Christianity & Crisis (vol 44, no 21), 24 December 1984, 488-492

Morning glories and sonic booms

What really happened on November 4?

by Andrew Reding

Editor’s introduction: After two months in Nicaragua last summer, Andrew Reding reported (C&C, Nov. 12) that the Sandinista Revolution includes both “inflexible ideologues of the extreme left” and other, currently more influential, elements seeking to establish “a socialist yet nontotalitarian democracy.” In late October Reding returned to Nicaragua to observe the close of the campaign and the conduct of the November 4 election. In this three-part article, he reports his experiences, analyzes the electoral system and the results of the balloting, and describes encounters with journalists from a number of countries

I FLEW INTO MANAGUA on October 28 with doubts about the electoral process then entering its final week; doubts raised by the dearth of dissenting reports amid the relentless barrage of journal articles and news stories in the mainstream U.S. media denigrating the integrity of the Nicaraguan elections. Though there was little in my previous experience in Nicaragua that corresponded with the picture being presented, I couldn’t help wondering whether the situation had changed for the worse. My doubts had grown after the abrupt withdrawal of the Independent Liberal Party (PLI) from the election.

With gray thoughts I entered a Managua vibrantly in bloom. Light bluish-purple morning glories livened the vacant lots in uncountable profusion as flamboyants, acacias, and other leguminous trees lined the streets with their brilliant red, yellow. and orange-and-yellow blossoms. So also in the human realm. Everywhere one saw a riot of colorful campaign posters, banners, billboards, and graffiti for the seven parties contesting the election. The green of the Democratic Conservatives contrasted with the red hammer-and-sickles of the Communists. the blue-and-yellow crosses of the Popular Social Christians, the white stars on red backgrounds of the Independent Liberals, and the side-by-side red and black streaks of the FSLN.

These were not the only signs of opening, of efflorescence. During my absence the Roman Catholic hierarchy gained a 10th member: Pablo Smith, who was appointed auxiliary bishop of Bluefields and who invited Daniel Ortega to his consecration, after which the two were pictured in a fraternal embrace. Amado Peña, the priest who was videotaped engaging in what were alleged to be counterrevolutionary activities last June, was pardoned. And the hierarchy as a group did not issue the widely expected pastoral letter calling for abstention from the elections. Bishop Pablo Vega of Juigalpa, the ultraconservative head of the Nicaraguan Bishops’ Conference, was left to issue his own condemnation of the Sandinistas, with little more than the verbal support of Managua Archbishop Miguel Obando y Bravo.

Meanwhile Brooklyn Rivera, the Miskito resistance leader, flew into Managua where he was welcomed by Education Minister Fernando Cardenal, S.J. He came to explore possibilities for a cease-fire and reconciliation, in response to overtures from the nine-man Sandinista Directorate. Initial negotiations proceeded well, leading to a mutual exchange of prisoners, in the course of which Ray Hooker, the kidnapped FSLN assembly candidate for the Bluefields region, was released. In a parallel but unrelated development, dozens of Conservative party members, jailed for alleged counterrevolutionary activities, were also pardoned and set free.

A staged withdrawal?

Even the case of Virgilio Godoy and the Independent Liberals. which seemed so clearcut in accounts reaching the U.S., looked very different on the scene. Though a substantial majority of party leaders had voted with Godoy for withdrawal from the election. the decision prompted a storm of protest at the grassroots level and in the Juventud Liberal Independiente, the party’s gang-ho youth organization. Constantino Pereira, the party’s vice-presidential candidate, then pulled a major surprise. Claiming the PLI’s half-hour of reserved prime time on national television, he urged party supporters to disregard the decision of other party leaders and go to the polls—a call that was ultimately heeded by well over 100,000 party sympathizers.

