US bars Nicaragua heroine as 'terrorist'

[Englander]

Writers and academics voice anger as state department refuses visa
to let Sandinista revolutionary take up post as Harvard professor

Duncan Campbell
Friday March 4, 2005
The Guardian

The woman who epitomised the 1979 Nicaraguan revolution that overthrew the dictator Anastasio Somoza has been denied entry to the US to take up her post as a Harvard professor on the grounds that she had been involved in "terrorism".

The decision to bar Dora Maria Tellez, one of the best-known figures in recent Latin American history, who has frequently visited the US in the past, has been attacked by academics and writers.

It comes at a time when President George Bush has appointed as his new intelligence chief a man associated with the "dirty war" against the Sandinistas in Nicaragua.

A spokeswoman for Harvard University said it was "very disappointed" that she would not be taking up her appointment.

Ms Tellez was a young medical student when she became a commandante with the leftwing Sandinistas in their campaign to topple the dictator.

More at;
http://www.guardian.co.uk/usa/story/0,12271,1430305,00.html

[natrat]

1. wtf -negraponte-death squads

terrorism now equals democracy

[annabanana]

2. Negroponte is probably the reason..

I'm sick of being on the side of the monsters.

[leftchick]

3. no shit...

it seems like this administration** has gotten away with hiring EVERY fucking monster the US has. If Jeffrey Dahmer wasn't already dead they would probably have a position for him.

:puke:

[0007]

35. I expect to see Salvatore "Sammy the Bull" Gravano (John Gotti rat)

to become Negroponte's assistance any day now!

[Stephanie]

5. Negroponte for sure

buckle your seat belts

[pinerow]

4. I'm sure that she would pose a clear and present danger

to all those bright-eyed and innocent Harvard types...:wtf:

[EFerrari]

6. Negroponte is the terrorist.

The "dirty war" was not waged only against the Sandinistas. It was waged against ALL the people in Nicaragua. We set them back at least ten years -- diverting resources from infrastructure, education, healthcare. Sh!t, we disrupted supplies lines of food and medicine. Civilians got dead, wounded, sick and hungry. We waged yet another illegal war on an innocent people but she is a terrorist? Neocons at their finest.

Motherf&ckers. :nuke:

[Karmadillo]

7. Both Al-Qaeda and Nicaragua have three "a"s.

Do you really need any more proof this woman played an active role in the attack on the WTC? Don't be dupes.

[struggle4progress]

8. This is a Reagan-era tactic designed to ensure that the American public ..

... hears no "inappropriate" views from abroad.

[natrat]

9. terrra terra terrra

[Minstrel Boy]

10. Goddamn these fascist bastards

They deal crack with Contras, and embrace psychopaths like Orlando Bosch, and have the fucking gall to call Dora Maria Tellez a terrorist.



FYI, here's a brief Spanish Q&A with her from a couple of years ago:

http://www-ni.laprensa.com.ni/archivo/2003/abril/15/nosotras/enconfianza/enconfianza-20030415-04.html

"Sandino in his tom mix hat
Gazes from billboards and coins
'Sandino vive en la lucha por la paz'
Sandino of the shining dream
Who stood up to the U.S. marines --
Now Washington panics at U2 shots of "Cuban-style" latrines"
- Bruce Cockburn

[IndianaGreen]

11. American terrorism is good

Latin American freedom fighters are bad.

The US never barred the Somoza family, or the Batista family, or the Shah, from entering the US. We love our thugs and that's how we like it.

:puke:

Any doubts that the "war on terror" is nothing but a pretext to impose American oppression on the world?

[hector459]

12. So, if you help overthrow a brutal dictator we helped keep in place

you are a "terrorists." Now i understand why we label Castro a terrorist. I get it!

[plasticsundance]

13. Sssh ...

Fascism is on the March. Can we get some legislation going to have Bush banned from the US. We'll build him a home at Disney World when it is finally built in Iraq.

