5

The Culture of Terrorism

We learn more about our moral and intellectual culture by a closer look at the debate, or lack of it, over Central America. Its basic determinants we have already noted. Early concerns over El Salvador abated when successful terror reduced the danger that the U.S. might be drawn into a war that could be costly to itself. Guatemala was never a topic of much concern because the U.S. role was disguised by the use of client states and it appeared that domestic military forces were adequate to the task of violent repression. And hundreds of thousands of peasants starving in Honduras fall well below the threshold of attention. With regard to Nicaragua, concern remains high, again because of the fear that state terrorism might fail, with potential costs for the United States.

The controversy over support for the U.S. proxy army reflects these priorities. “Contra leaders and their backers in Washington,” the media explain, “are acutely aware that the future of the entire project could turn on how much military success the contras can have” before the next congressional vote on aid. They understand very well that the purpose of U.S. aid “is to permit people who are fighting on our side to use more violence,” in the words of Assistant Secretary of State Elliott Abrams.1 Accordingly, the contra leadership does not approach Congress with the plea that they can win popular support through the appeal of their political program and organizing achievements in Nicaragua; rather they insist that with U.S. military aid and CIA direction they can kill enough people and cause enough destruction to “soft targets” to make a difference. In adopting this public stance, they register their understanding that the debate within elite circles is largely tactical, and that in a terrorist cultural climate, nothing counts except the success of violence.

This perception is well-supported in editorial and other commentary, which regularly stays within this framework of assumptions, warning—to select a typical example—that the contras “have some distance to go before convincing the American people that they are capable either of forcing the Sandinistas to the bargaining table or of scoring a military victory,” and “may well be deprived” of further funding “unless Congress becomes convinced that they are up to the job.” In the light of the inconvenient—hence irrelevant—diplomatic record to which we return, we may dismiss the reference to “forcing the Sandinistas to the bargaining table” as mere parroting of state propaganda, designed to cover up the real issue: “scoring a military victory.” Syndicated columnist Smith Hempstone fears that “it will be difficult for Reagan to wangle a two-year financial commitment for the contras,” though “a major contra military victory” before the next funding request “would help enormously.”2 Such commentary, virtually exceptionless, amounts to an acknowledgement that the contra leadership comprehends the mentality of U.S. elites quite well: in these circles, the overriding criterion is the success of violence. If it succeeds only after reaching the level of Pol Pot-style atrocities as in El Salvador and Guatemala, that is a proof of our heartfelt commitment to democracy and human rights; if it appears that violence may fail, as in Nicaragua, that shows that Nicaragua may be “beyond the reach of our good intentions.”

In accordance with the guiding principle of “change of course,” it is permissible to concede that events of the past reflected more unsavory features of our “national purpose,” but now everything has changed, though in reality nothing has changed and our traditional victims will relive past horrors, suffering as well the burden of our uplifting rhetoric and self-congratulatory posturing as we keep them in their proper place. It is doubtful that any crime, however grotesque, might fail to be absorbed with equanimity into this remarkable system of intellectual self-defense.

Similar concerns over the effectiveness of violence were voiced internally during the Vietnam war. Thus William Bundy urged in June 1965 that “our air actions against the South should be carried on a maximum effective rate,” including B-52 bombardment, though there was one—and only one—problem: “we look silly and arouse criticism if these [B-52 raids] do not show significant results.” Meanwhile, B-52 raids in the densely populated Mekong Delta were showing “significant results” in demolishing the civilian society, presumably relieving these doubts.3

We therefore should feel no surprise when we learn that the U.S. command is proud of its success in directing its terrorist proxy forces to attack “soft targets” such as the “precise military targets” identified by the New York Times. Other “soft targets” include the health centers, medical workers and schools “targeted” by the contra forces with some success as noted, and civilian farms, which, as contra leader Adolfo Calero has explained, are legitimate targets.4 State Department spokesman Charles Redman, at a July 1, 1986 press briefing, confirmed U.S. support for this strategy, explaining that cooperative farms “often have a dual military-economic purpose” and their inhabitants “are armed and receive regular military training.” Citing Redman’s statement, Americas Watch observes that it

would do credit to George Orwell’s Ministry of Truth. It would be interesting to know, however, whether [the State Department] considers how its theory that a cooperative has a “dual military-economic purpose” and, therefore, is a legitimate target for attack, might be applied, for example, to an unfortified Israeli kibbutz where attackers kill and injure children, burn houses and kidnap civilians. Is it now U.S. policy that such an attack would be legitimate?5

More important for assessing the nature of a terrorist culture is that the principles expressed by the State Department are generally accepted, even by critics of government policy. The media derisively dismiss atrocity mongering by Sandinista apologists who ignore the possibility that civilians assassinated by the contras might have been armed or accompanied by armed militia; the murder of agricultural workers in Israeli collectives, armed for self-defense, or rocket attacks on these defended outposts, is treated somewhat differently. New Republic editor Michael Kinsley, a liberal dove by the standards of American discourse, writes that the State Department defense of “bloody contra attacks on government-sponsored farm cooperatives” has merit, because “In a Marxist society geared up for war, there are no clear lines separating officials, soldiers and civilians”—a justification that could be offered with ease by Abu Nidal.6 The attacks on other “soft targets” are also appropriate as a means “to undermine morale and confidence in the government,” Kinsley continues, “a perfectly legitimate goal if you believe in the cause”—as he does, in essentials—“but impossible to achieve without vast civilian suffering.” A “sensible policy,” then, must “meet the test of cost-benefit analysis,” an analysis of “the amount of blood and misery that will be poured in, and the likelihood that democracy will emerge at the other end.”7 In El Salvador and Guatemala, “cost-benefit analysis” apparently reveals that the policies were sensible: 150,000 corpses, well over 1 million refugees, unknown numbers tortured, raped and starved “poured in,” and “at the other end,” the kind of “democracy” that passes muster by the standards of liberal American opinion.

Kinsley’s colleague, New Republic editor Morton Kondracke, offers his basis for cost-benefit analysis with refreshing clarity. “The contra movement seems to have done its part to earn refunding,” he concludes, because, according to Reagan administration officials, the contras “have overrun several garrisons and cooperatives,” which “contra leaders claim . . . are not civilian and agricultural” but rather “militarized”—as are Israeli kibbutzim. The success of violence is the crucial factor, and since it is adequate by his standards, the contras merit further support, particularly because contra military commander Enrique Bermúdez assures him of the popular support for his forces within Nicaragua—in the cooperatives burned to the ground by his intrepid warriors, for example.8

Departing from these impressive sources, we might inquire into the military victories that inspire Kondracke’s admiration. The “most important military action we have carried out in the northern part of the country” according to contra spokesman Bosco Matamoros, duly reported as such by the Times, turned out to be slightly different as their correspondent later discovered on the scene: just another attack on “one of the most isolated villages in Nicaragua’s northern mountains” in which the attackers never came close to “either the town’s dirt airstrip or the small collection of shacks that serves as local headquarters for the Nicaraguan Army,” but did succeed in burning down most of the houses in a nearby grain cooperative, stealing cattle from “distraught” peasants who report that “we came down here from the mountains to escape the contras” and cannot return “because they’ll kill us,” and killing three children and a pregnant woman with 18 other civilian casualties by shooting machine guns into houses as they ran by in this major military victory.9 Kondracke concedes that this military victory, with children killed “after contras threw grenades into houses”—the only victory he cites—will apparently not help his favorites in “attracting popular support”; so we are left with “overrunning cooperatives” as a sufficient basis for renewing support for the proxy army.