Naturally this provoked a serious crisis in the PLI. Godoy was outraged, but helpless. Since his formal request to have the PLI stricken from the ballots was turned in a couple of days after the legal deadline for withdrawal previously agreed upon by all parties, Pereira clearly had the law on his side. Godoy maintained an inexplicable silence as Pereira revealed that the former had met with U.S. Ambassador Henry Bergold and with members of the Coordinadora, the right-wing coalition led by Arturo Cruz, immediately before announcing the decision to withdraw, without telling other party leaders—pointedly including Pereira—what had happened in these meetings. Left in the dark, Pereira speculated that the abstentionist Coordinadora, feeling outmaneuvered by the participating parties as the election drew near, might have offered Godoy the presidential nomination in a broadened coalition, if he could achieve a delay in the election by pulling his party out at this critical juncture. Reinforcing this perception was the peculiar phenomenon of Godoy’s almost overnight metamorphosis from collaborationist traitor to national hero in the pages of La Prensa, mouthpiece of the Coordinadora.

Whatever occurred behind the scenes, it was hard to see the action of Godoy and his colleagues except as an effort to sabotage the election in line with objectives shared by the Reagan administration and the Coordinadora. It was harder still to reconcile the pullout with the party’s non-Marxist but progressive, nationalist, and revolutionary heritage. Appealing to this tradition, Pereira protested in El Nuevo Diario (Nov. 9) that “we have been a party and an opposition of the democratic left, a revolutionary opposition…The PLI has never been a party of the right and all of a sudden we find ourselves with this ‘lobby’ that is forming itself within this very party, which moves us to adopt a form of opposition similar to that of the Coordinadora.”

At last word, Godoy had succeeded in suspending Pereira from the party for 18 months, but without affording Pereira the opportunity to appear in his own defense, and the matter is to be appealed to the courts. Meanwhile, in the ultimate of ironies, there are indications that Godoy’s abstentionists may claim the nine assembly seats the PLI won through Pereira’s call to the polls.

If there had been any real doubts about the FSLN’s continuing popularity, they were set aside by the party’s tumultuous election-eve rally in the Carlos Fonseca Plaza on the lakefront. This is the same plaza that was used for the Revolution’s fifth anniversary celebrations I had attended in July. Because other parties were having difficulty in turning out more than a few hundred supporters for their rallies, I wasn’t surprised to find only several thousand FSLN sympathizers in the square at the scheduled time. But then, over the next couple of hours, seemingly endless lines of people sporting campaign T-shirts, hats, and visors, and carrying FSLN flags and campaign posters of Daniel Ortega and Sergio Ramírez, surged into the plaza. Eventually, more than 300,000 of Managua’s 850,000 residents turned out, and as the sun set and the warm-up music got underway, the crowds started to dance, sing, and shout for joy. Interestingly, the featured music—upbeat, reggae-like songs like “Coast People Happiness” and “Bluefields Express”—was furnished by Dimensión Costeña, a black band from the English Caribbean coast that has become the nation’s favorite and has performed at FSLN rallies and dances all across the country.

Even as hundreds of thousands of Nicaraguans turned festive in anticipation of the country’s first serious elections in this century, the U.S. abruptly escalated its campaign of psychological intimidation. A loud explosion stunned Managuans the morning of Wednesday, October 31, when an SR-71 spy plane broke the sound barrier as it overflew the capital. This was to become a daily occurrence through election day and beyond. The contras simultaneously stepped up their attacks, the most dramatic of which killed six children, aged 5 to 11, in the village of San Gregorio near the Honduran border. (Bishop Vega refused to denounce the massacre, saying instead that “killing the soul is worse than killing the body and therefore a bomb placed in the soul is more serious” (El Nuevo Diario, Nov. 4).

The contras countered

Election day itself passed largely without incident. Though the turnout was lower in some of the more vulnerable regions, the contras were unable to close down more than 9 of the 3,892 polling stations spread through the far reaches of the country. With an average of only about 400 registered voters per polling station, the voting proceeded very smoothly, with moderately long lines forming only in the early morning as voting got underway and again as closing time approached in the evening.

I spent all day, from sunrise to sunset, checking dozens of polling places in Managua, León, Chinandega, and Chichigalpa, then returned to observe the sorting and counting of ballots at a polling station near the Baptist Seminary in Managua where I was staying. Nowhere did I witness the slightest hint of coercion. I saw only one weapon, a rifle slung over the shoulder of a special electoral guard at the entrance to one of the polling places in León. In Chinandega I spotted one impropriety: a giant puppet, of the sort traditionally used in religious celebrations in Nicaragua, dressed in FSLN red-and-black and dancing around with a drummer on a side street only half a block from a polling station.

