Kissinger and Latin America by Stephen G. Rabe

Author:Stephen G. Rabe
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Cornell University Press

Aggrieved U.S. diplomats and informed Nicaraguans understood that Shelton and the Nixon administration were ignoring a looming crisis in Nicaragua. When Governor Nelson Rockefeller made a one-day stop in Managua during his 1969 tour of Latin America, anti-Somoza elites complained to him that the Somoza-Debayle families had turned the nation into their private hacienda and controlled political life. Rockefeller recorded in his notes “tremendous dissatisfaction, bitterness, frustration, and hatred which exists in an important segment of the population under present circumstances.” After his visit, Rockefeller received a letter from Pedro Joaquín Chamorro, publisher of the opposition newspaper La Prensa. President Somoza permitted a modicum of free expression in newspapers because he understood most Nicaraguans could not read. Chamorro wrote that Nicaragua’s problem “centered around an annihilated, rotten, and obsolete political system.” Nicaragua’s expanding population of young people blamed the United States for Somoza because of the historic and continued U.S. relationship with the Guardia Nacional. Chamorro worried that frustrated young people were listening to extreme leftist voices. He explained, “The situation in our country is tense and I fear that it is nearing collapse more rapidly than some people suspect.”49 The U.S. embassy concurred with that analysis in the period before Ambassador Shelton arrived in Managua. Guerrilla activity had begun to increase in the northern mountains of Nicaragua.

In a momentous development, the inspirational leader of the Catholic Church in Nicaragua, Archbishop Miguel Obando y Bravo (1970–2005), turned against the Somoza regime. The archbishop was a moderate in both his political and liturgical views. He did not embrace liberation theology or all ideas inherent in the Medellín conclave of 1968. But Archbishop Obando y Bravo believed in democracy. Somoza was supposed to leave office in 1972, but he concocted a scheme to postpone presidential elections until 1974. In late November 1971, the archbishop announced that he would no longer participate in fraudulent elections. Ambassador Shelton predictably criticized the archbishop for not trusting in his idol.50 But the archbishop persisted. In May 1972 he issued a pastoral letter criticizing the government, and in July he addressed university students, telling them that “a situation of violence is crushing the masses.” He recommended that the students resist by adopting the peaceful tactics of Mohandas Gandhi and the U.S. civil rights movement. In October 1972, he explained his views to political officer Cheek, noting that the Church must stand up for the “little man” and that “the Church must fight injustice and other evils besetting mankind by peaceful means.”51

The beginning of the end of the Somoza dynasty began on 23 December 1972. A powerful earthquake destroyed Managua, which had been built on a fault line. Ten thousand Nicaraguans died, 70 percent of structures collapsed, and over 300,000 people were left homeless. The U.S. embassy collapsed, falling into a pit created by the earthquake. A staff member died at the embassy, but James Cheek would win an award for heroism from the State Department for frantically burrowing through the rubble, amid the aftershocks, to rescue an injured staff member.

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