NEWS COVE~AGE S iJfsTA REVOLUTION

NEWS COVE~AGE

REVOLUTION

By Joshua Muravchik

With a foreword by Pablo Antonio Cuadra, Editor ofLA PRENSA

American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research Washington, D.C. Distributed to the Trade by National Book Network, 15200 NBN Way, Blue Ridge Summit, PA 17214. To order call toll free 1-800-462-6420 or 1-717-794-3800. For all other inquiries please contact the AEI Press, 1150 Seventeenth Street, N.W., Washington, D.C. 20036 or call 1-800-862-5801. Publication of this volume is made possible by a grant from the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, Inc.

Distributed by arrangement with

UPA, Inc. 4720 Boston Way 3 Henrietta Street Lanham, MD 20706 London WC2E 8LU England

ISBN 0-8447-3661-9 (alk. paper) ISBN 0-8447-3662-7 (pbk.: alk. paper) AEI Studies 476

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Muravchik, Joshua. News coverage of the Sandinista revolution / Joshua Muravchik. p. cm. - (AEI studies; 476) Includes bibliographies. ISBN 0-8447-3661-9 (alk. paper). ISBN 0-8447-3662-7 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Foreign news-United States-History. 2. Press and politics­ United States-History. 3. Nicaragua-Politics and government-1937-1979. 4. Nicaragua-History-Revolution, 1979. 5. Public opinion-United States. 6. Nicaragua-History­ Revolution, 1979-Foreign public opinion, American. I. Title. II. Series. PN4888.F69M87 1988 972.85'052-dcI9 88-10553 CIP

© 1988 by the American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Re­ search, Washington, D.C. All rights reserved. No part of this publica­ tion may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without permission in writing from the American Enterprise Institute except in the case of brief quotations embodied in news articles, critical articles, or reviews. The views expressed in the publications of the American Enterprise Institute are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the staff, advisory panels, officers, or trustees of AEI.

'1<\merican Enterprise Institute" and @ are registered service marks of the American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research.

Printed in the United States of America ABOUT THE AUTHORS

JOSHUA MURAVCHIK is a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute. His articles appear frequently in Commentary, the New Re­ public, the American Spectator, the New York Times, and the Wall Street Journal, and he has contributed to Foreign Affairs, the New York Times Magazine, and numerous other magazines and newspapers. His re­ cent book, The Uncertain Crusade, was praised in the New Republic as "certainly one of the most important neoconservative foreign policy statements that have appeared to date." His 1983 article, "Misreport­ ing Lebanon," which appeared in Policy Review, was widely hailed as the definitive critique of press coverage of the 1982 war in Lebanon. Mr. Muravchik received his Ph.D. in international relations from Georgetown University. In 1986, the Wall Street Journal wrote: "Joshua Muravchik may be the most cogent and careful of the neoconservative writers on foreign policy."

PABLO ANTONIO CUADRA is widely recognized in Latin America as Nicaragua's greatest living poet. He serves as well as editor of La Prensa. Board of Trustees The American Enterprise Institute Willard C. Butcher, Chairman for Public Policy Research Chm. and CEO Chase Manhattan Bank Founded in 1943, AEI is a nonpartisan, nonprofit, Paul F. Oreffice, Vice-Chm. research and educational organization based in Chairman Washington, D.C. The Institute sponsors research, Dow Chemical Co. c'onducts seminars and conferences, and publishes Robert Anderson books and periodicals. Chm. and CEO AEI's research is carried out under three major Rockwell International Corp. programs: Economic Policy Studies; Foreign Policy and Warren L. Batts National Security Studies; and Social and Political Chm. and CEO Studies. The resident scholars and fellows listed in these Premark International pages are part of a network that also includes ninety Winton M. Blount adjunct scholars at leading universities throughout the Chm. and CEO United States and in several foreign countries. Blount, Inc. The views expressed in AEI publications are those of Edwin L. Cox the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of Chairman the staff, advisory panels, officers, or trustees. AEI itself Cox Oil & Gas, Inc. takes no positions on public policy issues. John J. Creedon Pres. and CEO Metropolitan Life Insurance Co.