But neither I nor any of the U.S. Baptist missionaries and ministers I was staying with were able to uncover any irregularities in the actual voting or counting of ballots. Among dozens of U.S. and European electoral observers and journalists with whom I traded observations the verdict was unanimous: “clean as a whistle.” Speaking to El Nuevo Diario, José Figueres, ex-president and founding father of modern Costa Rican democracy, said he was deeply impressed by the order and correctness of the process, concluding “I don’t know what those who predicted otherwise are going to have to say for themselves.” José Peña Gómez, who is mayor of Santo Domingo (capital of the Dominican Republic) and a vice president of the Socialist International, described the elections as a good beginning toward consolidating democracy.

With all the participating opposition parties concurring in these sentiments, it was left to La Prensa to do what it could to cast doubts upon the election. Beneath a banner headline “Voting amidst great apathy,” it published a series of four photographs showing lines of soldiers waiting to vote. Then on the back page, it ran a series of eight photographs showing empty or near-empty polling stations. The implication to be drawn—which bore no relation to the scenes I had witnessed—was that only Sandinista soldiers went to the polls.

The next day’s edition of La Prensa followed up with a signed column that sought to discredit the whole process through a little simple arithmetic. Citing the Supreme Electoral Council’s estimate that it took each voter roughly two minutes to cast a vote, and multiplying that figure by the roughly 400 registered voters per polling station. the columnist came up with a figure of 13.3 hours—a period longer than that in which voting occurred. Then he delivered the coup-de-grace: Since most polling places had short lines or no lines at all in the late morning and early afternoon, the abstention rate had to have been enormous, and—by implication—the Supreme Electoral Council must have been presenting falsified results.

The arithmetic clashed with the facts. Most polling places have two voting booths, so that two people were able to mark their ballots at the same time. Beyond that, the two minutes required to process each voter overlapped the two minutes of the preceding and succeeding voters. As one had her registration checked, another voted and still another had his thumb inked to prevent repeat voting. But La Prensa has an infinite capacity for rising above reality. Reporting the vote tabulations, its editors headlined only the percentages of abstention and of invalid ballots. This is as if the New York Times had run a headline saying “45% abstain” in place of announcing President Reagan’s reelection.

Barricada, which functions as the FSLN’s house organ, exulted in the party’s victory. In contrast, El Nuevo Diario held to the pluralistic course it has set for itself, presenting the results as a victory for the whole nation. While emphasizing the significant demonstration of popular support for the FSLN, the paper drew attention also to the strong electoral showings of the Democratic Conservatives, Independent Liberals, and Popular Social Christians.

A vote of confidence

Indeed the electoral results were fascinating for what they revealed about the political mood of the Nicaraguan people. In the midst of a war and in the absence of any sanctions for failure to vote, over 70 percent of all eligible voters cast ballots—fully 17 percent above the figure in the U.S. election two days later. Even allowing for the 6 percent of eligible voters who failed to register and for the 6.7 percent who cast invalid ballots, the FSLN still garnered the votes of 44 percent of all citizens of voting age, as compared to President Reagan’s 31 percent in the U.S. elections.

Just as importantly, the results disproved the all-but-unanimous contention of the U.S. mass media (echoing the White House line) that the participating opposition parties were “marginal,” and—correspondingly—that Arturo Cruz and the Coordinadora constituted the only opposition with a meaningful base of support among the Nicaraguan public. In fact, a third of the votes were cast for opposition parties: of these, significantly more than half went to parties with platforms well to the left of the Coordinadora’s.

Not that there was any mandate for leftist extremism either. In spite of aggressive campaigning and wide publicity, all three communist parties were trounced. Especially noteworthy was the poor performance of the Socialist party. Because of the enormous personal popularity of its presidential candidate, Domingo Sánchez, affectionately known as Chaguitillo, it had been expected to do well. In the event, his charisma didn’t work; the voters relegated the Socialists to sixth place with 1.4 percent of the vote. Altogether, the communists attained only 3.9 percent of the vote, reflecting a distinct lack of enthusiasm for imported versions of “communism,” Soviet or otherwise, among the Nicaraguan people.

