Daniel Ortega:
The Washington Post's Target Of The Week
By Leigh Saavedra
05 October, 2005
Crisis Papers
"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. Libeling 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."
"Originally
published in 'Crisis Papers,' October 3, 2005"/
Part II: "Daniel
Ortega: A Victim of U.S. Power," will appear in next week's CRISIS
PAPERS.
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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.