The Sam Dillon book, relates that by late '86, 5,000 political opponents had been jailed, and 200,000 had been forced into 145 "settlements" aka internment camps.
In Vietnam, these were called "strategic hamlets, no? When Samuel Huntington is the intellectual author of firced resttlement, we condemn, when the FSLN ignore or cheer.
Review by ex-Maoist neo-con Robert Leiken in TNR.
Everybody Has His Own Gringo: The CIA and the Contras by Glenn Garvin (Brassey's, 288 pp., $23.95)
Commandos: The CIA and Nicaragua's Contra Rebels by Sam Dillon (Holt, 393 pp., $27.50)
On my first visit to the New Nicaragua, I tasted a cup of bitterness at a hacienda in Matagalpa. It was the summer of 1981, only two years after the Sandinistas' triumph over the tyrant Somoza. My assurance faltered when the coffee pickers blamed their evident misery on the government I wanted to admire: "We can't even offer you sugar for your coffee or a soft drink. `No hay.'" They had been told that the green land was theirs. For the first time the scandalous refrain, "We were better off under Somoza," dazed my ears.
Not far from the hacienda, a Matagalpan farmer named Luis Fley was acting on his disillusion. A former Sandinista commando and revolutionary official, Fley was becoming a "contra." He had made contact with a group of peasants known by the acronym milpas (Anti-Somocista Patriotic Militias). Sam Dillon of The Miami Herald describes how Fley and his neighbors joined them in one of the first "spontaneous internal anti-Sandinista uprisings." At the time I was assured that these were not spontaneous peasant uprisings, but premeditated incursions by revanchist members of Somoza's National Guard. Real peasants, like my disgruntled coffee farmers, could only revile the contras.
When Nicaragua stood in the glare of the media and in the force field of the cold war, the coverage of it was governed by our own left/right feud. Like most journalists, Dillon was a critic of the Reagan policy and the contras. One of the few who sympathized was Glenn Garvin of The Washington Times. Though each of them returned from their explorations with their ideological presuppositions intact, their books reach some arrestingly similar conclusions: that the contras were largely peasant volunteers who evolved into a genuine guerrilla army, enjoyed the indisputable support of the peasantry, and (as the liberal Dillon puts it) forced the Sandinistas to "sue for peace."
Something like a revolution of reputations has taken place since the Sandinistas' defeat in the election of 1990. Legalized looting on a Brobdingnagian scale swelled the outgoing Sandinistas' bank accounts, but it reduced their stature to the level of their infamous predecessor. "The Sandinistas came into office proclaiming `property is theft,'" cracked the opposition newspaper La Prensa, "and left proclaiming `theft is property.'" Meanwhile the contras are enjoying something of a re-evaluation in surprising American corners. "The Sandinistas were not more popular than the contras as was widely imagined," Paul Berman of The Village Voice has realized, "they were merely more frightening." In the liberal New York Review of Books under the title "The Betrayal of the Contras," Michael Massing, another critic, has conceded that the Sandinistas' "own heavy-handed policies, rather than any outside incitement, gave rise to the contras." Human rights groups that for years piously reported that Sandinista abuses were the exception and contra abuses the rule have now taken notice of the dozens of clandestine cemeteries discovered at the site of reported contra massacres. The graves contain the remains of peasants tortured and beheaded by Sandinistas.
But the most unexpected revisions have come from the Sandinistas themselves. The election returns showed that the contras were anything but the onus for the opposition that the American press had supposed: the opposition chalked up its most lopsided margins precisely where the rebels reportedly had been terrorizing the local peasantry. (In Matagalpa the Sandinistas lost by nearly two-to-one; in the central provinces of Chontales and Boaco the margin was closer to three-to-one.) After the elections, a top Sandinista comandante publicly acknowledged that the contras were "a campesino movement with its own leadership," and rival Sandinista factions started blaming each other for their unpopularity in the countryside. And last year Alejandro Bendana, once Daniel Ortega's spokesperson, argued in an essay that the contras were the product of "the policies, limitations, and errors of Sandinismo."
With these revisions and self-criticisms, the cloud of pious lies and fake anti-imperialist rhetoric that covered the mayhem in the Nicaraguan countryside has begun to lift. Of course, the clouds issued also from our own newspapers and televisions, where the Sandinistas figured, by and large, as the campesinos' friend and guide and the contras as their scourge, as a proxy army of cross-border raiders created by the CIA out of mercenary remnants of Somoza's National Guard, terrorizing a rural population for the first time enjoying freedom and development, forcing the regime to close ranks against superpower intervention.
