This is an admittedly ad hoc diary, not particularly readable, about a topic that probably seems about as far as it can get from the concerns you want to focus at the moment. I’m posting partly “for the record” because when things get a lot worse in Nicaragua—as they probably will—it might be good to know in advance some of the dynamics involved in stirring up support for US-endorsed “regime change”. The spotlight, in this case, is not on Fox News but the Guardian.
I confess I only recently became aware of controversy about Daniel Ortega’s current government in Nicaragua. To be honest I’d been only dimly aware Ortega was once again presiding over Nicaragua.
I received an email today from an old friend, who in the past has described his political position as “Libertarian Leninist”. Possibly the Sandinista Revolution of 1979 in Nicaragua came pretty close to his ideal. (Or perhaps the Mexican Zapatistas would be a better fit. Remember them? They were those rather otherworldly revolutionaries led by a reclusive masked poet, whose uprising, such as it was, greeted NAFTA at its birth. Wonder what they’re doing to observe its death...)
What follows is from Mitch, and from all the various documents and comments he included in his email. There are a series of letters-within-letters, concluding with a letter addressed to the Guardian, objecting to its unbalanced reporting.
After that I add some thoughts of my own. My thoughts are only indirectly relevant to the current situation, but perhaps they’ll help explain why this matters a lot.
Note: I will be able to join in any discussion (if there is one, which seems doubtful) starting about ten hours after posting it.
From Mitch Cohen
As someone who was heavily involved in the Nicaragua solidarity movement in the 1980s (and who recently published a book about my trip there in 1984), I recently signed onto a letter sent to The Guardian, in protest of its biased coverage of events in Nicaragua. I repost that letter below the current NEW article. We also sent a similar letter to Democracy Now, for the same reasons.
Now, John Perry -- who lives in Nicaragua and who gathered the signatures, has sent this, the latest about events in Nicaragua. It's really informative, as too many U.S. leftists -- regardless of what one thinks of Daniel Ortega and the current Nicaraguan government -- fall for the U.S. government line on Nicaragua, even as Bolton et al. move against Nicaragua and Venezuela, and as Hillary Clinton had moved against Honduras several years ago.
Is history repeating itself, the first time as tragedy and the second as farce? (And what of the third, fourth, and fifth time?)
Mitchel Cohen
From John Perry
Hi everyone
I'm writing to let you know about new developments on this. A freelance 'journalist' Carl David Goette-Luciak who has writen for the Guardian and Washington Post has been expelled from Nicaragua, in part because he was not accredited as a journalist. This follows a detailed expose of his activities working with opposition groups, by Max Blumenthal.
The Guardian has responded with a very critical piece, in part blaming Max. However, this has encouraged a former friend of Goette-Luciak to write the letter below, also sent to the Guardian. It explains how the two of them set out, very naively, to help depose the Sandinista government.
Of course, the Guardian may not publish it, but please make use of this material with your contacts as it helps show that the Nicaraguan government's action was justified and that the Guardian has made a serious misjudgment in using this guy's reporting.
John Perry [email address omitted but can be available on request -schelydra]
Letter from Wyatt Reed to the Guardian:
As a longtime friend and former collaborator of your correspondent with the Nicaraguan opposition, I feel compelled to make a few points clear in light of the recent media frenzy over the deportation from Nicaragua of Carl David Goette Luciak. I must be extremely clear: in the six months we lived and worked together in Nicaragua we were both very open about our plan to use our friendships with Nicaraguan opposition figures to push for the end of the Sandinista government and create careers for ourselves as journalists or consultants in the process. We were not CIA but we were in many ways serving its same historical purpose.
I must stress that I wish no ill will on Carl David. I’ve known him since middle school, we were best friends for much of our lives, and I want only to set the record straight. Having already spent several years in Nicaragua, I had made connections with multiple prominent anti-government groups at the time of our partnership. And since I introduced him to many of them, I feel compelled to state publicly that any notion we had of being impartial and objective journalists was simply a lie. We arrived together in Managua in January 2016 without prior journalistic experience but with a shared understanding that the Nicaraguan government represented a fundamental betrayal of socialist ideals, and the shared understanding that the ruling Sandinista party needed to be removed from power.
In the time since, I’ve come to understand that regardless of our personal feelings on the Nicaraguan president or government, any illusions we had of being uniquely capable of helping the Nicaraguan people achieve self-determination were ultimately founded in a kind of white savior complex. I left, realizing Americans cannot liberate the Nicaraguan people. Not thirty years ago, when the US government created the Contra army to fight a decade long war against socialist Nicaragua, and not now. Americans can only help destroy their government, and in the process hand power over to the same conservative neoliberals who seek to roll back the Nicaraguan safety net, privatize national resources, and undo a decade of improvements in poverty reduction and healthcare.