On the whole it was an impressive vote of confidence for the distinctive synthesis of socialism, nationalism, and radical Christianity pioneered by the FSLN under the banner of Sandino, and at the same time for democracy, pluralism, and moderation. Although the Conservative party drew the second largest number of votes, the ideological position it represents came in third as the two parties with non-Marxist but still “revolutionary” platforms—the Independent Liberals and Popular Social Christians—drew a greater number of votes and delegates.

Though it is risky to make predictions in a revolutionary situation, the outlook as of this writing is reasonably favorable for the emergence of an agenda that is at once socialist, nationalist, pluralist, and democratic when the new National Assembly convenes to draft a constitution in January. In a press conference immediately after the election, president-elect Daniel Ortega indicated that the FSLN will seek a wide consensus among the parties, aiming toward national unity. That commitment appears to be reflected in the names and affiliation of delegates elected to the Assembly under the FSLN banner. Only one of the nine Comandantes de la Revolución who make up the party’s national directorate (Carlos Núñez) is represented, along with but two lower-ranking comandantes, both women. Others among the FSLN delegates are ranchers, businessmen, three members of the Organization of Revolutionary Christians, and two Baptist ministers. About 15 of the FSLN representatives aren’t even FSLN members; they were selected by the FSLN on the basis of their abilities and patriotism.

There is something remarkable in all this. For the first time in history, a Marxist-Leninist “vanguard” party that came to power through armed struggle has submitted itself to an open electoral test against a wide range of opposition parties. However little appreciated this point is in the U.S., it is widely respected even by the opposition parties in Nicaragua. Popular Social Christian standard-bearer Mauricio Díaz concluded that “this experience is unique because the Revolution has known how to combine itself with Western democratic forms” (El Nuevo Diario, Nov. 6). At Conservative party headquarters shortly before the voting, a couple of party leaders told me the very same thing, adding that it is all the more remarkable in that their country is at war, under siege by the world’s most powerful country: “After that, how can you call the FSLN a communist party?”

Ironically, it seems that precisely in the measure that Nicaragua’s revolution opens itself to Christian influence and stakes out a democratic path, it becomes perceived as a greater menace to the interests of a large segment of those who dominate the economic and political power structures of the U.S. The example being set by the Sandinistas is dangerous to these interests elsewhere in Latin America in a way that an easily caricaturable Cuban or Soviet form of socialism never could be.

That is the real message behind the SR-71 sonic overflights, the intrusion of U.S. warships into territorial waters in full view of the coast, and finally the hysteria over the phantom MiGs, all timed to coincide with—and overshadow—the momentous developments unfolding in Nicaragua. Nicaragua is indeed becoming an ever more subversive exporter of revolution, not through the virtually nonexistent transfer of arms, but rather through the far more potent agency of its example. In the words of vice-president-elect Sergio Ramírez. “We’re exporting new ideas, ideas of change and renewal, ideas that are establishing a new world…. How can we prevent peasants in some other Central American country from hearing, from knowing, from understanding that in Nicaragua land is being given to other poor peasants like them? How can we keep them from realizing that here children are being vaccinated, while theirs are still dying from gastroenteritis and polio?” (In These Times, Nov. 14-20)

In my judgment it is not fanciful to see a connection between sentiments like these and the tactics of the ClA-financed and directed counterrevolutionaries, who systematically target health centers, schools, and agricultural cooperatives and single out teachers, doctors, and newly landed peasants for execution. And it is for the same reasons that the Reagan administration has targeted the Nicaraguan electoral process and liberation theology. Because they institutionalize and give moral authority to social revolution, they must be discredited and destroyed at all cost. Hence the policy of severe economic and military pressure intended to drive Nicaragua, as Grenada before it, to the cracking point.

So far, it is a policy that has not had its intended effects. In fact, the latest U.S. saber-rattling rallied virtually all the newly elected opposition delegates to the defense of national sovereignty and honor. The Popular Social Christians called upon their partisans to prepare to take up arms to defend the country (El Nuevo Diario, Nov. 10). Even Clemente Guido, leader of the right-wing Democratic Conservatives, insisted that there was an important distinction between civil war and foreign invasion. and that “every people has a right to arm itself when it is assailed by a foreign power” (El Nuevo Diario, Nov. 10). And Brooklyn Rivera, the Miskito resistance leader. has said that if the U.S. invades, he and his fighters will participate in the defense of the country.

