Rumours of Glory

by Bruce Cockburn

  Another sinister figure who pops up in both Central America and Iraq is John Negroponte. In 2004 President Bush appointed Negroponte ambassador to Iraq, just in time to usher in a plan, devised by Steele and others, to divide and conquer rival factions among the population in order to benefit the U.S. occupation. From 2004 to 2006 that civil war resulted in the sowing of death on Iraqi streets to the tune of three thousand bodies a month. As ambassador to Honduras from 1981 to 1985, Negroponte was similarly charged with establishing U.S. training bases where the Contra army, aiming to overthrow the Sandinistas, learned the fine arts of destabilization: terror, murder, and otherwise making life difficult for the civilian population. Most Nicaraguans wanted only peace and enough land to grow food so they wouldn’t starve, and they had successfully shucked the bonds of a succession of U.S.-backed dictators. For that, they paid dearly.

  Honduras suffered the pains of intervention as well, with U.S. military aid increasing from $3.9 million in 1980 to $77 million by 1984. Negroponte oversaw the vastly increased militarization of Honduras, including the notorious government death squad Battalion 3-16, “a secret army unit trained and supported by the Central Intelligence Agency,” according to an extraordinary 1995 investigative report by The Baltimore Sun. “Battalion 3-16 used shock and suffocation devices in interrogations,” the Sun reported. “Prisoners often were kept naked and, when no longer useful, killed and buried in unmarked graves.” Negroponte was well aware of the Honduran military’s death squad activities yet continued to orchestrate shipments of U.S. weapons and cash.

  Elliott Abrams was another Reagan hack who reappeared during the second Bush administration. In 1982 Abrams, as assistant secretary of state for human rights and humanitarian affairs under Reagan, was quick to discount as “not credible” reports from Central America that in December 1981 the Salvadoran army had executed five thousand civilians in the village of El Mozote. Abrams’s denial came despite well-documented reports of the massacre from human rights groups, and articles in the New York Times and The Washington Post. (In 1993 the Salvadoran Truth Commission confirmed the deaths, and in 2011 the government of El Salvador apologized for them.) Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International accused Abrams of covering up atrocities committed in Nicaragua, Guatemala, El Salvador, and Honduras. In due course Abrams pled guilty to two counts of withholding information from Congress in the Iran-Contra scandal. In 2001 president George W. Bush appointed him to the post of special assistant at the National Security Council, where he allegedly played a role in the failed coup attempt against democratically elected Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez in 2002.

  Then there’s Dick Cheney, who as a U.S. congressman in the 1980s supported the viciously repressive Salvadoran government. Cheney even served as an observer of the 1984 Salvadoran elections, which were widely condemned as a farce but which he touted as a success. Of course, Cheney’s role, when he was vice president, as an architect of the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan is well known. The wars he fomented enriched several major U.S. arms, energy, and service companies, particularly his own Halliburton.

  Perhaps one more parallel: I, too, was, at moments, in Central America, Iraq, and Afghanistan as the wars raged, the difference being that the successes I saw involved poor and embattled communities struggling to rise above the worst forms of external pressure to survive and attempt to create more equitable societies. This was particularly true in Nicaragua, where the Sandinista revolution ousted the Somoza dictatorship in 1979, and where Nancy White, Rick Arnold, and I went after we left southern Mexico.

  Our first sight of Managua, the capital, seemed post-apocalyptic. Most of the city centre had been leveled in the disastrous earthquake of 1972 and never rebuilt. Streets remained rutted and potholed, weaving through a landscape of rubble. Here and there a small strip of two-story buildings still showed signs of life, but in between, an infant wilderness had arisen. In some places, you could spot little tent communities where people were squatting.

  The nations of the world poured buckets of relief money into Nicaragua after the quake, but instead of using the funds to rebuild homes for the 120,000 people who had been displaced, Somoza, the classic banana-republic dictator, salted it away in his own bank account. Even many of his upper-crust cronies were disgusted. The ranks of the revolution swelled. In 1979 he was forced to make use of his ill-gotten gains to flee the country. Justice caught up with Somoza in the streets of Bogotá, where his limousine, with him in it, was blown to bits in a rocket attack. No one claimed credit, but a Sandinista official told me it was thought that “a few of the boys” had done the job.