Christopher C. DeMuth Paul A. Miller Officers President Chm. and CEO American Enterprise Institute Pacific Lighting Corp. Christopher C. DeMuth President Charles T. Fisher III Richard M. Morrow Chm. and CEO David B. Gerson Chm. and Pres. Executive Vice President National Bank of Detroit Amoco Corp. David Packard James F. Hicks D. Gale Johnson Chairman Vice President, Finance and Chairman Hewlett-Packard Co. Administration; Treasurer; and AEI Council of Academic Secretary Advisers Edmund T. Pratt, Jr. Chm. and CEO Patrick Ford Richard B. Madden Pfizer, Inc. Vice President, Public Affairs Chm. and CEO Mark Shepherd, Jr. Potlatch Corp. Chairman Robert H. Malott Texas Instruments, Inc. Chm. and CEO Roger B. Smith FMC Corp. Chm. and CEO General Motors Corp. PaulW. McCracken Edmund Ezra Day University Richard D. Wood Professor Emeritus Chairman of the Board University of Michigan Eli Lilly and Co. Randall Meyer Walter B. Wriston Former President Former Chairman Exxon' Co., U. S. A. Citicorp Council of Academic Douglas J. Besharov Chong-Pin Lin Advisers Resident Scholar; Director, Associate Director, Social Responsibility Project China Studies Program D. Gale Johnson, Chairman Robert H. Bork John H. Makin Eliakim Hastings Moore John M. Olin Scholar in Legal Resident Scholar; Director, Distinguished Service Professor Studies Fiscal Policy Studies of Economics University of Chicago Nicholas N. Eberstadt Brian F. Mannix Paul M. Bator Visiting Scholar Resident Fellow; Managing Editor, Re8ulation John P. Wilson Professor of Law Mark Falcoff University of Chicago Resident Scholar Constantine C. Menges Gary S. Becker Gerald R. Ford Resident Scholar University Professor of Economics Distinguished Fellow Joshua Muravchik and Sociology Resident Scholar University of Chicago Murray F. Foss Visiting Scholar Michael Novak Donald C. Hellmann George F. Jewett Scholar; Professor of Political Science and Suzanne Garment Director, Social and Political International Studies Resident Scholar Studies University of Washington Allan Gerson Norman J. Ornstein Gertrude Himmelfarb Resident Scholar Resident Scholar Distinguished Professor of Robert A. Goldwin Richard N. Perle History Resident Scholar; Codirector, Resident Fellow City University of New York Constitution Project Thomas Robinson Nelson W. Polsby Gottfried Haberler Director, China Professor of Political Science Resident Scholar Studies Program University of California at Berkeley William S. Haraf William Schneider J. Edward Lundy Visiting Scholar; Resident Fellow Herbert Stein Director, Financial Markets Peter Skerry A. Willis Robertson Regulation Project Research Fellow Professor of Economics Emeritus Karlyn H. Keene Herbert Stein University of Virginia Resident Fellow; Managing Senior Fellow; Editor, Public Opinion Editor, AEI Economist Murray L. Weidenbaum Mallinckrodt Distinguished Alan L. Keyes Edward Styles University Professor Resident Scholar Director, Publications Washington University Jeane J. Kirkpatrick Sir Alan Walters James Q. Wilson Senior Fellow Senior Fellow James Collins Professor of Counselor to the President for Kazuhito Wantanabe Management Foreign Policy Studies Visiting Fellow University of California at Ben J. Wattenberg Los Angeles Marvin H. Kosters Resident Scholar; Director, Senior Fellow; Economic Policy Studies Coeditor, Public Opinion Irving Kristal Carolyn L. Weaver Resident Scholar; Editor, Senior Fellow Regulation Research Staff Robert Licht *John C. Weicher Claude E. Barfield Visiting Scholar; F.K. Weyerhaeuser Scholar Resident Fellow; Director, Associate Director, Science and Technology Constitution Project Makoto Yokoyama Visiting Fellow Walter Berns S. Robert Lichter Adjunct Scholar DeWitt Wallace Fellow *On leave for government service.

Contents

FOREWORD Pablo Antonio Cuadra

INTRODUCTION 1

BEFORE THE REVOLUTION: THE NATURE OF THE 1 SANDINISTA MOVEMENT 7 Who Are the Sandinistas? 7 Marxism 10 Communism 13

SOURCES OF CONFUSION 24 2 Deception 24 Misunderstanding 30 Disinformation 36

THE VIEWS OF THE U.S. GOVERNMENT 42 3 Media and Government Differences 42 Differences within the Administration 46

AFTER SOMOZA'S FALL: THE NEW NICARAGUA 50 4 Media Portrayals of the Regime 50 Domestic Issues 65 Foreign Alignments 86

CHANGES IN THE GOVERNMENT'S PERCEPTION OF THE 5 SANDINISTAS 100 6 CONCLUSION 106

Foreword Pablo Antonio Cuadra

One of the peculiarities of Central American history resides in the fact that it has fallen to the press to defend the rights of man against those who have held power and sought to expand it at the expense of individual rights. Newspapers have been our only compensation for weak legislative and judicial branches, always confronted by ex­ ecutives perpetually tempted to excess. Nicaragua is a case in point: there, the daily La Prensa has been called "the republic of paper." The Somozas constantly sought to break or stretch the bonds of constitu­ tional limitation and erode liberties searching for greater and greater povrer. In our newspaper the republican conscience was born and survived by stating plainly what either fear or venality inspired con­ gressmen or judges not to say. The people remembered as much, and this is the way they learned to identify their rights. For, in fact, there are two ways to be a democrat. One can either establish and practice democracy from the seat of power itself, or one can fight for it from the outside. Spanish America is more a democ­ racy of desire than of fulfillment, but that desire is informed by a greater vehemence and force of tradition precisely because it has cost so much blood and sacrifice. Democracy is and remains our collective ideal, so much so that tyrannies of the left and right pay it the ultimate compliment of hypocrisy. They speak of themselves as "authentic democracies," thus indirectly paying tribute to the system that made America, that liberated it from colonial rule, and that is the legacy of its heroes, and whose prestige is unsurpassed in the minds of our peoples. However much and however frequently the cause of liberty has been betrayed, it has ignited every revolution on this continent. For Central Americans the press and freedom of expression rep­ resent not merely the free play of opinions but that invisible wall of containment and defense against another tradition, equally vener­ able-that of the "strong man," whether Spanish or Indian, the prod­ uct of a history at once morally and racially violent. Our newspapers have thus played a different role from those of

xi FOREWORD

the United States. There, freedom has enjoyed a multiplicity of de­ fenses; the three branches of government are independent of one another; the private sector and individual rights enjoy an almost sacred status. Thus the North American press has enjoyed more freedom but for that very reason has been less concerned about the lack of it. In Central America the most elemental struggle for freedom of expression is permanent and dramatic, in a way that our North American colleagues have never experienced. That is why they all too frequently appear to be strangely, discouragingly insensitive to our struggle, a struggle that by rights should affect them as much as it does us. The North American does not struggle against power, with rare exceptions, but rather against a different political party. He fights not for democracy but rather within democracy; thus his consciousness of freedom is very different from our own. Or rather, his perspective is naive-virginal, without history as it were-when the unexpected news item suddenly erupts in his crystal ball. I have always had a special terror of that kind of "objectivity." The last Somoza, educated at West Point, knew how to speak English well and in truly deplorable fashion managed to convince the North American press for many years that, as hard as he had worked at it, the Nicaraguan people were not ready for democracy. Years later, Tomas Borge-who lacks neither intelligence nor a certain charm-also managed to convince the best newspaper people in the United States that as interior minister he was the greatest guarantee for keeping the extremists and radicals at bay. But Borge was one of the founders of the Sandinista Front and has openly declared his Marxism-Leninism on many occasions. No matter! All that is history. The newsman's art would seem to consist of viewing matters with a spurious objectivity, which somehow super­ sedes history itself. We should not be surprised, then, that in Somoza's day a fair number of American reporters categorized La Prensa as a passionate opponent of the government and therefore not objective. On March 7, 1988, Stephen Kinzer of the New York Times pater­ nalistically called La Prensa to order for its lack of objectivity in a very well-balanced article-two spoonfuls of poison, one of antidote­ whose headline was "La Prensa: Gadfly of the Sandinista State. The Editors Don't Let the Facts Get in the Way." Many years have passed since Alexis de Tocqueville recorded the peculiar myopia that characterizes American politics when it regards other countries. This would seem to be a genetic inheritance that the American press has made no effort to correct, particularly when it moves south of the Rio Grande. xii FOREWORD

