Pro and Contra: Democracy in Nicaragua?

An Anonymous World Citizen With a Reply by Mark Falcoff

Editor’s Note: On June 2 an advertisement appeared in the New York Times, sponsored by the Friends of the Democratic Center in Central America (PRODEMCA) under the title, “Democracy Is the Issue in Nicaragua.” It stated that “there are many issues in the present debate over U.S. policy toward Nicaragua, but the basic issue is this: will we stand beside the Nicaraguan democratic resistance in its struggle against totalitarianism? Or will we declare that this movement is a lost cause, and offer only to help its supporters adjust to lives as victims, refugees, and exiles?” The document offered no particular prescription for this assistance, but merely urged that “our people… send an unmistakable message to Managua, Moscow and Havana [that] the American people support the struggle for democracy in Nicaragua. We may differ over what form our assistance should take, but we are firmly united in the conviction that our aid is a moral and strategic obligation.” The signatories, some 67 in all, included political figures, intellectuals, labor leaders, religious leaders, and former functionaries of the Carter and Reagan administrations. Each subsequently received the Open Letter which is reproduced below. What follows the Open Letter is the response of one of the recipients, Mark Falcoff of the American Enterprise Institute.

Dear Signer:

I was astonished that you chose to sign your name to an ad claiming that “Democracy is the Issue in Nicaragua.”

I write to you in sadness because I respect your work and your background. It is because of that background that I urge you to reconsider your statement. Given your position of influence and your credibility in many circles your name lends great legitimacy to the ad’s contention. Therefore, I ask you to do something. Please visit Chile, Honduras, El Salvador and Guatemala. Then visit Nicaragua. I would be happy to help raise the funds for you to do this if that is necessary. During these visits, talk not only to political leaders, but also to the opposition, the press, and the peasants. Go not as an honored government guest, but as an anonymous world citizen. If your conclusion after this trip is that Nicaragua fails in comparison to the others, so be it. I believe that your conclusions will be the opposite.

The ad raises several important questions:

First, if democracy in Nicaragua is the issue, why wasn’t this group of people raising funds for those fighting against Somoza? There was no controversy about Somoza’s democratic inclinations. For almost fifty years, the Somozas had permitted no semblance of democratic rights and in the 1970s his regime’s repression and brutality were equaled only by Chile and Argentina.

Second, if support of democracy is the lynchpin of our foreign policy, then the situation in Nicaragua should be relatively low on our priority list. The clearest case for U.S. intervention would be in Chile. Chile had the longest democratic tradition of any Latin American country until 1973 when it was plunged into totalitarianism with significant and explicit U.S. support, as documented by 1975 congressional hearings. Today, there is no free press in Chile. There have been no elections in Chile since 1973. Torture is widespread in Chile as documented not only by independent organizations such as Amnesty International but also by the U. S. Department of State. Yet, in such a clearcut situation, the U.S. government continues to give support to dictator Pinochet. The most recent public statement from then Assistant Secretary of State Langhorne Motley who returned from a visit to Chile in early 1985 after General Pinochet had inaugurated his latest state of siege was, “My impression is that the destiny of Chile in Chilean hands is in good hands.”

There are other cases of totalitarianism almost as bad as that of Chile. Guatemala and Haiti come to mind. Thousands of innocents are still being lost in those countries each year according to the U.S. Department of State and humanitarian organizations. In these countries there is no thought of democracy. Yet there are no full page ads, nor even letters to the editor about these situations from the signers of your ad.

Argentina is an excellent case in point about the selective use of “democracy” as a justification for U.S. intervention. Most of your co-signers supported the Administration’s policy of reintroducing aid to the Argentine military government even while it was gaining the reputation of being one of the most brutal regimes in the world. This policy was a direct repudiation of Jimmy Carter’s human rights policy. Argentina remembers. One of the little reported news stories of 1984 was former President Jimmy Carter’s emotional visit to Buenos Aires where most of the democratic leaders thanked him literally for saving their lives. The democratic government in Argentina came about because of the loss of the Falklands, not because of U.S. pressure in any form.

