From the Left by Bill Press

Author:Bill Press
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: St. Martin’s Press

EYEWITNESS IN NICARAGUA

At the time, one story that interested me greatly was Nicaragua, where the Sandinistas under Daniel Ortega had overthrown American-backed dictator Anastasio Somoza. Now the right-wing Contras, allegedly with American assistance, were in turn trying to oust the Sandinistas.

After commenting on the war in Nicaragua and attending several meetings with Southern California peace activists—including businessmen Harold Willens and Aris Anagnos, Rabbi Leonard Beerman, producer Lila Garrett, and former priest Blase Bonpane, head of the Office of the Americas—I asked news director Dennis Swanson for permission to travel to Nicaragua with a video camera and report on the conflict.

Swanson agreed, but first I had to figure out how to get there. Problem solved when I spotted an ad in The Nation magazine for educational trips to Nicaragua led by one Alice McGrath of Ventura County. I called Alice and signed up for her next trip. But first, she said, it was important the two of us meet privately.

A week later, in the coffee shop of the Burbank airport, Alice told me that, early in her career, she’d been a member of the Communist Party. As a TV journalist, she wanted me to know that and would understand if I backed out of the trip. Even though she was the first “Communist” I’d ever met, I assured her I’d have no trouble traveling with her. After all, I’d often been accused of being a “fellow traveler” myself. And Alice proceeded to tell me her amazing story.

She was the very Alice McGrath of Zoot Suit fame. In 1942, Alice had been hired by attorney George Shibley to assist in the defense of twenty-two Mexican American youths charged with murdering a farmworker near Sleepy Lagoon in Los Angeles County. After all twenty-two were convicted and sent to San Quentin State Prison, Alice worked with the renowned journalist Carey McWilliams, executive secretary of the Sleepy Lagoon Defense Committee, making speeches, writing articles, and raising funds in support of the group—all of whom were eventually released after an appeals court ruled they’d been wrongly convicted on insufficient evidence. Alice’s role in the Sleepy Lagoon case was the focus of Zoot Suit, the highly successful play (1978) and movie (1981) by Luis Valdez.

Alice later moved to Ventura County, where she founded a pro bono legal defense committee, earned herself a brown belt in judo, and became a peace activist—or, as she called herself, a “Sandinista in exilo.” In spring 1986, our group, the eighty-sixth mission she’d led to Nicaragua, included Irish American actress Fionnula Flanagan and Lydia Brazon, a Nicaraguan American from Los Angeles with important high-level contacts in the Sandinista government.

In Managua, we met several top Sandinista officials, including interior minister Tomás Borge. We also met with business leaders, teachers, and mothers who’d lost their sons in the Contra war. We traveled to Estelí, where you could still see bullet holes from the revolutionary war in the walls of downtown buildings. In the beautiful mountain town of Matagalpa, we ran across Los Angeles contractor

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