Other “military victories” prove to be similar on investigation. “In their April report on military actions,” the London Times notes, “the Nicaraguan rebels listed as one of their main achievements the destruction of a “Sandinistan Army garrison at La Victoria.”10 But when journalists visited this village in south-central Nicaragua, “they were able to find little evidence to substantiate the Contras’ account.” Rather, they found that in La Victoria, “formed two years ago by peasants fleeing from Contra raids in the North,” there was no military garrison but rather a settlement of 45 families attacked by heavily armed contras who “came in shouting, ‘Here come the sons of Reagan’.” The sons of Reagan succeeded in overrunning the cooperative defended by untrained militia armed only with rifles, including a 13-year old boy who was killed, destroying many houses, killing, and burning crops. The CIA “has been frustrated in its attempts to stop American supported anti-Sandinista rebels attacking poorly defended state farms and cooperatives and killing innocent civilians, according to Western diplomatic sources with access to U.S. intelligence,” the report continues (accepting this very dubious CIA claim as true), and has so far been unable “to change the image of the Contras from that of a ruthless horde to one of an effective military force with legitimate, populist aspirations”—the latter obviously being a proper task for the CIA.

But the contra “image” is adequate for the enlightened editor of a journal that seethes with endless rage over PLO terrorism, because “under U.S. influence the contras are promising democracy, just as under U.S. influence El Salvador is creating it,” one of these arguments being as compelling as the other.11

Across the spectrum, it is recognized that success in the exercise of violence is the condition that the proxy army must satisfy to merit continued support, though it would be helpful if we could modify their “image.” There are few qualms and no awareness of what is implied by these open commitments, as one should expect in a terrorist culture.

Similar assumptions prevail elsewhere. U.S. international terrorism has by no means been confined to Central America. As noted earlier, the worst single act of international terrorism in 1986 was the U.S. bombing of Libya, killing some 100 people according to Western reports. The pretext was fraudulent, as was known but concealed by the media at the time though the point is now tacitly conceded—without, however, any capacity to draw the obvious conclusions. At the time, the most extreme critics of Reagan were enthusiastic, arguing that it is quite proper to kill “innocent civilians, or murderous states would never fear retribution” (Anthony Lewis).12 And though it is now conceded that the pretext was a fraud, respected commentators such as the 1987 Pulitzer Prize winner Charles Krauthammer continue to laud this “self-enforcement action” by the United States, which must play its role as global “enforcer,” he blandly asserts. He goes on to denounce the United Nations for daring to condemn the attack as a violation of international law. The UN even stooped to the level of “condemning Western retaliatory actions such as the raid on Libya” without mentioning “the provocation”—conceded to have been a fabrication, a matter of no account. These are simply further signs of the commitment of the UN “to undermine the legitimacy of Western ideas, institutions, and interests” and to carry out other “mischief” that should, he urges, impel us to eliminate this institution, now useless since it no longer follows American orders.13

Within disciplined Western intellectual circles, few could comprehend that on the principle Anthony Lewis enunciates, innumerable people around the world are entitled to bomb Washington causing tens of thousands of casualties in retribution for the acts of the terrorist commanders who operate there with impunity.14 It is the hallmark of a terrorist culture that observations such as these may never be expressed, and must be incomprehensible when voiced far from the mainstream, where elementary rationality and minimal honesty are not excluded as intolerable affronts to decency.

We learn more about the nature of a terrorist culture by a closer look at the current interpretations of the consequences of the Reagan Doctrine in Central America—taking care not to forget that these policies merely extend, to a higher peak of savagery, the Carter administration programs, which have ample precedent in U.S. history. Since the successful slaughters in El Salvador and Guatemala have been removed from elite concern and—largely—public awareness, let us turn to the attack against Nicaragua, still an issue because of the potential costs to us. Documents circulated internally in the White House concede frankly that the contra armies organized by the U.S. government are a “proxy force” for which the U.S. must somehow construct a “political base” within Nicaragua, this task obviously being beyond the capacity of the “democratic resistance.” Meeting at a sumptuous country club in Costa Rica with “catered buffet and open bar,” the “collection of successful businessmen, bankers and attorneys” who make up the contra civilian leadership established by the United States as a classical Communist-style “front organization” explain the difficult problem they face: “to diffuse an impression of the contras as principally a military force with a vague, and largely conservative, political program” and to project a progressive image that might have some appeal within Nicaragua. The problems probably explain why their “exile Assembly” was largely ignored by the press; unreported, for example, was their conception of “democracy,” to which we return. A further reason is that the “moderate” elements imposed for domestic propaganda purposes by the U.S. government (Arturo Cruz and Alfonso Robelo) “drew relatively cool receptions” and “a tepid response, while mention of the only civilian leader with real power, Adolfo Calero, elicited “thunderous applause.”15

Calero was not permitted to enter Costa Rica. An avowed proponent of terrorism as just noted, he is the ultra-right civilian leader of the major military force of the contras, the FDN, based on the Somozist National Guard and commanded by National Guard Colonel Enrique Bermúdez. A secret 1982 Pentagon intelligence report described its basic elements as a “terrorist” organization headed by former National Guard officers. Before taking on the role of civilian figurehead, the most respected contra leader, Arturo Cruz, recognized that the proxy army had committed “damnable atrocities” against civilians and that their victory might lead “to a possible mass execution of the flower of our youth.” After joining as their spokesman with a handsome CIA subsidy, he explained that they cannot be dissuaded from atrocities without “demoralizing the fighters.”16 Nothing has changed since, including the irrelevance of U.S.-backed atrocities to elite opinion. The horrifying record of contra atrocities compiled by human rights groups, priests in Nicaragua, and others, continues until the time of writing. Two investigators cite a high-ranking State Department official who describes the U.S. stance with regard to the atrocities of their proxy army as one of “intentional ignorance.” The same has largely been true of the media and Congress. To select examples virtually at random, U.S. journalists reported the killing of four civilians and abduction of nine others from an agricultural cooperative at San José del Pueblo; I located no report in the press. A report released by Michigan Congressman David Bonior and Bishop Thomas Gumbleton of Detroit detailing contra murders, rapes, kidnapping and other atrocities in late 1986 appears to have passed unnoticed. A book by a Spanish priest with extensive testimony from victims of contra atrocities also appears to have passed without notice. And so on, along familiar lines.17 If these trivialities are brought up, they can be dismissed by the doctrine of “change of course.”

Use of local collaborators and mercenaries to attack, suppress and control the domestic population is traditional practice. There are many examples. “Indian regiments were doing most of the work of conquering India for the English,”18 who then relied on native mercenaries to keep the population under control. In the Congo Free State of King Leopold, who succeeded in reducing the population from 20 million to 10 million in two decades with Nazi-style atrocities, a native army of 20,000 men, given “a completely free hand to loot and rape,” was instrumental in implementing the conversion of the country into a Belgian slave labor camp. In South Africa, the white regimes were able “to find African chiefs as allies and to make use of African levies pressed into military service,” and black police and troops have conducted many of the worst atrocities until today.19 The Nazis in occupied Europe also relied on local forces to carry out their murderous chores. The same was true of the French and later the U.S. in Indochina, and of imperial powers generally. In southern Lebanon, Israel employs local recruits to carry out torture, assassination, massacres and general intimidation. From the earliest days of the American colonies, indigenous elements were organized for terrorist operations, in the conquest of the continent and of the Philippines, and the attack on Indochina, including the Hmong tribesmen, recruited by the CIA for a murderous “secret war” conducted by many of the same people now engaged in the private phase of the U.S. war against Nicaragua,20 then abandoned after their usefulness had come to an end.