I have many disagreements with the Sandinista party. However, I do not feel that the violent overthrow of their government can in any way benefit working class Nicaraguans. I mourn with them the tragic deaths of the hundreds killed in the gunfights between police and armed opposition. But if the Sandinista government falls we must ask ourselves: how many tens of thousands more will die when the health clinics are closed? How manychildren will go barefoot, hungry, and uneducated if their welfare state is abolished? They can’t just fly back to the United States. Unlike them, the westerners who bring about “regime change” rarely have to stick around and suffer the consequences.
Wyatt Reed
From Mitch again:
Although the Guardian pledged to publish a shortened version of the following letter, it has not yet done so.
So John Perry, who is coordinating this letter, asks that we circulate the full version (updated just before it was submitted, to take account of developments).
If you'd like to sign on, his address is
John Perry [lemail address omitted but can be available on request -schelydra]
Masaya, Nicaragua
In solidarity with the people of Nicaragua,
Mitchel Cohen
Nicaragua - Letter to the Editor of The Guardian
[This version of the letter was sent to the editor in chief but not published; The Guardian also received a shorter version for publication that has not yet been published.]
For the past three months there has been a political crisis in Nicaragua, with opposing forces not only confronting each other in the streets but fighting a media war. The Guardian should be at the forefront of balanced and well-informed reporting of these events. Instead, despite plentiful evidence of opposition violence, almost all your 17 reports since mid-April blame Daniel Ortega's government for the majority of deaths that have occurred. One of your most recent articles ("The Nicaraguan students who became reluctant rebels", July 10) leaves unchallenged an opposition claim that theirs is "a totally peaceful struggle.â" Only one article (July 4) gives significant space to the government version of events.
While most of the recent violence is associated with opposition barricades erected across the country, you still refer to a "wave of violence and repression by the government" (June 24). Not once do you refer to the numerous deaths of government supporters or the 21 deaths and hundreds of injuries suffered by the police, including the killing of four policemen observing a "peace" demonstration on July 12. Nor did you report the only attack on a member of the "national dialogue" set up to try resolve the crisis, when student leader Leonel Morales was shot and left for dead on June 12; he is a government supporter. Your report from Masaya (June 12) failed to mention that the protestors had burnt down public buildings, ransacked shops and destroyed the homes of government officials. Nor did you record the kidnapping of hundreds of long-distance lorries and drivers, who spent a month in effective captivity despite efforts by their ambassadors and international mediators to secure their release (eventually achieved by the government on July 8). Your report of the shooting of a one year-old boy in "the latest round of government repression" (June 25) does not mention video evidence that he was killed by opposition youths.
The author of several articles, Carl David Goette-Luciak, openly associates with opposition figures. On July 5 he blamed the police for the terrible house fire in Managua three weeks earlier, relying largely on assertions from government opponents. Yet videos appearing to show police presence were actually taken on April 21, before barricades were erected to prevent police entering the area.
Several times you cite "human rights activists" who are often long-standing government opponents (such as Vilma Núñez, April 28, who told the BBC on July 10 that Ortega now has an "extermination plan" ). You unquestioningly quote Amnesty International (May 31) even though their reports turn a blind eye to violence by protesters. You do not refer to detailed evidence that opposition groups benefit from millions of dollars in US funding aimed at "nurturing" the Nicaraguan uprising (theglobalamericans.org, May 1).
On June 6 you said that "Ortega has lost control of the streets" and on June 11 that Nicaragua is "a country of barricades." Since then the government has successfully worked with local people to restore order and remove the vast majority of barricades. Armed bands have been arrested in the process, including members of notorious gangs from El Salvador. This goes unreported.
Most of the articles refer to protestors' demands that Ortega should simply renounce the presidency, but not that international bodies mediating the crisis (the UN, Organisation of American States and the Central American Integration System) have all rejected this as being unconstitutional and likely to produce chaos. You have given sparse coverage to the many marches by government supporters calling for a peaceful, negotiated outcome.
Recently, Simon Jenkins wrote in a different context (July 5) of "the rush to judgment at the bidding of the news agenda" in which "social media and false news are weaponised." In our view this is precisely what is happening in mainstream reporting of Nicaragua. We call on the Guardian to take a more responsible stand, to challenge the abundant misinformation and in the future to provide a much more balanced analysis of the crisis.