No one can now predict the final outcome of Nicaragua’s daring effort to combine revolutionary social change with representative democracy. What is certain is that it poses a terrible threat to extremists of both right and left, who can be expected to do their best to derail it before it has a chance to undermine their respective manichaean ideologies. What is also certain is that as U.S. citizens, we are not mere spectators. Unless we act to curtail our government’s interference with the Nicaraguan people’s right to self-determination, we must inevitably share in the responsibility for whatever intemperance might emerge.

Christianity & Crisis (vol 44, no 21), 24 December 1984, 492-493

How votes count in Nicaragua

A system favoring pluralism

by Andrew Reding

THERE WERE TWO ELECTIONS held in Nicaragua on November 4: one to choose a president and vice president of the republic, the other to choose delegates to a national legislative assembly that is to draft a new constitution. Since the constitution will determine the role of the presidency, decide what rights are to be secured by the new government, and more generally chart its political objectives, it is to the composition of this National Assembly that one must look to get some idea of the significance and portent of the elections.

It would be difficult to imagine a more representative formula for apportioning legislative seats than the one selected for the National Assembly. To ensure regional representation, the country was divided into nine regions, six covering the more densely-populated Pacific slope, and three spanning the sparsely-populated Caribbean slope. In keeping with the principle of one person, one vote, each region was granted a number of representatives in proportion to its population, varying from one delegate for the Río San Juan area to 25 for Managua. Each participating political party puts forth a slate of candidates equal to the number of seats available in each region, and the seats are then apportioned among the parties through a system of proportional representation. If a region has 10 seats, for instance, each 10 percent of the total votes cast in that region entitles a party to one delegate from that region.

This system, copied in large measure from Western European democracies, is considerably more representative than the winner-take-all formula in force in the U.S. Whereas the U.S. method assigns representatives only to regional majorities, the Nicaraguan system provides representation for all but the most insignificant minorities as well: Since votes that aren’t sufficient for representation in one region are carried over to others, it takes only a little over one percent of the national vote to obtain a representative for a distinctive point of view. Moreover, all losing presidential candidates of parties that manage to elect at least one representative are themselves also seated in the Assembly. Had the Sandinistas chosen the system of representation used in the U.S., they would have taken virtually every seat in the Assembly, shutting out the opposition. Instead they consented to a system that actually favors the opposition and safeguards pluralism.

The Nicaraguan campaign financing system dispenses an equal sum of money to every participating party, regardless of membership or level of popular support. For this election the sum was set at 9 million cordobas, or about $320,000 at the official exchange rate. The same principle applies to television and radio exposure. with 30 minutes of prime-time television and 45 minutes of radio time set aside each day to be shared among all parties. The virtue of this arrangement is that it affords each point of view an equal opportunity for a serious hearing. The U.S. campaign financing law, by contrast, provides support only to major parties, by way of a “matching” system that uses federal funds to double existing inequalities in access to campaign funds, further favoring those who serve the wealthy over those who serve the poor.

Supervision of the electoral process is entrusted to a five-person Supreme Electoral Council, empowered as a “fourth branch of government” to ensure “respect for, and guarantee of, the popular vote.” All five members are appointed by the Supreme Court: three as professionals, and two from among nominations submitted by the National Assembly of Political Parties (ANPP). ANPP itself is dominated by opposition parties (since each party contributes one delegate to that body), so that, as it turned out, both of the Supreme Electoral Council members selected from the ANPP nominations were likewise members of opposition parties (the Conservatives and Popular Social Christians).

Though registration is mandatory, voting is not. The absence of sanctions against those who choose not to vote sets the Nicaraguan electoral system apart from those of other Latin American (not to mention European) countries, including Venezuela, Colombia, Costa Rica, and El Salvador. Although 94 percent of eligible citizens registered, only 75 percent of those who registered actually voted.

The voting was conducted by secret ballots, one for president and vice president, the other for regional candidates to the National Assembly. In each instance, the parties wore listed horizontally under their respective flags, in an order determined by the drawing of lots. Voting was carried out in booths, behind thick black curtains that concealed all but shoes. There voters marked their X’s, then folded the ballots over and dropped them into opaque urns.