As a poet I sympathize with Pablo Antonio Cuadra-my other persona, editor of La Prensa-who has been forced to endure for nine years of the Sandinista regime the almost daily visits of American journalists. They always ask the same questions-almost all of them fervent admirers of what the Sandinistas have told them, contrary to what they might read in the not-very-objective La Prensa-and after the questions and answers, the result is always the same: a total lack of comprehension. It could be, of course, that we are the ones who do not under­ stand. Possibly the American journalist is not really much interested in the Nicaraguan problem but in certain internal political problems in the United States. It isn't that they are against the so-called contras; they are against Reagan, or vice-versa; their objective is not the victory of peace and democracy in Central America but of the U.S. Congress against the White House. On other occasions the lack of understanding or the misconcep­ tions are the result of a guilt complex, sometimes quite well de­ veloped. We may think they are looking at the future; in truth, they are contemplating their own past and ours. They recognize how wrong their policies have been. After Vietnam indecision would ap­ pear to be the best decision of all. But we Central Americans do not have the luxury of fighting within democracy. We are fighting to establish it. That is quite another, less comfortable, less easy matter. Then you have the "liberal." The liberal American journalist has the largest conscience Diogenes' lantern will ever light upon. Unfor­ tunately, its very breadth contains a crucial contradiction. These are humanitarians who close their eyes to offenses against human rights. In my comfortless experience I can testify that among the American liberals I have known, the greatest nobility coexists with an incorrigi­ ble naivete. If I were so inclined, I might luxuriate in the repercussions President Daniel Ortega's strident fulminations against the Americans now enjoy in the American press. After all, we still have a few scores to settle with "the Yankees," and even a verbal reprisal is a delicious treat for the Nicaraguan nationalist sensibility. But it is impossible not to notice the things that are working precisely in the opposite direc­ tion-the submission to Castro, the intervention of the USSR and the entire Soviet bloc in the internal affairs of our country. The strangest spectacle of all is the wave of improbable foreigners-Vietnamese, Cambodians, North Koreans, Bulgarians, East Germans-flooding our landscape, while a contrary current of thousands of Nicaraguans, young people above all, flee into exile. We have emptied our own country of human resources to replace them with people at once

xiii FOREWORD

strange and totally alien to our history, our customs, our culture. The Russians and the PLO kiss us on the lips. We are addressed with endless bows by the servants of Kim II Sung; we are advised by Cuban neo-imperialists; flocks of blond students help us, badly, to pick coffee. In effect, we have lost our historical privacy. For eight years we have been the biggest story in the world press but also the biggest lie. Because we have completely destroyed our economy in spite of the advice and admonitions of high officials of the regime since resigned; we have sacrificed a unity that our political history has almost never known; we have provoked a civil war that consumes the same peas­ ants and same Indians for whom we fought; we have provoked the hostility of neighboring countries ... all to the benefit of a single beneficiary, not our people, but a foreign power, the one least re­ spectful of the values of nationalism that we proclaimed to be our banner. We have taken in vain the name of our 30,000 dead and pushed a revolution off the rails. Instead of a state for the people, we have the people for the state. Inste.ad of power for the people, once more we have dictatorial power imposed over the people. Once more, too, the pharaonic pyramid is repeated: the ruler above, obedience below. On high a "vanguard" enjoys privilege; below the salt lies the broad, submissive multitude. "Who can say that this is Communism?" a member of the U.S. Congress asked me one day, with evident sincerity. "It is not," I replied. "Just as the scaffold is not yet a house. But we are too close to the history of Cuba not to see that what has been built so far is an imitation of that model. An imItation that has encoun­ tered serious resistance and, for that very reason, cannot be a precise copy. In any case," I added, "you cannot criticize us if we wish to create our own version rather than plagiarize?" It may be quixotic to ask the press of democratic countries-and above all the press of a country that guides the destinies of the free world-to take the effort to distinguish between plagiarism (covered by a deceptive populist liturgy) and the genuine creative liberty of a people. Perhaps using as a measure democracy without adjectives it may succeed in making out the true face of America, hidden behind the ideological masks that currently disguise it. Up to now Don Quixote has not received a very gentle reception. The big lie seems to be more welcome than a bloody truth. Joshua Muravchik has taken the trouble to document, case by case, the inexplicable conduct of our "allied" press. At first his work profoundly depressed me, for it revealed the loneliness of those who would fight for man and his rights and liberties. xiv FOREWORD

A quick glance about reveals that those who should be with us are turning their backs on us. But then as we carefully observe the work of Muravchik, we realize a deeper, more fulfilling truth: others are at work in the vineyard. And freedom will always win the last battle.