Third, your advertisement specifically compares the situation in Nicaragua to that in El Salvador. It is not clear to whose advantage this comparison works. In Nicaragua, Arturo Cruz decided not to run. He was not prohibited from running. This is not a semantic distinction. As you are aware from the New York Times report of October 21, 1984, Cruz campaigned almost to the end of the election period. It was apparent from Administration comments that they did not want Cruz to run or if he did, to withdraw before the election claiming the conditions were unfair. In fact, one senior Administration official was quoted as saying, “The administration never contemplated letting [emphasis added] Cruz stay in the race because then the Sandinistas could justifiably claim that the elections were legitimate.”

John Oakes, former senior editor of the New York Times in a piece on November 5, 1984, noted, “The most fraudulent thing about the Nicaraguan election was the part the administration played in it.”

By their own admission, United States Embassy officials in Managua pressured opposition politicians to withdraw from the ballot in order to isolate the Sandinistas and to discredit the regime.

The U.S. Latin American Studies Association developed a report on the electoral process in Nicaragua (available for $3 from the Center for U.S. Mexican Studies, University of California, San Diego D101, LaJolla, CA 92093): The FSLN, the government party, received 67 percent of the votes, 29 percent were divided among three opposition parties to the right of the FSLN and less than 4 percent were divided among three parties to the left of the FSLN. The opposition parties together won 35 seats in the National Assembly (36.5%).

The conclusion of the Association whose members are experts in Latin American history and politics was that, “A 33 percent share of the vote going to the opposition parties represents meaningful opposition which the FSLN government had the political courage to recognize through a clean vote count and accurate reporting of results.”

Meanwhile, in the much touted El Salvadorean election, leftist civilian opposition leader Guillermo Ungo was not permitted to participate. According to Ray Bonner, former NYT reporter on El Salvador, “confidential documents show that the army would not permit him or other leftist candidates to run.” You know, of course, that the term leftist in El Salvador rarely refers to communists or socialists, but rather to those who favor land reform, the right of workers to organize, and the government provision of services to the poor. Until recently, Duarte himself was dubbed a leftist by the Administration, and spurned accordingly.

In Nicaragua there is press censorship. But it is remarkable how many anti-Sandinista stories get into the press. Indeed, every visitor to Nicaragua finds the opposition vocal, articulate and more than eager to air their grievances. In El Salvador, however, there is no opposition press. Opposition editors and reporters have been murdered and their printing plants bombed.

Nicaragua is not a perfect democracy. It is a practicing one, and in comparison to those countries around it, it looks benign, even beneficent. In El Salvador, civilian populations are bombed by the government army using U.S. supplied military aid and expertise. Leftists are excluded from elections, reporters are murdered and fear stills the voices of concerned citizens. In Nicaragua, many thousands of citizens have been murdered by the counter-revolutionary forces for which you urge support. And rightists are not excluded from elections, reporters are not murdered and there is so little fear that the voices of critical citizens are reported almost daily in the U.S. press.

Given these non-controversial facts of life south of our border, what am Ito make of your ad? If democracy is the key issue for you, why do you target Nicaragua when it is among the more democratic nations of Central America? When a reader knows that you did not speak out against the undemocratic and brutal regime of Somoza, yet are now asking for assistance to the contras, 46 of whose 48 leaders were former Somocistas, how can she take seriously your ad’s headline?

I end where I begin. Visit the five countries. Make your own decision. But if democracy is indeed the key issue, then I am confident that you will withdraw your support for U.S. aid to the Contras in Nicaragua.

Sincerely,

Harriet S. Barlow

Blue Mountain Lake, New York

Mark Falcoff replies:

Dear Ms. Barlow:

Since you have addressed your letter to me in a somewhat impersonal fashion, I have chosen to respond to it publicly rather than in the privacy of individual correspondence. It is not normally my practice to respond to letters which are not individually addressed to me (or to editors who have published my work), but since you obviously have given so much thought to the issue, and have raised so many serious points of objection, I do feel you deserve a careful reply.

