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Today's
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July 23, 2004
Gary Leupp
The 9/11 Commission and the Looming
War on Iran
July
22, 2004
M.
Junaid Alam
Ten Ways to Build a Better Democrat
Brian
McKinlay
Rusted On Down Under: Howard, Bush and Sharon
Jason
Leopold
Cheney Lobbied for Easing of Sanctions on Terrorist Regimes While
CEO of Halliburton
Chris
Floyd
Mob Rule: Ripping the Lid Off of America's Pious Myths
Uri
Avnery
Chirac v. Sharon
July
21, 2004
Paula
J. Caplan
The Emotional Casualities of War: Psychologists
Can't Heal All the Damage
Joshua
Frank
Nader Sleeping with the Enemy? Let's be Fair
Ron
Jacobs
American Exceptionalism
Reza
Ghorashi
The Elections, Iran and al-Qaeda
Amy
Martin
Will Congress Rearm the Guatemalan Generals?
John
Ross
Bush May Lose, But His Wars Will Go On and On
Sex,
Drugs & the Blues!
Serpents in the Garden
CounterPunch's Sizzling
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July
20, 2004
Stan
Cox
The Bush / Kerry War Ticket
Chris
Randolph
An Open Letter to Dr. Ehrenreich: It's Over, Barb!
Forrest
Hylton
The Ghosts of Gonismo: "Popular Patricipation"
and Bolivia's Gas Referendum
Mark
Scaramella
It's Official! Mendocino County is Crazier and Fatter Than the Rest
of California
Sam
Bahour
The World is Knocking on Israel's Door
George
Reiter
A Defense of David Cobb
John
Ross
Burying Iraq, Burying Bush
John
L. Hess
Girlie Stuff: Media Tolerance of Arnold & Co.
Website
of the Day
This Land is Your Land
July
19, 2004
Uri
Avnery
Marie and the Ghosts: the Hoax of Paris
Col.
Dan Smith
What Has Been Accomplished?
Mike
Whitney
Allawi: Our Puppet with a Pistol
Karyn
Strickler
Just Marriage, Not Gay Marriage
Robert
Fisk
The Crisis of Information in Baghdad
David
Swanson
Media Blackout of US Labor Opposition to Iraq
War
Jennifer
van Bergen
The Death of the Great Writ of Liberty
July
17 / 18, 2004
Gary
Leupp
Apocalypse Now: Why the Book of Revelations is
Must Reading
Ghada
Karmi
Vanishing the Palestinians
Lenni
Brenner
When Cattle Unite, Lions Go Hungry: Notes for Ralph Nader
Ben
Tripp
Man on a Bridge: a Ghost Story
Brandy
Baker
What Would Elizabeth Cady Stanton Make of John Kerry?
M.
Shahid Alam
Israel Builds Another Wall
Sasan
Fayazmanesh
Nuclear Hypocrisy: Israel, Iran and the IAEA
Patrick
Bond
The George Bush of Africa
Fred
Gardner
Politics of Marijuana: Cannabiniod Therapuetics
William
Blum
Bush and Thucydides
Ben
Terrall
Carter and the Indonesia Elections: "I Don't See Anything Wrong
with a General Running the Country"
Tom
Barry
John Lehman on the War Path
David
Vest
Dylan Without the Music
Phyllis
Pollack
Return to Sin City: Keith Richards Does Gram Parsons
Ron
Jacobs
Smearing Muhammad Ali: Bob Feller Strikes Out
Joshua
Frank
Kerry to Edwards: "Let's Lose!"
David
Nally
A Call for Sudan: Our Georgraphical Blindspot
Toni
Solo
Bolivia's Gas Referendum
Landau,
Hassan, Prashad & Lindorff
Three Reviews of Moore's F911
Poets's
Basement
Ford, Smith and Albert
July
16, 2004
Dave
Zirin
Adonal Foyle: Master of the Lefty Lay-Up
Shervan
Sardar
Dershowitz, the ICJ and Jim Crow Laws
Ron
Jacobs
The Lil' Engine That Couldn't: Kucinich Surrenders on Anti-War Plank
Robert
Fisk
Iraq, According to Edgar Allen Poe: Coffin Bombs
in Baghdad
Greg
Moses
The Forts of Iraq
Mickey
Z.
Ad Infinitum?: Presidential Campaigns in the Age of TV
Dan
Bacher
A Landmark Win for Salmon and the Tribes
Dave
Lindorff
The Mumia Case: Support from NAACP, But a Movement
in Shambles
Paul
McGeough
Did Allawi Shoot Inmates in Cold Blood?
