Nicaraguan leaders
By HARRY SLOAN THE greasy grins, backslapping and handshakes between Gorbachev and Reagan in Geneva stand in some contrast to the increasing US efforts destabilise and overthrow the Nicaraguan government.
Washington has consistently and without proof denounced Nicaragua's Sandinista leaders as "Marxists" "agents of Moscow" - and funnelled tens of millions of dollars to finance the terrorist activities of the "contra" forces who carry out their murders under the cynical banner Nicaraguan Democratic Front.
But while the contras operated from bases in neighbouring Honduras and Costa Rica -ting bloody cross-border raids and occasional CIA-orchestrated sabotage missions against ports and economic targets the revolutionary struggle has also found solid support in the hierarchy Nicaragua's Catholic Church.
In many dictatorial Church leaders have to some degree supported liberation struggles: but in democratic Nicaragua there has been running battle between the Sandinistas and Cardinal Obando y Bravo.
The Church has taken a particularly vicious stand against the conscription of soldiers to fight the contras • though it mounted no such campaign to prevent former dictator Somoza recruiting for his notoriously brutal National Guard. Indeed many of the NDF's contra forces today disgruntled and defeated National Guard thugs looking for vengeance and a return dictatorship.
The publication in October of a church-sponsored newspaper attacking the Sandinista government and conscription appears to have been one of the decisive triggers to a new clampdown on civil liberties.
President Ortega measures including curbs on freedom of the press, and restictions on the right of assembly and habeas corpus.
He blamed the crackdown firmly on the escalating American offensive clamp down on
Contras' allies to and of the
A CONGRESOhave mouncounterof regimes, and on "agents of imperialism in the interior" who are "developing actions sabotage and to defence of our homeland."
are parties in Nicaragua the old-style
Of course even announced other countries!
the
Socialist Viewpoint No. 9 December 1985 p23
But arms, production.
some eradicate
Jesuit priests.
The firm movement rectionaries.
A destablise the
The extent to which the capitalist
- more or less open supporters of the contra gangs
- have been allowed to operate freecrush the ly has been the strangely exceptional feature of the Sandinista revolution.
then not all were satisfied: journalists complained that detailed reportage of military matters to do with the war were being censored — as if they are reported in
But those who imagined that the
Sandinistas could continue to allow such freedoms even while imperialist
Campaign:
pressure has grown were naive in the extreme. In a poor, blockaded coun try, where the forces of rection have
CARMEUPvast US resources at their disposal, the struggle to defend and extend the revolution of 1979 could never be reduced to some kind of large scale debate or ideological exercise.
To defend the revolution means physically and militarily to beat down those who are arrogantly threatening to overturn it and return Nicaragua to the dark ages of Somoza.
though the Sandinistas recognise this on one level - and have sought to mobilise the necessary equipment and human resources to repel and inflict defeats upon the contras — there is another level on which they are opposed to carrying through the same fight.
Ortega and the Sandinistas fought the election pledged to maintain a "mixed" (capitalist) economy, within which the reactionary capitalist allies of the contras continue to own and control a majority of the means of
While the new restrictions may censor some publications and outlaw gatherings of counter-revolutionaries, they will not this wealthy and well-placed fifth column of imperialism or confront the power of the Church with a fullscale education campaign: leading Sandinista ministers are also moves that have been taken must be seen in this context — not least becasue the new restrictions on civil liberties apply at least potentially to the Nicaraguan workers' as well as to the counter-offensive against the NDF and its allies is legitimate even overdue. The censorship of the press in wartime is nothing extraordinary in itself simply extraordinarily late in this instance.
But in supporting measures to contras, Nicaraguan workers should ask themselves how long the right wing capitalists are to be let off the hook — and in whose interests? Is it not high time that their factories, land and other assets were seized, and they were forced to join their real colleagues in the contra camps across the border or luxurious villas in Miami? Nicaragua Solidarity 20/21 Compton Terrace, London N1.