Daniel Ortega And The Return Of The Sandinistas

Nearly twenty-six years after they rode a revolution to power, and sixteen years after they were defeated in an election, the political party that American Republicans love to hate is back. Daniel Ortega of the Sandinista party of Nicaragua looks to have won a commanding enough victory in Sunday's elections to win the Presidency outright, without need of a second round run off vote.

There's quite a bit of history behind this election, and perhaps before a new smear campaign is begun against the Sandinista leader, a quick overview is in order from someone who didn't think of the Contras as kin to the American Founding Fathers.

In the late 1970s a popular revolution in Nicaragua overthrew the reign of the Somoza family. De facto rulers of the country since the turn of the century, either directly as president or the power behind the throne, the Somozas had protected the interests of the elite and American business at the expense of the majority of the population.

The 1979 uprising led by the Sandinista National Liberation Front (Frente Sandinista de Leberación Nacional in Spanish or more familiarly known by its initials FSLN) was aimed at improving the lot of the majority who lived in poverty through an aggressive program of land reform, nationalization of industry, education, and improved health care. Major private landowners – mainly American and British - who used prime agricultural land for ranching instead of food growing were forced to surrender their land for redistribution to the people who had been their former tenant farmers.

After years of seeing American backed governments, like El Salvadore and Chile, in Central and South America oppress and kill their own people, the revolution in Nicaragua became a rallying point for people looking to affect change in the Western Hemisphere. Aid workers from around the world, but primarily the United States and Canada, came to the country to help what they saw as building hope.

They helped villages set up agricultural systems that we would take for granted, like irrigation, figure out how to maintain the Russian tractors (the United States had imposed a trade embargo in 1985 under Reagan so they were forced to turn to anyone who would sell them equipment) they were using, built school houses, and educated teachers in the skills needed to teach young people.

Now I'm not going to idealize them, they were still a single-party government in most ways until the 1990 election which saw their defeat, but with the assistance of Cuba and other South American countries they managed to increase the literacy rate to 50% from single figures, and eliminate polio and other diseases that plague the poor.

Part of the reason for their inability to hold elections was the Reagan administration's creation and funding of the armed terrorists called the Contras, which placed the country on permanent war footing for most of the 1980s. When the United States Congress refused to fund the Contras, Oliver North, an American Marine officer serving with the National Security Council, supposedly set up an arrangement to sell arms illegally to the Iranian government in order to raise money to fund the Contras without anyone else in the Reagan administration having knowing about it. (Talking to a Reagan staff member about it in 1987 he laughingly said, "Yeah, everybody knew about it from the secretary pool up – how the hell are you not going to know about an arms deal worth that much money – where do you think he got the weapons from – a pawn shop? But of course none of us knew a thing officially.")

Article Author: Richard Marcus

Richard Marcus is the author of the forthcoming book What Will Happen In Eragon IV? and has had his work published in print and on line all over the world. The not so long-haired Canadian iconoclast writes reviews and opines on the world as he sees …

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