In 1979, a popular revolutionary movement led by the Sandinista party (FSLN) overthrew the Somoza dictatorship but not before Somoza’s national guard destroyed one-third of the farmlands, hundreds of factories and smaller work places, utility plants, and thousands of homes; 50,000 people were killed (mostly by Somoza’s forces); 160,000 were wounded or maimed; 40,000 children were orphaned—out of a population of 2 million.2
In 1984, after five years of Sandinista rule, infant mortality dropped to the lowest in Central America; unemployment declined from 60 to 16 percent, while inflation was reduced from 84 to 27 percent. The portion of the national budget spent on health increased 600 percent. Staple foods consumption increased 30 percent. Rural clinics, free hospitals, and vaccination campaigns produced a 50 percent drop in malaria. These medical services, along with an improved diet, brought a dramatic decline in children’s diseases. Land was distributed to more than 40,000 families and to farm cooperatives. Over 85 percent of the population was now able to read and write at third-grade level or better.3
Like the Allende government in Chile, the FSLN in Nicaragua incurred the ire of US leaders not because it was a failure but because it was beginning to succeed in ways that were inimical to the interests of wealthy owners and corporate investors, most of whom believed that if rolling back poverty was to be accomplished by infringing on their class privileges, then poverty would have to stay put.
The Reagan administration cut off all aid and trade to Nicaragua, imposing a crippling economic embargo on that country. US forces mined Nicaragua’s harbors, blew up its oil depots, and openly armed, trained, and financed a mercenary army of “contras,” who engaged in a premeditated war of bloody attrition to terrorize civilian noncombatants. US fleets stood at the ready off both Nicaraguan coasts and US planes regularly invaded that country’s air space. President Reagan said he wanted the Sandinistas to cry “uncle” and Secretary of State Shultz promised to “cast out” the Sandinistas from “our hemisphere.” Yet, in 1984, when Managua charged that Washington was pursuing a policy of aggression against Nicaragua and was planning an invasion, ABC News dismissed this as “the Sandinista paranoia” and the Washington Post, as “Nicaraguan paranoia.”4 The paranoia diagnosis was inadvertently put to rest in June 1985 when Reagan and Shultz both announced that the United States might have to invade Nicaragua before too long.
US leaders sold their interventionist policy to the American public by wrapping themselves in the mantle of peace and democracy. First, they claimed they were intervening in Nicaragua to “interdict” Sandinista weapons that supposedly were being sent to the Salvadoran rebels—even though the arms were flowing the other way, from El Salvador to the US-supported contras. Then, they claimed it was to prevent the Sandinistas from carrying out a plan of aggression against its neighbors. Next, it was to force democratic reforms within Nicaragua. “Even a cub reporter grows skeptical about a courtroom defendant who continually changes his alibi. Yet many veteran journalists hardly blinked at the ever-changing rationale invoked to justify U.S. support for the contras.”5 Each day the White House, State Department, and Pentagon flooded the news media with scores of press releases, briefings, leaks, staged events, and interviews, saturating a receptive press with anti-Sandinista propaganda.6
While the US media uncritically disseminated the White House’s charges of Sandinista “totalitarianism,” elections were held in Nicaragua in 1984. Seven parties ran for seats in the National Assembly and for the presidency, representing a broad ideological range from left to right. Regardless of size, all parties enjoyed relatively easy ballot access, public financing of 12 million cordobas (about $431,000), and an equal amount of time each day on the state-run radio stations and television channels. Each party was also permitted to receive unlimited funds from private donors, including organizations outside Nicaragua, a provision that worked to the advantage of the more affluent conservative candidates. Some 460 official foreign observers from all over the world, who were free to check all aspects of the voting process and ballot counting, agreed that with the exception of a few incidents, the campaign was fair, honest, and noncoercive.7
Yet these democratic efforts won scant and skeptical coverage in the US media. The impression left by the media was that if the FSLN were to win, then the election simply could not be considered democratic. Stories carried in the New York Times were typically headlined “SANDINISTAS MAY WIN BIG IN ELECTIONS BUT AGAINST WHOM?” and “GOING THROUGH THE MOTIONS IN NICARAGUA,” the gist of these articles being that the election was somehow rigged by the Sandinistas.8 A Washington Post story, headlined “CONTROVERSIAL VOTE SET TODAY IN NICARAGUA,” emphasized the “pervasive presence in the society” of FSLN supporters, thereby treating Sandinista popularity as a sign of undemocratic political monopoly. 9 The Sandinistas won the 1984 election with almost 65 percent of the vote, while two conservative parties gleaned 13 percent and 9 percent, respectively. Since the National Assembly had proportional representation, the minority parties were assured of seats. Ignoring the realities of Nicaragua’s election, an editorial in the New York Times several months later attacked the Sandinistas for refusing “to subject their power to the consent of the Nicaraguan people.”10
LOOKING ONE WAY FOR SUPPRESSION
The same US press that uttered nary a word about restrictions on press freedom in pro-capitalist states throughout Latin America, Asia, and Africa seemed preoccupied with the subject in regard to Nicaragua. The New York Times, for instance, ran over sixty articles in the mid1980s critical of the Sandinista government on this issue. But the violent extermination of two Salvadoran dailies, La Cronica and El Independiente, earned only three passing references in the Times and was virtually ignored by the rest of the US press.