Website
of the Day
10 Reasons to Fire Bush (and 9 Reasons Kerry Won't Be Any Better)
| July
23, 2004
25 Years
on
Revolution
in Nicaragua
By
LEE SUSTAR
Washington
was in shock on July 19, 1979. A massive popular insurrection had
put radical leftists in power in Nicaragua, a country ruled with
an iron hand for the previous 43 years by the Somoza family, funded
and armed by the U.S. to keep "order" in its "backyard."
Coming
just four years after the U.S. defeat in Vietnam and coinciding
with a revolution in Iran, the first successful revolution in Latin
America since the one in Cuba 20 years earlier couldn’t have
come at a worse time for rulers in Washington For workers and the
poor in Central America and throughout Latin America--tens of millions
who were suffering under the boots of U.S.-backed dictatorships--the
revolution was an inspiration.
Nicaragua,
a desperately poor country with a population then of about 3 million,
had long been a target of U.S. imperialists because of its strategic
location on the isthmus between the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans.
The Tennessee adventurer William Walker launched a private invasion
of the country in1853, briefly taking power and restoring slavery
in the interests of wealthy Southern slaveowners.
Fifty
years later, Wall Street literally owned the Nicaraguan economy--by
then geared to coffee exports--and U.S. Marines occupied the country
between 1908 and 1912. A second Marine occupation began in 1927--but
this time the U.S. faced a nationalist guerrilla war led by Augusto
Sandino, who had worked in the sugar mills and banana plantations
owned by U.S. companies in Central America.
Sandino
was eventually assassinated, but his fighters forced the gradual
withdrawal of the U.S. by 1933. Washington turned to Anastasio Somoza
García, head of the U.S.-trained National Guard, who initiated
the savage family dictatorship that would last until the revolution.
His nephew, Anastasio Somoza Debayle, who became president in 1967,
was known for the murder and torture of opponents and staggering
levels of corruption.
Meanwhile,
the country suffered under the biggest foreign debt per capita in
Latin America. By 1975, just 1.5 percent of the biggest landowners
owned 41.5 percent of the agricultural land.
Somoza
even targeted the wealthy bourgeois critics of his rule--and in
1978 ordered the assassination of Pedro Joaquín Chamorro,
a newspaper editor and scion of one of Nicaragua’s wealthiest
families. The murder of Chamorro triggered widespread popular protests--120,000
marched at his funeral and highlighted the widespread hatred of
Somoza.
Yet
while Chamorro’s Conservative Party sought to oust Somoza
with U.S. backing, the revolutionary Sandinista National Liberation
Front (FSLN) rallied mass support for a revolutionary overthrow
of the regime.
The
FSLN, inspired by both Sandino’s legacy and the example of
the guerrilla fighters of the Cuban Revolution, had three main tendencies.
The first, called Prolonged Peoples’ War, sought to emulate
the Cuban example of daring military acts by bands of guerrillas
to build popular support in the countryside.
Another grouping, the Proletarian Tendency, pointed out that with
60 percent of the country’s population living in cities, the
working class--about 20 percent of the population--would be the
decisive factor in revolutionary change.
The
third tendency in the FSLN--known in Spanish as "Terceristas"--argued
that the armed struggle should be linked to a mass movement that
could bring together workers, peasants and sections of the bourgeoisie
into an anti-Somoza revolution. The revolution unfolded in much
the way the Terceristas had envisioned.
When
Somoza unleashed his U.S.- and Israeli-supplied weapons on unarmed
civilians--including the aerial bombardment of working-class neighborhoods
in the capital city of Managua--the mass opposition only deepened.
An estimated 50,000 people died in the fighting that lasted more
than a year. The U.S. finally pulled the plug on Somoza, forcing
him to flee to Miami.
*
* *
The
revolutionary government immediately faced two interrelated questions.
One was whether to encourage worker and peasant struggles and expropriate
the wealth of Nicaraguan capitalists beyond Somoza’s immediate
circle, and two, how to deal with an increasingly hostile U.S.
The
FSLN directorate, led by Daniel Ortega, aimed to consolidate the
revolution by nationalizing Somoza’s vast properties--worth
40 percent of the country’s gross domestic product--while
encouraging the "patriotic" bourgeoisie to undertake private
investment in a "mixed economy." This strategy, they believed,
would mollify the U.S.
Socialism--the
stated eventual aim of the FSLN--was to be postponed to an indefinite
future. Peasants did benefit from immediate land reform, while workers
gained the right to organize unions and were promised better pay
and conditions.
A series of FSLN-sponsored mass organizations--including those for
women, youth, students and others--were created to deepen the roots
of the revolution. But with leftist guerrilla movements gaining
ground in nearby El Salvador and Guatemala, Washington was determined
to bleed the Nicaraguan revolution to death.
