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Mayor and 'Foreign Minister': How Bernie Sanders Brought the Cold War to Burlington
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Aspects of the trip might have unsettled another visitor. A reporter who traveled with Mr. Sanders wrote of strict limits on the taking of photographs. At the anniversary celebration, a wire report described a chant rising up: “Here, there, everywhere, the Yankee will die.”
If Mr. Sanders harbored unease about the Sandinistas, he did not dwell on it.
“After many years of economic and political domination, Nicaragua is determined not to be a banana republic anymore, and it’s free to make its own decisions,” Mr. Sanders declared, according to a Nicaraguan newspaper, El Nuevo Diario, quoting him in Spanish. “Is this a crime?”
Unusual though it was, Mr. Sanders’s trip did not shock his constituents. His Nicaraguan odyssey was part of a yearslong effort to infuse local politics with international issues, and to transform Burlington — a once-sleepy college town on the shores of Lake Champlain — into a haven for left-wing activism in the twilight of the Cold War.
A New York Times review of Mr. Sanders’s mayoral papers – including hundreds of speeches, handwritten notes, letters, political pamphlets and domestic and foreign newspaper clippings from a period spanning nearly a decade – revealed that from his earliest days in office Mr. Sanders aimed to execute his own foreign policy, repudiating Mr. Reagan’s approach of aggressively backing anti-Communist governments and resistance forces, while going further than many Democrats in supporting socialist leaders.
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/17/us/bernie-sanders-burlington-mayor.html