Reply #2: What Everyone Should Know About Nicaragua [View All]

[Karmadillo]

http://www.commondreams.org/views01/1107-04.htm

What Everyone Should Know About Nicaragua
by Mark Weisbrot

The United States' first post-September 11 foray into Latin American politics—in Nicaragua's election—provides a glimpse of how Washington's new "counter-terrorism" policy may play out in this region.

Conservative candidate Enrique Bolanos defeated the Sandinistas' Daniel Ortega, in an election that had been cast as too close to call. US officials publicly warned against a Sandinista victory, accusing them of "links to terrorism," and openly supported Bolanos.

But to understand the meaning of these events, we need a bit more history than most press accounts are providing.

The Sandinistas took their name from Augusto Cesar Sandino, a Nicaraguan who led a guerilla war from 1927-33 against US Marines who had invaded his country. The Marines finally left in 1933, but not before setting up a National Guard, led by Anastasio Somoza Garcia, to run the country. Sandino was murdered by the Guard, and Somoza established a family dictatorship that ruled the country with US support until the Sandinista-led revolution in 1979.

When Anastasio Jr. fled to Miami—our haven for retired dictators—in 1979, Nicaraguans celebrated the departure of "the last Marine." Tens of thousands of people had been killed in the insurrection, as Somoza's air force bombed poor residential neighborhoods of Managua, figuring that all of the people living there were his enemies.

Partly because of the church-based, pacifist background of the organizations that joined their movement, the Sandinistas broke with the pattern of modern revolutions and rejected vengeance. They set a 30-year maximum sentence, even for the most vicious of their former tormentors and torturers.

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