(Translated by Mark Falcoff)

xv

Introduction

On July 19, 1979, a new government was proclaimed in Managua, and Nicaraguans danced in the streets. The bloody civil war was over. The repulsive dictator had fled. North of the Rio Grande, Americans shared vicariously in the celebrations. Their joy that Nicaraguans were now free was, however, tinged with guilt at the close relationship their own government had long maintained with the fallen dictator. It was also tempered with concerns about the exuberant young revolutionaries who had led the I fight against him. The government of Jimmy Carter was determined to make things work between the United States and the new Nicaragua. Earlier, it had reversed U.S. support for the dictator Somoza, not only cutting off American aid but even blocking third parties from sending sup­ plies to him. And it had withdrawn the U.S. ambassador as a means of pressing the old regime to capitulate. Now it hastened to dispatch him back to present his credentials to the new government, sending along a planeload of emergency supplies as a token of good will. For once, said the commentators, America would extend a hand of friend­ ship to a revolutionary regime instead of making it our enemy. For once we would avoid the mistake of allowing our fears to become a self-fulfilling prophecy. In the months that followed, America jumped to the head of the line of foreign aid donors to Nicaragua. The civil war had paralyzed the economy, leaving thousands destitute and homeless and many wounded. American food and medicines saved many lives. Before long more than $120 million had been donated. Before long, too, however, Americans' anxieties about the new Nicaragua grew into fears, and then fear gave way to consternation. America's gifts were accepted, but its hand of friendship was spurned. Nicaragua's new leaders turned sharply toward Cuba and the Soviet Union. The free elections they had promised were postponed indefinitely. The promise of amnesty for members of the vanquished National Guard was swept aside in a wave of imprison­ ments, irregular proceedings before "revolutionary tribunals," and

1 INTRODUCTION

even some secret executions. The new government cracked down on its other opponents, as well. Soon it became clear that the nine commandantes of the Sandinista National Liberation Front (FSLN) constituted the real government of the country and the five-member junta, representing a coalition of forces, was a mere facade. Its two non-Sandinista members resigned in frustration within nine months. By the end of 1980 the Carter administration was on the verge of severing aid to Nicaragua after failing by other means to persuade it to cease supplying guerrilla insurgents in neighboring countries. Nic­ aragua was on its way to becoming a Communist state. Then Reagan took office, and the break was complete. America's failure to win over the Sandinistas surprised some Americans, including even some in the Carter adminstration who had worked for Somoza's ouster, believing that some kind of nationalist democratic regime would follow. As William P. Bundy, editor of For­ eign Affairs at that time and no enemy of Carter's, wrote in late 1979: "If Gerald Ford had been elected in 1976... it seems a safe bet that Tacho Somoza would still be in charge of Managua."l Americans, however, whether in government or out, should not have been surprised that the Sandinista National Liberation Front was unmoved by their blandishments. The front was a hard-bitten Marx­ ist-Leninist group that had split away from the Nicaraguan Socialist party (PSN), the official Moscow-recognized Communist party. Its leader was Carlos Fonseca Amador, who, according to the standard Sandinista texts, had jointed the PSN in 1955. 2 Soon after joining the party, Fonseca traveled to the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe and upon his return published Un Nicaragiiense en Moscu, a paean to Soviet socialism. The only thing that Fonseca found in Russia that he seemed to have trouble swallowing was the official criticism of Stalin. Apparently nothing in Fonseca's ideological educa­ tion prepared him for the revelations of Khrushchev's speech to the Twentieth Party Congress, which Fonseca seemed at pains to explain to himself as well as to his readers: The sure thing is that Khrushchev in his famous speech criticized Stalin; though we must keep in mind that the Russians do not view criticism as attack, but instead a recog­ nition of merits. It was thus that Nikita in his speech recog­ nized the important role that Stalin played in Russia's progress. ... They remember Stalin as a great man. While he lived they viewed him as a semi-God. Now they no longer do so. Now they see him simply as a great man. 3 According to Nicaraguan Interior Minister Tomas Borge, Fonseca subsequently assumed leadership of a party cell comprising the two 2 INTRODUCTION of them and Silvio Mayorga. In 1961 these three led in founding the FSLN. Inspired by "the armed struggle of the Cuban people and their victorious revolution," the nascent FSLN split with the PSN in 1962 because of the PSN's commitment to gradualism. Until then, wrote Fonseca, "some of the components of the FSLN retained the illusion that it was possible to accomplish a change in the pacifistic line of the leadership of the Nicaraguan Socialist Party. In the year 1962 this illusion was dissolved in practice with the establishment of the Sandi­ nista Front as an independent grouping."4 During the next several years, the FSLN continued working closely with the PSN, apparently hoping to win the party over to a more revolutionary strategy. After the front's first guerrilla sally ended in disaster in 1963, it turned its energies to above-ground urban political work in a united front with the PSN called the Re­ publican Mobilization. Later, Fonseca was to look back upon this period as a brief "deviation" in the front's history, during which it "vacillated in putting forth a clearly Marxist-Leninist ideology."s The vacillation ended in the aftermath of Nicaragua's 1966 election. Borge recalled: The electoral process and its bloody outgrowth on January 22, 1967 defined our differences with the other political groups. While the Socialist Party and the Republican Mobi­ lization took part in the campaign with loudspeakers, sig­ natures and fiery exhortations to unite with the bourgeois opposition ... the FSLN moved its most valuable cadre into the mountains.6 In 1969 the FSLN issued its "historic program," which bore the earmarks of Leninism. "The Sandinista National Liberation Front," declared the program, "arose out of the Nicaraguan people's need to have a 'vanguard organization' capable of taking power through di­ rect struggle."7 For all the audacious rhetoric, the Sandinistas' second major attempt at guerrilla action, in 1967, had ended no less disastrously than its first in 1963. Following this setback the front entered a relatively quiescent period that lasted until 1974 when a daring raid on a Christmas party of Managua's elite brought it a public relations bonanza and impelled President Somoza to declare martial law. Dur­ ing the front's quiescence, Carlos Fonseca lived in Cuba, the primary home of exile of FSLN leaders. In 1977, the so-called "Tercerista" or "Insurrectionist" faction of the FSLN, led by Daniel and Humberto Ortega, achieved ascendancy within the organization. What distinguished this Sandinista faction from the others was its eagerness to forge a united front with non­ Communist opponents of Somoza. This flexibility signified a shift in 3 INTRODUCTION

