Nicaragua is trouble on our doorstep
WASHINGTON - When I covered the Nicaraguan revolution in 1979, I spent many days that summer after the fighting was over chatting casually with Daniel Ortega and the rest of the scruffy Sandinistas in the sunshine outside the iconic InterContinental Hotel in downtown Managua. These guys didn't look a lot like heroic Latin American "revolucionarios." The "jefe," Daniel, as he was called everywhere, had a big mustache and tried hard to look presidential, but he always looked sleepy and about to doze off - not at all like the Cuban-backed communist he said he was.
Lest you forget, the Reagan administration secretly created and supported an anti-Sandinista group called the "Contras," which roughly means "those who are against," in a charade that involved conspirators in the basement of the White House selling arms to Iran for money to fund the counter-revolutionaries, even presenting the Iranians with a cake, supposedly to whet their appetites. Those were the headlines every day in the early 1980s. But all the dramatics burned out in a series of elections and alternate presidencies, until Daniel, who had been Nicaragua's president during the '80s, became president again in 2007. Since then, virtually nothing has been reported from Nicaragua.
But on April 19, and nearly every day since then, the quiet Nicaragua of President Daniel Ortega and his wife and vice president, Rosario Murillo, has exploded. Protests have erupted on the streets, with riot police called "turbas" firing on the protesters, mainly students who should have been the major benefactors of the Sandinista communist/socialist regime, which gave them free education and other privileges. At this writing, nearly four dozen have been killed and hundreds wounded, and attempts at dialogue by the Catholic Church and organizations of the remaining private sector are unfulfilled.
His wife did not soothe the situation by referring to the protesters as "those tiny, petty, mediocre beings, those beings full of hate" for whom, she said, "we demand punishment."
Where has little Nicaragua, with only 6 million people who are largely descendants of the original Spanish conquistadores been all these years?
The Ortega government has presented itself as a typical communist/socialist Cuban-style state, but in fact, it has had to allow a good deal of private property and investment.
The events of these last few weeks, if they make us think again of those events of my summer of 1979 and then Washington's responses of the '80s and of what the Sandinistas have done and not done, should also make us think of bigger historic questions that seldom get asked. To me, as a student of Latin and Central America, it is these questions that are crucially important, especially since we are so deeply and insanely involved in the Middle East,
How can a responsible nation not think first about its neighbors? Why should we be infatuated with Fallujah and Peshawar and Raqqa, while ignoring San Pedro Sula and Managua and San Salvador? Why are we so set upon wasting our seed and our sensibilities in faraway regions that share neither our history nor our geography?
Email Georgie Anne Geyer at gigi_geyer@juno.com.
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