[gratuitous]

14. I was going to mention Negroponte

But I see that I was roundly beaten to it. Several times.

[Say_What]

15. This is becoming routine....

with anyone the Bushistas think will deliver the wrong message to muriKan sheeple. They refuse them entry. Most recently:

61 Cuban scholars

musians

foreign diplomats

gay couple

and they told us we lived in a *free* country!! LOL

[Moderator]

16. kick to combine

[chlamor]

17. U.S. Denies Visa To Let Nicaraguan 'Terrorist' Take Post At Harvard

US bars Nicaragua heroine as 'terrorist'

Writers and academics voice anger as state department refuses visa to let Sandinista revolutionary take up post as Harvard professor

Duncan Campbell
Friday March 4, 2005
The Guardian

The woman who epitomised the 1979 Nicaraguan revolution that overthrew the dictator Anastasio Somoza has been denied entry to the US to take up her post as a Harvard professor on the grounds that she had been involved in "terrorism".

The decision to bar Dora Maria Tellez, one of the best-known figures in recent Latin American history, who has frequently visited the US in the past, has been attacked by academics and writers.

It comes at a time when President George Bush has appointed as his new intelligence chief a man associated with the "dirty war" against the Sandinistas in Nicaragua.

<snip>

She later led the brigade that took Leon, the first city to fall to the Sandinistas in the revolution, and she is celebrated as one of the popular figures of the revolution. She became minister of health in the first elected Sandinista administration.

Last year Ms Tellez, now a historian, was appointed as the Robert F Kennedy visiting professor in Latin American studies in the divinity department at Harvard, a post which is shared with the Rockefeller Centre for Latin American Studies. She was due to start teaching students this spring.

The US state department has told her she is ineligible because of involvement in "terrorist acts". A spokesman for the department confirmed yesterday that she had been denied a visa under a section making those who had been involved in terrorist acts ineligible. He said he could not comment further on the reasons for the ban.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/usa/story/0,12271,1430305,00.html?gusrc=rss

[Fenris]

18. Sandinistas were terrorists.

Unlike those wholesome Contras...

[VegasWolf]

19. Boosh can't even spell PhD, much less understand what it implies. n/t

[chlamor]

20. She would poison the young minds

of the elites. They might stop thinking about consumption and begin to ponder the less privileged. God forbid they would see connections between the daily lives of the colonizer and the daily lives of the colonized. I suspect she is brilliant.

Wealth is the problem-Poverty its necessary offspring

[Judi Lynn]

21. If a majority of Americans finally start getting awakened and informed

about what has been going on during the soul-less agression of Republican Presidents, it's going to be a lot harder for them to keep pulling off this nonsense.

As it is right now, a lot of people get so overwhelmed by the elements of their daily lives, they've got little energy left over to start delving into educating themselves politically. They simply assume what they've been told is the truth. Very few people ever question it, although the broad opinion of politicians is really low.

There's not a lot of free world left, nor a lot of time, before our rabid right-wing tries to control it all. Hope something can shake them out of their American "dream" before it goes permently into the nightmare.

We won't be hearing THIS from our own media! From the article:

A number of academics and writers are protesting against the ban. "It is absurd," said Gioconda Belli, the Nicaraguan writer who was also an active member of the Sandinistas and is now based in Los Angeles. "Dora Maria is an outstanding woman who fought against a dictatorship. If fighting against tyranny is 'terrorism' how does the United States justify the invasion of Iraq? It is an insult."

Ms Belli, whose memoirs of her time as a Sandinista, The Country Under My Skin, was published two years ago, said many people were puzzled and angry about the decision.

Professor Andres Perez Baltodano, a Nicaraguan sociologist based in Toronto, said: "Dora Maria is as much a terrorist as George Washington." He described the taking of the National Palace as a heroic act which had helped to lead to the overthrow of a dictator.
(snip/...)

Thanks, chlamor. Great article. Odd, and sad outcome.