  The Nicaraguan people were alive with revolution. They believed themselves charged with the task of building a better life for everyone after centuries of serfdom—understanding that “for everyone” might be a utopian goal, but a worthy one nonetheless. Not every Nicaraguan we spoke with was a Sandinista supporter, of course; some were critical of the new leadership. These people were usually relatively well off and had enjoyed a certain level of comfort during Somoza’s reign. But the majority of the population, most of whom were poor, clearly felt the Sandinistas spoke for them. How much that was true was evidenced by, among other things, the total absence of anti-Sandinista graffiti and the fact that, in contrast to virtually every other country I have visited south of Texas, people in uniform were not seen as a presence to be feared.

  After several visits to Nicaragua between 1983 and 1988, it was obvious to me that regardless of the ideology, background, qualifications, or even honesty of the men and women who were running the place, they were at that moment the absolute best option for the Nicaraguan people. At the time the country was the poorest in the Western Hemisphere after Haiti (and today remains so), yet under the Sandinistas life improved dramatically for most people, even in the face of a war waged against them by the most powerful nation on earth.

  Look at them working in the hot sun

  The pilloried saints and the fallen ones

  Working and waiting for the night to come

  And waiting for a miracle

  Somewhere out there is a place that’s cool

  Where peace and balance are the rule

  Working toward a future like some kind of mystic jewel

  And waiting for a miracle

  You rub your palm

  On the grimy pane

  In the hope that you can see

  You stand up proud

  You pretend you’re strong

  In the hope that you can be

  Like the ones who’ve cried

  Like the ones who’ve died

  Trying to set the angel in us free

  While they’re waiting for a miracle

  Struggle for a dollar, scuffle for a dime

  Step out from the past and try to hold the line

  So how come history takes such a long, long time

  When you’re waiting for a miracle

  “WAITING FOR A MIRACLE,” 1986

  To listen to a sample of this song visit b.hc.com/s/47.

  Every time I visited Nicaragua, the Sandinistas were fighting for survival. They were attempting to rescue a nation under siege. After a bloody war against the oppressive Somoza regime, the movement gained control of the country, only to suffer constant attacks by mercenaries trained and armed by the United States. Some Sandinista leaders were taking advantage of the situation to improve their own lives, giving themselves nice houses to live in, reliable transportation, better schools. But for that price the country was getting vastly increased life expectancy and sharply curtailed child mortality, even while at war. Everyone who wanted to learn to read was able to, including an old farmer I met. He was very proud. He told me, “Thanks to the Sandinistas, nobody’s ever going to fuck me on a contract again.” Naive, but nice to see.

  Cooperative farms sprouted everywhere, hunger diminished, coffee pickers were allowed to organize and share profits. Foreign plantation owners could no longer rely on bleeding the country dry to p
ay corporate shareholders. There was fairness, an uncommon element in Central America at that time.

  Battered buses jammed up to the roof

  Dust and diesel the prevailing themes

  Farmer sleeping on the truck in front

  Feet trailing over like he’s trolling for dreams

  Smiling girl directing traffic flow

  .45 strapped over cotton print dress

  Marimba-brown and graceful limbs

  Give me a moment of loneliness

  Dust and diesel

  Rise like incense from the road

  Smoke of offering

  For the revolution morning

  Headlights pick out fallen sack of corn

  One lone tarantula standing guard

  We pull up and stop and she ambles off

  Discretion much the better part of cars

  Rodrigo the government driver jumps out

  He’s got chickens who can use the feed

  We sweep the asphalt on our hands and knees

  Fill up his trunk with dusty yellow seeds

  Dust and diesel

  Rise like incense from the road

  Smoke of offering

  For the revolution morning

  Guitars and rifles in blue moonlight

  Soldiers stretched out on sparkling grass

  Engine broke down—they took us in

  Now we make music for the time to pass

  Tired men and women raise their voice to the night

  Hope the fragile bloom they’ve grown will last

  Pride and passion and love and fear

  Burning hearts burning the boats of the past

  Dust and diesel

  Rise like incense from the road

  Smoke of offering

  For the revolution morning

  “DUST AND DIESEL,” 1983

  To listen to a sample of this song visit b.hc.com/s/48.

