Home from the Dark Side of Utopia

by Clifton Ross

  But it was election time and Chávez had decided to put his own man in office there and had gone on the offensive campaigning against Governor Viloria, and even going so far as to slander him as a “traitor.” It wasn’t as if Viloria wasn’t committed to the project of Chávez: he was. He simply maintained his independence, no more. But that was apparently unacceptable to Chávez who, like a good military man, needed to have everyone under his command. Marc called a cab for me and I left for the airport, still troubled by the news from Trujillo.

  Chapter Eleven: A Revolution in the Rear View Mirror

  In 2009 I focused on Central America to begin doing ­interviews with social movement activists, first in El Salvador and then in Honduras in the wake of the coup that took Mel Zelaya out of power. The latter was a complicated situation, much more than many on the Left seemed willing to acknowledge. Mel Zelaya as Liberal Party president of Honduras, had proposed a referendum on amending the constitution as many other left presidents in the region had done. Coincidentally, most of those changes among the left governments had extended “popular power” as well as executive power. That had certainly been the case in Venezuela under Chávez, and something similar had happened in Ecuador under Rafael Correa, in Nicaragua under Daniel Ortega, and elsewhere, and now the same process was being proposed by Mel Zelaya, who was perceived by many Hondurans as being in the same camp with those other reformers who were viewed as “anti-democratic.”

  Latin America has a long-standing tradition of rule by caudillos, or strongmen who maintain themselves in power for far too long by a system of patronage to supporters. Since the peace agreements with rebels in the early to mid nineties and the dismantling of military dictatorships, many Latin Americans have been very cautious about the return of rule by caudillo. Liberal democratic reforms have been quite popular and they represent a great advance over the authoritarian governments of the past, of the Left or the Right. It was, in fact, thanks to these liberal democratic reforms, limited though they were, that autonomous social movements had space to grow and thrive in the region.

  So when Mel Zelaya proposed reforms in the constitution, he might well have broken Honduran law. As The Telegraph reported, “The coup was triggered when Zelaya illegally ignored the Supreme Court and the congress who tried to stop him from calling for a constitutional referendum in a bid to extend presidential term limits.” And, in fact, a six-member truth commission determined that both Zelaya and the military violated the law: Zelaya, for calling for the referendum, and the military for having sent him into exile, rather than allowing him to be impeached.1

  At the time the nuances of this were lost on me, and on most left activists who went to Honduras to do solidarity with Zelaya supporters.

  The following year I returned to Central America, this time spending a few weeks in Nicaragua. The FSLN had come back to power four years before, but under very different conditions than they had in 1979—and as a very different party. The Frente Sandinista de Liberación Nacional (Sandinista National Liberation Front, FSLN) when it came to power in July 1979 organized its “vanguard of the vanguard” directorate as a coalition of nine “comandantes,” (commanders) three from each of the three “tendencies.” Roger Miranda, former aide to brother of Daniel Ortega and Sandinista Minister of Defense, Humberto Ortega, in his book detailed the conflicts and processes that went on in the nine-man directorate or comandancia, during the years the Sandinistas were in power. On the positive side, the directorate as a group provided a check on individual members that was ordinarily missing in other Marxist-Leninist governments. No one person nor, in this case, single faction, was able to unilaterally impose its will on either the directorate or any subordinate organism or branch of government, although the Ortega brothers, representing the Tercerista (Third Way) faction, maneuvered to gain the loyalty of the entire Proletarian faction and one or two members of the “Guerra popular prolongada” (Prolonged people’s war, GPP) faction, headed by Tomás Borge.

  Daniel Ortega, a man characterized as “lacking in graces and personality,” nevertheless was a cunning strategist and politician, and back in 1984 he managed to win the candidacy for president among the directorate, and marginalize the more charismatic and popular comandante, Tomás Borge.2 Daniel Ortega, of all nine comandantes, had the patience and the will to take the mantle of Somoza and build a family dynasty that would eventually rule the country.