[Voltaire99]

28. Brilliant quote from Gioconda Belli. Let's weigh the moral value...

"It is absurd," said Gioconda Belli, the Nicaraguan writer who was also an active member of the Sandinistas and is now based in Los Angeles. "Dora Maria is an outstanding woman who fought against a dictatorship. If fighting against tyranny is 'terrorism' how does the United States justify the invasion of Iraq? It is an insult."

--

But of course the Sandinistas were deciding the fate of their own nation, as it falls to any citizen to do.

The US forces brutalizing Iraq are unwelcome invaders; the people want them out. Who is to say that a 19-year old American redneck shooting indiscriminately at anyone in Iraq has more moral authority to decide the fate of that nation than an Iraqi?

Bring the troops home. And, for a change, keep them there.

[Judi Lynn]

32. Here's yet another time line.After looking at a few of these from L.America

you start recognizing a very familiar pattern, unfortunately. It's an old, brutal story by now, in every instance.

Here's a look at the thirty years from 1967 to 1997:

1967 Somoza Debayle establishes a military autocracy, silencing his opposition through the National Guard.

1967 Somoza Debayle offers soldiers from his National Guard to fight in the Vietnam War.

1968 Nicaraguan functionaries, sent by Somoza Debayle, help overthrow Panamanian president, Arnulfo Arias.

1971 Somoza Debayle steps down from government, but retains the post, Chief of the Armed Forces. A governing coalition is formed, which is comprised of a Conservative and two Liberal executives.

1972 A devastating earthquake strikes Managua, leaving 6,000 dead and 20,000 injured. Somoza Debayle embezzles money from international relief funds. Martial law is declared; and Somoza Debayle is made Chief Executive of the Nicaraguan government. U.S. marines are sent to Nicaragua to insure Somoza's regime is instituted.

1974 Somoza is decreed president of Nicaragua.

1978 By the end of the decade, Nicaragua experiences an economic slowdown and circumstances are ripe for a revolution. Joaquín Chamorro, editor of the anti-Somoza newspaper, La Prensa, is assassinated. The public holds Somoza responsible. Led by the Sandinista National Liberation Front (FSLN), anti-Somoza guerrilla forces launch a violent uprising against the military. Nicaragua is plunged into a near civil war.

1979 The corrupt, repressive, US-backed dictatorship of Anastasio Somoza Debayle is overthrown and is succeeded by the Sandinistas. The Sandinistas will implement reforms that significantly improve social conditions. For instance, the literacy rate will improve from 25% to 80%, student enrollment will more than double by 1984, the number of school teachers will more than quadruple, and the percentage of people with access to health services will dramatically increase. An Oxfam report entitled, The Threat of a Good Example, on the Sandinistas will conclude in 1985 “In Oxfam's experience of working in seventy-six developing countries, Nicaragua was to prove exceptional in the strength of that government commitment .” This should be contrasted with Nicaragua's neighbors at the time ( Guatemala and El Salvador). which has “military dictatorships responsible for the sheer institutionalization of state terror, installed and propped up by the US,” the report notes. “Tens of thousands of civilians were regularly slaughtered by government death squads trained and armed by the CIA. The vast majority of the populations were impoverished.”
People and organizations involved Anastasio Somoza Debayle

1983 The CIA responds to the Sandinista revolution, under US President Ronald Reagan, by creating a paramilitary force to “stop the flow of military supplies from Nicaragua to El Salvador,” despite little evidence of this actually occurring. During the '80s the force mounts raids on Nicaragua, attacking schools and medical clinics, raping, kidnapping, torturing, committing massacres, and mining harbors. By the late '80s, the paramilitary force grows to around 50,000.
People and organizations involved Ronald Reagan

1984 US President Ronald Reagan publicly claims to end aid to the Contras in accordance with a congressional ban. However his administration continues the support, leading to the Iran-Contra scandal.
People and organizations involved Ronald Reagan

1984 Elections are held in Nicaragua and the Sandinistas win with 67% of the vote. International observer teams comment that they are the fairest elections to have been held in Latin America in many years.

