Oliver's Twist by Craig Oliver

Author:Craig Oliver [Oliver, Craig]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: PENGUIN GROUP (CANADA)
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

Nicaragua was a very different story. There the United States had no puppet government in place, and although the Sandinista regime was Marxist, the Reagan administration did not view it as a major continental threat. Consequently, it attracted less attention from the American media. As a Canadian crew, however, we visited frequently. Various Canadian aid groups and the Canadian Catholic church had been active there for years, and a number of Nicaraguans had attended Canadian schools.

It was difficult not to have some respect and even sympathy for the Sandinistas. In 1979 they had overthrown one of the most hated and repressive military regimes in the Americas, that of Anastasio Somoza Debayle. When it became known that Somoza and his cronies had pocketed millions in foreign aid following the country’s devastating 1972 earthquake, Somoza’s government lost any remaining moral authority in the eyes of the world and was eventually abandoned by the U.S. government under Jimmy Carter.

Prior to the successful revolution, the Sandinista National Liberation Front, a coalition of socialist groups, had conducted a guerrilla campaign of strikes, hostage takings, and armed insurrection against the Somoza regime. When the guerrillas finally took control, the country was in economic ruin. Among the new regime’s first programs were land reform, grassroots political organization, and measures to improve literacy, health care, and working conditions.

The Sandinista leadership was a mix of dedicated Marxists, practical socialists, and leftist intellectuals. By 1982 they had imposed so-called emergency security measures that the Reagan administration pointed to as a pure Communist dictatorship. It was true that Fidel Castro was a hero to many of them, but the Sandinistas never adopted the nation-as-prison pattern of the Soviet Union. They jailed the noisiest of their political opponents and were not particularly gentle, but they didn’t routinely murder them. A degree of open criticism of the government was permitted, including an opposition newspaper.

The leadership did, however, accept military and economic aid from the Soviet Union. For that reason, the Reagan administration hoped to contain and even squash the Sandinistas before they spread the Communist contagion to other Latin American countries. The United States imposed a harsh economic embargo and in effect bought itself a counter-revolutionary army, the Contras, to wage another guerrilla war in the country. Congress prohibited federal government funding of the Contras in 1983, but the administration continued to finance its dirty work through such covert schemes as the sale of arms to Iran. The revelations surrounding the Iran-Contra Affair were the low point of Reagan’s time in office, though he himself preserved a deniability of the essential details. The Contras never succeeded, and in 1984 the Sandinistas gained the legitimacy of election victory under their bespectacled, intellectual guerrilla leader, Daniel Ortega.

We in the CTV crew covered those elections and were moved by the turnout of thousands who lined up in the hot sun to cast ballots. One night the Contras attacked our hotel, the site of the government’s election headquarters, with small arms fire. I threw my mattress against the balcony window to protect myself from shards of glass if the room was hit.

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