  As the feminist American poet Margaret Randall wrote in the 1995 preface to her 1981 book, Sandino’s Daughters, “In a word, the [Sandinista] revolution meant dignity. The wealthiest class lost out, of course, and therein lay the problem for the ‘free’ world.” Randall spent the years 1980–84 living in Nicaragua, working in support of the revolution. When she returned to the United States, in 1984, the government, citing the 1952 McCarran-Walter Immigration and Nationality Act, revoked her citizenship and attempted to deport her, claiming that her books went “against the good order and happiness of the United States.” The Center for Constitutional Rights defended her in federal court, which in 1989 ordered her citizenship reinstated.

  The Sandinistas also instituted environmental cleanup programs because the Somozas’ corporate allies left the country a toxic and deforested mess. Pesticide use on export crops was suspected of causing cancer and environmental degradation. Investigators also discovered one of the largest cases of mercury poisoning outside Minamata, Japan, in Lake Managua. For years a company 40 percent owned by the Philadelphia-based Pennwalt Corporation dumped waste from a chlorine and caustic soda plant in Managua, into the lake, which is a principal source of fish for the Nicaraguan diet. For more than a decade Somoza’s government knew about the mercury and other contaminants, which were sickening inhabitants of the area, and did nothing about it. In 1991 the government ordered the plant closed. Neighbors celebrated.

  * * *

  The day we go up to the Honduran border is the day they commemorate Sandino’s death. Racing through Managua streets in Sandino Day dawn. Fireworks at 5 a.m. Hope and hard work. Reconstruction. New houses mushroom slowly out of blasted ground. Fonseca’s tomb is guarded by a kid in sneakers with a Czech machine gun. Fields of fresh rice. Girl driving a donkey cart. Small boy on horseback driving a cow across the highway. Siren river, onion fields, tobacco coops. Flowering leafless fruit trees. We’re following the army to the Honduran border. Crowded ancient buses. A car with Salvadoran plates. Tobacco fields are raided, therefore constantly guarded. Ironically, Nicaragua reminds me of Israel in a certain sense—being surrounded by enemies. Everything is militarized and everyone is aware of the need for self-defense.

  * * *

  Nancy, Rick, and I arrived in Nicaragua as guests of the Asociación Sandinista de Trabajadores de la Cultura (ASTC), the Artists Union. Many Sandinista leaders were artists. The ASTC had a headquarters in Managua, a villa with a pleasant backyard that contained a small stage. We performed there a couple of times, and that’s where I met writer Rosario Murillo, wife of President Daniel Ortega, who headed up the Artists Union. She was well spoken and engaging, and we chatted a few times. I thought with some envy, “There is no other country in the world with a government like this—a government of artists and intellectuals.”

  I remember in the mid-eighties, after I’d made a couple of trips to Central America, my dad asked me, “What’s so special about Nicaragua? It’s so tiny and it has no influence. Why should anybody care?” Well, the United States cared enough to spend vast sums of money, for more than a century, to squash it. Nicaragua was special because the Sandinistas had cut the reins of imperialism to create a greater good for a majority of people, a very rare occurrence and an example that would have shone like a beacon to the rest of the post-colonial world, had it been allowed to prosper.

  We played music in sundry odd venues across the country: a 5 P.M. concert at the main intersection of a Managua suburb; a lunchtime performance in the police station in León; a somewhat more formal appearance in the pleasant garden of the ASTC headquarters. We also played at the military base of an elite commando unit of the Sandinista army. While waiting to play, we sat in a small office in the company of a soldier, our assigned bodyguard. He didn’t speak any English. He carried a Russian AK-47 assault rifle. I had seen them only in pictures.

  “Interesting rifle,” I said.