Each party had the right to post an observer at each polling station, but some were far more efficient at producing observers than others, in large measure reflecting their level of support: finding 4,000 poll watchers is no easy task,especially for small parties. Complementing the domestic poll watchers were more than a thousand foreign observers and journalists who surveyed the voting and counting all across the country.

Of the four major historical parties in Nicaragua—the FSLN, the Liberals (PLI), the Conservatives (PCDN), and the Social Christians (PSC)—only the PSC stayed out, joining Arturo Cruz’s Coordinadora. The other two parties in the Coordinadora are little more than paper parties: the Constitutional Liberals and the Social Democrats, who maintain a serious existence only in the pages of La Prensa, whose editor just happens to be a director of the Social Democrats.

An option on the right

The absence of the Coordinadora did not effectively narrow the spectrum of political choice, since the Conservatives offered essentially the same electoral platform, centered on free enterprise, negotiation with the contras, and anticommunism. The Liberals offered a moderate program between that of the FSLN and that of the Conservatives; the Popular Social Christians (PPSC), born of a schism in the PSC, offered an explicitly Christian option; and three communist parties offered positions at varying degrees to the left of the FSLN.

Of the valid ballots for the Assembly, 66.8 percent were cast for the FSLN. Although the FSLN led in every region ofthe country, there were notable regional variations, with the highest levels of support being registered in the north, around Estelí (72.5 percent for Region 1) and León and Chinandega (72.6 percent in Region 2). Their weakest showing was in the south, around Chontales (60.7 percent in Region 5) and Granada and Rivas (61 percent in Region 4).

When imbalances in participation in registration and voting are taken into account, regional variations are accentuated. Registration in Special Zone I (Zelaya Norte, comprising the northeast of the country) was below 59 percent, by far the lowest level in the country (the average being 94 percent). Not coincidentally, this is the region where most of the Miskito population lives. So not much can be made of the FSLN’s majority here. especially since a high proportion of military personnel are stationed around Puerto Cabezas.

The FSLN’s weak spot on the Pacific slope was around Chontales (Region 5), where registration was at 81 percent and where only 63 percent of those who registered actually voted. Chontales is a traditionally conservative area, whose principal city (Juigalpa) happens to be the seat of the country’s most right-wing bishop, Pablo Vega. Counterbalancing weaker showings here and in the northeast, the FSLN drew extremely strong support, undergirded by very high turnout, in densely-populated regions 1, 2, and 3 (Estelí, León, and Managua).

Only in scattered towns and neighborhoods did opposition parties lead. Nationally, the Conservatives (PCDN) came in second with 14 percent, followed by the Liberals (PLI) with 9.7 percent, and the Popular Social Christians (PPSC) with 5.6 percent. Regional variations were even more pronounced than in the case of the FSLN, with the Liberals doing well in the north around León, Estelí, and Matagalpa, the Conservatives doing even better in the south around Juigalpa, Granada, and Rivas (attaining 21.8 percent of the vote for Region 5), and the Popular Social Christians making their strongest showing in Managua. Interestingly. the Conservatives lost their traditional rural base to the FSLN, reflecting the achievements of five years of agrarian reform by the Sandinistas; but they made up for the loss by picking up substantial backing from the urban middle class, reflecting disaffection over government policies that give priority to the poor and to the war effort while giving rise to shortages of consumer goods.

The three communist parties came in far behind, managing to attract only slivers of support: the Moscow-line Socialists (PSN) with 1.4 percent, the Communists (PCdeN) with 1.5 percent, and the Popular Action Movement (MAP-ML) with 1 percent.

Translated into Assembly seats, these figures gave the FSLN 61 representatives to 14 for the Conservatives. 9 forthe Liberals, 6 for the Popular Social Christians, and 2 each for the three communist parties. giving the opposition over a third of the 96-seat total.

Christianity & Crisis (vol 44, no 21), 24 December 1984, 494-496

Who says what’s fit to print?

The words behind the words

by Andrew Reding

WHY IS THE NEWS OF NICARAGUA that reaches the U.S. public — and, for that matter, news consumers in some other countries — so jarringly different from the impressions I’ve formed there? To find out, I spent part of my time on this return trip mingling with the international press corps. Of course, I talked at length with only a relative handful of the more than 600 correspondents from all over the world who converged on Managua for the elections. And, since I didn’t conduct formal interviews, I won’t be quoting those I did talk with by name. But my experiences did furnish some pointers for reflection.

