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Children, Victims Of A Policy of Lies & The Almighty Dollar

By Mike Gillen

".... I Started Sobbing"

The image of a 13-year old boy dealing with the recent amputation of his leg in a military hospital in Jinotega, Nicaragua—it sticks in my mind, as do the images of children I once knew in Vietnam 17 years ago. Also maimed. Also old before their time. Also victims of a U.S. foreign policy based on lies and the almighty dollar.

If the North American people (as they are called in Nicaragua) could only see what their tax dollars are being spent on in Central America...

They'd see, as we did on the farm cooperative near La Trinidad, children scrambling into their bunker—where they've had to go several times in the last year, to hide, shivering, because of Contra "freedom fighter" activity in the area (which has included the killing of children in similar bunkers elsewhere in Nicaragua).

And I wonder...will any of these kids wake up screaming, in the middle of the night, years later, at the memory? Probably. These are the more insidious effects of Reagan's policy, of support for the Contra murderers.

Health workers, school teachers, coffee pickers, pregnant women, young children and old people. They are all fair game for the Contras who Reagan has called the "moral equivalent of our Founding Fathers." There is plenty of documentation and testimony on the nature of Contra brutality in Nicaragua. No wonder they can't hold any ground there; they are not exactly popular.

The most graphic signs of Reagan's War, of course, are in hospitals, civilian and military alike. A claymore does not distinguish between one and the other. And, thanks to Reagan, again, the Contras seem to have plenty of Claymores. Like the one the Secretary General of the Uno de Segovia Region showed us in Estel?, along with parts of an American helicopter that got shot down somewhere along the border.

The victims were there, with blood-soaked bandages, in La Trinidad and Jinotega. Sixteen-year-old. Fifteen-year olds. Fourteen-year-old. Some barely able to talk through the twitching of their young bodies.

The victims were there, too, in the modern military rehabilitation center we visited in Managua, where one young veteran showed us how he planed a block of wood with only one forearm left. And another did it standing on the one leg he had left.

Still, they gave us a pretty rousing welcome there and elsewhere. They are friendly, generous people who repeated over and over again that it's not the North American people that they have anything against: it's "your bad government." They know where to assign the blame for their suffering, for the needless war.

As Comandante Omar Cabezas told us in Managua in the Ministry of Interior building, "If my neighbor sends his dog over to bite me, I'm not ging to discuss it with the dog (read Contras); I'm going to take it up with owner (read Reagan)." Yeah, they know where to place the blame.

Perhaps the most lingering image for me, of the effects of Reagan's policy in Nicaragua, will be the faces of the war orphans. The ones we saw in Estel?, in the north, and in the little town of San Marcos south of Managua. They number in the thousands throughout the country. Oh, if I could bring them all up to stand on the front lawn of the White House for Ronnie and Nancy to smile upon...

It all caught up with me a week or so after getting back from Nicaragua. I was shaving, and I was thinking about those orphans Ron Arm and Bob Spicher and I visited in San Marcos; the one who kept coming up to us and saying—asking ?"Papa? Papa?" What the hell could you say—yeah, I'm your papa and I'm going to take you home, and everything will be all right? I couldn't say a damn thing. And standing in front of that mirror that day I started sobbing, and then the tears started rolling down my cheeks right into the shaving cream. It had been a long time. "Jesus Christ, what the fuck are we doing to those people!" I said aloud for only my cats to hear.

We've seen some of the effects of Reagan's policy in Nicaragua. You can only see so much in a week, but it was enough. It was depressing and it's still depressing. It was frustrating before we went down, knowing what those fucks in Washington are doing—or trying to do—with the funds they send either directly or indirectly (through Israel, for example) to the Contras.

But now that we've been there, and seen it, and experienced the warmth and hospitality and friendship of the people of Nicaragua, and enjoyed the beauty of the countryside—it's even more frustrating. Hopefully, no further funds will be voted, at least, for the Contras (this was written before the last donation of taxpayers money to the CIA's thugs). Hopefully there will be invasion of Nicaragua. Hopefully, the American people have learned something from Vietnam (the Nicaraguan people certainly have; as Cabezas told us, "We learned among other things, that you don't have to have fancy boots to fight a war...").

But, then again, all it takes is one fabricated "incident" to "justify" destroying Nicaragua further "to save it."

There's a fund-raising party in my neighborhood tomorrow night for the Bertah Calderon Hospital in Managua. I've been asked to speak at it. I think I'll be there....

Mike Gillen
VVAWNY/NJ