tactics but not a deviation from the movement's Communist ideology. Indeed, the new approach resembled the united front approach of the orthodox Communists, the PSN, that the Sandinistas had once re­ jected. The triumph of the Ortega faction was consecrated with the adoption of a new Sandinista platform in 1977. Called the Political­ Military Platform of Struggle of the Sandinista Front for National Liberation for the Triumph of the Sandinista Popular Revolution, this document left no ambiguity about the ideological coloration of the front's new leadership. Larded with incantations of "the scientific doctrine of the proletariat," the platform declared that "our cause ... is the sacred cause of Marx, Engels, Lenin and Sandino." It explained that "the dialectical development of human society leads to the trans­ formation from capitalism to communism." It predicted that after the fall of Somoza "our present-day Marxist-Leninist vanguard will be able to fully develop its organic structure and become a strong Leninist party." It characterized the united front as a "tactical and temporary alliance" and affirmed that "the present struggle against the tyranny should lead us to a true people's democracy (not a bourgeois one)." It even went so far, in one bit of historical reminis­ cence, as to assert that during the 1930s, "the glorious Russian revolu­ tion was in a process of consolidation and combat against counterrevolutionary terror within its own country," as if the Sandi­ nista authors had been weaned on Stalin's. version of Soviet history and had not yet learned that since Khrushchev the party line no longer defended Stalin's purges.8 Nor did the tactical flexibility of the Ortega line, which allowed the FSLN to ally with non-Communist groups and even to allow some non-Communists to fight under its banner, signify any deviation from Leninist orthodoxy in the front's internal structure. The platform declared:

The task at hand is to make the Sandinista struggle massive, without massifying the FSLN.... The vanguard, the FSLN, must be the political and military High Command of the fighting people.... Because of our vanguard's high pres­ tige, all the people who are connected to it in some way consider themselves militants of the FSLN. This is exceed­ ingly important, and must not be discounted. However, we must be aware that those who are not incorporated into the vanguard structure, although they may feel part of it, do not take on the responsibilities, duties, rights, etc. of actual vanguard militants. In time, the people will begin to under­ stand the difference between the vanguard and the masses.

4 INTRODUCTION

It went on to exhort "selective recruitment," "revolutionary criticism and self-criticism," and "constant vigilance to uphold the Sandinista and Marxist-Leninist discipline."9 Two years later the Sandinistas were in power and were proceed­ ing apace to put into effect their long-held plans for transforming Nicaragua. At first, many Americans (and Nicaraguans) hoped that Sandinismo would turn out more benign and democratic in power than in its ideological pronouncements, but within the span of about a year, most such hopes were dashed. Why were Americans and the American government so surprised? One inevitable question is whether the news media presented a clear picture of the Sandinistas or a misleading one. This issue was brought into sharp relief in March 1982 when the Washington Jour­ nalism Review published a pointed retrospective critique of the past coverage of Nicaragua by the New York Times, the Washington Post, and CBS TV. IO This critique was all the more remarkable because it was written by Shirley Christian (now with the New York Times), who had covered Nicaragua for the Miami Herald, and who therefore was violating professional journalism's taboo against publicly criticizing the work of colleagues. In order to take a closer look at this question, I have undertaken to study the press coverage of the Sandinistas dur­ ing the year before they took power and their first year in power. I have taken as my subject the four major newspapers-New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, and Los Angeles Times-and the three major television networks, as well as one British news journal, the Economist. I have examined every news story or broadcast about the Sandinistas listed in the respective news indexes. (In the case of the television networks, I have relied upon the abstracts and index published by the Vanderbilt University Television News Archive.) My method of analysis is informal rather than quantitative. I have examined hundreds of news stories with a single question in mind: What image of the Sandinistas is presented? I have brought to this analysis all the fairness and objectivity that I can. A more formal or quantitative method is often regarded as lending objectivity to a study, but in this case I think it would have had the opposite effect. I have written numerous articles about Nicaragua, and my opinions about the Sandinistas and U.S. policy are as clear as I can make them. I am, in that sense, not a "neutral" observer of Nicaragua (although my opinions on the substantive issues do not predispose me to any conclusions about the history of press coverage of Nicaragua). Any quantitative analysis would entail assigning news stories to categories that could be counted, categories like "pro-Sandinista" and "anti­ Sandinista," or more complex or sophisticated ones. But whatever the

5 INTRODUCTION categories, the reader without access to my files would have no independent means of evaluating whether I had assigned stories fairly. In contrast, with the common-sense, discursive approach that I have employed, any skeptical reader can easily check to see whether I have quoted accurately and fairly or whether any of my generaliza­ tions are too broad. To the extent that I have conclusions to present, the standard of proof to which I aspire is nearer that of the courtroom than that of the laboratory. I hope at best to make an argument compelling enough to convince a jury of my peers (including those who may not agree with me about Nicaraguan or U.S. politics), not one that will claim the degree of scientific certainty that can be achieved in controlled experi­ ments. And in many cases, in work such as this, even the courtroom analogy far overstates the degree of proof possible: many interesting inferences cannot be proven beyond a reasonable doubt but can merely be shown to be more likely true than false. The underlying discipline, therefore, must be not to allow one's assertions to outrun or exaggerate one's degree of proof. This is the standard that I have endeavored to keep. I am indebted to Andrew Weber, Timothy Goodman, Jacob Heilbrunn, and Joanna Lowry for their very able research assistance; to Christopher DeMuth, Suzanne Garment, Lawrence Harrison, and Robert Lichter for their valuable comments on the manuscript. Notes 1. William P. Bundy, "Who Lost Patagonia? Foreign Policy in the 1980 Campaign," Foreign Affairs, vol. 58, no. 1 (Fall 1979), pp. 8-9. 2. Carlos Fonseca Amador, Un Nicaraguense en Moscu (Managua: Secre­ taria Nacional de Propaganda y Educacion Politica, 1980) p. 5. 3. Ibid., p. 40. 4. Idem., "Nicaragua: Zero Hour" in Tomas Borge, et al., Sandinistas Speak, edited by Bruce Marcus (New York: Pathfinder Press, 1982), p. 34. 5. Ibid., p. 35. 6. Tomas Borge, Carlos, the Dawn Is No Longer beyond Our Reach (Van­ couver: New Star Books, 1984), p. 51. 7. Reprinted in Borge et al., Sandinistas Speak, p. 13. 8. FSLN National Directorate, Nicaragua: On the General Political-Military Platform of Struggle of the Sandinista Front for National Liberation for the Triumph of the Sandinista Popular Revolution (Oakland: Resistance Publications, [n.d.]). 9. Ibid. 10. "Covering the Sandinistas: The Foregone Conclusion of the Fourth Estate," Washington Journalism Review, March 1982.

