 |
An Anthology of the Best Political Opinion and
Commentary
|
Daniel Ortega: The Washington Post's
Target of the Week
By Leigh Saavedra
(formerly writing as Lisa Walsh Thomas)
"I was provided with additional input that was radically different from the truth. I assisted in furthering that version."
Oliver North
The first time I saw Daniel Ortega, he was driving his black SUV down a busy street, his window rolled down against the heat and dust of Managua, his arm on the sill, exposed to the sun. I was in the back of a pickup truck with some other journalists and I stared in awe. He had one passenger, a smallish man. Nothing, not even a car window, separated the president of the country from the passers-by. Back in the U.S. this completely unprotected man was being portrayed as a tyrant.
My companions, mostly European, were amused to find me so shocked. But how could he be sure of his safety? I asked questions until Daniel had gone on ahead, changed lanes, and disappeared from our view. A vague refusal to believe what I'd just seen caused me to imagine Ronald Reagan or the newly-elected George H. W. Bush going for a spin, no bodyguards, no bulletproof glass. This, more than any other powerful, singular event is where my enlightenment about the U.S. media began. I knew they kept things from us. That's why I'd gone to Nicaragua to see for myself what the newly liberated Camelot experience run by young poets was like. I finally told my companions that a U.S. president in such a situation wouldn't last an hour.
That was sixteen years ago, my second day in Nicaragua, my first of two winters. Later I would meet and spend some time with this man so demonized in the American press. But then, and at this moment, it is enough to remember just one epiphany on a hot day, straddling the floor of the pickup and trying to shoot video, my vision of everything suddenly and permanently altered.
Yesterday, The Washington Post did it again, published a "warning" propped up by blatant lies that refer to Daniel Ortega as someone who tried to install a "Marxist dictatorship." It's an editorial in the October 3 edition, called "Nicaragua's Creeping Coup."
In the Post's own words:"MANY PEOPLE outside Latin America probably assume Daniel Ortega's political career ended 15 years ago when his ruinous attempt to install a Marxist dictatorship in Nicaragua ended with an election he decisively lost."
..."his ruinous attempt to install a Marxist dictatorship in Nicaragua..."
How daring can even an editorial be when it, without evidence, determines the policy of a new government to be "a ruinous attempt." Daniel Ortega never -- I can safely repeat, NEVER -- tried to install a Marxist dictatorship in Nicaragua, or anywhere. "Dictator" is one of the words in the semantics war that the far right has been waging for over twenty years now. The goal is to turn the country against a man and his philosophy, and whatever words can be injected into various diatribes and news pieces, is fair game, whether or not there is truth involved.
For the young, the seventies was a long time ago. Not for those of us who watched the decade's events and subsequently lived for any period of time in close range of them. 1979 was the year an IRA bombing killed Earl Mountbatten of Burma and exiled religious extremist Ayatollah Khomeini returned to Iran. We were all aware that year that Egypt and Israel had ended 31-years of animosity with a peace treaty, and the 18 members of the Arab league cut all ties with Egypt as a result.
A lot of things were happening, many of them portending the coming of a more frightening world. A malfunction in the Three Mile Island Nuclear Generating Station, the execution of Pakistan's former prime minister, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, for murdering political rivals. And in what is now an interesting coincidence in terms of our current problems, President Ahmed Hassan al-Bakr of Iraq named General Saddam Hussein as his successor, two days before the victorious Sandinistas moved into Managua.
With so much happening, with oil up to $23.50 a barrel (a 50% increase) and gold reaching $300 an ounce, the world wasn't on the edge of its seat when the dictator Somoza fled to Miami during the night of July 16, 1979, taking along the entire Nicaraguan treasury. As the people's insurgency reached Managua, Somoza's way of fighting had been to bomb his own city and, when that didn't work, to flee to the U.S. with all that belonged to his country. (He later left Miami and went to Paraguay, where he was assassinated.)