Ellen Barfield, Baltimore, MD Chapter Veterans for Peace
Brian Becker, Radio Show Host, Loud & Clear
Carol Berman, Nicaraguan Cultural Alliance
Max Blumenthal, journalist
Al Burke, Editor, Nordic News Network
Lee Camp, head writer/host of Redacted Tonight
Maritza Castillo, Nicaraguan activist
Sofia Clark, political analyst
Mitchel Cohen, former Chair, WBAI radio Local Board
Don DeBar, writer and radio journalist
Warwick Fry, writer and radio journalist
Greg Grandin, journalist
Peter Grimes, sociologist and author
Paul Baker Hernández, singer, song-writer
Chuck Kaufman, Alliance for Global Justice
Dan Kovalik, human rights lawyer
Barbara Larcom, Baltimore Coordinator, Casa Baltimore/Limay
Abby Martin, journalist and presenter, The Empire Files
Arnold Matlin M.D, Rochester (NY) Committee on Latin America
Camilo Mejia, former Amnesty International prisoner of conscience
Nils McCune, IALA Mesoamerica
Nan McCurdy, Methodist missionary
Ben Norton, journalist
John Perry, writer
Stephen Sefton, writer
Patricia Villegas, President, Telesur
S. Brian Willson, Lawyer activist
Kevin Zeese, co-director, Popular Resistance
Some Comments on the policy of Regime Change,
I have some strong opinions on this (based much more on past experience than any recent information) , but in both directions, so they kind of cancel each other out. But that doesn’t really affect the main point, that forced regime change in Nicaragua is NOT a good idea. I remember all too well the left jubilation (my own included) that greeted the Khmer Rouge victory in Cambodia 1975, just before the South Vietnam government fell next door. I remember how we thought the first horrific reports coming out of “liberated” Cambodia seemed unbelievable. Cambodia is an extreme case—Ortega is certainly not Pol Pot—but it’s important to acknowledge that knee-jerk unconditional support for any revolution that calls itself Left (sometimes just because it calls itself Left) has never been a great policy. But most of us here are old enough to also remember the absolute hell Reagan and most others, before and since, have unleashed on one Third World country after another, notably including Nicaragua, wherever there’s been a government that acted like it was leading a sovereign country into a autonomous future.
Does anyone else remember who supported the Khmer Rouge bid to return to power after the Vietnamese took them out in 1978 or so? For years the Pol Pot gang were telling the UN they were the rightful government of Cambodia, backed up by only two countries on earth. There was China… and the United States of America… (okay, maybe three, if North Korea joined in). How can we expect anyone anywhere to not scoff at the American commitment to upholding freedom around the world? When I was working as a political cartoonist, my best client, a big New York paper, asked to me to do my part to drum up public support for two invasions. Since saying no would jeopardize my livelihood, and I didn’t really know enough about either situation at the time to offer coherent objections, I did my duty and portrayed both General Noriega of Panama (1989) and Saddam Hussein of Iraq (1990) as dangerous and ridiculous characters. The Saddam cartoon—as ordered, he was playing with toy weapons of mass destruction—accompanied an op-ed piece generated from some think tank—it pre-dated Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait by a week or more. When I was handed the job, I still thought Saddam was supposed to be America’s best friend in the Middle East, right up there with Israel (only less prone to attack American warships, e.g., the USS Liberty). So I had to be assured that no, he was unspeakably evil. Our editorial page editor, a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, was somewhat privy to “deep state” schemes and did his best to bring his readers along for the ride.
By that time, there were reports coming back from post-invasion Grenada about the changes brought by the US liberation of the island from its leftist government—the most noticeable difference, I heard from a Grenadian on talk radio, was that every street corner now had a storefront fundamentalist church, and rampant dealing and using of drugs. The hope of a better future in this world was dead, so any route elsewhere was welcome. (Guatemala in the 1980s was where the Pentacostal Gen. Rios Montt unleashed a genocidal campaign against Mayan villages, for which he was all but sainted by US televangelists. Haiti was already in an uproar after the 1986 mass uprising to overthrow of the long-running Duvalier dictatorship—and then US followed with an endless series of “regime changes” to liberate the country from its liberators and open it up for neocolonial hyperexploitation.)
