The Nicaraguan Reality
Landau, Saul
books The Nicaraguan Reality NICARAGUA: REVOLUTION IN THE FAMILY by Shirley Christian Random House. 337 pp. $19.95. by Saul Landau The daily misreporting on Nicaragua over six years throughout...
...Parties do function, from billboard advertising to formal party congresses, but pluralism, to function, means integration of the diverse sectors of society in their work, organizations, schools, and social life around the goal of sane national development—a difficult task...
...Christian's thesis, like President Reagan's, is that inside the "family" one group of middle- and upper-class revolutionaries stole the revolution from another...
...It was a revolution facilitated by the conservative and libertarian opponents of Somoza, by priests, by business competitors and landowners, and by people who had risen out of the urban poor...
...I watched from the outset a revolution whose leaders, like almost all revolutionaries, were deeply influenced by Marx, Lenin, and Castro, and whose Nicaraguan nationalism was the dynamic factor...
...But what a high price Nicaragua has had to pay for this small U.S...
...Catholic priests and San-dinista militants who run government ministries and those who organize in the neighborhoods agree that their revolution is an attempt to allow the poor to gain a rightful place in the modern world, a sense of dignity, and a material base from which the spirit is enriched by plausible hopes and dreams...
...Reporters like Christian function in a psychological warfare context, which the Sandinistaphobes use to convert U.S...
...They attacked the sacred church, ran afoul of the Miskitos, alienated "pure people" (the market vendors), and destroyed private property, civil liberties, and democracy...
...Finally, Christian dismisses class conflict even as a factor in history-making...
...And what other government has offered real cultural autonomy to them, as the Sandinistas are now doing, despite their serious and irrevocable errors in that area...
...She also neglects the contras' impressive record of authenticated human-rights atrocities...
...She also assumes that U.S...
...troops sent in...
...property...
...The reality of guerrilla war is meeting and defeating—by demoralizing—the superior force of the enemy...
...She does not understand that it was the mistica sandinista that inspired the mu-chachos of the barrios to display extraordinary courage and will in confronting trained Guardsmen armed with tanks and armored vehicles, with artillery and aircraft...
...The revolutionaries, once embarked on their course of change, have had to face the Pavlovian counterrevolutionary response of the United States, which is now called "low intensity warfare...
...Sandinism is an ideology whose purpose is to allow Nic-araguans to reenter the course of history, to recapture their heroic past and their current natural resources...
...To label this revolution Marxist-Leninist is convenient for Christian, but it obfuscates Nicaraguan reality—a poor, un-dereducated, structurally distorted Third World land...
...Christian has produced a book that she could have ghostwritten for President Reagan...
...policy...
...In Nicaragua, Sandinistas and U.S.-backed contras are killing each other...
...Books like Christian's have become the propaganda part of this war...
...Compared to whom...
...The United States blew its opportunity to block the Sandinistas from taking power during the Carter years, and President Reagan has not posed the real issue for U.S...
...by Saul Landau The daily misreporting on Nicaragua over six years throughout the major media has now been recapitulated in a book...
...The Sandinista leaders are terribly human...
...It was not the masses," Christian declares, "but the economic and political elites who made it possible for the Sandinistas to march triumphantly into Managua in July 1979...
...Nicaragua is rife with contradictions, and the revolution has not been able to realize some of its goals largely because of the war supported by U.S...
...Indeed, the United States never cut off trade with him...
...What government in the history of the Western Hemisphere has devoted a significant percentage of its budget to the betterment of Indians...
...According to her, the Sandinistas manipulated, lied, and hustled for power from the outset and did little effective Somoza fighting "from their comfortable spots in the suburban hills" of Costa Rica, while their good cousins, the honest, decent middle-class businessmen, made the big sacrifices, bore the brunt of the real combat, and lost because they had the misfortune to believe in the Sandinistas' promises...
...You wouldn't know from Shirley Christian's description of life in modern day Nicaragua that La Prensa publishes every day and lashes out at the government in semihysterical prose...
...Now, the revolutionaries hold the reins, and that basic fact has produced irSaul Landau is a senior fellow at the Institute for Policy Studies in Washington, D.C...
...Ironically, in the seventeen pages devoted to "the baggage of the past," her main source is a former Somoza lackey who participated in the dynasty's corruption...
...At the same time, any romantic star-dust should be immediately rubbed out of the observer's eyes...
...To name it "totalitarian" is absurd...
...The mistica sandinista, blended with profound books cultural Catholicism, produced their unique ideology...
...backing, was the counterrevolution in power...
...Christian, however, downplays the war and places all the blame for Nicaragua's plight on the Sandinistas' evil internal policies...
...Marines had invaded Nicaragua in 1894, 1896, and 1899 "to protect U.S...
...The war superimposes itself on an underdeveloped society...
...Christian never mentions that intervention violates international law...
...In Christian's Nicaraguan family, the bad cousins won, and the good cousins were forced by conscience to join the contras...
...At the same time, they must offer the propertied classes continued incentives to keep producing...
...Christian's book is a kind of public relations job for this gang— and, of course, in the name of Nicaraguan democracy...
...The past to her is regrettable...
...And they have both admitted and paid for some of their mistakes...
...A 1985 Congressional Report discovered that forty-six out of forty-eight FDN military commanders (the major contra organizations) were former Somoza National Guard officials...