I have boxes of black and white photos I took in 1989 and 1990, showing the skeletons of buildings Somoza bombed. Better, I have a head full of memories and stories told to me by friends I made and people in the market I talked with. One is a great story just for the telling but also serves to paint a fair portrait of one extraordinarily heroic Nicaraguan in the last days under Somoza.
The late Dolma Sevilla, who came later to be a close friend of mine, supported her young sons' involvement in the revolution to free the people. One son was killed in Leon, and the other continued to fight, returning to Managua from the jungle. While Somoza was bombing his own capital and fighting was going on in the city itself, the Guards showed up at her door in search of her son Rafael, by now a known rebel. Rafael was not there. The Guards ransacked Dolma's house, looking in every closet and under every bed.
An hour after they gave up, having tracked a load of inimitable Managuan dust all over the house, Rafael, helped by two friends, staggered home and made his way into the house through the back. He had been shot in the arm, a nasty wound but nothing fatal. Dolma hid him and doctored his arm, shooing away the two friends lest they attract attention.
After another hour, the somocistas returned. Dolma's heart almost stopped. Rafael was hidden on a mattress under a table, with only one thin wall separating him from the room where Dolma had to meet the soldiers. She said later that she never thought, that she was just guided by God. She reached for her broom and opened the door.
Before any of the soldiers could say a word, she began screaming at them that they had tracked dirt all over her house, that she would have to wash every scarf, every curtain, that there were boot marks on her clean floors ... and somewhere in the screaming, she opened the door, broom in hand, and began chasing them, hitting them on their heads with the straw end of the broom while she admonished them to EVER dirty her house like that again. If I could have one video in my life, I would choose that it be of this short Indian woman with a two-foot braid down her back, chasing away the National Guard with a broom.
Rafael healed in time to get back in the fight so that he was able to taste victory. I later wondered, relentlessly, if he had any idea how close he had been to death that day his mother chased away the Guard.
The day after Somoza escaped Managua with his mistress and the national treasury, the ragtag Sandinista guerillas arrived in Managua, and this was a victory march where the victors were showered with flowers from young girls.
The exhausted but ambitious Sandinistas set up a temporary junta to govern while they studied and searched for the system that would best benefit all Nicaragua. In the junta was Daniel Ortega, a champion, fearless revolutionary who had been forced to sit out a portion of the fight in jail. Also in the junta was Violeta Chamorro, who would many years later be the U.S.' choice for Nicaraguan president. The junta examined the U.S. Constitution carefully, borrowing from Patrick Henry and adopting the slogan, "Patria Libre o Morir" (a free country or death).
And while the inexperienced members of the junta tried to manage the economics of a country with a completely empty piggy bank, volunteers from all over the world began to arrive, their primary purpose to join the Sandinistas in lowering the high illiteracy rate under Somoza, when only the rich attended school. An estimated hundred thousand people joined the endeavor to educate 400,000 Nicaraguans, and the end result was the plunging of illiteracy, over 50 percent under Somoza, down to just over 10 percent, such success earning Nicaragua UNESCO's Nadieshda Krupskaya International prize, in recognition of "the heroes and martyrs, the Nicaraguan teachers, and the international volunteers who gave so much to so many."
I wonder if anyone on the staff of the Washington Post is aware of that.
This is how it was, and the world supported the young new country whose first act was to abolish the death penalty. It was the first taste of complete freedom most Nicaraguans had ever had. There were others, however, who were not happy. Members of Somoza's National Guard, fearing trial for the years of terror, fled the country. In so doing, they left their homes and property, which were confiscated by the new government, as were the vast holdings of Somoza.
The problems in Nicaragua were economic. It was never a rich country in the first place and Somoza had taken what it did have. Further, its new leaders knew nothing about economics. As one example, they decided to use all the money they could get together to plant beans, to ensure a lack of hunger in the country. But when harvest time came, they realized they had not bought farm machinery required for harvest.
