U.S. terrorism critiques are selective

Trebat is a graduate student in the mathematics department.

By Nick Trebat

In early November, the Bush administration and much of the
American media celebrated the defeat of Daniel Ortega in the
presidential elections in Nicaragua. Reporting “spontaneous
celebrations” in Nicaragua’s capital, the Los Angeles
Times assured us we will no longer have to listen to the Sandinista
leader’s “Marxist rants,” or fear his links to
“terrorist” nations such as Libya, Iraq and Cuba. Top
Bush administration officials called the election a “healthy
sign of democracy,” and expressed relief that the
Sandinistas’ “abominations of human and civil
rights” were a thing of the past.

These remarks should strike us as ironic. The Sandinistas came
to power in 1979 after overthrowing the dictator and long-time U.S.
client Anastasio Somoza. As was noted at the time by humanitarian
organizations and several European governments, the Sandinistas
enjoyed tremendous popular support in Nicaragua, owing to their
commitment to health, education and social justice. The
“National Literacy Crusade” of 1980 boosted the
literacy rate in Nicaragua from 45 percent to 86 percent, and
subsequent health campaigns led to dramatic reductions in infant
mortality and the spread of diseases like malaria, polio and
diphtheria. These achievements won recognition from the United
Nations, the World Health Organization, and even the World Bank,
which noted that the Sandinista projects were
“extraordinarily successful in some sectors, better than
anywhere else in the world.”

The Reagan administration’s response to the revolution was
to recruit, train, and arm a mercenary army known as the
“contras” that for the next ten years laid waste to
Nicaragua in a civil war that left as many as 50,000 dead. In
addition to funding the contras, the U.S. practiced intense
economic warfare by blocking Nicaragua’s access to credit,
imposing a trade embargo on it, and mining the country’s
ports with explosives.

In 1985 Nicaragua presented a case against the United States to
the World Court, which called on the U.S. to “refrain …
from the use of force against the territorial integrity” of
Nicaragua. The Court also ordered the U.S. to pay Nicaragua $17
billion in war reparations. Unwilling to accept the verdict, the
Reagan Administration announced it would “temporarily”
revoke its pledge to accept the court’s jurisdiction.

The White House claimed it needed to defend the hemisphere
against Nicaragua’s plans for communist domination, and cited
as proof of this an alleged flow of arms from Nicaragua to leftist
guerrillas in El Salvador. Former contra leader Edgar Chamorro
spoke to this claim in his sworn affidavit to the World Court:
“It was never our objective to stop the supposed flow of
arms, of which we never saw any evidence in the first place. The
public statements by U.S. government officials about the arms flow,
we were told by the CIA agent … were necessary to maintain the
support of Congress, and should not be taken seriously by
us.”

Such remarks suggest that it was not communist imperialism the
Reagan administration opposed, but rather the Sandinistas’
commitment to social reform. Although Sandinista law guaranteed the
rights of private property, the government nationalized many
industrial plants and large landholdings that were either unused or
“unproductive”. By 1981, the Sandinistas had already
distributed 1.5 million hectares of land to 200,000 poor families.
Much of this land, incidentally, belonged to Somoza, who before the
revolution owned 20 percent of prime farmland in Nicaragua.

Contradicting the Reagan administration’s claim that
Nicaragua was hostile to the U.S. and its allies, the Sandinistas
made remarkable commitments to honor Nicaragua’s foreign
debt, much of it inherited from Somoza himself. They did so because
they wanted Europe’s support, and hoped to at least continue
trading with the United States, which would have been unthinkable
if they declared a debt moratorium or instituted avowedly
“communist” policies. In 1982, the Washington Post
reported that Nicaragua remained “one of the few countries in
Latin American that continues to pay its debt on time.”

Still, the White House refused to leave Nicaragua in peace. In
1989, the Sandinistas agreed to hold early elections in exchange
for an end to the contra war. Elections were held in February 1990,
and the Bush administration made it clear to Nicaraguan voters that
Contra violence and economic isolation would end only if the
opposition candidate Violeta Chamorro was elected.

Chamorro was indeed elected, and today Nicaragua resembles the
country it was under Somoza, with government corruption widespread
and 70 percent of its people in poverty. The Nicaraguan business
community estimates the current government, in which the new
conservative President Enrique Bolanos served as vice-president,
stole as much $60 million from government coffers.

Just as in 1990, Washington made it clear whose side it was on
in the recent elections. Days before this year’s election,
U.S. Ambassador to Nicaragua Oliver Garza was seen with Bolanos
handing out bags of rice””mdash;stamped “USA”””mdash;to
poor Nicaraguans.

On Oct. 31, North Carolina Senator Jesse Helms submitted a
resolution to Congress suggesting that if the conservative Bolanos
did not win, the “United States Government” would
“review and modify as appropriate its political, economic,
and military relations with Nicaragua and its support through
multilateral institutions for Nicaragua.”

More disturbing than the Ambassador’s partisanship or
Senator Helms’ legislative blackmail was the use of the
tragedy of Sept. 11 to denigrate Ortega’s campaign. Bush
officials repeatedly referred to Ortega’s links to
“terrorism,” and criticized what they called his
30-year “relationship with states and individuals who shelter
and condone international terrorism.”

The criticisms are not only hypocritical given the decade of
U.S.-backed Contra terror, but they do a great injustice to the
victims of Sept. 11, whose deaths are now used to advance the Bush
administration’s foreign policy. And they do perhaps even
greater injustice to the tens of thousands killed in Nicaragua as a
result of U.S. intervention.

In light of the tragedy of Sept. 11, it would be nice to see the
American government denouncing terrorism in all its forms, and one
way to do so would be to apologize for its decade-long support of
terrorism in Nicaragua.

Instead, our government chooses to be selective in its critique
of terrorism, and rather than apologize to Nicaragua, the United
States insults the country by meddling in its elections.

As proud as we Americans may be of our country, and as patriotic
as we may feel in the wake of Sept. 11, it is time we recognize
that this is exactly the kind of behavior that forces people in
other countries to ask, as was asked at a recent demonstration in
Pakistan: “Americans, Think! Why Are You Hated All Over the
World?”