Some 67 persons signed the ad which inspired your letter. Your generalizations about them I find fairly breathtaking, since it would be difficult to find a political advertisement in recent years subscribed to by so many different kinds of Americans. They do have one thing in common, however; they believe in democracy, not as someone else defines that word, but as we define it and practice it in the United States. They also believe it the appropriate and desirable form of government for other peoples. While they recognize that it will not always be on the agenda, given different cultural and historic situations, wherever the opportunity does present itself, we as a people should express our firm solidarity and concrete support.

Obviously we have failed to persuade you. As far as I can tell, your fundamental objection is two-fold: first, because at this particular moment we have singled out Nicaragua for attention instead of, say, Chile, you believe we cannot be sincere in our convictions. And because we disagree with you, we must not know very much about these countries, probably because we have never been to them, or if we have, it has been as “honored guests” rather than “anonymous world citizens.”

You are wrong on both counts. Looking over the list, I believe that I am probably one of the more conservative signatories. Let me just cite to you some of the things I have said about the Pinochet regime in Chile over the last ten years in conservative publications: in Commentary magazine (May, 1976), I described it as “a fascist regime of astounding ferocity;” in the Hoover Institution symposium The United States in the 1980s, (1980), I singled out not merely Chile but Argentina and Uruguay (then under military rule) as examples of countries where “the issues of human rights and political freedom have become so compelling as to completely overshadow the other kinds of questions… that would normally be at the heart of diplomatic interchange.” Most recently, in The Wall St. Journal (June 13, 1985) I wrote that the “military junta” which came to power in Chile in 1973 has a record “on basic freedoms [which] is one of the worst in Latin America.” Despite the fact that I was not a supporter of the Carter administration, I have found it useful and necessary to defend its human rights policies in such uncongenial environments as the National War Colleges of Argentina, Chile and Uruguay (the latter on two occasions). I did not support reintroduction of military aid in Argentina until its return to democracy (a position I also hold presently on Chile), which fact you can easily document by consulting the hearings of the Houe.]Foreign Affairs Committee. Nor is my travel restricted to these three countries—I have also been in Guatemala, Nicaragua, Honduras on numerous occasions, not as “an honored guest” but not, I concede, as “an anonymous world citizen” either (my passport carries the Great Seal of the United States). I therefore believe I have a perfect moral right to sit in judgment on the government of Nicaragua, and also that I possess the breadth of experience necessary to place events there in proper context, I should add somewhat gratuitously that I am totally fluent in Spanish.

Of course, this does not mean ipso facto that I am right and you are wrong. But it does mean that I have reached my conclusions by a route as least as legitimate as your own.

Let me now turn to several other points in your letter.

Your reading of recent history in both Nicaragua and El Salvador is extremely selective. It amounts to saying that (a) the recent elections in Nicaragua were valid, (b) that the ones in El Salvador were not, and (c) that if there were any deficiencies in the Nicaraguan electoral process, it is the fault of the Reagan administration and not the FSLN. On Nicaragua you cite as your authorities the New York Times and also the report of a committee of the Latin American Studies Association. I am sorry to inform you that neither of these are unimpeachable. You may not be aware of the fact that the recent conduct of the Latin American Studies Association (LASA), when speaking or acting ex cathedra on policy issues, has provoked a major scandal in the learned professions, and indeed, even within its own ranks. Its past president, Professor Jorge Dominguez of Harvard, has specifically singled out for criticism the rude and discourteous treatment of Carter administration spokesmen participating in panels on Nicaragua, and some members of the Latin Americanist community have simply dropped out of LASA because of its incapacity to treat the Nicaraguan (and Cuban) issue fairly and objectively. The Times has also had its problems interpreting events in Nicaragua, though it has not failed to report a number of events which you see fit not to cite, such as the mobs which threw stones at Arturo Cruz when he tried to campaign; the prohibition on meetings in open places (in a country where there are few halls large enough to hold more than several hundred people); the constant shifting of ground-rules by the Sandinistas; the inability of the opposition to organize and actively campaign at the local level, and so forth. At a dinner sponsored by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington shortly after he withdrew from participation, Mr. Cruz was pointedly asked by many critics of the administration whether he felt that had U.S. policy been different, he could have participated. As I was present, I recall very vividly his comments, which could be summarized as follows: “I do have my problems with the Reagan administration, but the real issue is in Nicaragua—with the Sandinistas, who want an election of some sort, but one in which there will be no serious opposition to challenge them, and nothing I have been able to do can persuade them to change their minds.” So much for statements made in camera. Insofar as the public prints are concerned, for someone so committed to this issue, you seem strangely unaware of the criticisms of the Nicaraguan regime which have been ventilated in such liberal publications as The New Republic (Robert S. Leiken, “Nicaragua’s Untold Stories,” October 4, 1984), New York magazine, The New York Review of Books, even—saints preserve us!—The Nation.