1984 The Associated Press discloses a 90-page CIA-produced training manual called “Psychological Operations in Guerrilla Warfare” giving advice for the contras on political assassinations, blackmailing, mob violence, kidnappings and blowing up public buildings, and calling for “implicit terror.”

1985: FSLN's presidential candidate, Daniel Ortega takes office and declares a state of national emergency, suspending civil rights. The Iran-Contra Affair begins. This U.S.-orchestrated operation secretly channels funds to the Contras soldiers, which is in direct violation with the Boland Amendment.

1986 Nicaragua appeals to the World Court in The Hague to end US efforts to destabilize its government. The court rules in its favor, ordering America to end its interventionist policy in Nicaragua and to pay massive reparations. America ignores the World Court's ruling, not paying a cent and instead escalates the war.

1987 The International Court of Justice (ICJ) decides on the amount owed by the US to Nicaragua—$17 billion. The US continues to ignore the ruling.

1987 The UN General Assembly calls on the US to comply with the International Court of Justice's (ICJ) judgment that the US pay Nicaragua $17 billion in reparations. The US continues to ignore the ruling. The UN will repeat its demand the following year.

1988: Nicaragua is a disaster zone, ravaged by civil war and the onslaught of Hurricane Hugo. President Ortega agrees to the first round of peace talks with Contra leaders. A temporary truce is reached in March.

1988 US President Ronald Reagan announces that he will no longer seek military aid for the Contras.

1990 Elections are held in Nicaragua, and the Sandinistas lose to US-backed Violeta Barrios de Chamorro, after the US spends $9 million on her election campaign including bribing Nicaraguans to vote for her.
People and organizations involved Violeta Barrios de Chamorro

1991: The UNO coalition governs Nicaragua. They severely cut government spending on successful, Sandinista-led social programs in such areas as health care and education. On July 1st, right wing sectors attack Sandinista land reforms, which have redistributed land to small-scale farmers. The impact is felt across the nation.

1997: Arnoldo Alemán Lacayo, the Liberal Party's conservative candidate, wins the presidential elections- 49 to 39 percent over FSLN opponent, Daniel Ortega.

1997 Nicaragua is crippled by the highest per capita debt in the world. If the US were simply to honor the World Court ruling, the debt would be paid off three-fold.
(snip/...)

http://wherewearebound.typepad.com/in_our_name/nicaragua/

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Your suggestion concerning bringing the troops home and keeping them here is timely. We need to take a new approach to living with other people and learning to respect them.

[HysteryDiagnosis]

22. Lies, damn lies and statistics... statistically speaking, the U.S. may

have done more to further the activity of "terrorists/freedom fighters" than any nation on earth... oh the hypocrisy.

www.soaw.org
Fourteen human rights activists -- including two minors -- were tried in January in Columbus, Georgia's federal court for their nonviolent actions to close the School of the Americas (WHINSEC) in November of 2004. Eleven were sentenced to prison for three to six months. Last week these 11 received notice that they are to report to federal prisons around the country on March 15 to begin serving their sentences. Read more about the SOA 14 and ways that you can support these peacemakers.

[Jonathan_Hoag]

23. Are you trying to claim ...

that Sandinistas engaged in no terrorist activites while taking over Nicaragua?

And what is this woman's qualification to a professorship outside of history of political extremism? After the fiasco surrounding tenuring Ward Churchill as full professor and department chair with no qualifications whatsoever (he does not have a PhD and only has an MA in 'Communications', an unrelated field) I am understandably suspicious.

[chlamor]

24. Such Matters Are Unhelpful For Required Doctrine, Thus Better Ignored

Such matters are unhelpful for required doctrine, thus better ignored.