It was always difficult with this system of stereotypes to explain how the contras became, as Dillon mentions, "the largest guerrilla force in Latin America since the Mexican revolution." Officials of the United Nations and the Organization of American States supervising the contra demobilization were stunned at their numbers: 28,000 fighters, plus families. And the Sandinista Bendana, who made his career on American television affirming the opposite, acknowledges that "the integration of thousands of peasants into the counterrevolutionary army" was not the work of the CIA but "of Sandinismo."
Bendana, who studied at Harvard and whose unaccented defense of his government became a staple of the evening news, verifies that Sandinista rural authorities labored under the delusion that "in the countryside, as well as in the rest of the nation, two great antagonistic social forces were taking shape." Through proper "political work" the rural "working class" promptly "would be brought to participate in the great confrontation between proletarians and bourgeoisie." The Sandinista missionaries to their own countryside, in short, had learned about Nicaragua from the safe distance of a dogmatic Marxism. But, as Dillon makes clear, Fley's Matagalpa, like most of the Nicaraguan countryside, was studded with small proprietors who traditionally shared planting, plowing, and harvesting. And when "class warfare broke out," it was the peasantry as a whole that rose up against the new elites from the city.
Fley watched his Sandinista superior "fast becoming a petty tyrant in his dealings with coffee farmers" as he "swaggered through every minute of the day in olive drabs, side arm strapped to his hips," cheating the peasants blind. Peasants who dared to complain at one of the renowned Sandinista "open meetings" were labeled "bourgeois counterrevolutionaries." "Later several of the most vocal peasants were arrested. Others saw their farms confiscated, then given to Sandinista party people." Before a year of revolutionary power had elapsed, "many peasant farmers were so fed up with government policies, they were already looking back with nostalgia to a romanticized time before the revolution."
These new accounts furnish the general outline of what now must be seen as a large and complex phenomenon. Not long after their initial attack, contra units were spending from six months to two years deep inside Nicaragua, fed and sheltered by the peasants and provided with exact information on Sandinista troop movements. "The contras," Bendana tells us, "grew well beyond the expectations of the North Americans themselves," becoming "a parallel social and military power in the Nicaraguan countryside." As fresh recruits streamed in, Garvin describes how contra commando units would "break in two, like an amoeba, and the new unit would go still deeper inside in Nicaragua." By the time of the first American cutoff of aid in 1984, "the war raged throughout the countryside," and the Sandinistas were on the defensive. Roger Miranda, a former top official in the Sandinista Defense Ministry, states in a forthcoming memoir that the contras, but for poor leadership and the sudden lack of funding, "might have moved ahead to a military victory in 1984 when the [Sandinista army] did not yet have the military units it needed to stand up to a rapidly expanding peasant insurgency ."
In the year following the suspension of aid, the contras survived not because of Oliver North, but, as Dillon shows, because they rapidly "forged a social base with peasant farmers through a vast strip of farm country extending from the Honduran border south through nine provinces all the way to Costa Rica." When American military aid was resumed in 1986, CIA and Pentagon training and equipment enabled the contras to coordinate their hitherto local and tactical operations into a major strategic offensive. "Eight months into the rebel offensive," Dillon writes, "Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega sued for peace, committing his revolutionary government to democratic rule and leading it into direct peace talks with the contras." "The Sandinistas negotiated," Garvin concludes, because "the roof was falling in."
Why, then, was the media stereotype so inaccurate? Well, for one thing, if this was a peasant army, who were those contra officials with their expensive clothes and expansive bellies in the swank hotels of Miami and Tegucigalpa? As one dissident contra complained, "It was as if the contra leadership had been designed to their critics' specifications." Bendana agrees with Garvin and Dillon that the first contras, the milpas, were in fact Sandinista peasants; but the early contra ranks contained none of the stylish ex-student activists who founded the Sandinistas and most modern revolutionary organizations. The task of establishing the contras' organization and their foreign alliances fell to a former National Guard colonel named Enrique Bermudez.