When
Republican Ronald Reagan took office in 1981, he dramatically increased
support--funds, arms and training from the CIA and right-wing Cuban
exiles--to the Nicaraguan counterrevolutionaries, or contras. Reagan
called the FSLN "totalitarians" and vowed to make them
say "uncle."
The
U.S. ambassador to neighboring Honduras, John Negroponte--who now
holds the same post in Iraq--turned that country into a U.S. base
for the contras and right-wing death squads throughout Central America.
*
* *
The
contras sought to destroy the Nicaraguan economy and terrorize the
population through landmines, kidnapping, rape, torture and murder.
By 1990, more than 40,000 Nicaraguans had died at the hands of the
contras--and the country was compelled to spend 62.5 percent of
the government budget on defense.
Sanctions imposed by the U.S. greatly compounded economic problems.
Nevertheless, in 1984, Ortega and the FSLN won the presidential
election with 67 percent of the vote, closely monitored by international
observers.
When
the contras’ human rights violations came to light, the U.S.
Congress banned further aid. But Reagan’s White House illegally
and secretly sold arms to the Iranian government in exchange for
the release of hostages--and funneled the proceeds to the contras.
As
the 1990 elections approached, the FSLN was confident of victory.
Instead, the election went to the conservative candidate, Violeta
Chamorro, widow of the newspaper editor murdered by Somoza’s
thugs.
Many
on the international left spoke of an "electoral coup."
The reality is more complicated.
While
the U.S. and its contra butchers are to blame for the destruction
of the Nicaraguan economy, the contradiction at the heart of the
FSLN’s politics was instrumental in its downfall. FSLN leaders
couldn’t escape the centrality of class divisions in the "revolutionary
alliance"--the fact that workers and "nationalist"
employers had contradictory interests.
The
conditions of workers had deteriorated throughout the 1980s as runaway
inflation wiped out wage gains. Workers participated in Sandinista
unions and mass organizations--but they didn’t hold political
power, and their right to strike was suspended for a year as early
as 1981. This allowed the opportunistic Nicaraguan Socialist Party--a
longtime rival of the FSLN--to give a left-wing cover to Chamorro’s
coalition, which in turn functioned as the respectable face of the
contras.
There’s
no guarantee that a different course--a seizure of the factories
and fields by workers and an attempt to internationalize the revolution--would
have succeeded. The tragedy is that FSLN’s policies of accommodating
to capital all but guaranteed defeat--and for many leftists in Latin
America, the experience has discredited the very idea of revolution.
While
the FSLN continues to function as an opposition party, its leaders
accept the framework of free-market "globalization" policies
pushed by Washington. Today, Nicaragua is the poorest country in
the Americas after Haiti, and is a haven for sweatshops that supply
U.S. corporations.
Yet
at a time when mass movements have overturned governments in Argentina,
Bolivia, Ecuador and Peru and the U.S. has a backed coups in Haiti
and Venezuela, the experience of the Nicaraguan Revolution points
towards the possibility--and necessity--of revolution and an uncompromising,
internationalist transformation of society based on workers’
power.
Lee
Sustar
writes for the Socialist Worker and is a frequent contributor to
CounterPunch.
He can be reached at: lsustar@ameritech.net
Weekend Edition July 17 / 18, 2004
Gary
Leupp
Apocalypse Now: Why the Book of Revelations is
Must Reading
Ghada
Karmi
Vanishing the Palestinians
Lenni
Brenner
When Cattle Unite, Lions Go Hungry: Notes for Ralph Nader
Ben
Tripp
Man on a Bridge: a Ghost Story
Brandy
Baker
What Would Elizabeth Cady Stanton Make of John Kerry?
M.
Shahid Alam
Israel Builds Another Wall
Sasan
Fayazmanesh
Nuclear Hypocrisy: Israel, Iran and the IAEA
Patrick
Bond
The George Bush of Africa
Fred
Gardner
Politics of Marijuana: Cannabiniod Therapuetics
William
Blum
Bush and Thucydides
Ben
Terrall
Carter and the Indonesia Elections: "I Don't See Anything Wrong
with a General Running the Country"
Tom
Barry
John Lehman on the War Path
David
Vest
Dylan Without the Music
Phyllis
Pollack
Return to Sin City: Keith Richards Does Gram Parsons
Ron
Jacobs
Smearing Muhammad Ali: Bob Feller Strikes Out
Joshua
Frank
Kerry to Edwards: "Let's Lose!"
David
Nally
A Call for Sudan: Our Georgraphical Blindspot
Toni
Solo
Bolivia's Gas Referendum
Landau,
Hassan, Prashad & Lindorff
Three Reviews of Moore's F911
Poets's
Basement
Ford, Smith and Albert
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