I had some indirect personal knowledge of the Central American death squads—a few prophetic glimpses over a decade before the bloodbath began in earnest. My best friend in college had family members who would later sponsor some of the most notorious murders. I used to hang out with him at his country’s consulate, where a retarded teenager connected to the consul’s household was usually dressed up as a Green Beret. After dinner we’d have coffee from beans shipped directly from his home, and I’d hear affectionate tales of the backward peasants and their peculiar habits. My friend died of cancer very young—possibly from nibbling too many coffee beans, washed down with cognac, whilst puffing on fine cigars—shortly before the killing of Archbishop Romero, the murderers financed by that same coffee plantation’s profits, according to the New York Times of September 6, 1981:
One former army officer who commands [Orlando de Sola’s] respect and support is Maj. Roberto D'Aubuisson…
...the major was implicated in several key political assassinations, including the sniper shooting of Archbishop Oscar Arnulfo Romero while he celebrated mass in March 1980 …
In May last year, [Orlando] de Sola invited D'Aubuisson to Miami and personally escorted him to meet with friendly Senators and Congressmen in Washington. De Sola has visited D'Aubuisson in Guatemala City and has also taken advantage of visits there to make contact with former officers of Somoza's National Guard who are struggling to build a mercenary army to resist the Sandinista Government in Nicaragua and, it is alleged, to help train death squads in El Salvador.
(Emphasis added.) It should be noted that a great deal has happened over the intervening years, relating to the de Sola-d’Aubuisson connection, etc, etc. In September 1981, this was all quite new and new kinds of US involvement in Central America’s various civil wars was just beginning to materialize.
When we talk righteously of removing Daniel Ortega from power (again) in the 2018, it’s worth remembering in whose footsteps we’d be following. That doesn’t in itself prove it’s a bad idea but it certainly should give one pause, to put it mildly.
Finally—since this is not supposed to be a diary about regime change in general, or an overview of Central American History, but a criticism of the editorial policies of a particular newspaper and the agenda of a particular freelance reporter— I should what I noticed about that newspaper when I was in London and did some freelance ‘toons for the Guardian at the time of the 2003 Iraq War. For most of a year, I was studying the paper’s war coverage (and pre-war and post-war coverage too) very, very closely for my work — I never knew when I might get a call for a job and had to be somewhat prepared with information and ideas.
You may remember that right after the war had reached its supposedly successful conclusion, there was a weapons inspector quoted by the BBC saying that the WMD scare had been deceptively orchestrated and exaggerated by the Blair government (along with the US of course). You may recall too that Blair’s attack dog Alistair Campbell then unleashed a furious propaganda assault on the board of the BBC when they declined to punish those responsible for the report; and meanwhile the weapons inspector himself committed suicide after being outed, named (David Kelly), and interrogated in Parliament. The BBC Board heroically resisted for a while, then got crushed. After that the BBC’s news and opinion programs became noticeably much tamer, asking softball questions in deferential voices when Blair’s ministers were being interviewed about the ghastly unravelling of conquered Iraq. The reason I bring this up is that I was absolutely sure that the Guardian too started taking a far more docile and bland tone. (The leftish tabloid Daily Mirror went limp after 2004 when editor Piers Morgan got framed and then sacked in a fake-news scandal. For a few years it seemed that only the also-ran Independent did any serious digging into the ever-worsening Mideast situation.)
It seemed evident by the fall of 2003 that the Guardian understood its role was to be the left wing of the Establishment—not quite the same thing as being a fierce and fearless left critic of the Establishment.
If the global Establishment wants Ortega out badly enough, we can probably expect its left wing to do its part— for basically the same reason I did my part to encourage the invasions of Panama and Iraq, almost thirty years ago. The Guardian, like me, knows which side its bread is buttered on, and who can afford to be so principled or so objective that it will leave us shut out, in the cold, with no way back in?
A POSTSCRIPT:
Perhaps the core topic of this diary is the need to monitor and challenge news, info, and analysis coming not only from “the other side” but also from “our side”, and from sources we habitually regard as reliably moderate and at least moderately reliable. The Guardian is by no means the only liberal-leftish info source that needs to get its act a lot more together. TYT had a segment on the Haitian “elections” that should be used in classrooms as a textbook case of how to pass on the most disingenuous establishment propaganda without batting an eye. Just the other day I got entangled in a “meme” (is that what they’re called?) indicating that the sex prosecutor’s pre-Kavanaugh experience was limited to defending a priest accused of child molesting—which should call for a public apology to the prosecutor herself. I had to track down and correct everyone who had shared it from my facebook page. These things matter. Fact-checking, and humor, are the two main areas where we cannot afford to give up an inch of our hard-won territory.