6 1 Before the Revolution: The Nature of the Sandinista Movement

In the year before it seized power in Nicaragua, the Sandinista Na­ tional Liberation Front (FSLN) was generally described in the major U.S. media as a leftist guerrilla movement aiming to overthrow Presi­ dent Anastasio Somoza Debayle. The precise content of the FSLN's leftism-whether it had an ideology and, if so, what this ideology might be-was ordinarily either vaguely described or described as vague.

Who Are the Sandinistas?

The Newspapers' Views. The Washington Post's Karen DeYoung spoke of the FSLN as being "hazy in ideology,"l while the New York Times referred in an editorial to "the politically ill-defined Sandinist guerrilla movement,"2 and the Wall Street Journal spoke of the FSLN as "left leaning."3 Sporadically, other references sharpened the image slightly. The Washington Post carried a story by wire service reporter Tom Fenton that described the guerrillas as a group "who favor establishment of a socialist system."4 One Wall Street Journal story described them as "radical."5 The one major American daily that gave a much clearer picture of the FSLN was the Los Angeles Times. That picture emerged both in news stories and in editorials. In one editorial, for example, the paper predicted: Even among moderate Nicaraguans, the feeling has grown that, when Somoza is forced out, it will be at the point of Sandinista guns. For Nicaragua the tragedy is that, when that happens, the leftist guerrilJas are unlikely to put down those guns and accept the democratic process. 6

7 NEWS COVERAGE OF THE SANDINISTA REVOLUTION

A month later, another Los Angeles Times editorial warned that "if things go on as they are, the likely result will be a Castro-lining, Marxist-dominated government on the one hand or a new, re­ pulsively repressive military regime on the other," adding that "nei­ ther the right-wing officers of the national guard nor the hard-core Marxists in the Sandinista movement have any attachment to repre­ sentative government."? A few months later, another editorial said: If Nicaragua's future is left to be settled in a bloody civil war, the most likely result is a new dictatorship-run this time by totalitarians of the left. This is not what most Nicaraguans want-which is precisely why the Sandinistas are no more interested than is Somoza in an GAS-conducted plebiscite. 8 In news stories, Los Angeles Times correspondent David F. Belnap described the FSLN in terms such as these: "an extremist guerrilla outfit seeking the violent overthrow of General Anastasio Somoza."9 His colleague Francis B. Kent wrote: The Sandinista National Liberation Front ... was dominated in its early years by students and young intellectuals dedi­ cated to the principles of Marx and Lenin. Many of them were trained in Cuba and North Korea. In the past two years, however, the Sandinistas have broadened their base of support to include diverse sectors of the population-conservative political figures, labor leaders, churchmen, wealthy businessmen-that support some San­ dinista actions. IO Read quickly, this passage seemed to suggest that the Sandinistas were no longer dedicated to Marx and Lenin. That was not at all the case. Read more carefully, however, what it said was quite true-that the FSLN was amassing a broader base of support. But if some Los Angeles Times stories required close reading, that paper also rewarded close readers with a variety of valuable insights into the FSLN. David Belnap offered this rare description of Sandi­ nista fighting tactics in Nicaragua's poor barrios: 'Armed rebels of the Sandinista National Liberation Front have been forcing the residents of Las Americas at gunpoint to dig up paving blocks and cart them to the airport highway for barricades and to help build barricades along the streets of the housing area itself, one resident said."ll An inter­ view with the family of a prominent Sandinista leader, a young woman who had left medical school to join the revolution, contained revealing snippets from her correspondence. Her goal, she said, was to help in "the birth of the new world which, as ... almost every

8 NATURE OF THE SANDINISTAS birth, will be painful and at the same time joyful."12 A sophisticated reader could hear an ominously familiar refrain in this talk of midwif­ ing a "new world." This Sandinista leader, for one, obviously had in mind goals more ambitious than the mere overthrow of Somoza. While the Los Angeles Times offered the clearest picture of what the Sandinistas were, the New York Times offered the most muddled and misleading. Perhaps the weakness of the New York Times report­ ing on this subject flowed from its editorial conviction that it hardly mattered what the Sandinistas stood for as long as they got rid of Somoza. "The tyrant we know in Nicaragua ... seems worse than any possible successor," said a Times editorial, and thus "if North Americans show themselves unafraid of [Somoza's] Red scare stories, we may yet help to bring better times to Nicaragua. They can hardly become worse."13 This was high hyperbole. Anyone who had read the Times in recent years should have had no difficulty recalling many regimes far worse than Somoza's, starting with the Cambodian Khmer Rouge. To readers who were unable, therefore, to share the complacency of Times editorialists, the paper's news columns offered reassuring im­ ages. Alan Riding, the leading Times correspondent then in the re­ gion, described the FSLN as "a broad-based organization that was founded in 1962 and now includes Roman Catholic youths, young businessmen, peasants, priests and leftist students."14 The term "left­ ist students" implied that those listed in the other occupational catego­ ries were not "leftists," an impression reinforced by a statement Riding quoted from FSLN leader (and future Sandinista president) Daniel Ortega: "'The U.S. just has to learn to accept that there can be nationalist and democratic revolutions in Latin America today. Wash­ ington accepts social democracy in Western Europe, but not in Latin America.' "15 The quotation oddly suggested that the FSLN was Social Democratic, even though the Sandinistas' official program clearly repudiated any such stance. Later, Riding reported that "avoiding frightening talk of Marx, the guerrillas describe their ideology as Sandinismo, which to most Nicaraguans means patriotismo and anti-Somocismo."16 Whatever Sand­ inismo may have meant to most Nicaraguans, the real question was what it meant to the Sandinistas. On this question, the Times was less than helpful. The headline to Riding's story aptly summarized the impression it conveyed. It read: "Sandinists, Patriots First-Marxists Maybe Second." In reality, there was no "maybe" about the Sandinistas' Marx­ ism-and ample reason to doubt whether that commitment did in­ deed take second place to their patriotism. More than one Sandinista