Nor did the press take much note of the sixty-five reporters who, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists, were murdered by government-allied death squads in El Salvador and Guatemala during the mid-1980s. The US press also failed to observe that no governmentsponsored killings occurred in Nicaragua in the years after the Sandinista victory.
In August 1986, the Israeli government closed al-Mithaq, a Palestinian daily published in Jerusalem, along with a weekly al-Ahd, claiming that they were financed by the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. No evidence was made public to support the charge. Attorneys for the newspapers maintained that the two publications were financially independent and had no links to any Palestinian organization. These acts of media suppression caused no stir in a US press that was fulminating about totalitarianism in Nicaragua.
The following year, even as President Reagan was lambasting the Managua government for its alleged violations of freedom of the press, President Corazon Aquino shut down three opposition radio stations in the Philippines for much the same reason the Sandinistas had given for temporarily closing La Prensa —lending support to an armed movement seeking to overthrow the government. This move earned virtually no attention or critical comment from the US press and media commentators.
See Extra! October/November 1987; editorial, Nation, October 24, 1987; Alexander Cockburn’s column in the Nation, September 27, 1986.
Much was made of the fact that on a number of occasions, the Nicaraguan government censored pages in La Prensa or suspended publication for brief periods. La Prensa was a right-wing daily that received funds from the US Agency for International Development and the National Endowment for Democracy. It openly supported the US-financed contra army and had several contra members on its editorial board, yet it was allowed to continue publication throughout the war. La Prensa was not the only opposition voice. About half the radio and television stations in Nicaragua were privately owned and many of these gave the government a daily ideological pounding of a kind that made the US mainstream press look like the tepid establishment mouthpiece it is.11 Nicaragua was under invasion from hostile forces and had suffered much loss of life and destruction of property, yet the “totalitarian” censorship imposed by the Sandinis
tas was much less restrictive than what the US government imposed during World War I and World War II.
By 1990, conditions in Nicaragua had gone from bad to worse due to the punishing effects of the US-sponsored contra war and US economic sanctions. In the national election that year the Sandinistas faced a coalition of opposition parties (UNO) that was heavily financed by the US government. In anticipation of another possible Sandinista victory, the US media once more began to question the fairness and legitimacy of the impending election. One New York Times story was headlined “FEAR OF DISORDER SHADOWS OPPOSITION CAMPAIGN.”12 Another Times article asserted that “controversy has raged about Sandinista campaign techniques ... and the Sandinista refusal to admit [a U.S.] Administration delegation to monitor the vote.”13 The story failed to note that hundreds of neutral foreign observers from all over the world were in the country, making the election the most closely monitored in history. As the voting began, the Times reported that persons in contra-controlled regions were afraid to go to the polls because they feared Sandinista retaliation. Yet, deeper into the story we read that “despite the anxiety, the turnout ... appeared high.”14 The story offered no evidence that the Sandinistas had intimidated anyone.
Having been promised an end to war and economic embargo if the US-supported opposition party were elected, a battered population voted the Sandinistas out of power. US press commentators and editorialists suddenly dropped their reservations about the election’s legitimacy and hailed the results in superlative terms.15 Without exception the media referred to the 1990 contest as Nicaragua’s “first free election” thereby ignoring the 1984 election described above.16 The press never questioned the legitimacy of the US government’s injecting large sums into the contest to help UNO to victory. On the contrary, such intervention was presented as a laudatory attempt to “level the plaving field.”17
The news media recognized that US policy had undermined the Sandinistas’ rule but this also was treated as a good thing. The FSLN defeat was ascribed to three causes, in descending order of importance: (1) Sandinista “mismanagement of the economy,” (2) weariness with the eight-year contra war and resentment about the military draft, (3) the US embargo. The United States was seldom linked to the contra war and the war was seldom treated as a cause of economic ruination. US economic sanctions were extensive and brutally effective. But the American public had the opportunity to read only one or two words (“embargo” or “sanctions”) to describe the terrible toll taken. Sandinista “mismanagement”—of which there was no doubt some—was seldom described in any concrete detail but was repeatedly and unfairly blamed for the catastrophic attrition inflicted by the US war and embargo.18
The Nicaraguan people did not vote out the Sandinista government. They voted for an end to the US campaign to destroy them. It was not a vote against “Sandinista tyranny” but for Washington’s candidates. The hope was that the United States would then do what Bush had repeatedly promised: lift the sanctions and stop the war.19 In no pre-election article did the US press mention this influential factor.
After the UNO government took office, US aid was used to speed up the “free-market” reconstruction of the economy in order to integrate it into the client-state “new world order.” Aid also went to right-wing political organizations and anti-Sandinista media and for school textbooks that taught “traditional” counterrevolutionary values.20 Meanwhile the population suffered even greater economic calamity than during the war. The Bush administration, like its predecessor, was interested only in rolling back the Sandinista revolution. The people simply would have to endure the awful results. The White House was letting other nations know what awaited them if they dared to move away from a client-state status. Panama was next.