  The Sandinistas, despite all their protests and denials, were Marxist-Leninists in the mold of Fidel Castro. As such, they considered “liberal bourgeois democracy” as something of an obstacle on the path to socialist transformation. And so the elections of 1984 that Daniel Ortega won with over 67% of the vote, were described by one comandante as a “nuisance,” but one “which disarms the international bourgeoisie, in order to move ahead in matters that are for us strategic.”3 Clearly, democracy in any meaningful sense was no more on their agenda than it was on the agenda of the elites of Washington. Indeed, for the “Vanguard of the vanguards,” it was unthinkable that the people would lead.

  That was certainly the conclusion one might come away with from reading Roger Miranda’s book, The Civil War in Nicaragua, or Stephen Diamond’s Rights and Revolution: The Rise and Fall of Nicaragua’s Sandinista Movement. These two books, more than any others, filled in the gaps left by the official Sandinista narrative of the Nicaraguan Revolution, and they changed my own understanding of the Sandinista Revolution when I finally read them many years later.

  Miranda’s book was an insider account of the Sandinista comandancia: Before he defected to the US, he had been the secretary of the Minister of the Defense, Chief of the Popular Sandinista Army, and brother of then, and current, President Daniel Ortega, Humberto Ortega. Citing Miranda’s book, The Civil War in Nicaragua, I wrote elsewhere that by the time of the Sandinista victory “the US had cut off aid to the Somoza government of Nicaragua and the government of neighboring El Salvador, hoping to defuse the violence in the region. When the Sandinistas took power, they immediately began to funnel arms to other leftist guerrilla groups in Central America, hoping to establish an eventual Castro-Communist Isthmus. That didn’t go over well in Cold War Washington and President Jimmy Carter was legally obligated to end aid to Sandinista Nicaragua as a result. The incoming Reagan administration sent Thomas Enders to Managua to negotiate a peace agreement in which aid would be reinstated if the Nicaraguans would end arms shipments to the guerrillas in El Salvador (FMLN).

  “According to Miranda, despite ‘three detailed proposals’ and two follow-up phone calls from Thomas Enders to the Sandinistas, the FSLN Directorate never responded. Instead, Ortega and other Sandinistas went to Havana for advice. After Ortega recounted the details of the meeting, Castro told him, ‘Don’t negotiate.’ Less than two months later, ‘Daniel Ortega launched a bitter attack against the United States at the United Nations and the truce was off.’”4

  The Contra War, then, was an avoidable war. And contrary to what we believed in those years of the Sandinista Revolution (1979–1990), it was essentially a peasant war—albeit with important sectors of it funded and directed by the CIA. It was, to be precise, a peasant and a proxy war against a Marxist-Leninist vanguard party with a millenarian vision of a “Liberated Central America,” allied with Cuba, and the Soviet Union. This Sandinista “vanguard” played its part in creating the war by alienating the peasantry with forced collectivizations a la the Russian Revolution under Lenin and Stalin, arming the communist guerrillas throughout the region and following Castro’s disastrous advice not to negotiate with the Reagan administration. And the US responded to what it saw as a Soviet incursion in its “sphere of influence” by arming the Nicaraguan “Contra” peasants.

  In any case, the “armed resistance” in the form of “the first significant ‘Contra’ military attacks,” according to Miranda, weren’t carried out by Somoza’s ex-National Guard nor by “counterrevolutionaries” of any sort. In fact, they “were carried out by frustrated Sandi
nistas under the leadership of Pedro Joaquín González [a Sandinista peasant].”5 While it’s true that former members of Somoza’s national guard were counted among the Contras, “the maximum number of guardsmen in the Contras was only about four hundred,” an estimate confirmed by “Sandinista spokesman Alejandro Bedaña.”6 According to oral history recorded by Timothy C. Brown, former State Department liaison to the Contras, two of the eldest Contras were soldiers of the original Sandinista Army, and one had been a personal bodyguard of the “General of Free Men” himself, Augusto C. Sandino. The latter, Alejandro Pérez Bustamante, was by then too old to be a soldier, but he did support work for the Contras because he believed that “if Sandino had been alive during the Sandinista’s revolution, he would have been a contra.”7