But through these trials the support of something that many likened to legends of Camelot grew, and more volunteers came from Europe and the U.S. to help people with small coffee farms cut coffee, the main staple. Later, when I was there, I never did put in my time helping out with a coffee harvest, but I met almost no one else who hadn't. In Nicaragua, you just aren't somebody until you've cut coffee.
Desperate for loans, Nicaragua was willing to accept them from anyone. The U.S. was wary, but the Soviet Union sent technicians and cash; Cuba sent doctors and professors who could train doctors and nurses. Though the junta had firmly decided on a mixed economy, with the state owning half the property, using it to provide the people with health care and other needs and with private ownership accounting for the rest, the U.S. media focused only on the vast amount of help that Nicaragua accepted from the Soviet Union and Cuba. Rarely was the help from European countries even mentioned. The picture presented was described more and more as "the Marxist state." Nicaragua used socialism in its best ways, to help the people, but in doing so they were going against the wishes of the U.S. So the wary animosity began to widen.
They were criticized heavily for taking almost five years before having elections, though it had taken the United States eleven years before the election of George Washington. It didn't matter; socialism in any form -- even with a mixed economy that allowed for free enterprise, even with health care now available that drastically cut infant mortality -- was not acceptable. The U.S. fear of socialism, even the word, is close to phobic.
For so many, socialism and communism were interchangeable words, so that when Daniel Ortega was elected by a large majority in 1984, he was simply "the Communist leader." This was the picture portrayed in the United States, always with emphasis on Nicaragua's close ties with the Soviet Union and Castro. The only acts to substantiate U.S. fears (and declarations) that Nicaragua would nationalize the economy, as had happened in Cuba after their revolution, were the encouragement of farm workers to organize under cooperatives on appropriated land. Private business not previously owned by the Somozas continued operations, and the private sector's contribution to the GDP remained fairly constant, from 50 percent to 60 percent.
Three years into the new country, still being governed by the junta, the "contras" were formed. They were first financed by Argentina and then by the U.S. CIA. Being a mix of guns-for-hire and former National Guard, the contras' method of attacking the new government was to mount raids in northern Nicaragua, particularly on coffee plantations and farming cooperatives. As the attacks of the contras became more numerous, U.S.-Nicaragua tension grew. The Sandinistas called the contras "terrorists" because many of their attacks targeted civilians. At the same time that human rights groups called contra tactics brutal and indiscriminate, U.S. President Ronald Reagan began to refer to them as "freedom fighters." According to "Americas Watch," the contras engaged in "violent abuses ... so prevalent that these may be said to be their principle means of waging war."
And yet, on TV sets across our own nation, we continued to hear about "the freedom fighters."
The contras were still attacking peasants in the north when Nicaragua held its first elections in 1984. Eighty-three percent of Nicaragua's 1.5 million electorate showed up to vote, though the most rightwing parties in the country boycotted the election. In the end, Daniel Ortega garnered approximately 70 percent of the vote, with Sandinistas running for seats in Parliament getting about the same. The Sandinistas encouraged foreigners to observe their elections, and there were 400 observers on the day of elections. The world, except for the U.S., declared the elections to be fair and valid.
With Daniel Ortega now Nicaragua's first popularly elected leader in decades, the U.S. increased its military activity in the region.
My personal observation of contra activity was minimal, but the horror of it was sculpted for me one day by a Maryknoll priest who showed me his strangely-architectured church. The bottom three feet were made of concrete cinderblocks, and the rest of wood. He explained that he had made it in the fashion of so many shacks in the north, where peasants had strengthened their little houses by adding cement blocks around the bottom. This was the documentation that I had sought for the rumors that the contras often surrounded houses at night, shooting through the walls to kill the occupants sleeping on the floor, many of them being women and children. His church stood quietly in the dusk that day, and it struck me that it stood as a monument, perhaps even a tomb. While I've never seen absolute proof of this brutality, the image of the soft-spoken Maryknoll priest and his church have stayed embedded in permanent memory.