One especially revealing experience rose out of an informal roundtable discussion held at the International Press Club in Managua, involving about two dozen correspondents — roughly half from the U.S. and the rest representing major dailies in Mexico, Colombia, and Venezuela.

The Latin Americans came angry. Why, they wanted to know, was the U.S. press so exaggerating the importance of Arturo Cruz and his Coordinadora? One of them put the question con brio:

You people are already there in the morning when he wakes up; you take note of what he eats for breakfast, then you follow in his footsteps all day long, recording his every utterance, his every breath. To be sure, Arturo Cruz is no insignificant figure on the national scene, in view of the powerful domestic and foreign interests he represents; but why are you people so inflating his stature out of all proportion to the very modest level of popular support he has?

Two stars of the establishment press in the U.S. responded by saying that their heavy coverage of Cruz was in keeping with basic principles of “objective journalism.” “With President Reagan and Secretary of State Shultz making daily pronouncements to the effect that Cruz is the only valid democratic alternative to the Sandinistas, he is a major story and we can hardly ignore him.”

“You mean to tell us,” said another of the Latin American correspondents, “that you let the Reagan administration dictate your agenda?” Another pointed out that President Reagan also refers to the guerrillas of El Salvador all the time. How often, he asked, does the U.S. press give them the sympathetic coverage it lavishes on Arturo Cruz?

These difficult questions elicited confessions about the constraints imposed on correspondents by their editors back home, along with a more combative reply from one of the top correspondents on hand:

You Latin Americans just don’t understand our type of press. We don’t take as explicit a political perspective as you do. You — and the Sandinistas especially — can’t understand our adversarial relationship. The norm here is for cooperation between press and government; our norm — and it’s the same one we use with our government in the U.S. — is confrontational.

On another occasion I spoke with the Tegucigalpa correspondent of a well-known wire service, a young woman from the U.S. who mentioned that she finds Tegucigalpa (the Honduran capital) an unpleasant city. I asked her how she felt about Guatemala City. To my consternation, she replied that she absolutely loved it, that it was her favorite city in Central America.

“Don’t you find the Policía Nacional a little disconcerting — all those blue-shirts with the automatic weapons at every corner?”

“Oh, yes,” she answered, “I suppose if you can’t stomach the violence:….Since I’ve been in Tegucigalpa I’ve actually come to miss going out for a newspaper and seeing a couple of murders along the way.”

When I stared at her in distaste, she added, “Just a joke.” It was not the kind of joke any of the Latins I met would have made.

A few days later I ran into the correspondent from a major French daily, at Interprensa, the government press center. I asked what impressions she had formed of the Nicaraguan electoral process. “It’s a complete farce,” she told me, “a total sham.” Why? I asked. “Because as everyone can well see, there is no contest. There is no question who will win beforehand.” Did she mean that the election was rigged? No. she responded a little testily, but an election whose outcome was so little in doubt could scarcely be dignified with the title “election.” I could have asked whether her test would apply to some French and U.S. elections whose outcomes were wholly predictable, but instead inquired how long she’d been in Nicaragua. A couple of days, it turned out.

Surprisingly, some of the other European correspondents, such as the reporters for the major Irish dailies and a reporter/analyst for the leading Polish weekly, didn’t know a word of Spanish. At one press conference a journalist asked Agriculture Minister Jaime Wheelock a question in English, prompting a reminder that he was in a Spanish-speaking country. The Swedes and the Dutch, on the other hand, not only showed a reasonable mastery of Spanish (along with four or five other languages) but also came with open minds.