  The Contra war, while indeed funded by the US government, was a civil war that pitted thousands of disaffected campesinos against the Sandinistas and their urban supporters. Moreover, according to Miranda, the US aid to the contras was “only a small fraction of the amount of aid the Soviet bloc sent to the Sandinistas.” In a section of his book entitled, “How to Provoke a Peasant Insurrection,” Miranda argues that the cause of the war was the fact that “the Sandinistas reneged on their promises of political pluralism, a truly mixed economy, and international nonalignment, and pursued contradictory political and economic routes, with predictable results.”8

  In fact, the peasants weren’t really on the Sandinistas’ radar. Miranda says that “Somoza, the dictator, had been defeated mainly by urban workers and most of the middle and upper classes who had little sense of, or indeed true interest in, what the peasants thought and wanted. Somoza had kept the rural population poor mainly by denying them access to vast land holdings, but he allowed a largely free agricultural market economy in the countryside, which at least permitted subsistence living. The Contra War was fueled by peasant disaffection with the Sandinista government’s step backward toward collectivization. The Sandinista leadership, influenced by the Cuban experience, didn’t understand that what the peasants wanted was a piece of land and the resources to cultivate it. They didn’t want cooperatives, production units in which peasant families worked together and share the produce of the land. The collectivization and other programs assured the alienation of the peasants, declining production, and in an agricultural country, a failed economy.”

  Miranda concludes that all this drove many peasants into the Contra army, making the Contra War a widespread rural insurgency so that “by 1987 Contra forces operated with considerable impunity in well over half the country.”9 None of this, however, negates the fact that the CIA recruited Argentinian fascists, fresh from the genocidal slaughterhouses of the dictatorship to train Contras in torture, terrorism, and other brutal criminal activity and bring the Sandinista government and its supporters to their knees—or, as then Secretary of State George Schultz said, “make them cry ‘uncle.’” Nothing could justify the terrorist war the Reagan administration waged against Nicaragua in those years, but Miranda’s testimony certainly throws that history into a new light.

  Stephen F. Diamond is clearly more sympathetic to the FSLN and to a great degree he seems willing to accept the FSLN’s narrative of the process, although he has a different understanding of its meaning. Diamond says that when the FSLN took power in Nicaragua, they had an extraordinary opportunity to democratize the country, but the comandantes refused it. The three tendencies, which had split from each other over strategy in the mid 1970s, had many problems to resolve in organizing a post-Somoza Nicaragua, but “at no time did any of the three tendencies ever surrender their perspective of becoming the vanguard in front of a mass movement… The idea of a mass movement…itself becoming the vanguard, or rather, training, organizing and selecting its own vanguard, was completely foreign to all three wings of the Frente.”10

  Some argue that the FSLN played a key role in the revolutionary process of Nicaragua and “earned” its place as the vanguard. While it’s certainly true that the fledgling FSLN, with its membership of 500–1000 militants,11 provided critical assistance at different points of the struggle, it’s also true that in the major events of the struggle, the people were the key protagonists, often in scenes without any sign of the FSLN. Three major moments in the struggle demonstrate this fact. First, there were the “riots” in the wake of the killing of La Prensa newspaper owner and editor, Pedro Chamorro, in January 1978, when the struggle against the Somoza dictatorship “turned a corner” and some 30,000 took to the streets. The “mob” chose clear, strategic targets to attack, which were “key to the Somoza-dominated economy.” Diamond points out that in this series of actions, culminating in a funeral where some 120,000 gathered to bid farewell to the journalist, “neither the FSLN nor the middle class opposition played a leading role.”12

