, and, in that way, is changing the delicate balance of power that guarantees world peace...

...Ambiguity and fog have become fashionable now, and taking sides is considered a sign of stupidity or poor taste...

...Those who deny Nicaragua bread and butter condemn her for receiving them...

...The final volume of his trilogy, Memory of Fire, will be published by Pantheon Books this spring...

...If it survives, let it survive mutilated, and mutilated in its essential parts...

...The contras are not, therefore, mere paid mercenaries working for the restoration of the colonialist past and a dethroned dynasty...

...There is no government in the Americas or in Europe, democracy or dictatorship, democraship or dictatorcy, that doesn't feel authorized to propose, discuss, and perhaps impose some kind of solution for the problem of Nicaragua, which is the same thing as saying the problem of Central America...

...Uruguay, a respected democracy, spends the same percentage on its armed forces, much smaller than the swelling columns of militia and people's army in Nicaragua, and it should be noted that no foreign power is invading Uruguay or threatening it on its frontiers...

...The people used to be very poor and they are still very poor, but something, something essential, has been changed...

...For most Americans, Nicaragua has not been invaded but is the invader...

...Relief for cynics, consolation for deserters, alibi for the greedy: let no one bother himself with the belief that change is a possible venture...

...They are not taking place because Nicaragua is a satellite, a sad pawn on the chessboard of the great powers, but so it may be one again...

...Since the fall of Somoza, Nicaragua has redistributed more land than all other Central American countries put together through a prudent but true agrarian reform that has limited itself to the expropriation of non-productive lands and those that had belonged to the ruling dynasty...

...Calling for a change is permitted, proclaiming it to the sky may even turn out necessary, but making a change, transforming reality, that scandalizes the gods...

...Since wiping it out is impossible because it would imply the extermination of the majority of the population, the system tries to deform it at least...

...These words I put down here, which have nothing neutral about them, are an attempt to give some of that help, even though it be of small import...

...they don't perceive her as a poor colony trying to be a country, but as a mysterious and dangerous power, threatening, lying in wait on the border...

...Honest opponents, and they do exist, would have to recognize, at least, that during these eight years the Sandinista revolution has done the possible ano 'the impossible in laying the bases of justice and sovereignty necessary for democracy not to be a castle in the air, not to be a pro forma tax paid to the reigning hypocrisy, a joke on people who have nothing and decide nothing...

...Those who condemn Soviet aid in the name of independence would do better to work for some other aid so as to broaden the freedom of movement of this young and besieged revolution...

...Ever since it became rather clear that the Sandinista revolution was serious and that it planned to break out of the straitjacket of neo-colonialist capitalism, the system made up its mind to wipe it out...

...The four points of the compass are regaled once more with the cruel story of another revolution that has betrayed its aspirations...

...Few, very few Americans have been there and have seen the reality: that in all of Nicaragua there's only one skyscraper, five elevators, and one escalator (which hasn't been working for over a year), that there are fewer Nicaraguans than there are inhabitants of the borough of Brooklyn in New York, and that because of hunger and disease they live twenty years less than if they'd been born in the United States...

...it has taught reading and writing in indigenous languages and in English to 50,000 people...

...For the first time in its history it has taught the population to read and write, and not only the Spanish-speaking population...

...monies of official political life are projected, like the deceitful shadows of a magic lantern, over the background of an atrociously anti-democratic social reality...

...Approximately five million acres have been turned over to a hundred thousand families...

...They are not taking place because a dictatorship exists in Nicaragua, but so one may again...

...they have a right to an echo but not to a voice...

...Nicaragua is not looking for walls to hide behind, but it needs shields with which to defend itself...

...Nicaragua is part of the Third World...

...Nicaraguans are, therefore, third-class people...

...Nicaragua used to be a country of illiterates, and today one out of every three Nicaraguans is studying...

...With or without a dictatorship, in most Latin American countries the people vote but don't elect, and the cereJANUARY/FEBRUARY 1988 Eduardo Galeano is an Uruguayan author and journalist...

...From the point of view of the opinion makers, they don't deserve respect: third-class people are condemned to copy...

...This propaganda wears the mask of disappointment...

...Nicaragua spends 40% of its budget on defense and police, but Nicaragua is at war with the leading power in the world...

...Everybody has been giving Nicaragua the Democracy test...

...And although it is quite true that the rules of war impose an inevitable verticalism, and in the trenches orders take the place of explanations, it is no less true that an armed people is a proof of democracy...

...Deforming the revolution would be, in the end, wiping it out: deforming it to such a degree that no one could recognize himself in it...

...The fact that there are three hundred thousand Nicaraguans, soldiers and militiamen, armed with rifles, some in exchange for a meager salary and the majority in exchange for nothing, shows that this strange Sandinista tyranny is not afraid to arm the people, who, according to the enemy, are anxious to overthrow it...

...But this writer feels a joy in choosing and he confesses to being one of those antique creatures who still believe that joy gives meaning to the mysterious adventures of the human animal on this earth...

...It gives the impression that when it took on the transformation of Nicaragua, the Sandinista revolution had brought about an unforgiveable cataclysm that challenges the powerful and violates the law of universal balance: if it weren't for Nicaragua, Central America would be enjoying peace and happiness, or, at least, would cease disturbing the good order of the world...

...Now, for the first time, they are doing something, and for the first time they believe in what they are doing...

...Armed resistance to aggression reveals in a painful way the collective dignity of a people forced into violence from without...

...Nicaragua has put an end to poliomylitis and has reduced other illnesses, has vaccinated the entire population and has lowered infant mortality to such a degree that today one out of three of the children who had previously died shortly after entering the world has survived...