Chinese, Soviet, Polish, and Cuban

At a reception held for the foreign press at Sacuanjoche, the government’s diplomatic entertainment spot on the outskirts of Managua, I met a correspondent from the People’s Republic of China. Astonishingly, his Spanish was by far the best of any foreign correspondent I met, as were his knowledge and appreciation for Latin American history and culture. I learned from him that Nicaragua does not have diplomatic relations with China, instead maintaining ties with Taiwan, which provides the country with a small amount of economic aid. When I asked why, he swelled with emotion and snapped, “I wish you’d go address that question to Daniel Ortega!” Yet he made it a point to emphasize that this is not just a Nicaraguan peculiarity, but rather one that is characteristic of Central America. What is so astonishing is that the Sandinistas have not altered the Somoza China policy, thereby keeping it in league with some of its dictatorial neighbors on this important foreign policy question. Even more interesting was that in spite of bad feelings over this issue, the Chinese correspondent, clearly reflecting the views of his government, demonstrated respect for the Nicaraguan Revolution and for its electoral process.

His attitude was in marked contrast to that of the three correspondents from the Soviet Union — one from Isvestia, two from the Novosti Press Agency — whom I encountered on election day in Chinandega, Nicaragua’s fifth-largest city. They started the conversation by asking me, as the lone U.S. reporter on the scene, how I felt about U.S. aggression against Nicaragua. I replied that they were hardly in a position to ask such a question in view of their government’s brutal treatment of the Afghan people and their sovereignty. The argument that followed could easily have been transposed from similar Vietnam-era debates in the U.S.

They then tried a tamer question: What did I think of the Nicaraguan electoral process? I said I had been impressed by what I had seen so far, and then put the same question to them. To my fascination, they were noncommittal. “In fact,” one of them told me, “we still can’t be sure this is a genuine revolution. What with all these priests running government ministries, an agrarian reform that permits large landholders to keep their lands and their profits as long as they produce, and now these bourgeois elections with open challenges by bourgeois parties…You call that socialist progress?” When I made a reference to liberation theology, one of them asked: “Truthfully now, isn’t this ‘liberation theology’ just ideology dressed up as religion to suit the cultural mores of Latin Americans? After all, religion has historically always been the tool of the ruling classes to keep the working: classes subdued.” They were scandalized when I tried to suggest that the incarnated Gospel of Jesus Christ was in fact far more radically revolutionary and liberatory than Marx’s project. And they lost all interest in me when I first asked whether they’d ever heard of Milovan Djilas’ The New Class (they swore they’d never heard of it) and then sketched out its scathing critique of the role played by the new privileged classes in Soviet-bloc countries, party functionaries living lavishly off of the productive surplus of workers and peasants.

There were a couple of correspondents from Poland on the scene at the same time, and it was interesting to see how they deliberately avoided contact with the Russians. The Poles, it turned out, were intimately familiar with The New Class: They said it was an underground favorite, regularly smuggled into the country. Unlike the Russians, they were genuinely interested in the electoral process, but in a thoughtful and critical style. On the question of the Sandinist Defense Committees, for example, one of them shared his anxiety that such grassroots “mass organizations” tend to degenerate over time into agencies of totalitarian monitoring and control.

I also met a Cuban correspondent, who was again interesting for his difference in approach from that of the Russians. He was impressed by the Nicaraguans’ electoral experiment, and intrigued to find out more about the contribution of liberation theology to the Nicaraguan Revolution, this time on its own terms. This widened into a friendly discussion with a couple of reporters from El Nuevo Diario, who were delighted to hear of my appreciation for their paper’s openness to political pluralism and to liberation theology.

The most striking discovery I made in my personal survey of the international press corps in Nicaragua is that perceptions of the Nicaraguan Revolution depend far more on North/South than on East/West distinctions. The legacy of European imperialism (which extends to a large section of the white population in the U.S. and of the Russian population in the USSR) has yet to die out. U.S., Russian, and certain European journalists were unable to view developments in Nicaragua outside the Procrustean confines of their own cultural biases, which they absolutize as more “advanced,” “objective,” or “scientific.” It is left to the other third world countries — notably without regard to ideology — to give the Nicaraguans a serious hearing. Thus it was that the Chinese, Angolan, Latin American (including Cuban), and Caribbean correspondents, together with a smattering of Europeans (especially from the more peripheral nation), were the ones to truly observe the elections rather than simply confirm prejudgments.

It is it pity that our own link with the third world, our “rainbow coalition,” hasn’t developed its own mass circulation communications media, politically aware and committed, offering a perspective that might help us sympathize with the liberatory strivings of our neighhors, and in so doing help forestall the further bloodshed and suffering that will otherwise be the fruit of further ignorance and misunderstanding.

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