The same practices have long been routine in the Caribbean and Central America. Official U.S. policy at the highest levels has been to rely on indigenous military forces to suppress the domestic population, a matter to which we return. Quite regularly peasants are organized for the task, as in the case of the terrorist ORDEN in El Salvador, or Somoza’s National Guard in Nicaragua, recruited by Somoza “from the poor peasants of the region” for his earliest operations in 1926 and later consisting largely of “usually illiterate, poverty-stricken campesinos.”21 The same has been true in Haiti, where the Duvalier dynasty formed the dreaded Tontons Macoutes from similar elements—a force that still carries out its grim work, still granted “a licence to bully, extort and kill” for “a once-only payment of $15.” In one July 1987 massacre, hundreds were cut to pieces with machetes by sharecroppers whipped into a frenzy by landowners to kill “Communist priests,” employing a device that is often effective in rallying impoverished and frightened peasants, and incidentally destroying a Church-initiated effort to organize the poor in an area of vast inequality; shortly after, a respected anti-Communist political leader and two aides were “hacked to death by a frenzied peasant mob after the victims were accused of being Communists.”22

The enormous economic and propaganda resources of the dominant (often foreign) society combined with a depressed economy, ethnic rivalries, religious controls, exploitation of fear and ignorance, a mounting cycle of violence and other factors facilitate such efforts.

Apologists for U.S. terror and repression appeal to the fact that its agents are mobilized locally to justify the actions as “defensive” or even “populist.” Nazis, the Belgian Monarch, South African racists, the U.S.-backed dictators of the Caribbean and Central America, and other torturers and mass murderers might have advanced similar arguments, with comparable justice. The sudden enthusiasm among U.S. elites for “tough peasants”—namely, those recruited for U.S. terrorist operations—is a noteworthy cultural phenomenon.

We read constantly in the U.S. media that the contra foot soldiers are peasants, as are soldiers generally in the Third World, including the soldiers press-ganged for service in the Salvadoran army and those who filled the ranks of Somoza’s National Guard, often recruited in the areas where contras supplied by U.S. air drops operate today. The ranching country of central Nicaragua was a “traditional recruiting ground for the brutal National Guard that sustained the dictatorship” of Somoza, and with its moderately well-to-do private farmers, is the main center of contra support today.23 Jorge Castañeda writes that the neglect of the Sandinistas for the “poor and backward peasantry of the northern reaches” in the first years after the fall of Somoza “when linked with ties the Somoza National Guard had in remote, poverty-stricken areas— traditional recruiting grounds for most Latin American armies—made this sector of the population ideal for contra enrollment” before it was “neutralized” by land reform and resettlement from areas of conflict, thus reducing the “meager popular support” for the contras in scattered and generally remote regions.24 It comes as no surprise that “among the contras membership in the National Guard appears to hold little or no stigma,” or that many joined the contras “because they were either members of the National Guard or had relatives who were,” while others describe their service in the U.S.-trained elite battalions that have wreaked havoc in the Salvadoran countryside.25 The Miskito areas were an early recruiting ground for the contras, but no longer, it appears, as a result of Sandinista reforms and the moves towards autonomy, unusual if not unique in the hemisphere, hence a target for contra sabotage by kidnapping and terror.26 In fact, “during the past year, the number of volunteers [throughout Nicaragua] dwindled to almost none, contra commanders acknowledge,”27 despite the extraordinary level of support provided by the foreign master and the increasing harshness of daily life under wartime conditions in a country that was only barely beginning to recover from the ruinous conditions that were Somoza’s legacy.

Americas Watch reports that contra terror continues to be the primary source of human rights abuses in Nicaragua, though they also condemn government practices. They know of no “systematic violations of the laws of war in the course of military operations by the government” and conclude that there are two “political prisoners in the sense in which that term is used in the United States,” one since “released without charges” after having been arrested for draft evasion. Amnesty International currently has no “prisoners of conscience” in Nicaragua.28

As in the Miskito areas, peasants sometimes joined the contras on the basis of real grievances, though these do not begin to compare with the abuse suffered under the reign of U.S. client states or its proxy army attacking Nicaragua. As to whether these grievances would have been properly addressed, we can only speculate, since the U.S. intervened at once to exploit and exacerbate them, in fear that Sandinista reforms might prove successful. That they are being addressed is sometimes ruefully conceded in the U.S. press, with the customary twist. A Wall St. Journal article, headlined “Managua Tightens Grip on Former Contra Strongholds,” reports how the Sandinistas have proceeded to “build support by handing state farms over to landless peasants and offering foreign exchange incentives to cattlemen to boost meat production,” and inaugurating new dairy projects, while in the Miskito areas, “the government is repairing and painting schools and medical clinics and bringing movie projectors for the first time to Indian villages”29—thus undercutting the U.S. goal of saving the people from oppression.

Edén Pastora, the darling of contra supporters when he was leading the southern front attacking Nicaragua from Costa Rica with CIA and South African support, lost his status as a “great Central American patriot”30 and disappeared from view after he was removed by the CIA for failure to follow orders. But he has not remained silent. He comments that

in Nicaragua, the “contras” are referred to as “the guardsmen,” which is not altogether wrong, because the former Somozist guardsmen force peasant youths to join their ranks and take them away to camps in Honduras . . . Instead of building up their morale to make them idealist guerrillas, they depersonalize and demoralize them. The peasants are turned into guardsmen, into a repressive and killing machine. The guardsmen murder prisoners of war and continue to say “yes, sir.” The “contras” will never be able to enter Managua.

He describes contra chief Adolfo Calero as “a loyal soldier of the CIA, a pawn whose only merit is having been a Coca Cola salesman.” He informed the French press agency that the “fascist contras” would “not respect their mothers” if they regained power. “The contras,” he says, “are the ones that serve as instruments of Washington’s policies against Nicaragua. They hold their meetings in the U.S. and receive thousands of dollars for putting themselves at the service of imperialism.”31

Pastora is also interviewed in the national U.S. media, with such comments omitted, however.32

According to U.S. mercenaries serving with the contras, including Adolfo Calero’s security chief Joseph Adams, Pastora is a prime target of “widespread assassination plots” involving “the most senior contra leaders,” who also “maintain a list of Managua civilians—including members of the clergy as well as Sandinista politicians—who would be marked for assassination when FDN forces entered the Nicaraguan capital,” to establish “democracy.”33

Pastora’s views on the contras are echoed by others in the region, rarely heard here, and without affecting their status as the “democratic resistance.” A coffee-grower in Honduras describes the contras as “moneyed commanders and the commanded poor, turned into the dogs of war,” a “gang” without a “true ideology and with profound internal inequalities,” who recruit by force and promise pay “with the victory” while the money “goes into the biggest pockets.”34 An editorial in the right-wing Honduran journal El Tiempo, whose owner Chaim Rosenthal has called upon the U.S. to invade Nicaragua to overthrow the Sandinistas, states that “We know what is the cause of the terrorism that is flowering more rapidly than we had expected [within Honduras]: the presence of the contras with the complicity of the civilian and military authorities,” describing popular discontent with the contras as a “powder keg” waiting to explode.”35 A retired senior officer of the Israeli army, an arms merchant in Central America for 4 years, describes the contras as “an invention of the media and some people from the psychological warfare department in the Pentagon” who will fight as long as “the Americans give us a lot of money . . . to play soldier for them and bullshit about democracy.” Their commanders “sit in the jungle with a finger deep up their ass and think how to squeeze more dollars from the idiot gringos in Washington, just as the generals of South Vietnam did back then,” while American journalists are led through Honduran jungles and told they are in Nicaragua—among other less complimentary remarks based on his observation of the media at work in Honduras.36

The most important currently available source of direct information about “the new contras,” refurbished by official U.S. aid, is an account by Rod Nordland, an experienced correspondent with a distinguished record of important work, who spent a month in April-May 1987 with a contra unit in northern Nicaragua and then traversed the same area with Sandinista troops.37 He found the comparison striking.

