A reply to Mr. Hughes of the Christian Science Monitor, regarding the "End of the Contras"


While Mr. Hughes and others lament the end of the Contras we might do well to take a different sort of look at this new turn of events in what has been a long (almost ten years now) and desultory chapter in American history. Ultimately, from the academic perspective, only one thing should count of course, and that is the truth; and in this case the truth lies somewhere between the "John Foster Dulles" domino-theory paranoia of International Communism of Mr. Hughes and the revisionist view that all political species evolve and that forbearance and Machiavellianism might prove better than guns in places like Nicaragua bent on experimenting with alternative forms of government.

Essentially, the reason that the Contras are more or less kaput is that they never were a viable force in the first place and that whoever they were, and/or whatever they are, remains a story of shadows and sneaky deals orchestrated as much in Washington as in the backcountry of Nicaragua. Why has their exact origin remained something of a mystery? Perhaps more importantly, at least at this point, why has their leadership remained so unclear? Why have they failed to even once achieve a significant military objective despite hundreds of millions of dollars of military assistance (gleaned, incidentally, from some very shady deals with our arch-enemy Iran)?

According to the recent National Geographic study the average person in Syracuse or Sacramento doesn't even know where Nicaragua is much less know the difference between the Sandinistas and the Somocistas...and then he is asked to be a "patriot" and support democracy by sending money for guns so some "Freedom Fighters" can kill Communists in Central America. Although Mr. Average Citizen may not know that Anastasio Somoza had developed tyranny to a high art in Nicaragua and that Enrique Bermudez, the apparent leader of the Contras, was once a high-ranking officer in Somoza's cut-throat army and was instrumental in that regime of terror, he does remember Viet Nam and something about a "Gulf of Tonkin Incident" and a charlatan named Thieu and he says, "Wait a minute."

This is what Mr. Hughes decries as the "vacillating character" of American support (for the Contras). I would prefer to call it democratic forbearance. Vacillation is as much a part of democracy as certainty is a part of tyranny. It would be nice if everything were black and white and that every problem had only one simple cause and one simple solution but it ain't so.

For God's sake let us honor Viet Nam and the 55, 000 Americans who died there with TRUTH today. Surely that can be the only good thing to come out of that horrible, perjured nightmare. And that is not what we have gotten from the Contras and the White House -- TRUTH. The Contras never were a guerilla force bent on "democratizing" Nicaragua. The original Contras were the remains of the defeated, despicable, brutal army of El Presidente Somoza who had virtually owned and ruled Nicaragua for forty-five years and they were finally driven out by a coalition of revolutionary groups, the largest of which were the Sandinistas (named after Cesar Sandino who had been murdered by the first Somoza fifty years ago).

Essentially, the Contras were like the Tories here in America after the revolution; they were the disgruntled, abandoned losers. Should we have worked out some sort of deal with them and re-established a colonial relationship with King George? How utterly preposterous! (Yet there were many who, like Benjamin Franklin's own son, thought that we should). But yet here we expect the Nicaraguans to work out a deal with the very same thugs they had just gotten rid of. It doesn't make any sense either.

At first, we were told that the raison d'etre for the Contras was to police the jungles to stop the flow of arms from Marxist Nicaragua to the rebels in El Salvador. Remember, the White Paper of the CIA purporting to have discovered such gun-running? But how many people remember that that same document was proven to be a complete fabrication? (The unbelievable thing was that Nicaraguans had, in fact stopped sending arms to the guerillas next door because the guerillas in El Salvador were so successful that they were now arming themselves adequately with stuff they captured from the inept Salvadoran army). And remember the now-documented fabrication of the "Gulf of Tonkin Incident" Mr. Hughes? Is it too much to imagine that even in the face of threats to our "national security" (such as a Nicaraguan invasion of Brownsville, Texas) and in the name of patriotism ("America. Love it or leave.") that we might still be reluctant to support such glandular enterprises?

So, then it was decided to be more up front about these Contras and fund them simply as counterrevolutionaries, "freedom fighters" as Mr. Reagan called them. They would force the Sandinistas to democratize. And the Sandinistas did, in fact "democratize" in 1984, with elections as free as any the team of international observers from Finland, Sweden, Germany and Canada had seen anywhere else in Latin America. But that still wasn't good enough for the old school domino theorists in the Pentagon. They may have had free elections but by damn they were still Marxists and so they had to go.

By then truth was unimportant because the harbors of Nicaragua were "mined by the Contras" and then we learned that it had not been the Contras after all but our own CIA and we were condemned and humiliated once again, this time by the International Court at the Hague. And although President Reagan was unruffled by the magnitude of the condemnation, the American people were not quite so indifferent and their wishes were expressed in Senator Boland's amendment in 1984, prohibiting any further aid to these squalid counterrevolutionaries; that is to say, no more Viet Nams.

But Colonel North and several other people who had never been elected to any political office and with unabashed, unquestioning loyalty to their president thought they knew better than the vast majority of people of this country and the lawmakers in Congress and continued to fund the Contras illegally and we ended up with Iran-gate, one of the sorrier episodes in our history. Meanwhile, the Contras never once engaged the Nicaraguan army in battle, preferring to sneak into remote villages to kill, rape, burn and mutilate. I challenge Mr. Hughes or anyone else to tell me one good thing the Contras ever did (such as building schools, hospitals or any other community-based humanitarian project). Throughout their fabricated sordid existence we have heard only stories of barbarism, and corruption, disputations among their own leadership, Swiss bank accounts, cocaine, illegal airfields in neutral countries but nary a single humanitarian or military accomplishment.

They never wanted, as you claim, to "take back" their revolution from the Sandinistas Mr. Hughes because they were the cause of the revolution in the first place for God’s sake! To call them "freedom fighters" and equate them with our own venerable founding fathers is a naivete, a misunderstanding of history almost criminally grotesque. The one man of some distinction among the early Contras, Arturo Cruz, was driven away by their prevaricating vulgarities. And, as far as the rest go, I resent equating Madison, Jefferson, Franklin and Washington with an ex-Coca Cola salesman and some fierce, sneaking sergeant.

Often, we seem to make big decisions based on little examples, so let me close with two illustrations which might serve to suggest two bigger choices. A few years ago the Sandinistas shot down a plane full of guns for the Contras and captured the supply officer, Eugene Hasenfus, an American mercenary. He was tried as a war criminal and sentenced to thirty years in prison. Then, those same puppets of the "Evil Empire", those horrible Sandinistas, three months later sent him back to Minnesota so he could be home with his family for Christmas! Who cares whether this was a "political" gesture for the press; at least the guy got home in one piece. Not long after that particular incident a band of Contras pillaged a small town in northern Nicaragua and found Ben Lindner, a young American engineer building a small hydro-electric generator there and what did they do? How did Reagan's "freedom fighters" treat this young American idealist? They simply blew his brains out right there on the spot. So there you have two examples, two philosophies, two ways of doing things, two choices. I suggest we consider the larger implications of these two examples and celebrate the end of the Contras.