From: harelb@MATH.CORNELL.EDU (Harel Barzilai)
Newsgroups: alt.activism,soc.culture.latin-america
Subject: Nicaragua MYTHS (3): "Free Elections" with a gun to your head
Date: 16 Aug 92 07:05:37 GMT
Organization: misc.activism.progressive on UseNet ; ACTIV-L@UMCVMB


In Guatemala, the independent _Central America Report_
(Inforpress Centroamericana) concluded that "Most analysts agree
that the UNO victory marks the consummation of the US
government's military, economic and political efforts to
overthrow the Sandinistas." Under the heading _The Winners_, the
journal added:

    US President George Bush emerged as a clear victor in the
    Nicaraguan elections.  The decade-long Reagan/Bush war
    against Nicaragua employed a myriad of methods -- both covert
    and open -- aimed at overthrowing the Sandinistas.  Bush's
    continuation of the two-pronged Reagan policy of economic
    strangulation and military aggression finally reaped tangible
    results.  Following the elections, Ortega said that the
    outcome was not in retrospect surprising since the voters
    went to the polls "with a pistol pointed at their heads"

-- a conclusion that the journal accepts without comment. "The
consensus attributes the population's defection...to the critical
economic crisis in Nicaragua," the report continues, citing an
editorial in the Guatemala City press that "pointed out that more
than ten years of economic and military aggressions waged by a
government with unlimited resources created the setting for an
election determined by economic exhaustion." "It was a vote in
search of peace by a people that, inevitably, were fed up with
violence," the Guatemala City editorial concluded: "It is a vote
from a hungry people that, more than any idea, need to eat."
{note: _Central America Report_, March 2, 1990.}

The analysis ends with this comment:

    "While many observers today are remarking that never before
    has a leftist revolutionary regime handed over power in
    elections, the opposite is also true.  Never has a popular
    elected leftist government in Latin America been allowed to
    undertake its reforms without being cut short by a coup, an
    invasion or an assassination"

-- or, we may add, subversion, terror, or economic strangulation.

Readers in Guatemala, or elsewhere in Latin America, need no
further reminders of this truism.  One will search far for any
hint of such a thought, let alone a discussion of what it
implies, in U.S. commentary.  Even the fact that Nicaragua had a
popular elected government is inexpressible in the U.S.
propaganda system, with its standards of discipline that no
respectable intellectual would dare to flout.

Much of the press abroad saw the events in a similar light.  The
editors of the London _Financial Times_ observe that "The war
against the Contras has eroded the early achievements in health
and education of the Sandinista revolution and brought the
country close to bankruptcy." The victors, they add, are the
contras -- which is to say, the White House, Congress, and the
support team who set up, maintained, and justified what was
conceded to be a "proxy army" by contra lobbyists, who hoped that
Washington might somehow convert its proxies into a political
force (Bruce Cameron and Penn Kemble of Freedom House); in vain,
despite resources and advantages undreamt of by authentic popular
and guerrilla movements.  Their Managua correspondent Tim Coone
concludes that "Nicaraguans appeared to believe that a UNO
victory offered the best prospect of securing US funds to end the
country's economic misery" -- correctly, of course. {note:
_Financial Times_, Feb. 27, 1990.  After noting that the contra
war brought the country close to bankruptcy, with $12 billion in
damages in addition to the vast costs of the economic sanctions,
they attribute primary responsibility to Sandinista "economic
mismanagement" and their "totalitarian system." I leave the logic
to others to decipher.  Cameron and Kemble, _From a Proxy Force
to a National Liberation Movement_, ms, Feb. 1986, circulated
privately in the White House.}

##################################################################

from:

		 ===================================
	       T h e   D e c l i n e   o f   t h e

		 D e m o c r a t i c   I d e a l
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