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Nicaragua and US Intervention

By John B. Elder

Esteli, somoto, Condega, Jinotega, Chinandega—the names of northern Nicaraguan cities torn apart in 1979 by the vicious air assaults of Anastacio Somoza's National Guard—now stand ready for another, potentially more destructive attack. The aggressor will again be the Guard, this time accompanied morally and materially by the "gringo", the American soldier. Let's examine how such a disastrous strategy is born.

Havana, Cuba: January, 1959: Fidel Castro marches triumphantly into the capital after six years of guerrilla struggle. A billion dollars worth of U.S. investment on the island is threatened. Castro is more interested in pushing ahead with the construction of a socialist state than in continuing to have Cuba bled dry by U.S. capitalists. The differences between Castro and corporate America have never been reconciled.

Santiago, Chile; September, 1973: Salvador Allende, democratically elected Marxist president of South America's premier constitutional republic, is machine-gunned to death in La Moneda, the presidential office, and Chile's experiment in social justice, already sabotaged by CIA intervention and multinational conspiracies, is crushed under the jackboot of General Augusto Pinochet Ugarte and his fellow fascists.

The U.S. was not prepared for Castro's wily maneuverings in Cuba following Bautista's overthrow. Opinion in Latin America was that the Cuban revolution was an anomaly and that it would not be repeated. The U.S. would be ready the next time.

In Chile, the left argued that Allende confided too much in the non-intervention pledges made by the Chilean generals. Allende disarmed the country before the revolution was consolidated, they complained. So darkness overtook Allende and his dreams of an economically independent Chile.

Nicaragua is acutely conscious of the dissimilar histories of her two Latin American sister nations. A popular insurrection, culminating in July, 1979, led to the defeat of the Guard and the exile of Somoza. The FSLN (Frente Sandinista de Liberacion Nacional) inherited a country heavily in debt. Nicaragua's industrial capacity was smashed, its farms were neglected. The Nicaraguan people were exhilarated by the removal of the feudal yoke imposed by the Somoza family since 1932, but there were tired too, and unsure how reconstruction was to proceed.

The year following the establishment of a Sandinista Junta was decreed the "Year of Literacy." Thousands of teachers, students, and office workers formed literacy brigades and spent long months in the countryside teaching the fundamentals of reading, writing and revolution to the 70% of the population which was illiterate. No longer would the city dwellers look down at their humble country cousins. From this encounter, repeated countless times all over rural Nicaragua, there emerged a determination that a free Nicaragua would be created. But no evolution is without its counter-revolutionary elements. Threats from "gusanos" (literally, "worms"), Cuban counter-revolutionaries are still a serious matter for Castro. The fascists in Chile, under the banner "Fatherland and Liberty" sowed the seed which destroyed Allende and his dream.

In Nicaragua today, the danger that the reconstruction process will be slowed or even halted is very real. "Somocistas," followers of Somoza (who was assassinated—"adjudged" say the Sandinistas—in Paraguay last year), including many exiled ex-guardias, long to return to Nicaragua which for so many years was their personal fiefdom. Honduras, Nicaragua's neighbor to the north, is infested with ex-guardias. The military governments of El Salvador and Guatemala, and the nominally civilian government of Honduras all look upon Nicaragua as a threat to their own repressive rule. And now, enter Uncle Sam, pushing aside the hard-earned lessons of Vietnam and picking up the Big Stick.

In this atmosphere it was natural and justifiable that the theme for the second year of the Sandinista government would be defending the revolution—"The Year of the Militia." The threats to Nicaragua are real and the response has also been genuine. Throughout the country, military training is preparing tens of thousands of Nicaraguans to fight against any aggressor who would seek to again enslave Nicaragua. These militia groups are especially active in northern Nicaragua where teachers and community workers have been killed by counter-revolutionaries operating from Honduras. So, yes, the country is arming itself. It aims to defend a revolution that was son at the cost of over 50,000 lives.

Since Somoza's overthrow the Nicaraguan government has not been able to open a constructive dialogue with Washington, mostly because of our leaders' paranoia regarding Soviet intervention in this hemisphere and a refusal to look clearly at the underlying social and economic issues which fuel popular movements in half a dozen Latin American countries.

The lesson for us is clear—a deadly combination of ignorance and misplaced machismo is leading us again to intervene in the internal affairs of a country that not only doesn't want our intervention, but which is prepared to fight us.

As veterans whose minds are clearer than those now shaping our foreign policy, the time has come for us to say that no one will benefit from our intervention in Nicaragua except perhaps the board of directors and the stockholder of a U.S. corporations and their Somocista lackeys. The Nicaraguan people are determined, as were the Vietnamese, that no imperialist power shall rule their country; it is unconscionable that we should threaten Nicaragua with any intervention, economic or military, with the pretense that our national security, "way of life," GNP, Chase Manhattan Bank, or whatever else is itself threatened.

NO NEW WAR IN NICARAGUA!

John B Elder

(The author is a Vietnam vet and member of the San Antonio VVAW Chapter; he also spent two years in Latin American as a member of the Peace Corps.)