As they departed from their Honduran bases, contra “morale seemed high, their new backpacks burst with up-to-date material, the skies droned with the motors of C-47 cargo planes dropping ammo to them, courtesy of the CIA” along with supply helicopters ferrying military supplies “in Red Cross disguise” (as shown in an accompanying photo, yet another violation of the laws of war in the familiar sleazy style of the Reagan administration; this violation of international law, a device also employed in Carter’s rescue operation for commanders of Somoza’s National Guard, was denounced by the Red Cross in Geneva in a response to the Newsweek photo that received little notice here38). They were equipped with U.S. aerial reconnaissance maps showing the Sandinista base that was their assigned target “in such detail that the location of every latrine was noted” and were decoding messages on their portable computers.

In short, typical guerrillas.

But the contras soon degenerated into the same kind of “ruthless horde” described by the London Times reporter cited earlier, stealing food and cattle from terrified peasants, some of whom were “strong-armed” into serving as guides “and, worse, to walk on their point (the first man in the column) to make sure we weren’t falling into a trap.” The contras excelled at robbing the local peasants who were “paralyzed by our arrival, except one terrified woman who ground cornmeal for us so assiduously that she ignored her baby crying for attention,” and whom they terrorized by their behavior as marauding bandits with their “skulls and crossbones tattooed on their arms,” boasting names “like ‘Exterminator’ and ‘Dragon’.” They were “great at retreating; attacks, they never quite managed.” They also never managed to impart any political message, nor did they appear to consider this as part of their task, even though “the independent-minded campesinos of the mountains are natural enemies of the Sandinistas,” having been “hurt badly by the failing economy” and having received no benefits from the revolution. Nordland describes how the contras proceeded “to cement [the] loyalty” of a peasant who was bitterly anti-Sandinista for these reasons:

We ate his chickens, beans, tortillas, bananas, plantains, cassava, grapefruits and agreed with him that it was a pity other contras had already eaten the eligible pigs. We slept in his yard, despite standing orders to camp away from homes lest civilians are killed in an attack. We sent him out to scout the hills for Sandinistas at night, and before dawn we walked him out on the point . . . Small wonder that, taken aside, neither he nor his wife would speak against the Sandinista troops who come through. The compas speak softly, they said, and gave political talks, but normally ask only for coffee . . . In the battle for hearts and minds, the contras are still the losers

even in the remote areas where they have potential support. They are still more “the losers” among the families whose children are kidnapped and forced into the contra army, including the family of one 14-year-old boy Nordland met with the contras, whom he later interviewed: “His family had been given a plot of land by the Sandinistas after their victory. ‘How could they want to destroy the revolution,’ [his mother] wondered, ‘when it has helped us and so many other people’.”

Nordland also interviewed a “relatively big landholder” whom he expected to be anti-Sandinista and who told him: “Mister, if the war just drags on like this, soon it will degenerate into banditry.” Nordland’s final conclusion: “Mister, it already has.”

Returning to the same region with Sandinista troops who quickly swept the contras from the area in a counteroffensive that was the biggest of the war—and the shortest,” Nordland found a very different picture. Unlike the contras, who carefully avoid military targets, “concentrating on more lightly armed civilian militias and undefended targets” (when they are not simply marauding), the Sandinistas, whose conduct “made a striking contrast with the contras,” “found contras and fought after only two days,” and continued to do so. “Their discipline held firm after many months” in the remote mountains, though they were mostly “draftees on two-year tours of duty.” “Where it had taken a mere three weeks for the contras we accompanied in the same mountains to turn into an unruly scourge, Sandinista troops on the march never even stopped at a peasant’s house, except with permission from an officer—and then only to wait outside for drinking water . . . When they did requisition food, the campesinos told us, they always paid.” Peasants also agreed that only the contras “impress campesinos as guides or make them walk in front of the troops.”

An accompanying story quotes a March 1986 memorandum by Robert Owen, who described himself in congressional testimony as “the eyes and ears” of Oliver North. He had “few kind words for the Nicaraguan contras.” For many of their leaders, Owen concluded, the war “has become a business”; “There are few of the so-called leaders of this movement who really care about the boys in the field.” The commander of the Costa Rican-based southern front, Fernando Chamorro, “drinks a fair amount and may surround himself with people who are in the war not only to fight, but to make money.” Another contra leader “had potential involvement with drug running and the sales of goods provided by” the U.S. government. More money to the contras “will be like pouring money into a sinkhole.”

Nevertheless, the cost to the U.S. is limited, and the “ruthless horde” recruited for their services have been able, in part at least, to perform their assigned task of preventing Sandinista reforms and ensuring that “theirs must become a revolution of misery, a frightful object lesson to the people of the region” (Piero Gleijeses).

Arturo Cruz was the indispensable symbol of contra democracy—until he resigned from the leadership in 1987 accompanied by denunciations from Secretary of State George Shultz because his resignation “resulted from a failure to get his own way rather than a concern over democratic reforms in the movement.” Jeane Kirkpatrick also discovered that the hero had feet of clay after his unconscionable dereliction. He was “a man of mercurial temperament” who “had lived outside Nicaragua for 20 years before he returned to work for the Sandinistas in July 1979” and “it seemed to many Nicaraguans that he was never comfortable working in the framework of Nicaraguan politics.” He is “a technocrat” and “not a political man,” a person who “seemed to evoke more intense admiration among North Americans than Nicaraguans,” Kirkpatrick explained. At the same time, the congressional Iran-contra committee released a document showing that Oliver North’s payments to Cruz began out of concern that Congress might disclose that he was on the CIA payroll, in particular, during the time when he was a candidate for President in the 1984 elections in Nicaragua.39 Reports that Cruz was on the CIA payroll had been dismissed as a canard by contra supporters, and neither these comments on Cruz’s newly-discovered weaknesses nor others reminded the reader that during the 1984 elections, Cruz was presented by the U.S. government, the media and the journals of opinion as the only hope for democracy in Nicaragua, with largely fabricated accounts alleging that the Sandinistas blocked his campaign by violence and other means because of his great popularity in Nicaragua, suddenly dissipated now that he is failing to perform his duties under U.S. orders.