9 NEWS COVERAGE OF THE SANDINISTA REVOLUTION

has written that his nationalism grew out of his revolutionary beliefs, and not vice versa. As Omar Cabezas, the FSLN's celebrated leader and memoirist, put it: "I know and came to Sandino through Che."17

The Networks' Views. The major television networks reported little about what the Sandinistas stood for during the year leading up to their seizure of power. They provided very slim coverage of Nic­ aragua, except for what is called in the trade, "bang, bang," or footage of violence. A spate of TV news reports appeared in August 1978, when a few dozen Sandinistas led by Eden Pastora seized Nicaragua's National Palace and held hundreds of hostages. Following that, there were only intermittent TV reports until mid-1979 as Nicaragua's civil war grew to its climax. During the palace seizure, all three networks carried repeated references to the Sandinistas as "terrorists," a term that was not applied to them in the newspapers and that the networks did not use again after the incident was over. The use of this term did not seem to imply any specific analysis of the FSLN but was simply descriptive of the armed band of Sandinistas who seized the hostages. During this episode and after, the networks also referred to the Sandinistas fairly often as "Marxist." This term, usually used as an adjective to convey a capsule identification of the FSLN, was not accompanied by the kind of analytic report on Sandinista ideology that sometimes appeared in the print media. Just as often, TV news references to the Sandinistas avoided giving any political identification of them. Walter Cronkite's description of them as "guerrillas who are opposed to the rule of General Anastasio Somoza" was typical. 18 (This and all subsequent references to network reports refer to the evening news.)

Marxism

Although the networks were not always consistent, they seemed to have no hesitancy about applying the label "Marxist" to the FSLN. This was not the case for much of the print media. For the New York Times and the Washington Post, the question of whether the Sandi­ nistas were Marxists became a complicated one. The Los Angeles Times, however, was even more consistent than the TV networks in charac­ terizing the Sandinistas as Marxists. It reported that "the Sandinistas have been battling Somoza's rule for years, vowing to replace it with a Marxist government."19 Another time it referred to "the Sandinista guerrillas-who ... advocate a Marxist society"20 (Leonard Green­ wood). On another occasion, it referred to "the Marxist philosophy of the front"21 (Leonard Greenwood). On still another it used this

10 NATURE OF THE SANDINISTAS

slightly more ambiguous formula: "the guerrillas, many of whom openly proclaim themselves Marxists"22 (Frank del almo). It often used such passing references to the FSLN as "a Marxist guerrilla organization"23 (Frank del almo and Leonard Greenwood); "Marxist-led" (editorials, David F. Belnap and Oswald Johnson); "Marxist-dominated" (David F. Belnap); or "Marxist-oriented" (Belnap). In short, all of the correspondents who reported from Nic­ aragua for the Los Angeles Times, as well as its editorial writers, de­ scribed the FSLN as Marxist. In contrast, the Washington Post described the Sandinistas as Marxist early in the period under study but then changed its evalua­ tion. an July 23, 1978, the Post's Karen DeYoung referred to "Marxist guerrillas."24 A month later, the Post ran an AP wire service story that called the FSLN "a Marxist band."2s Two days after that, a story attributed to "news services," said that "the guerrillas are trying to overthrow Somoza and install a Marxist government in Nicaragua."26 A week after that, another DeYoung story referred to "Marxist guer­ rillas" and even used that term in the headline: "With Moderates Split, Marxists Lead Fight against Somoza."27 After August 1978, however, the Post ceased referring to the FSLN as Marxist. From then on, it was invariably characterized as only partly Marxist or as a group that was termed "Marxist" by its adversaries. After having called the Sandinistas "Marxist" in June and August of 1978, Karen DeYoung shifted in September. She then wrote of "the Sandinistas, who at various times in their 16-year history have espoused Marxist ideology."28 In December, Post correspondent Mar­ lise Simons wrote that the "Tercerista" faction of the FSLN "controls the Sandinista army" and is "largely non-Marxist."29 In the same month, DeYoung wrote about Congressman Charles Wilson's attack on Panamanian President Omar Torrijos for support­ ing the FSLN. She wrote of "Torrijos' involvement with what Wilson called Sandinista 'Marxist revolutionaries.' "30 In July of 1979, when the FSLN uprising was on the verge of success, she \vrote that "Somoza repeated his longstanding assertion that the Sandinistas ... are interested in the long-term establishment of a Marxist govern­ ment."31 These references to the fact that certain of the Sandinistas' opponents characterized them as Marxists had a curious effect. The references were accurate as far as they went: Somoza, Congressman Wilson, and others had indeed called the Sandinistas, Marxists. But by reporting only this, while no longer itself characterizing the FSLN in similar terms, the Post conveyed the impression that such charac­ terizations were dubious or exaggerated. This was underscored by a Post editorial that used such an attributed characterization for sarcastic

