Reagan and Nicaragua (How should we feel?)
In light of Nicaragua's elections, I set to thinking about the legacy that former President Ronald Reagan left us regarding this small Central American country. Instead of writing about it myself I will simply cut and paste snippets from other articles that can sum up what really happened. In 1979 the Sandinistas (or socialists) overthrow the brutally corrupt, American backed dictatorship under the Somoza family:
Between 1979 and 1984, Nicaraguans organized to create a new society. By 1983, a literacy campaign had dropped illiteracy rates from over 50% to 13%, 184,000 small farmers were given land, and vaccination campaigns and new health clinics had dropped infant mortality and raised life expectancy, leading the World Health Organization to call Nicaragua a "Model Nation in Health Attention". Hope was in the air.
War was in the air, also. Reagan unleashed the CIA to generate a war against this nascent government of the people in the form of a "contra" army formed out of the remnants of Somoza's National Guard. They attacked civilian targets throughout Nicaragua beginning in 1981, killing tens of thousands, and causing billions of dollars in economic damage. In 1984, Nicaragua held elections recognized as valid by the international community, but discounted by the United States. Daniel Ortega, a member of the Directorate of the Sandinista Party won the elections with 67% of the vote. He was an eloquent and often fiery speaker against the intervention of the United States.
Throughout the 1980's the war and economic embargo of the US continued, sucking the energy out of Nicaraguan society. In the mid-1980's one could feel the pressures of the war taking their toll on the spirit of the people. I participated in the work brigades of these times. In 1983 and 1985, I cut coffee with other internationals and Nicaraguan "volunteers" from the cities, in the hills of the Segovias and in El Crucero near Managua. I felt the difference between these two trips in the enthusiasm of the people for the struggle, and came to the conclusion that the real battle for Nicaragua would occur in the United States, where the fate of the contra war would be decided.
The horror of the continued support of the US government for the war against Nicaragua led a group of us to the halls of Congress where we were arrested in 1986 for protesting the appropriation of $100 million to the contras in the face of a World Court judgment declaring this to be an illegal war. A judgment of $17 billion dollars was levied by the Court against the US, and ignored by the US.
The Full Article
No government is perfect, but when the United States perpetrates the killings of tens of thousands of civilians through CIA training programs, how should we remember those who had the power to stop it? How should we remember Ronald Reagan in light of these atrocities? Is he still the great hero that I've always been told he was? Or does he stand right along all the more obnoxious despots of the world because of his participation in these murders?
I think what Franklin Roosevelt said of the Nicaraguan dictator Anastasio Somoza is quite telling:
"He's a son of a bitch, but he's our son of a bitch."--F.D.R.
If he is "our" son of a bitch, what does that make us?