Once again, not a single phrase refers to the fact that, unlike the U.S. clients in the "fledgling democracies," the Sandinistas had not launched a campaign of terror and slaughter to traumatize their populations. Rather, as a huge mass of generally ignored documentation demonstrates, this task had been assigned to the U.S. proxy forces; this inconvenient fact...

<snip>

A year after these visits, severe malnutrition began to appear in Managua and parts of the countryside, as U.S. terror and economic warfare continued to take their bitter toll in a pathetically poor country, which, for obvious historical and geopolitical reasons, is utterly dependent on economic relations with the United States. George Shultz, Elliott Abrams, and their cohorts may not have overthrown the government, but they can take pride in having vanquished the programs of development, preventive medical care, and welfare that had offered hope to the poor majority for the first time. Their achievements can be measured by the significant increase in dying infants, epidemics, and other normal features of the "Central American mode" to which Nicaragua is to be "restored" by U.S. benevolence.47 The propaganda system may cover their tracks today, but history will render a different judgment.

Returning to the eighty-five opinion columns in the Times and the Post, even more interesting than the uniform hostility to the Sandinistas was the choice of topics. There are two very striking differences between the Sandinistas and the U.S. favorites who adhere to "regional standards." The first is that the Sandinistas, whatever their sins, had not conducted campaigns of mass slaughter, torture, mutilation, and general terror to traumatize the population. In the eighty-five columns, there is not a single phrase referring to this matter, an illustration of its importance in American political culture. The second major difference is that the Sandinistas diverted resources to the poor majority and attempted measures of meaningful social reform -- quite successfully, in fact, until U.S. economic and military warfare succeeded in reversing the unwelcome improvement in health and welfare standards, literacy, and development. These facts merit two passing phrases in eighty-five columns, one in a bitter condemnation of the "generally appalling leadership" in this "repressive society." There is no word on the fact that, unlike U.S. clients, the Sandinistas had protected the poor from starvation, eliciting much scorn about their economic mismanagement -- scorn that is withheld from Honduras, which permits peasants to starve en masse while exporting specialty crops and beef to the United States, and from U.S. policymakers, who imposed development policies on Central America that produced statistical growth (eliciting much self-congratulation) and starvation (about which we hear much less). There is also no mention of Sandinista efforts to maintain a neutralist posture -- for example, of the trade figures at the time of the U.S. embargo that virtually wiped out private business and helped reduce the economy to bare survival: Nicaraguan trade with the Soviet bloc was then at the same level as U.S. trade with these countries and well below that of Europe and most of the Third World.48

<snip>

http://www.zmag.org/chomsky/ni/ni-c03-s06.html

[AP]

25. "Understandably suspicious"? I don't understand.

Why are you suspicious of Harvard's opinion of what a scholar is? Because you're suspicious of whom U of C thinks is a scholar?

Huh?

[haele]

27. Dora Maria Tellez is a noted historian

and economic analyst. She has been the head of a URACCAN (Universidad de las Reciones Autonomas de la Costa Caribe Nicaraguense) Bibliographical Research Project. In 1985-90 she was Minister of Health, later she was Minister of Education in Nicaragua (through 1998).

She wasn't "just" a revolutionary commander, just as many of our early politicians - like President Monroe - weren't "just revolutionary commanders". She's highly educated and over the years has worked in high leadership positions with various governments and coalitions to attempt to bring a working economy to a ruined country. She's been published and is known as an informed speaker on Central American politics, welfare, and economic policies. I'm thinking that her activities alone since that little affair where she took charge and made a major contribution to the overthrowing of that petty dictator, Somoza probably qualify her for a position of visiting professor...