Cruz describes the contra movement as “very ill.”40 Its main problem is that “it was artificially formed too soon by the US” which “used as its core a group which the Nicaraguan people had rejected—the Somocista National Guard.” Its civilian leadership is “a mere ‘clique’ of businessmen and old-line politicians who were incapable of articulating a coherent political message.” After a new contra directorate was formed at U.S. initiative in May 1987, “the senior US official who has worked with the contras for many years says, ‘Unity will be the merest façade, kept together—at least until the US elections—by the ringmaster, CIA’”; the leaders are “opportunists,” lacking “political or moral principles, or any real sensitivity to the Nicaraguan poor,” a “liberal contra official” adds, referring to the new democratic hopeful, Alfredo César.41 “The contras suffer from political anemia,” Philip Bennett reports, and “continue to neglect military objectives while raiding poorly guarded symbols of the Sandinista revolution such as farm cooperatives, often killing innocent civilians.” Trips to the war zone reveal that “roaming contra units rarely impart an explicit political message.” “Some contra leaders point to the difficulty in devising a political formula to match the concrete promises of land and social services espoused by the Marxist insurgency in El Salvador.”42 A “leading US intellectual” who supports the contras—and presumably qualifies as a “leading intellectual” for this reason—complains that they cannot “figure out a social program that would appeal to people, and then put it into some kind of context,” and have no interest in a political program or a grass-roots structure. Another problem, this leading thinker explains, is that it is hard to arouse Nicaraguans against the government

because of the social services they are provided with. Thus, the Sandinistas have been able to keep the opposition at the level of mere grumbling. How does one oppose such a regime? I don’t think the contras have any idea.43

In fact, they and their backers, including this “leading intellectual,” have a very good idea: you oppose such a regime by random terror and the resources that can be mobilized by a violent superpower, in accordance with William Casey’s insight that “It takes relatively few people and little support to disrupt the internal peace and economic stability of a small country.”44

With his departure from the directorate formed by the U.S. government to mislead Congress and the media, Cruz will presumably forfeit his $7,000 monthly (tax-free) paycheck and perhaps the “several million dollars from a private aid network over the last three years, money that has never been publicly accounted for,” though Alfonso Robelo, the wealthy businessman who stayed on to provide a facade of “democracy,” will presumably continue to receive the $10,000 per month provided for his services.45

At the “exile Assembly,” Cruz—at the time still playing his assigned role and thus a heroic defender of democracy—told the delegates that “all the conditions [for victory] are present, except only that we have failed until now to define clearly and consistently our own political positions,”46 a minor defect. Meanwhile senior U.S. officials bewail the fact that “the contras can demonstrate no major political gains” and “have almost no support systems” within Nicaragua. They do not understand why the proxy army attacking Nicaragua from foreign bases is “not as effective as the leftist rebels in El Salvador,” who have always fought within their own country, receive virtually no known outside aid, and face a military force far better equipped than the army defending Nicaragua from terrorist attack, with nearly 80 helicopters, 11 A37 bombers and 12 C47 gunships, and direct participation of the U.S. Air Force and other U.S. military forces in surveillance, coordination of bombing, and ground operations.47

Contra commanders complain of “the lack of airplanes and pilots” for their “rudimentary air force” and the lack of “small boats for river patrol.” The problem they face is that they need dozens of flights per month to keep their troops functioning within Nicaragua, this “aerial resupply network” being the “key to the contras’ ability to keep large numbers of fighters in the field.”48 “The air operation is the key to the war,” according to a Western diplomat in Managua who monitors the rebels (presumably a U.S. Embassy official, probably CIA): “Without it, the contras couldn’t make it.”49 According to Nicaraguan and Western estimates, U.S.-run supply flights reached the level of 30-40 flights monthly, delivering hundreds of tons of equipment, from April 1987, in an effort to ensure that the much-heralded Spring Offensive would be sufficiently violent to impress Congress.50 The CIA “has equipped the rebels with a computer center that intercepts and decodes hundreds of Sandinista messages a day,” information that is dispatched “via portable computers with special encoders to rebel units in the field.”51 In addition, extensive U.S. surveillance provides the proxy army with up-to-the-minute intelligence on Nicaraguan army deployment,52 while the government must cope somehow with CIA commando operations, the constant threat of invasion, and other conditions that are also unimaginable in the case of an authentic guerrilla force. British journalists who travelled with the contras report that they are often “better equipped than the Sandinistas,” describing their high-quality “state of the art” weapons and communication systems, and also explaining the basis for recruitment: “Sandinista price freezes on agricultural products mean that many peasants make less money now than they did under former dictator Anastasio Somoza”53—a result of the effort to maintain subsistence levels under wartime conditions for the poor who are left to starve in U.S. domains, in accordance with the approved “Central American mode.”

Meanwhile contra supporters assure us that it was “the abuses and horrors of the commandantes” that “led to what has to be seen as a civil war—not, as the Sandinistas claim, the U.S. aggression against Nicaragua.”54

Despite the resources flowing in lavish abundance and the direct U.S. participation, it doesn’t work. Even journalists impressed with their achievements agree that “without continued airlifts and renewed American support, it is virtually impossible that the contras can survive as an effective guerrilla force,” thus tacitly conceding that they are not “a guerrilla force” in any meaningful sense of the term. U.S. officials fear that these incomprehensible failures are “going to have long-term costs for us,” the same correspondent reports.55

The failures of the proxy army are particularly dramatic in comparison with neighboring El Salvador. Close by areas where thousands of government troops carry out ground sweeps, guerrillas “nonchalantly held a town meeting” in a village just four miles from a government military base that they had “devastated,” carrying out “a frank, if highly political, discussion of the basic needs and social issues affecting the majority of Salvadorans,” with their audience plainly interested and supportive. Meanwhile, government “Army patrols continue to enter areas of conflict as a raiding force, rather than a governing presence with a political vision that appeals to the peasantry,” according to military analysts; “both American officials and members of his own party say Mr. Duarte has failed to administer effective social programs, despite ample American aid,” and “his ruling Christian Democratic party, they say, has become a corrupt political machine in a land where most Salvadoran peasants cannot find work, clean water or health care.” U.S. economic aid supports “the businesses of the rich,” whose “wealth . . . is safe because taxes are collected irregularly and dollars can be quietly tucked away in Miami bank accounts” and whose sons “are safe because there is no draft and the army press gangs do not pick up young men in affluent neighborhoods, one expression of the class character of the war.” Little U.S. aid “appears to reach the impoverished majority of Salvadorans who live in the urban slums and the countryside,” where U.S. aid officials rarely travel. “The poor are press-ganged into military service” and “political power remains in the hands of the urban elite,” while “most Salvadorans are afraid of policemen and soldiers, and few of the poor would dream of seeking legal redress against a landlord because virtually no judge would favor a poor man.”56

The armed forces, who “once applied scorched-earth tactics” and “supervised death squads on the ground and bombed from the sky,” can now “afford to be more lenient” in areas where they have established control, the Wall St. Journal reports; “but as long as the left is a political threat, the army doesn’t dare let go of the leash entirely” (my emphasis). A Catholic priest describes the rebuilt village of El Barillo, devastated by government terror, as now “a concentration camp.” Villagers say that they are “afraid to talk” to an American journalist. They are “under the boot,” an international human-rights worker observes. “The army fears that El Barillo’s relatively efficient organization is a sign of continuing leftist influence,” since nothing of the sort could be expected under government rule.57

“Democracy,” American style.