  The uprising of Monimbó, an indigenous community southeast of Managua, a little over a month later represented “the most dramatic example of this mass opposition movement.” When some 2,000 residents of the community gathered to rename their plaza after the martyred Pedro Chamorro, they found themselves quickly surrounded by National Guardsmen who lobbed tear gas and fired on the crowd. “Instead of fleeing in complete disorder, as the Guard had no doubt expected, the crowd resisted vigorously” with rocks and fireworks. The battle between the residents of Monimbó and Somoza’s national guard went on for two weeks before the guard finally took the town and in the process killed two hundred or so residents. Diamond says “only a handful of FSLN cadre took part in the Monimbó uprising, and they were only sent in after events had begun.”13

  The most impressive action in which the people acted as their own “vanguard” began just a little over a month before the final victory when the FSLN carried out an action in the capital of Managua hoping to “sting Somoza and Carter, but not to win final victory.” Stephen Diamond wrote “the populace of Managua surprised them. Thousands of “irregulars” formed their own militias and demanded a final confrontation with the Guard.” What was to be a three-day guerrilla operation turned into a three-week mass uprising. The FSLN finally called the “Repliegue,” or retreat, to Masaya, and the uprising subsided briefly. But the people of Managua continued to act as their own vanguard. Diamond writes that “when the official Frente [FSLN] forces reentered Managua on the 19th of July, they found the city already liberated. The population itself had done the job. A similar process took place in dozens of localities. As the National Guard withered in the face of the armed uprising, the population naturally took its place. This was not a passive mass, but a self-organized and armed populace that had thrown off the oppression of a brutal dictatorship.”14

  Humberto Ortega later reflected on the way that the “vanguard” ended up attempting to extinguish, rather than fan, the flames of discontent. He said, “we could not stop the insurrection… The mass movement went beyond the vanguard’s capacity to take the lead. We certainly could not oppose the mass movement, stop that avalanche. On the contrary, we had to put ourselves at the forefront in order to lead it and channel it to a certain extent.”15

  Diamond speculates, “perhaps without the presence of the Frente, broadly based democratic institutions would have taken hold.” Instead, the FSLN spent the next year disarming the people and convincing the real liberators of Nicaragua of their need for a vanguard. In large part, the Sandinistas were successful—except in the countryside with the peasantry, as we saw earlier. Throughout the entire revolutionary struggle, and into the “reconstruction” after the victory, the FSLN “confirmed its organizational principles as lying firmly within the Stalinist tradition.”16

  Both Miranda and Diamond believe that the FSLN National Directorate’s hunger for power resulted in many missed opportunities. The insistence of the National Directorate on arming not only the FMLN in El Salvador—the sticking point in negotiations with the US—but also guerrilla insurgencies throughout Central America, from Costa Rica to Guatemala, was extremely problematic. The policy no doubt came out of an ap
ocalyptic Marxist vision of a “revolutionary Central America,” that was entirely unrealistic: during the Cold War neither Carter nor Reagan would have allowed such a thing. But the policy did have the effect of increasing tensions in the region, and it led to violent backlashes against social and popular movements, and it cost the lives of thousands of innocent civilians. Diamond believes that “if the Frente had believed in democratic politics, they might have taken the opportunity of the general strike in the wake of Pedro Chamorro’s assassination to organize new political parties and trade unions where open discussion of Nicaragua’s future could have taken place. Such an organizing drive could have greatly altered the character of Nicaraguan politics—away from the inevitably violent and tragic confrontations with the National Guard, to a situation where, because the regime no longer held the political will of the population, it would no longer have controlled even its army. Then the military force of the regime could not have been stopped from simply withering away.”17

  We have no way of knowing if this counterfactual conditional view would have played out the way Diamond imagines it would have, whether, for instance, the Somoza regime would have simply “withered away” in the face of emergent democratic forces or not. Yet it most likely would have meant avoiding the regional war that cost 30,000 Nicaraguan lives and 75,000 more lives in El Salvador—not to mention those killed in Honduras and Guatemala. And a commitment to democracy and the strengthening of democratic institutions by the Sandinistas would very likely have had long-term positive consequences on Nicaragua’s political culture and made it much more difficult for the reemergence of “Somocismo” in any form, including Orteguismo.