  “Ah-kah,” said the soldier. Then he popped the magazine out and, from across the room, tossed me the gun. I caught it, held it, liked it. It felt as though it belonged in my hands. All the childhood fascination with weapons came back. Before the decade was up I would own one, or at least its Hungarian equivalent.

  A highlight of that first trip to Nicaragua was meeting the Sandinistas’ minister of culture, Ernesto Cardenal, whose poetry had helped pique my interest in the region. The Sandinista government was nominally Marxist, but Cardenal continued to serve as a Catholic priest, which he felt was no contradiction. Like most progressives, Cardenal saw no conflict in a mostly Christian society, as Nicaragua is, also believing in an egalitarian distribution of wealth and political power. He carried his minister’s portfolio with none of the trappings of a politician. He was a man with a vision of how things should go, and the Sandinistas let him do it his way. Everyone in Nicaragua was encouraged to write and to create art through several programs: Let’s do pictures of your life. Or let’s write about your life. Write a short story. There was a fantastic flowering of the arts, conjoined in a revolutionary context.

  We also met the Sandinistas’ interior minister, Tomás Borge, who had been in prison with Ortega under Somoza, and there wrote a book, Carlos, The Dawn Is No Longer Beyond Our Reach: The Prison Journals of Tomás Borge Remembering Carlos Fonseca. Many of the movement’s leaders had written books, and the books were good: little books, fairly quick reading, but philosophical and movingly real.

  * * *

  We pass an army barracks that looks like a farm. A shot-down Somoza aircraft is planted on a hilltop, flying the FSLN flag on its tail. A banner in a rural village says, “As long as Nicaragua has children who love her she will always be free.” Women carry firewood on shoulders up the hill. Palms and pines on denuded hills. Battered buses with fantastic paint jobs, jammed with people. People cling to the roof racks, hang from the doors and the windows hoping they won’t have to get off and push. Hot roads, diesel clouds—the whole Third World perfumed with diesel. A fat man sleeps in the back of a pickup, feet dangling over the bumper. Rugged bushy hills full of the smell of coffee. Occasional
pause for the crossing of beautiful milky-white half-Brahma cattle. Around the bend and there it is—a chain across the road, a customs house, and a garrison of half a dozen militia. Thirty metres away a few Hondurans watch with suspicion and strut around like John Wayne. Their lookouts hiding on the hilltop watch us through field glasses while I watch them with mine. The main spokesman for the Nicaraguan garrison at the border is a short plump pleasant guy with a bad leg. I ask him, “What happens when you have to fight?” For he walked with a severe limp and had trouble getting around. He says, “Sandinistas don’t run anyway.”

  * * *

  One of the things that had intrigued me about the Sandinista revolution, when I read about it in advance, was that it was not accompanied by bloody reprisals. They didn’t take power and then go around massacring all of their enemies. They attempted to reconcile with their opponents, or at least ignore them. But many of the privileged enemies they had made went to Miami, and with U.S. backing and guidance formed a counterrevolutionary movement: the contrarrevolución, or Contras. I mentioned the apparent absence of a campaign of payback to a Sandinista official, who said, “We learn as we go. You look at the previous revolutions, and we don’t want to make those mistakes. The French revolutionaries killed all the people they didn’t like, but that was bad, it was unproductive. The Russian revolution made similar mistakes. The Cuban revolution, of course, was not so inhumane; it was a little better, though there were executions and repression and killings that probably were unnecessary, and we’re trying to be better than that.”

  I was able to travel freely through the Nicaraguan countryside, where one sometimes encountered oddly placed foreigners: hippie backpackers with no idea they were in a war zone; a troupe of itinerant American clowns on a mission to bolster morale among the people. One day during my third or fourth trip, I was hitchhiking in the blistering heat with a Swiss woman I’d met at my hotel. We were going swimming at a nearby lake. An olive-drab vehicle stopped for us. In it rode two blonds: a big, beefy, hard-faced male and a big, beefy, hard-faced female. They were glowing with sunburn and sweat. They spoke English, but with heavy German accents. When my Swiss friend addressed them in German, they pretended not to understand.