As for your other "suspicion" -

Yeah, the Sandinistas did some shitty things. The loss of non-combatant civilian life can never really be forgiven, no matter who had done it. Collateral damage is a difficult thing to deal with and should be avoided at all costs, no matter how hot tempers are flaring or how chaotic things are.
But from what I've seen - having spent a bit of time in the area - and from what I've heard from US forces that "trained" down in Nicaragua and El Salvador with Negraponte's approval, they weren't the worst by far - take a look at how the Somoza and the US backed Contras were raping that country and practicing coercive tactics in a method akin to genocide.
What the Sandinista had done in their revolution did was small potatoes in comparison.
Just remember that in situations where there is unequal representation in government - like any tyranny you can look at today - one man's freedom fighter is another's terrorist.
I'd hate to think that people like Noam Chomsky, David Hackworth and Howard Dean be as disregarded because they were nothing more than "mere <(sic)-punk> revolutionaries".

Haele

[Jonathan_Hoag]

29. Thanks for the info on her

Google didn't yield any useful biography of her...

[Say_What]

31. Check your history about Nicaragua. The US carried out terrorist

activities and devastated the country in the name of fighting *communism*. Just like they're doing now with Iraq.

<clips>

...He {Negroponte} also provided -- he was an ambassador in the Reagan years, ambassador to Honduras where he presided over the biggest C.I.A. station in the world, and the second largest embassy in Latin America, not because Honduras was of any particular significance to the U.S., but because he was responsible for supervising the bases from which the U.S. mercenary army was attacking in Nicaragua, and which ended up practically destroying it. By now, Nicaragua is lucky to survive a few generations. That was one part of the massive international terrorist campaign that the Reaganites carried out in the 1980's under the pretense they were fighting a war on terror. They declared a war on terror in 1981 with pretty much the same rhetoric that they used when they re-declared it in September 2001. It was a murderous terrorist war. It devastated Central America, had horrendous effects elsewhere in the world. In the case of Nicaragua, it was so extreme that they were condemned by the World Court, by two supporting Security Council Resolutions that the U.S. had to veto, after which, of course, they rejected the court judgment and then escalated the war to the point where finally the effects were extraordinary. By the analysis of their own specialists, the per capita deaths in Nicaragua would be comparable to about 2.5 million in the United States, which as they have pointed out is greater than the total number of casualties in all U.S. wars, including the Civil War and all wars in the 20th century, and what's left of the society is a wreck. Since the U.S. took over again, it's gone even more downhill. Now the second poorest in the hemisphere after Haiti and not coincidentally, the second major target of U.S. intervention in the 20th century after Haiti, which is first.

http://www.chomsky.info/interviews/20040607.htm

---

...Corruption, torture, and wholesale murder of dissidents continued for 45 years under two generations of Somozas, for after Somoza Garcia was gunned down in the streets in 1956, his son Anastasio Somoza Debayle took control. The Somozas plundered Nicaragua and became millionaires. The younger Somoza, "the vampire dictator," made $12 million a year buying the blood of his people and selling it abroad at a 300% mark-up, but his biggest single rip-off occurred in 1972 after an earthquake killed and wounded hundreds of thousands of Nicaraguans: Somoza had his National Guard seize $30 million in international relief supplies and sold them to the highest bidder. Near the end of his reign, he aerially bombed his own capital to stay in power, but he was overthrown in 1979 by a rebel group who called themselves the Sandinistas, after the revolutionary hero his father had slain.

http://home.iprimus.com.au/korob/fdtcards/CentralAmerica.html

[Vladimir]

33. And so what if they did?

the line between terrorist and freedom fighter is usually drawn at that point at which the interests of the third world cease and those of the West begin.

[Kimber Scott]

26. She will surely be better served elsewhere. A free country, perhaps? nt

[LynnTheDem]

30. If fighting against tyranny is 'terrorism' how does the United States

justify the invasion of Iraq?

Answer: It doesn't, as there is no justification, but the false justifications change on a monthly basis.

[ngant17]

34. maybe a proper protest would be to buy her book(s)

I couldn't find the author, Dora Maria Tellez, on Amazon so where would I look for that? Is there an English edition?

Call her a terrorist and putting a depraved man like Negroponte (who oversaw gov. terrorist ops in Central America) in an official position in US gov. is getting pretty twisted and sick. The hypocrisy never ends...