Fear of a U.S. invasion permeated the six years when Daniel was president. When I was there, Nicaraguans loved telling two stories to do with the anticipated attack by the superpower, and I was entertained with them more than once. First, the Sandinistas passed out guns so that the people could defend themselves in the event of a U.S. invasion. Second, during the weekly peace vigil in front of the U.S. embassy, manned primarily by Americans living in Nicaragua, American citizens, remembering the U.S. invasion of Grenada "to save U.S. medical students," held up signs saying "Please don't save me."
I would ask the Washington Post to please explain the reasoning and trust of a dictator who would pass out guns to the same people who would later walk past him as he drove unprotected through the streets of Managua. I would ask the same newspaper why U.S. citizens held peaceful demonstrations before the U.S. embassy for years, always asking in various ways that the U.S. keep its hands off Nicaragua. Did they not, perhaps, know more of how the people of Nicaragua felt than did the Washington Post's man on the scene, if such a man existed.
The only reporter from a major newspaper I ever got to know never left the lavish Intercontinental Hotel. He slept there, read there, ate there, swam there, and drank there. Yet, in the interludes between swims, he sent in reports to his newspaper. Perhaps A. J. Liebling was on to something when he wrote that "Freedom of the press is limited to those who own one."
The U.S. never invaded Nicaragua militarily, but they imposed an embargo that was crippling and painful. While the most militaristic act, aside from funding the contras, was the mining of Nicaragua's harbor (for which the World Court condemned them with a steep fine never paid), the most damaging act was keeping needed medicines from a people embracing liberty for the first time in their lives.
I first tasted Nicaragua in the winter of 1989. The short story writer Flannery O'Conner said that if you live to age nine you'll have enough to write about for the rest of your life. I might say that in the one winter, before I knew about the second, I lived and loved and learned enough to write about for the rest of my life.
I returned the next winter for the second election. It was on that trip that I learned the real power of the United States and saw the use of it to control a small, powerless country's hard-won democracy. To relate all that was involved will take a Part II.
But now, before beginning that, I would once more ask the Washington Post to explain how, in any fashion, they dare call a popularly elected president who fought for the freedom of his country right alongside the people who would later vote for him a "dictator." How, when the rest of the world acknowledged the 1984 election? How, when the president and the other members of his government as well could walk among the people as easily and safely as I could?
As an aside and to shore up the realization that Daniel's driving himself as he did was not the lone proof of the people's love for him, I remember meeting Miguel d'Escoto, a Maryknoll priest who served as Foreign Minister (the equivalent of the U.S. Secretary of State). I was looking for sandals in a shoe store; Father Miguel, as he was called, was looking for some good walking shoes. We were two of the three people in the store. I was younger then and self-assured enough to introduce myself. We stood and talked for a good ten minutes. The following year, when I returned and traveled with the press on the campaign trail, I saw him again, and he remembered me by pointing a finger and saying, "Texas."
Beautiful, poignant times are awarded some of us, whether by luck or design. The beauty of what I saw in Nicaragua will never leave me, nor will the poignancy of seeing it eaten up by greed. Today I wonder how many drawing boards in the White House war room have stacks of Venezuelan maps on them. It seems to never stop.
Places like the Washington Post, with their seemingly small words, make sure it doesn't stop. As the old African proverb says, "Until lions have their historians, tales of the hunt shall always glorify the hunters."
Part II: "Daniel Ortega: A Victim of U.S. Power," will appear in next week's CRISIS PAPERS.
Leigh Saavedra, formerly writing as Lisa Walsh Thomas, has written all her life. Her second book, "The Girl with Yellow Flowers in her Hair" is available through http://www.whatIdidinthewar.com. She welcomes comments at saavedra1979 yahoo.com.