A DEVIL IN PANAMA
In 1978, the United States and Panama signed a treaty to give the latter sovereignty over the Panama Canal by 1999. The canal had diminished in importance because of technical advances in transportation. But the US remained concerned about the fourteen US military bases in Panama and the Southern Command headquarters, which was the site for US military and covert operations in Latin America and the Caribbean. In addition, Washington was uneasy about the Panamanian government under General Omar Torrijos. Unlike most Latin American military leaders, Torrijos was a populist-reformist. He maintained friendly relations with the communist government in Cuba, and used monies extracted from businesses and banks to fund social programs, some of which were beneficial to the people.21
RESTORING “FREE-MARKET DEMOCRACY”
The Sandinista government initiated decrees redistributing about half the country’s arable land to peasants, and tens of thousands of city lots to the urban poor. Over a million Nicaraguans benefited from the democratization of property, to the detriment of some 35,000 affluent rural and urban landlords. With the 1990 electoral victory of Violetta Chamorro’s UNO government, the right wing charged that Sandinista leaders had pilfered the property for themselves. This cry was uncritically parroted in the US press. For instance, NBC evening news commentator John Chancellor called for the return of the “stolen property” to its “rightful owners.” The Sandinistas had repeatedly proposed that the UNO government conduct a systematic review of property distribution and deal with whatever corruption might be uncovered. But this fact went unreported in the US news media, as did the democratic nature of the overall land reform program.
The US government released $19.28 million in aid to the Chamorro government; the International Monetary Fund approved a $55 million loan. In return, the government entered into agreements with US agencies to facilitate private investments and to privatize state-run companies and banks. The government also inaugurated austerity measures, the burden of which fell primarily on the poorest sector. As of 1991, 50 percent of the work force was unemployed, 79 percent of the people lived in poverty, and hunger became a daily reality for many for the first time since the Somoza dictatorship. The budget cuts also impoverished the Sandinista police force and judiciary, and gutted the educational and health care systems. Students were turned away from schools. Hospitals lacked even soap for doctors. But narcotics were now in more abundant supply as Nicaragua became a transit point for drug shipments. For those lucky to have jobs, a new minimum wage failed to pay them enough to feed their families.
In the name of free trade, Nicaragua drastically reduced its tariff protections. Imported manufactured goods began replacing domestic ones, thereby increasing unemployment in the manufacturing sector. Forests were opened to foreign timber companies. Massive deforestation increased the drought and erosion, and some 50,000 rural families were starving by 1991, according to the National Farmers and Ranchers Union.
Perhaps because “Sandinista mismanagement” could no longer be blamed, the US media had little to say about the baneful effects of these free-market developments.
See reports by William Robinson and Laurie Jo Hughes in Nicaragua Monitor, October 1991, pp. 3, 5—7.
In 1981 Torrijos was killed when his plane mysteriously blew up in mid-air. His place was taken by the head of Panamanian military intelligence, Colonel Manuel Noriega. It is likely that Noriega, on the CIA payroll since 1967, engineered the crash that killed Torrijos. Noriega blunted much of the progressive character of the Torrijos administration. A Costa Rican legislative commission concluded that during the 1980s Noriega had engaged in running guns to the Nicaraguan contras and drugs to North America. He also collaborated with Oliver North in setting up corporate fronts to finance the contras and an airfield in Costa Rica to supply them. Noriega’s involvement in drug-trafficking dated back to his days as head of Panamanian military intelligence and was well known to US leaders and the CIA. Noriega received $200,000 a year as a CIA agent—even when George Bush was the agency’s director. Yet, in the 1988 presidential campaign, Bush claimed he had known nothing about Noriega’s narcotics activities.22
There were limits to Noriega’s willingness to serve Washington. He reasserted Panama’s indepe
ndence with respect to control of the Canal Zone and the extension of leases on US military bases. He reportedly refused to participate in an invasion against Nicaragua and apparently became a less eager collaborator in US espionage. Furthermore, he continued to maintain friendly relations with both Managua and Havana. Hostile reports about him began appearing in the United States. In 1987 the US Justice Department indicted Noriega for drug-smuggling. A crippling economic embargo was imposed on Panama, causing unemployment to double in that country of two million inhabitants, and social benefits to be cut drastically. Despite the tough US sanctions and US troop build-ups in the Canal Zone, Noriega refused to step down from power, as Washington demanded.
In the US press, our erstwhile friend and ally, Manuel Noriega, was swiftly transformed from “military leader” to “strongman dictator.” A media blitz demonized the Panamanian leader as a drug dealer and prepared the American public for the ensuing invasion. During the aborted 1989 elections in Panama, the US press widely publicized the beating of an opposition candidate by Noriega supporters. The press repeatedly referred to Noriega’s “goons” and “thugs.” Never did it refer to “Botha’s goons” in South Africa or “Duarte’s goons” in El Salvador or the various other thugs who practiced torture and murder in a host of US-supported client states.23
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