These comparisons reveal, once again, the true “symmetry” between El Salvador and Nicaragua. It is not, as the ideological system contends, that in each country there are guerrillas fighting the central government in a reflection of the global “East-West conflict.” Rather, in each country the U.S. has organized and directs a terrorist force that must use violence to achieve the ends of the foreign master and the local elites that rely on external power, unable to enter into a political struggle since they have nothing to offer the population beyond a renewal of misery and subordination. We can begin to speak of “symmetry,” of “the East-West conflict,” and of “U.S. security concerns,” when the Soviet Union organizes a mercenary force to attack El Salvador from Nicaraguan bases and to terrorize the population, supplying them with sophisticated modern equipment in daily air drops, while the KGB runs sabotage programs in El Salvador with its own “assets” and forces a state of mobilization there by a constant and credible threat to invade outright, constructs a permanent Soviet military base in Nicaragua, runs military exercises there involving tens of thousands of Soviet troops, maintains threatening naval forces off the coast, floods the Salvadoran airwaves with hostile propaganda, conducts regular overflights to gather intelligence on Salvadoran army operations to be dispatched to “the sons of Gorbachev” marauding in the countryside, coordinates military attacks by its proxy forces in El Salvador, and so on. Then the conventional picture will be more than an object of ridicule. As of now, it hardly has the merits of complaints in Pravda about U.S. aggression in Poland, a pitiful victim of the East-West conflict.

Furthermore, the real world pattern is traditional, adequately explained in the documentary record of secret planning and even public commentary, and a predictable consequence of the roots of intervention within domestic U.S. society. Such facts cannot be perceived within educated circles if they hope to retain respectability. There, we can at most only contemplate “the mystery” of “why is it that the United States so often supports dictators,” leaving it to “political scientists, philosophers and wise men to answer the question,” which is too deep for ordinary mortals to comprehend.58 And we may ponder the question of why Nicaragua remains “beyond the reach of our good intentions.”

We might observe that business circles abroad seem to have little difficulty in penetrating the mystery that so troubles Americans. Discussing U.S. support for Ferdinand Marcos, which elicited the thoughts just quoted, the London Economist observes simply that “For many years Mr Marcos was good for American business and America’s bases.”59 Hardly a profound insight, but sufficient to dissolve the mystery in this and numerous other cases.

Contra supporters, some of whom describe themselves as liberals or democratic socialists, find it natural that the U.S. should create a “proxy force” and attempt to construct a political base for it, because this reflects their conception of how the lower orders are to be managed. Correspondingly, they are enthusiastic about “the attractive new civilian leaders of the contras,”60 who essentially share this conception. One of the few independent U.S. journalists accurately observes that the official contra leadership

represent Nicaragua’s old business and land-owning classes, the kind of Third Worlder that American officials and businessmen like to deal with. That is why they were picked in Washington to head the contras. What Cruz, Robelo and Calero all reflect is the plantation mentality that infected Nicaraguan political life during the many decades of U.S. manipulation and intervention. They share the assumption that Nicaragua really belongs to the United States, and that it is valid for would-be leaders to turn to Washington to find shortcuts to political legitimacy.61

The same is true of those who praise them here as virtuous democrats while applauding or averting their gaze from the social and political system imposed and defended by the United States in El Salvador, a system similar in character to what it hopes to restore in Nicaragua.

An American academic specialist on Latin America observes that the contra civilian leadership “tends to be—or was prior to 1979—economically affluent, representative of a tiny elite or a small middle class,” men who were “alienated” by the revolution “because it challenged their privileges,” creating “a topsy-turvy world in which their own welfare was being considered the equal of the formerly dispossessed.” “Almost all the contra leaders are on the CIA payroll. Each of the seven members of the FDN directorate receives an annual salary of $84,000, tax free, compliments of Uncle Sam.” Alfonso Robelo was a wealthy cotton grower and cooking-oil processor, formerly “president of the Superior Council of Private Initiative, the umbrella organization for most of organized private initiative.” Arturo Cruz, who spent one year in Nicaragua from 1960 to 1985, “worked as an international civil servant and for the Inter-American Development bank.” Adolfo Calero managed Coca-Cola of Nicaragua and had long-standing CIA connections. Aristides Sánchez was a wealthy landowner and close associate of Somoza. Most of those who finally opposed Somoza did so for the same reasons that led similar elements to oppose Trujillo, Marcos and other U.S.-backed dictators and state terrorists: he was robbing them, not merely the poor. It is hardly surprising that “they have never issued a detailed program of their social, economic, and political goals.” Edgar Chamorro, who left in disgust after two years service as the contra spokesman selected by the CIA, states that they offer Nicaragua “nothing but a return to the past”; the contras “are being used as instruments of U.S. foreign policy by the CIA and the Reagan administration . . . and by the old Somozista gang to get back the money and power they lost in 1979.”62 Before joining the U.S.-directed civilian front for the contras, Arturo Cruz had described leading elements among them as “civic cadavers,” noting that “most of these persons in positions of military authority within the FDN are ex-members of the National Guard, who unconditionally supported Somoza until the end against the will of the Nicaraguan people”—in fact, 46 out of 48 of the contra commandantes as of mid-1984. In October 1985, Cruz expressed his continuing unhappiness that the contras “are almost totally controlled by right-wingers, many of them followers of” Somoza, views that he reiterated after resigning from the CIA civilian front.63

The device of historical amnesia and tunnel vision cultivated in intellectual circles protects the press and other commentators from perceiving that the curious technical problem of inspiring “our friends” and constructing a political base for them has always bedevilled U.S. planners conducting their exercises of international terrorism, described with such euphemisms as “covert action,” “low intensity warfare,” “counterinsurgency,” “pacification,” or “containing Nicaragua.” Throughout the Indochina wars, government experts struggled with the same problem: the U.S. is militarily strong but politically weak, as regularly discussed in captured Vietnamese documents as well as U.S. government analyses. Secretary of Defense McNamara pondered “the discouraging truth” that “we have not found the formula, the catalyst, for training and inspiring [our Vietnamese] into effective action”; all we can do is kill, he added. President Eisenhower attributed the high morale of the “Communist forces” in comparison with “the democratic forces” to the “sense of dedication” mysteriously produced by “the Communist philosophy.” General Maxwell Taylor bemoaned the “national attribute” that “limits the development of a truly national spirit” among the South Vietnamese while speculating about “the ability of the Viet Cong continuously to rebuild their units and to make good their losses,” “one of the mysteries of this guerrilla war” for which “we still find no plausible explanation”; the apparent contradiction with regard to the “national attributes” of the South Vietnamese is readily resolved when we recognize that the Viet Cong are by definition not South Vietnamese, since we are massacring their families and destroying their homes (in South Vietnam). In his Ten Point Program for Success in 1965, U.S. Ambassador Lodge proposed as Point One: “Saturate the minds of the people with some socially conscious and attractive ideology, which is susceptible of being carried out”64—the same perceptive advice now offered by Arturo Cruz and the “leading US intellectual” cited earlier. Somehow, it couldn’t be done, so it was necessary to saturate the countryside with bombs along with general terror.

The U.S. propaganda services were no less baffled. John Mecklin, who was responsible for their operations in South Vietnam in the early 1960s, described the Vietnamese peasant as a man whose “vocabulary is limited to a few hundred words,” whose “power of reason . . . develops only slightly beyond the level of an American six-year old,” whose “mind is untrained and therefore atrophies.” How, then, could they comprehend the benevolence of our intent while we were forcing them into concentration camps and slaughtering their families, or our sophisticated measures of “nation building”? But oddly, the political and military tactics of the Viet Cong, making use of techniques that were “skillfully entwined in the life and character of the Vietnamese peasant,” “confounded not only the U.S. Mission but also the aristocratic leaders of the [U.S.-imposed] Diem regime.” Their forces “were developed to a surprisingly sophisticated degree . . . with jungle arms factories, radio nets, clandestine hospitals, propaganda printing presses, . . . V.C. cameramen filming the action” in ambushes, and other such exploits. To the U.S.-organized military forces, the Viet Cong—South Vietnamese peasants with “atrophied minds”—seemed to be “eight feet tall.”65 What could be the explanation for this curious paradox?