Bermudez brought with him a handful of National Guard cronies who monopolized the top posts. His clique sold American supplies on the Honduran black market, while peasant guerrillas, awaiting supply drops that never came, were decimated by Soviet-made helicopters. Eventually the tensions between Bermudez's staff and the milpas exploded into internal rebellion: beset by a "strategic command" ignorant of guerrilla warfare and a "political directorate" incapable even of public relations, the contras eventually succeeded because the peasants sustained them. By the end of the internecine struggle, former milpas dominated the command structure, but by then it was too late to save the contras' reputation.
The contras embodied the vices and the virtues of the actual place, not the ones that fervent foreigners imagined. Most of Nicaragua's leaders, whether military or civilian, Sandinista or anti-Sandinista, were, and remain, moral monsters -- entirely capable of extolling their countrymen's sacrifices even as they fleece them. The Sandinistas' capacity to debauch nobility was every bit the equal of the contras'. Still, the partisan proclivities and post-Vietnam susceptibilities of American journalists made supple material for the Sandinistas' shrewd recasting of themselves as an ineffable compound of New Leftism, primitive Christianity, Third World nationalism, European semi-socialism, and development economics.
Shirley Christian once wrote that her journalist colleagues viewed the Sandinistas "through a romantic haze." Two years before the revolution, what had been a fairly dogmatic Leninist sect recruited a talking revolutionary poster named Eden Pastora. The Sandinistas installed the bearded charmer, who proclaimed himself a social democrat and called himself "Commander Zero," as their chief spokesperson and charismatic, though he had zero influence in their high command. Pastora and company beguiled the foreign press and roused the Nicaraguans to stand up to the tyrant Somoza. But after the dust settled the journalists were far slower than the Nicaraguans to discover that the dragon slayers themselves had become dragons.
The American press eagerly took up the challenge to prove that the contras were not Reagan's "moral equivalent of the Founding Fathers." Thus it was the "unstated ambition" of Stephen Kinzer, The New York Times's placid Managua bureau chief, "to expose the truth that the contras were not indigenous rebels, but cross-border raiders under foreign protection." In much of the Nicaraguan reporting "the truth" was known before the facts. Urges to "expose" were aroused almost exclusively by Reagan, rarely by the Sandinistas.
For a time Nicaragua's battlefield became the main theater of our post-Vietnam Kulturkampf. Our generation was confident that in Indochina it had discovered the truth about revolution and oppression, small nations and insurgent peasants. The Southeast Asian paradigm received a Central American habitation and a name when the Nicaragua-bound reporter did his background reading, consulted "area specialists" and "policy analysts," and debriefed his predecessor, which is to say immersed himself in our stereotypes of the region. The war of words covered the place like a fog.
Cumplo pero no obedesco, I comply but I do not obey: thus have the Nicaraguans traditionally satisfied the expectations and the demands of foreigners. Professing respect for human rights while persecuting their subjects, the Sandinistas fashioned that tradition into a political science. Their subjects employed a less grotesque version of those evasive tactics to cope with the Sandinistas themselves, politely telling apparatchik, pollster, or journalist what he wished to hear. Just before the 1990 elections, for example, an ABC/Washington Post survey "concluded" that "72 percent of [Nicaraguans] are angry the u.s. has supported the contras." Such surveys were conducted and reported as if candor could be expected in a place where for years even rumored support for the contras had meant detention or disappearance.
And the press corps in Nicaragua was, of course, only a branch of the American media, subject to the pressures and the prejudices of the home office. The "free market" enforced uniformity, penalizing the correspondent who tarried in the countryside and missed the Sandinistas' latest denial of Washington's latest charge or vice versa. And when the journalist got to spend time outside Managua, he could get entangled in "mythomania," the term that Nicaraguan savants use to describe their cultural tendency to merge fact and fancy. The empirically-minded American reporter, in search of facts to support his "truth," found himself in "the land of the poets." The tall tale is especially relished along Nicaragua's vast internal frontier, the contras' stamping grounds, steeped in custom and superstition, where the oral outweighs the written.
Then there was Edgar Chamorro, a deliberate mythomaniac and a more extravagant specimen of Nicaraguans' ability to fashion their discourse to others' specifications. As a contra press agent, the mild-mannered Chamorro composed some of the more febrile exaggerations of the Soviet and Cuban presence in Nicaragua. After his highly publicized defection from the contras, his fancy found a readier audience. (His most influential "confession" was published in these pages in 1985 and is cited repeatedly, along with other Chamorro tall tales, in Dillon's end notes.) After the Sandinistas' electoral defeat, Garvin found Chamorro in Miami "sad and lost," abandoned by his American patrons. Responding to Garvin's reproach that he had "twisted the truth," Chamorro confessed wretchedly: "I was all alone when I left the contras, and the left helped me out."
