Casual
Casual Republicans and Campesinos In a dirt-floored, thatched-roof bamboo hut in the mountainous jungles of northeastern Nicaragua, a group of poverty-stricken campesinos were complaining about...
...When you go back to Managua," Padre Pedro said, "you will tell the world about the problems the campesinos are having in the registration...
...And she did...
...Scheduled to arrive for the second weekend of registration was Dan Fisk, another senior Abrams aide who now looks after Nicaragua and other Latin American countries for Senate Foreign Relations Committee chairman Jesse Helms...
...While the Sandalistas ignore the Nicaraguan peasants they once so adored, many of the same Republicans who care so much about the peasants of Nicaragua hold no similar affection for the peasants of Haiti, who voted in droves for Jean Bertrand Aristide...
...And I found young Republican volunteers dancing the merengue with the locals in Managua's restaurants, riding on horseback along the muddy trails of Nicaragua's rainy-season jungles, and floating down the Rama River on flatbed panga boats to reach the most inaccessible voter-registration centers...
...And guess what...
...Later that evening, the local priest hugged and kissed Maria DeCesare again and again...
...The Nicaraguan government knows it, too...
...To the extent that the Left cares about Nicaragua at all, it supports the Managua government and its sometimes repressive military...
...I discovered this rather astonishing anomaly as a member of a delegation sent to Nicaragua on May 30 to observe the first weekend of voter registration, a critical phase in an electoral process that culminates in presidential elections this October...
...My traveling companion was Roger Noriega, who had worked to win military aid for the contras...
...Casual Republicans and Campesinos In a dirt-floored, thatched-roof bamboo hut in the mountainous jungles of northeastern Nicaragua, a group of poverty-stricken campesinos were complaining about the government to a young American woman who was meticulously taking down their grievances in a loose-leaf notebook...
...Many reported they had walked for hours for the chance to register, only to find that registration materials had not been delivered and registration centers had not been opened...
...And it opposes as "interference" IRI's efforts to ensure that those peasants get a chance to vote...
...It was reward enough in this new era to watch Maria DeCesare give some poor campesinos hope of doing what many of their fathers and brothers had given their lives to do: Vote...
...There are probably no more than three dozen Americans who give a fig about the problems of the 400,000 campesinos of central and northern Nicaragua...
...He's now one of House International Relations Committee chairman Ben Gilman's top aides...
...Robert Kagan...
...But it had taken them only a moment to sense that this confident woman who greeted them in exemplary Spanish and gently requested permission to ask them a few questions had come to help...
...But enough of the search for post-Cold War consistency...
...Hence the cumbersome and inefficient ad hoc registration process specifically designed just for this region of the country...
...When did all these Republicans become such committed Maoists...
...The once-famous, campesinoloving "Sandalistas"-the Birken-stock-clad American leftists who swarmed around Nicaragua during and after the Sandinista revolution in 1979-are all gone...
...Elliott Abrams, that is, Reagan's assistant secretary of state for Latin American affairs and my boss as well during the ugliest days of the contra-aid battles...
...Ten minutes earlier, when Maria DeCesare first walked into this makeshift voter-registration center, the campesinos had been stiff and reserved...
...Along with the Carter Center, it spiritedly defends a flawed electoral process that seems consciously designed to disenfranchise many of Nicaragua's poorest citizens...
...There are no Sandalistas in evidence anywhere, from Managua caf?s to the dirt roads and small farms in the hinterlands of Matagalpa and Zelaya...
...Like Maria DeCesare, they're almost all Republicans...
...The contra force supported by these Reaganites in the 1980s turns out in retrospect to have been the spearhead of probably the largest peasant movement in the history of Latin America...
...As we traveled through the provinces of Matagalpa, Boaco, Chontales, Jinotega, Zelaya, and along the Coco and Rama rivers, it became clear to all of us in the IRI delegation that most of the 300,000-400,000 residents of this vast stretch of Nicaragua were staunch opponents of the Sandinistas, steady supporters of the contras, and likely supporters of the leading anti-government candidate in the coming elections, Arnoldo Alem?n...
...The observer mission was organized by DeCesare's employer, the International Republican Institute (IRI), and received vital support in Washington from a handful of Republican staff aides in the House and Senate-a dwindling but still hardy band of former Reaganites who were once described by Sandinista foreign minister Miguel d'Escoto as "robots of the maniacal Abrams...
...They lost interest in the peasant cooperatives over which they once swooned, when those very same peasants voted overwhelmingly against the revolution in the 1990 elections...
Vol. 1 • June 1996 • No. 39