I do not believe this is the place to rehash old and extremely stale arguments about the legitimacy of the elections in El Salvador, but you should at least consider that at this point their validity has been accepted by some of the strongest critics of the administration in the Democratic party, and indeed by many Western European governments which are not generally inclined to follow our lead in Central America, notably France and Spain. However, even if everything you said about El Salvador were true, it would not alter the facts about Nicaragua one iota. If our policies in one part of Latin America are wrong, let us by all means criticize and correct them; but let us not begin by falsifying the situation in another.

Re-reading your letter, I find myself returning to your question—why Nicaragua? Why not Chile? The answer is that Chile (and Argentina, in its time) were or are the object of an international campaign of solidarity. The United Nations even maintains a Special Rapporteur for the human rights situation in Chile, though it does not for Cuba, Ethiopia, Cambodia, or Afghanistan, countries where one would normally also have the right to expect it. A double standard, yes; but better a double standard than none at all. The problem is that there is no international movement of solidarity for the Nicaraguan people, only for their government. This is a curious inversion of priorities, which I think can only be explained by the fact that Nicaragua is a small country locked into conflict with the United States. Indeed, I would argue that precisely because it is anti-American, the Nicaraguan government can expect its treatment of its own people to be overlooked or explained away by people in Western Europe, Latin America, even in the United States, where among “anonymous world citizens” the opposition of any foreign government to their own country and culture is the hallmark of political respectability.

There is another reason why Nicaragua is especially important. Like many of my cosignators, I do not believe—indeed, I do not wish to believe—that the only alternative to right-wing military dictatorships in Latin America is Communism. That means that a human rights policy properly understood requires not merely opposition to military juntas, but a commitment which goes beyond their downfall and follows the situation in a country until democratic institutions are firmly established. Precisely how that is to be done depends on circumstances, but the principle is clear enough. What you seem to be saying in your letter—perhaps without being aware of it—is, “Well, perhaps Communism is the logical and even acceptable outcome to right-wing dictatorship in Nicaragua—and what of it?” Perhaps acceptable to you, but not to me or my friends and colleagues who signed the June 2 declaration, but what is surely more to the point, not acceptable to the vast majority of Nicaraguans, who did not fight to get rid of Somoza only to impose upon their country a new and even more efficient, thorough, and permanent dictatorship. Your apparent indifference to them, not your antipathy to us, is perhaps the most genuinely disturbing feature of your letter.

One final point. The history of Nicaragua and the United States have been inextricably intertwined for more than a century. One may deplore this fact, but one cannot change it. The United States obviously played a part in the events which led to the creation of the Somoza dynasty, and it was also instrumental in bringing the last Somoza down. Indeed, once it was clear that the Carter administration had shifted course, the Somozas (and their opponents) knew the game was over. This is a hegemonic role with which many Americans seem uncomfortable, but it seems to me useless to deny. In any event no other country or combination of countries (much less fictitious sovereignties like “Contadora”) can play it. To decide to start practicing “non-intervention” now will add the cruelest twist of all to the history of U.S.-Nicaraguan relations. It would be one thing if all that were at issue were our prestige and self-esteem. We are a big-and-powerful country, and we can sustain a few well-deserved bloody noses for our transgressions, neglect, and past errors. But let us keep matters in proper perspective. If we have debts of honor to discharge with regard to a small and vulnerable country, let us do so at our own expense, not in the currency of the suffering—present and future—of its people. Believe me, Ms. Barrlow, I am,

Sincerely,

Mark Falcoff

Resident Fellow

Center for Hemispheric Studies

American Enterprise Institute

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