Garvin also demolishes whatever remained of the legend of another chameleon, the infinitely captivating and somewhat sleazy and utterly megalomaniacal Commander Zero. (Pastora, who set up his own contra group to rival Bermudez, is strangely absent from Dillon's account -- perhaps because the CIA's strong support for this ex-Sandinista conflicts with Dillon's thesis that the CIA always backed Bermudez.) But the skepticism that Garvin trains on Chamorro and on Pastora deserts him in the presence of Bermudez, his own preferred Nicaraguan, who encouraged susceptible Americans to fancy that he was George Washington's "moral equivalent" even as his inner circle dined and whored elegantly on peasant relief funds. Garvin ignores the many mutually corroborating accounts of the abuses of the Bermudez high command (thoroughly vetted by Dillon).
Should the United States have supported the contra cause? After the Sandinistas' sham elections of 1984 and their rebuff of all attempts to modify their totalitarian course, I came to believe that the answer was yes, but .... The "but" came to be known as contra reform. The American right, uncritically supporting the "freedom fighters," winked at defects of their leaders; but the left, trying to terminate them, slighted the peasant fighters and the justice of their cause. So when a number of contra reformers brought their ideas to Washington, a number of centrist Republicans and Democrats -- I was one of them -- found them persuasive.
On the effort to reform the contra leadership -- to stop the corruption and the human rights violations, and to modernize the contras' organization, diplomacy, and public discourse -- Dillon and Garvin diverge along the usual ideological lines. Their books epitomize the old partisanship almost as much as they expose it. The sole American official who supported the remarkable human rights work of Marta Patricia Baltodano was the much-maligned Elliott Abrams, which is why Garvin denounces contra reform as "State Department meddling." For Dillon, the endeavor was hopelessly quixotic. He organizes his narrative around Fley's seemingly lonely effort to identify and punish contra human rights violators. But contra reform was a broad undertaking by many Nicaraguans, including field commanders and grunts, political reformers and human rights activists. One whom Dillon does portray is Baltodano, the 28-year-old human rights lawyer, who trudged into the contras' mountain camps and mustered Fley and other reform-minded contras, defying the threats and the wrath of Bermudez's clique, the CIA station chief, and the American ambassador in Honduras.
Fley and other reformist contra commanders refused to excuse the crimes uncovered by Baltodano's Nicaraguan Association for Human Rights (ANPDH) by arguing, as Garvin does, the exigencies of guerrilla warfare. On the other hand, Dillon never inquires whether contra abuses were more or less heinous and widespread than those of the Sandinistas or, say, of the Afghan mujaheddin. The latter were, by all accounts, far more vicious than the contras, yet their offenses received little press treatment, in part because, unlike the contras, they enjoyed the support of a bipartisan consensus.
The gravest failure of American reporting in Nicaragua was not the 1990 elections, but the clandestine cemeteries. Baltodano's anpdh reported that after the Sandinistas fell, their office filled with "people seeking the whereabouts of their loved ones or merely hoping to give them a Christian burial":
The wave of complaints registered gives an idea of the terror that reigned in our campesino regions. The common graves remained there for years without the families of the victims daring to present the mildest claim before any national or international body.
Even today most of those claims remain uninvestigated thanks to the continuing Sandinista control of the army and police and what anpdh calls the "indifference" of the new government, which quickly forgot that it came to power via a massive rural vote. anpdh estimates those missing from Sandinista Nicaragua to be approximately 1,000 -- a number proportionately equivalent to those "disappeared" in Argentina's infamous "dirty war."
The covert killing continues. A dozen top contra commanders, including Bermudez and his main milpas rivals, have been dispatched by Sandinista death squads, after having been persuaded to count on a "reconciliation" policed by their adversaries; and so have more than 100 of their followers. The indifference of the present Nicaraguan government is matched by that of the present American government. Nicaragua quietly reverts to a less dramatic despotism while the United States, as in the past, averts its gaze.
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By Robert S. Leiken, Robert S. Leiken is writing a book on the American debate about the Cuban and Nicaraguan revolutions.
-- Michael Pugliese