Much the same was true in Laos, where the U.S. subverted the elected coalition government in 1958 because it was dominated by the left and later conducted one of the most intensive bombings in history to demolish the civil society of northern Laos as the sole means of blocking social reform and popular organization in this primitive peasant society; and in Cambodia shortly after, at an even higher level of slaughter. U.S. reporters were no less baffled over the familiar pattern than the American command. In his final summary report from Phnom Penh as the direct U.S. bombing ended, Sydney Schanberg raised “the key unanswered question: How have the insurgents—without any planes of their own, and without the extensive artillery support the Government troops have, with only small arms and mobile weapons . . . —been able not just to match the Government forces, which are more than twice their size, but to push the Government forces back and sustain the offensive for six months without any significant lull?” Exactly the question now raised by his Times colleagues with regard to El Salvador and Nicaragua. “Since the insurgents are not superhuman,” Schanberg muses, “there must be other explanations for their success.” Perhaps they are so “determined and capable” because they “are less fatalistic than the Khmers on this side” and “believe they can change their environment” (U.S. Embassy official). In this regard, “the enemy”—from the peasant society of inner Cambodia—are quite different from those who Schanberg calls “the Cambodian villager,” who “usually has no politics” and “is not interested in taking sides, only to be left alone to farm and fish and feed his family and once in a while to celebrate on a Buddhist holiday.”66 Just as in Vietnam and Laos, and now in Central America.

Over and over again, we discover that “our side” is unable to develop popular support or to survive political competition, unless, of course, popular organizations have been demolished and the ideological system, the military, production, commerce and finance—in short, the entire decision-making apparatus, the means of life, and the means of violence—are firmly in the hands of approved elements. This inability has always been incomprehensible in an intellectual culture committed to the rule of force, and to “reform” dictated from above in the interests of the foreign master. The current bafflement over the failures of the proxy army despite its extraordinary advantages, and the endurance of the Salvadoran guerrillas who lack anything remotely comparable, is a familiar refrain.

The constant perplexity over these paradoxes is not difficult to resolve, but the solution is unacceptable, therefore impossible to perceive, even when presented by respected mainstream figures. The bitterly anti-Communist French military historian and Vietnam specialist Bernard Fall explained the point lucidly during the early stages of U.S. aggression in Vietnam. He raised the question why the Americans, like the French and British before them, “must use top-notch elite forces, the cream of the crop of American, British, French, or Australian commando and special warfare schools” who are “armed with the very best that advanced technology can provide” to defeat local insurgents in Vietnam, Algeria and Malaya, “almost none of whom can lay claim to similar expert training and only in the rarest of cases to equality in fire power.” “The answer is very simple,” he wrote. “It takes all the technical proficiency our system can provide to make up for the woeful lack of popular support and political savvy of most of the regimes that the West has thus far sought to prop up,”67 or the civilian fronts for the proxy armies it has mobilized. He might have added that it also takes all the eloquence that advocates of state terrorism can muster to disguise the facts, just as the stern commitment of a terrorist culture to ignorance and insulation from unpleasant reality is required if we are to miss the obvious point of the lesson. The very same problem, Fall warned, would soon be faced by the U.S. in South Vietnam, as it was; and in all of Indochina, in Central America today, and in other tortured lands tomorrow.

In Indochina, Australian journalist Denis Warner, also passionately anti-Communist, could perceive the source of the problem: “in hundreds of villages all over South-East Asia the only people working at the grass roots for an uplift in people’s living standards are the Communists,”68 while the U.S. is dedicated to restoring the old order of suffering and corruption. This perception being unacceptable, U.S. ideologists were compelled to provide a different answer: the war in South Vietnam was simply an expression of the East-West struggle, with the South Vietnamese its passive victims; and the sly Communist leaders in Moscow and Peking are more adept at manipulation than their innocent American counterparts, while “our Vietnamese” (and Laotians, and Cambodians) are “fatalistic” or “corrupt.” Similarly today, it cannot be perceived that the situation in Central America has the same essential features as the U.S. attack against South Vietnam. Rather, it must be that the Salvadoran and Nicaraguan people are passive bystanders, victims of the East-West conflict, with the innocent Americans unable to match the trickery of the devious Communists of the Soviet bloc.

And so we are informed by “objective journalists,” merely describing the facts. James LeMoyne explains that “creating a base of popular support appears essential to guerrillas”—a remarkable discovery of the 1980s—and “it is one of the fundamentals that Cuban trainers have emphasized to both Salvadoran rebel leaders and Sandinista commanders,” who plainly could not have achieved this profound insight by themselves.69 “The contras’ American advisers,” he continues, “appear to have been far less expert in the art of guerrilla war” and have not given adequate thought “to making democracy, with its emphasis on individual choice, into a doctrine of revolutionary war.” Thus “the Nicaraguan contras need to study the Salvadoran rebels’ success in organizing popular support,” just as Americans in Vietnam tried to ape the methods of their South Vietnamese enemy.

LeMoyne, however, goes a step beyond his predecessors in the Indochina Agitprop system. The contras, he explains, face problems beyond those confronting the guerrillas in El Salvador, namely, the repressive apparatus of the Sandinistas which has “hindered the contras” and impeded their efforts to construct a political base. “The rebels face similar restrictions in El Salvador,” he notes, “but they are less consistently applied there.” The physical elimination of the independent media by violence, the murderous attack that destroyed the national university, the outright murder of the political opposition by the security forces, the assassination of the Archbishop who attempted to defend the “popular organizations” that were effectively demolished by U.S.-organized terror, the slaughter of trade union activists, journalists, human rights workers, priests and nuns, students and teachers, and tens of thousands of peasants, the scorched-earth tactics that devastated the countryside and created hundreds of thousands of refugees, the torture and mutilation and savage terror that traumatized the society—all of this is slight in comparison to Sandinista repression, in the eyes of the New York Times Central America correspondent. In the same issue of the Times, LeMoyne denounces Salman Rushdie for “writing a great deal of admiring drivel at the knees of various Sandinista commanders” which makes it “easy to consign his brief book to the bonfire where accepted truths belong,” as he is “swallowed by an exotic revolution whose darker sides he barely manages to glimpse”—in contrast to this tough-minded journalist, who is not fooled by the “Communists” and surveys the Soviet-American conflict in Central America with clear-eyed objectivity and no failure to “glimpse the darker side” of the U.S. operations in defense of democracy.70

These are persistent themes of the reporting from Central America by the leading Times correspondent in the region—which, it should be noted, is of high quality by general media standards. We return to further examples.

As noted earlier, it is a truth, whatever the facts may be, that Nicaragua is a Stalinist prison camp while El Salvador is struggling towards democracy with U.S. assistance. A review of the U.S. ideological system shows that this required picture has been presented with dedication and skill.71

According to the official view, Nicaragua is a Hitlerian state in its internal practices and its threat of foreign adventures. “There is no comparison between South Africa and Nicaragua,” President Reagan explained in a press conference. “In South Africa you’re talking about a country, yes, we disagree, and find repugnant some of the practices of their government but they’re not seeking to impose their government on other surrounding countries” in the manner of the Nicaraguan aggressors72; one finds no South African troops in Namibia in violation of international law, for example, and no South African moves to destabilize Botswana, Lesotho, Angola, Mozambique, and other states of the region.

