Fooling America; How Washington insiders twist the truth and manufacture the conventional wisdom by Robert Parry

Author:Robert Parry [Parry, Robert]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Public opinion -- United States, Elite (Social sciences) -- United States, Political leadership -- United States, Press and propaganda -- United States
ISBN: 0688109276
Publisher: New York : Morrow
Published: 1992-08-14T07:00:00+00:00

11 CW, the Sandinistas and Buzz Words

A sea of people waving red and black flags filled the central plaza in Managua. Five scraggly men arrived atop a fire engine. They were dressed in olive-green fatigues and each carried a rifle. Most were young and had lived shadowy lives until this point, the lives of secretive revolutionaries, in and out of government jails, lives under cover or on the run. The five Sandinista comandantes* were little known to their countrymen, except for the whispered legends of a nation undergoing revolution. But on July 19, 1979, they had triumphed over a brutal dictator, Anastasio Somoza Debayle, the last in a long line of family dictators, imposed on Nicaragua nearly half a century earlier by the United States.1

*The five original junta members were Tomas Borge, Eden Pastora, Jaime Wheelock and two brothers, Daniel and Humberto Ortega.

As these unkempt young revolutionaries were cheered by the jubilant crowd, the scene had the unruly vibrancy of an antiwar demonstration at a large American university during the Vietnam War. The Sandinista triumph looked, on a small scale, like what America might have resembled if the antiwar students’ youthful dreams of revolution in the sixties had somehow come to pass. It was, for Nicaragua, as if the SDS had taken power.

Like the student radicals in the United States, the Sandinistas were a mixed bag of revolutionaries—some Marxist-Leninist hardliners, some romantic reformers and some Social Democrats looking for a Nicaraguan middle course between a feudal capitalism that had failed in Central America and a communist-style system that would surely bring down the wrath of the region’s historic power to the north.

After the turbulence of revolution, a Sandinista-dominated committee of national reconciliation was established to put the Nicaraguan house back in order. While clearly under the thumb of the comandantes who had fought Somoza’s troops, the committee included at least the window dressing of moderate civilian representation. It was a profoundly divided coalition from the start, made more acute by the daunting reconstruction task before them.

The country had been devastated by an earthquake in 1972 and then the civil war. Somoza had drained the government’s treasury to finance suppression of the mounting dissent. And the wealthiest Nicaraguans, having learned from the bitter experience of the unprepared Cuban elite, had been quietly pulling their money out of the country and transferring it into a Cayman Island bank known as BAC International. As the political situation deteriorated and this monied class fled the country, their foresight would give them a nest egg for restarting their lives in Miami.

In Nicaragua, however, the daily struggle was to put the country back on its feet—and for the Sandinistas to show that their revolution would indeed make life better for the average Nicaraguan. Though unskilled in running a country, the Sandinistas had youth, enthusiasm and the sense that anything was possible. With help from idealistic Europeans and Americans—and the mentor of all Latin leftist revolutionaries, Fidel Castro—the Sandinistas mounted campaigns to eradicate illiteracy and expand medical care.

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