Remembering Ortega’s Gulag

Yeah, Obama wants us to hang out with guys like Daniel Ortega, Fidel and Raul, Hugo. Fine upstanding fellows all. (Uncle Barry has a closet full of Che t-shirts in all different colors but don't tell anyone I said so. Hey, one man's freedom fighter is another's cold blooded executioner)

Front Page Mag:

Remembering Ortega’s Gulag
By Jamie Glazov
FrontPageMagazine.com Monday, April 20, 2009

President Obama sat quietly, enduring a 50-minute rambling diatribe from socialist Nicaraguan president Daniel Ortega at the Fifth Summit of the Americas in Trinidad and Tobago over the weekend. Ortega denounced what he called a century of “terroristic U.S. aggression in Central America” and lashed out at the U.S. trade embargo against Castro’s Cuba. He also condemned what he termed the "illegal" war that was waged against the Sandinista regime, that he once led, by U.S.-backed Contra rebels in the 1980s.

But if Ortega is interested in history lessons, then it might be useful, on this occasion, to reflect on the Marxist tyranny he once headed -- and on its barbaric and vicious oppression of the Nicaraguan people. In so doing, it becomes transparently clear that the United States was not just justified, but also noble, in its backing of the Contra freedom fighters, whose sole purpose was to liberate Nicaraguans from Sandinista despotism.

Like all their Communist role models, when the Sandinistas captured power in Nicaragua in July 1979, they immediately imposed a ruthless dictatorship to maintain rigid control. Following in Castro’s footsteps, they set up local spy networks. Each neighborhood had a Comité de Defensa Sandinista (CDS—Sandinista Defense Committee), which served the same totalitarian purpose as the Cuban CDR and the Nazi regime’s block overseers—although the power of the CDS extended far beyond the Nazis’ model.

Emulating Stalin, Mao, and Castro, the Sandinistas took control of everything in the country. They censored all publications, suspended the right of association, and ruthlessly crushed the trade unions. They seized the means of production, and incentives for foreign investment disappeared. To put it plainly, another twentieth-century experiment with socialism annihilated a nation’s economy.

Nicaraguans who attempted to protect their property were imprisoned or executed by the new despots. Moreover, unlike the authoritarian but not totalist regime of Anastasio Somoza, whom the Sandinistas overthrew, they did not leave the native populations on the Atlantic coast of Nicaragua in peace. In Khmer Rouge style, the Sandinistas forcibly relocated tens of thousands of Miskito Indians from their land. Like Stalin and Mao, the new regime used famine as a weapon against these “enemies of the people.” The Sandinista army killed or imprisoned approximately fifteen thousand innocent Miskitos. The Sandinista crimes included a calculated liquidation of the Miskitos’ entire leadership—as the Soviets had done to the Poles in the spring of 1940, when, at Katyn Forest and other locations, the NKVD executed approximately fifteen thousand Polish officers.

The Sandinistas quickly distinguished themselves as among the worst human-rights abusers in Latin America, carrying out approximately eight thousand political executions within three years of the revolution. By 1983, the number of political prisoners in the new Marxist regime’s jails was estimated at twenty thousand. This was the highest number of political prisoners in any nation in the hemisphere—except, of course, Castro’s Cuba. By 1986, a vicious and violent “resettlement program” forced some two hundred thousand Nicaraguans into 145 “settlements” throughout the country. This monstrous social-engineering program included the designation of “free-fire” zones, in which government troops had carte blanche to shoot and kill any peasant they spotted.

The Sandinistas also institutionalized torture. Political prisoners in jails such as Las Tejas were consistently beaten, deprived of sleep, and given electric shocks. They were routinely denied food and water and kept in dark cubicles known as chiquitas (little ones), that had a surface area of less than one square meter. These cubicles were too small to sit up in, were completely dark, and had no sanitation and almost no ventilation. Prisoners were also forced to stand for long periods without bending their arms or legs; they were locked into steel boxes exposed to the full force of the tropical sun; their wives and daughters were sexually assaulted in front of them; and some prisoners were mutilated and skinned alive before being executed. One Sandinista practice was known as corte de cruz: this was a drawing-and-quartering technique in which the prisoner’s limbs were severed from the body, leaving him to bleed to death. The result of all of these horrifying cruelties was yet another mass exodus from a country enslaved by Communism, with tens of thousands of Nicaraguans escaping and settling in Honduras, Costa Rica, or the United States.

With Soviet and Cuban aid, Nicaragua developed the biggest and best armed force in Central America. In attempting to export its Marxist revolution, it posed a serious threat to stability and democracy in the whole region, and thus to the United States. In response, the Reagan administration backed a group of rebels called the Contras – to whom Ortega refereed in his diatribe at the Americas Summit. The Contras were mostly peasants led by former Sandinistas who felt betrayed by the totalitarian turn of the revolution. Their sole purpose was to bring democracy to their homeland.

In the end, Nicaraguans were able to oust their oppressors. On February 25, 1990, under massive international pressure, and intoxicated by their own propaganda with regard to their popularity, the Sandinistas held an election. The pressure of the Contras was also to be credited for forcing the Sandinistas to allow their own people a vote. As it turned out, the dictators had fundamentally failed to gauge what the people were really feeling. The Sandinistas, led by Ortega, were embarrassingly ousted from power by the Coalition of Nicaraguan Opposition Parties, headed by Violeta Chamorro.

Nicaragua obviously did not heal overnight, but the Sandinistas could no longer torture their own people in a position of total power. They made sure, of course, to fulfill their Marxist legacy by swiftly “privatizing” the huge property holdings they had confiscated during the revolution. But the reign of terror was cut short.

If Ortega wants to engage in history lessons, then its high time for a history lesson that involves the whole story, not just rhetoric about American “imperialism.” It's time for an honest reconciliation with who the Sandinistas really were and the tragic dark chapter they introduced into Nicaragua's history.