The U.S. government view is expressed in a joint State Department-Defense Department document entitled “The Challenge to Democracy in Central America,” distributed in celebration of International Human Rights Day on December 10, 1986:

In the American continent, there is no regime more barbaric and bloody, no regime that violates human rights in a manner more constant and permanent, than the Sandinista regime.

Commenting, Americas Watch observes that civilian noncombatant deaths attributable to government forces in Nicaragua over seven years, in the course of an attack of mounting intensity by the United States and its proxy army, might possibly reach 300, most of them Miskito Indians in 1981-2; in comparison some 40-50,000 Salvadoran civilians were “murdered by government forces and death squads allied to them” during the same years, along with “a similar number” during Somoza’s last year, “mostly in indiscriminate attacks on the civilian population by the National Guard,” and still higher numbers in Guatemala73—all of these atrocities supported or directly organized by the United States, contrary to much illusion.

Furthermore, those responsible, in Washington as in Central America, remain in power today, apart from the Somozist National Guard and wealthy business elites that the U.S. government is laboring to reinstall in accordance with its conception of “democracy.” When Morton Kondracke visits El Salvador to rejoice in its march towards democracy, he is greeted by President Duarte, who presided over most of the slaughter, and his defense minister General Vides Casanova, who supervised it in accordance with his principle that “the armed forces are prepared to kill 200,000-300,000, if that’s what it takes to stop a Communist takeover.” Kondracke concludes that the Reagan administration deserves credit for the wonderful achievements of the 1980s, having “handled El Salvador better than the Democrats managed Nicaragua.” His fellow-editors assure us that “the depredations . . . of the commandantes” in Nicaragua are “greater and more systematic depredations by far than Somoza’s,” including the slaughter of some 40-50,000 people by the Somoza regime after years of torture, killing, robbery and enrichment of the “democrats” while the population starved.74

The editors of the Washington Post conclude that Duarte “has worked hard, governing in a democratic manner, starting to tame the criminal right and to subordinate the armed forces, prosecuting a war and a social revolution, and cushioning as best he can the cruel economic effects of war, backwardness and social change.” In the real world, the “criminal right” are elements of the security forces whom Duarte lauds for their “valiant services” in their murderous assault against the population while laboring to ensure that Congress provides them with the necessary means,75 the rule of the armed forces remains absolute as demonstrated by their complete immunity from prosecution for past or present atrocities, and Duarte’s constructive policies are a figment of the editors’ imagination, as they can learn from the occasional news reports they publish. But Duarte is doing the job for which he was commissioned, and therefore, they continue, “the United States has a firm obligation to support an imperfect but striving democracy in El Salvador,” where, they assure us, the guerrillas could not possibly remain a “major presence” were it not for the “Sandinista government in nearby Nicaragua,” evidence as always being an irrelevant annoyance when the state has spoken.

Duarte’s popularity in the United States is not matched in El Salvador, where a 1986 poll by his Christian Democratic Party indicates that less than one-fourth of the country’s voters would support him in new elections; what the figures would be if the left were not excluded and the population not traumatized by terror, no one can judge, though we may recall Duarte’s admission that “the masses were with the guerrillas” when he joined the government and the onslaught of terror began in full fury.76 And while the remarkable democratic achievements under his government are praised with enthusiasm in the Free Press, the population of El Salvador perceives something rather different. Public opinion polls conducted by the Institute of Public Opinion of the Central America University in El Salvador in January-February 1987 reveal that 10% of the population “believe that there is a process of democracy and freedom in the country at present” while 18% think the situation has deteriorated and 28% believe “that there have been improvements, but that repression continues”; the remainder, almost half the population, “think that nothing has changed.” A majority believe that Duarte’s new economic policies will harm the poor, while few think the rich will be harmed (63%, 9%, respectively), and a substantial plurality say that the agrarian reform “might have helped” but the Duarte government’s “promises were lies” (41%, as compared to 22% who see advantages in the reform).77

Duarte is also less than a hero in South America. Throughout his

recent trip to the emerging democracies of South America, he was shunned by moderates and plagued by angry crowds. As he attempted to address the Argentinian Congress, over half the representatives filed out of the chamber. In Uruguay, he was denied permission to address the General Assembly and denounced by the Christian Democratic Party for his “obvious alignment with the Reagan administration.” Similar displays of opposition were evident in stopovers from Brazil to Peru.78

“Arriving in Uruguay, Argentina and Brazil, Duarte received unwarm welcomes,” the Costa Rican journal Mesoamerica reports. A labor union official declared that “the working class of Uruguay condemns his arrival to the country because he does not represent democracy” but rather “heads a regime characterized by notorious violations of human rights” and “he facilitates Reagan’s penetration into Nicaragua.” “Duarte’s daughter broke into tears in Brazil amidst boos and hisses by angry crowds waving signs saying ‘Duarte is a murderer, a genocide”‘ and “the strong objection to Duarte’s presence in Brazil forced him to change or cancel some public ceremonies planned.” “The greatest embarrassment endured by Duarte came when the Brazilian Congress was summoned to pay tribute to the visitor and a ridiculously low number of representatives turned out: 30 of the 479 representatives and seven of the 69 senators!”79

In Uruguay, Argentina and Brazil, where there is a good deal of experience with such matters, they know a killer when they see one.

Duarte’s popularity in the U.S. is reminiscent of Anwar Sadat, also a great hero in the United States, considerably less so in Egypt as American reporters discovered to their surprise when they travelled to Cairo to cover the memorial after his assassination. Duarte remains indispensable to the military because of his ability to ensure the flow of funds from Congress, and business circles have offered him ambiguous support for similar reasons. The general population has little choice. As long as he remains an outstanding democrat within the U.S. ideological system, fulfilling his assigned role, his prospects are reasonably secure.

Contra lobbyist Bruce Cameron charges the “liberal-left” with a double standard because it regards human rights violations by the Sandinistas as “less serious” than in El Salvador, while democratic socialist Ronald Radosh explains that “The need for pressure against the [Sandinista] regime” and “U.S. protection to the democratic resistance” is “more necessary than ever”; “The Sandinistas should be pressured to do no less than the Duarte government did in El Salvador,” he adds.80 Again we see how easy it is to tolerate, indeed not even to perceive the most gruesome atrocities as long as they are committed by “our side.” If such statements at first seem shocking, we should bear in mind that Radosh’s insight is perceptive. Suppose that the Sandinistas were to adopt the methods of the Duarte government, as Radosh advocates, resorting to physical destruction of the independent media and murder of the political opposition along with savage terror and mass slaughter of the population generally to destroy popular movements and to restore the old order under the control of the military and privileged civilian sectors dedicated to enriching themselves and serving the foreign master, while the pack animals die of disease and malnutrition and semi-slave labor and pesticide poisoning in the approved manner. Under these conditions, the U.S. would be pleased to support their “imperfect but striving democracy,” to the polite applause or indifference of American intellectuals who assure us of their profound dedication to the cause of the suffering poor of Central America, The general reaction here to what is taking place in the “fledgling democracies” shows that this judgment is painfully accurate.

In such ways as these the educated classes serve their function in a terrorist culture.