...Unlike Somoza, the Sandinistas must explain their policies using reason and justice as the criteria...
...National dignity, pride, and human rights are now assumed by the population...
...The government must be accessible and accountable...
...In 1909 opponents of President Zelaya...
...interference in Nicaragua before the Sandinistas...
...There are squatters all over Managua, refugees from the war, from the displacement caused by revolution...
...Somoza, with U.S...
...Indeed, according to Christian, Somoza was fashioning an agrarian reform, and, though authoritarian, he allowed his critics "a relatively large amount of space to act in public life...
...Once in power, of course, they behaved like rats...
...Christian belittles the role of the Sandinistas' National Liberation Front—the Sandinistas "probably would have become a footnote to history had a moderate regime been able to assume power in Nicaragua before the end of 1978"—and downplays the horrors of the Somoza period...
...There are shortages of sundry commodities, some goods are rationed, difficulties with transportation abound, corruption has been discovered in various sectors: problems everywhere one looks...
...And what united them was "Marxism Leninism," and when they split into factions in 1974 over tactical disputes, the archfiend of Caribbean Marxism Leninism, Castro, forced them to unify...
...He has just returned from his sixth visit to Nicaragua...
...Its human rights record compares favorably to its neighbors and to most of the Third World...
...Like all Third World revolutions, the Nicaraguan revolution dramatizes its uniqueness...
...Her family darlings, the Robelos, Caleros, and Cruzes, are not on the battlefield, and, should the contras somehow win through massive U.S...
...Christian draws a different, indeed a nasty, picture...
...The Sandinistas in the midst of war must also address a horrendous distribution of wealth and adhere to promises to build a more egalitarian society...
...They, like all revolutionaries, have made serious errors of judgment...
...Nor does she address the causes of U.S...
...Christian's history is a vague preface barely connected to the all-important current tragedy...
...opinion into an ever more hateful mind...
...Their war is her cause...
...You can't see the war from the streets of Managua...
...But look at intentions...
...Christian sees only the present...
...intervention somehow derives from natural law or is divinely ordained...
...revoltfed, which] set off a new civil war and produced the first direct U.S...
...In her desperation to influence policymakers, Christian omits basic and well-known evidence...
...reversible changes...
...Regional war could well break out, and, as House Speaker Thomas "Tip" O'Neill predicts, U.S...
...Then again, Somoza did not have many social obligations in his budget, nor did the United States finance a war against him...
...It puts on its front page stories that even the Reverend Sun Yung Moon's newspaper, the Washington Times, would be embarrassed to run...
...investment in violence...
...The revolution has committed itself to the notion of basic human rights, including the right to complain, without fear, about the government...
...In the streets, in the stores, in government offices, amidst the tension and excitement, people possess a quiet sense of security and dignity, one produced by the revolution...
...She ignores the dynamics of revolution, and of counterrevolution—which the United States forces into an armed struggle—and insists that the issue is simply good versus evil...
...Christian is the contras1 reporter...
...the new society struggles to emerge...
...These are serious charges, which, I believe, are called for because of the gravity of the situation in Central America...
...But the body bags—some 10,000 since 1982—keep coming back from the fronts...
...In Nicaragua today, the legacy of the old stares you in the face...
...Nicaragua is not a socialist Utopia, nor is it a viable model for other nations at this point—thanks in large part to Reagan's war...
...Like Fidel Castro's guerrillas, the Sandinistas won their legitimacy by confronting the "invincible" military power of the tyrant...
...The Nicaraguan revolution, like other Third World dramas, was and is a class struggle as well as an attempt to reconquer sovereignty and thereby control the course of the future...
...Her Sandinistas are raa-neuverers, petty power-seeking scoundrels who used other people, from Sandino through the late Pedro Joaquin Chamorro, to realize their one goal: power...
...The struggle over the political and economic structures of Nicaragua that followed the fall of Somoza was among these people, not between rich and poor...
...Solutions appear to be less abundant...
...The unfortunate effect of this kind of contextually misleading reporting becomes even more pernicious when transferred into the policy arena...
...The business part of Christian's family is and will be the cosmetic face for the ex-Somoza Guard that commands the guns...
...rather, she assumes, like the Kissinger Commission, that intervention has been axiomatic, and not that important...
...policy: the internal repressive policies of the Sandinistas who have attacked their democratic opponents because they "intended to establish a Leninist system from the day they marched into Managua...
...intervention, they will still not have power—only the facade of it...
...And that Sandinista mountain veterans organized the battles for the cities and led the muchachos...
...the Sandinista Party, the FSLN, while committed to its "vanguard" role, maintains its apparently contradictory pledge to allow political pluralism...
...military intervention...
...In fact, according to the State Department, U.S...
...One walks around Managua without fearing arrest, or the consequences of direct critical speech...
...Christian shows no interest in the structural deformities of Nicaragua, no concerns that its national sovereignty existed in name only, that the United States had established a de facto protectorate over the country since the 1890s...
...The Nicaraguan reality I have seen is exactly the opposite of Christian's...
...The author, Shirley Christian, might one day feel ashamed of herself, for she has done a disservice to journalism, has further poisoned already contaminated policy arguments, and has contributed, knowingly or not, to the Reagan Administration's disinformation campaign against Nicaragua...
...In some ways, material conditions may be worse than they were under the Somoza regime...
Vol. 49 • November 1985 • No. 11
