> Reagan's
>circle was obsessed with funneling huge wads of cash to the "Contras," the
>Nicaraguan death squads whose military effectiveness consisted only of
>massacring unarmed villagers, and who never once stood up to Sandinista
>troops and provided the least semblance of battle.
>See The Real Contra War by Timothy Brown. Red-diaper baby neo-con Schwartz
>on Brown,
via,
http://www.brothersjudd.com/index.cfm/fuseaction/reviews.detail/book_id/322/Salvador.htm
http://www.weeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articles/000/000/000/037tlvsy.asp
>... State Department’s senior liaison to the contras, and in the intervening years, he has immersed himself in an anthropological analysis of the indigenous culture of the peasants who served in the main contra force, the Fuerza Democratica Nicaraguense.
What he has learned is enlightening: The peasants’ defiance of the Sandinista regime reflected a conflict thousands of years old. This long, long war between the highland Chibcha and lowland Nahua Indians (a conquering offshoot of the Aztecs) began before the arrival of the Spanish in the sixteenth century, and it continues today.
In The Real Contra War, Brown has chosen to play by the rules of anthropology rather than polemics. It was well known throughout the Sandinista dictatorship that the Marxists in Managua had provoked serious opposition to their rule from the Indians of the Nicaraguan Atlantic Coast. But Brown is the first to demonstrate that the contra movement in north-central Nicaragua also reflected the ancient Indian desire to be left alone. The Nahuas, as a tributary of the totalitarian Aztec empire, built large cities, erected extensive hierarchies, and exported cocoa beans to Mexico, using slave labor. The Chibchas lived on individual farms, with no state structure. The Nahuas were absorbed by the Spanish to form the lowland population of modern Nicaragua. The Chibchas learned Spanish and adopted Catholicism, but their psychology remained intact—and when the Sandinistas’ commissars, inspired by Castro’s Cuba, arrived to herd the descendants of the original Chibchas into collectives, their reaction was predictable. They rose up and fought back.
A few foreign observers of Nicaragua in the 1980s recognized that the majority of the contras had also opposed the Somoza dictatorship, with many of them—the most famous being the controversial Eden Pastora, or Commander Zero—having served in the Sandinistas’ ranks.
But most of them turned against the Sandinistas the instant they perceived the Stalinist drift of the new regime. Indeed, the main lesson of Brown’s The Real Contra War is that all foreigners got the contras wrong, at one level or another. "The Sandinistas and their sympathizers . . . viewed the [contras] as useful counterrevolutionary foils, the Americans may have seen them as convenient surrogates in a late Cold War skirmish, and [Nicaraguan] civilian politicians may have thought of them as useful stepping stones to power. But the peasants of Nicaragua’s highlands saw them as their shield against yet one more in a thousand-year-old string of attempts at subjugation by outsiders."
The ironies present here are staggering. A former Reagan-era State Department official has employed indigenism—the favorite tool of leftists— to argue with great effect that the contras were "freedom fighters" comparable to Crazy Horse
and Emiliano Zapata.
>
Michael Pugliese