11 NEWS COVERAGE OF THE SANDINISTA REVOLUTION

effect. Somoza, said the Post, "counts on American distaste for the assumption of power by the 'Marxist' Sandinistas to enlist American diplomacy behind his flagging cause."32 Post stories that originated not in Central America but in Wash­ ington and that were based on conversations with sources in the Carter administration gave more credence to the presence of Marxism among the Sandinistas, but only as one element among others. Thus, John Goshko wrote of "the Sandinistas, whose leadership contains avowedly Marxist ... elements."33 And Don Oberdorfer wrote on the day before they took power that "some of the core groups of the Sandinista movement are avowedly Marxist."34 The New York Times gave its readers varying impressions of the degree of Marxism to be found among the Sandinistas. On one occasion, Times correspondent Alan Riding wrote that the FSLN "has Marxist elements."35 On another he wrote that "most top Sandinist leaders are Marxists." (The New York Times always insisted on translat­ ing Sandinista into English and rendering it "Sandinist.")36 On still another, the Times ran an AP wire story by Tom Fenton that said that the FSLN had been "transformed ... from a small and shadowy Marxist revolutionary group into a movement its supporters say en­ compasses a wide cross-section of Nicaraguans." Then Fenton added: "Many young fighters wearing the red and black of the Sandinistas spoke in terms reminiscent of Communist propaganda. But one in­ formed source insisted, 'There is a Marxist element in the FSLN, but it is obviously not in a position to control the movement.' "37 This idea was reiterated ten days later in another AP story carried by the Times, this one by Isaac A. Levi: The group was formed by a Cuban trained Marxist, Carlos Fonseca Amador, who was killed by Somoza troops in a mountain battle about two years ago. "There are still Marxists involved, but there is no doubt they can no longer control the movement," said a foreign diplomat who agreed to give his views on the condition he not be identified.38 The characteristic theme of the New York Times reporting, es­ pecially by its main correspondent in the area, Alan Riding, was that while the Sandinistas might be in large proportion Marxist, this need not matter. Thus Riding reported that "although many members of the Sandinist guerrillas are Marxists, they have frequently said that socialism could not come immediately to Nicaragua and that a return to democracy is their aim."39 On another occasion Riding wrote: "The Sandinist group, created in 1962 along Marxist lines, has grown

12 NATURE OF THE SANDINISTAS rapidly in strength and popularity over the last year since abandoning the goal of immediately bringing socialism to Nicaragua."4o And on another: "While most top Sandinist leaders are Marxists, they are also realists. They recognize that the guerrilla movement is held together by hate for the dictatorship rather than by love of Marx."41 This last quotation is from an article in the Sunday "News of the Week in Review" section ten days before Somoza's ouster. There, Riding explained why the Marxism of the Sandinistas might be unim­ portant. He suggested that it might amount to little more than a sentiment that could remain buried deep within their breasts with little impact on their political behavior. The key to keeping this Marx­ ism latent would be U.S. friendship and aid to the Sandinista govern­ ment. Riding argued that "if Washington fears a 'second Cuba,' many Latin Americans believe that Washington helped create the 'first' Cuba by alienating the young Castro regime."42 He added that "Presi­ dent Fidel Castro appears to view Nicaragua as a case study in liberation from dictatorship rather than transition to socialism,"43 as if liberation from dictatorship was per se an objective of Castro's. The Economist and the Wall Street Journal rarely touched on the issue of whether the Sandinistas were Marxists. On the rare occasion when they did, the Economist sounded most like the Los Angeles Times, speaking of the "Marxist-dominated Sandinists,"44 while the Journal sounded like the Washington Post or the New York Times, speaking of "the guerrillas (some of whom are Marxists)" and adding that "most State Department analysts believe that pressures from Nicaragua's neighboring military regimes. .. would make it extremely difficult to establish a purely Marxist government in Nicaragua."45

Communism

Whatever the quality of the reporting, the question of whether the Sandinistas were "Marxists" was complicated by the fact that the term was itself a euphemism. There are, after all, many different kinds of Marxists. The real question was whether they were Communists. But even this term is problematic. To say that someone or some group is "Communist" can mean either that it is affiliated with the Communist World or that it subscribes to certain beliefs. Since the disbanding of the Comintern and the rise of polycentrism, there is no formal method for determining whether a goup belongs to the international Communist movement. To apply the label Communist on the basis of beliefs is also complicated, however. In the era of polycentrism, what exactly are the hallmark beliefs of Communism? There is an answer to

13 NEWS COVERAGE OF THE SANDINISTA REVOLUTION this question, and the answer in short is Leninism. In the reporting on the Sandinistas over two years in eight news outlets, however, the name Lenin or the term Leninism appeared very rarely indeed. The term Communist was also not used very often not only because it is somewhat problematic but also because the effects of the trauma of the McCarthy years on the news media have lingered. The news media are so sensitive to the danger of falsely labeling someone a Communist that they rarely use the term at all. In the case of Nicaragua, the news media addressed the question of Communism sporadically, usually by way of reporting denials by FSLN guerrillas that they were Communists. The New York Times's Alan Riding reported that "there is constant debate on whether the Sandinist guerrillas are Communists."46 The Times's coverage of this debate, however, consisted mostly of reports of Sandinista denials. "Reporters who visited Esteli, one of three major cities in rebel hands in northwest Nicaragua, were besieged by self-proclaimed Sandinistas who said they were not Communists," reported the Times in September 1978.47 Another AP report from the same city said: "'Tell the world we're not Communists. We just want to be rid of Somoza,' a 45 year old woman told a reporter in Esteli before it fell."48 In other cities the story was the same. From Masaya Riding reported: " 'We're not Communists!' an elderly man called out. 'We're Sandinists!' ...A bare-chested man pushed through the gathering crowd. 'Look, those boys are the people,' he said, waving at a dozen youths carrying pistols and rifles. 'If they were Communists, we wouldn't support them, but they are the vanguard of the people. You can't call the people Communists.' "49 From Leon, Riding reported: ''A doctor in the group praised the young rebels. 'They're not Com­ munists,' he said. 'That's a fairy tale that Somoza invented and only the National Guard believes.' "50 In another story Riding quoted ap­ provingly an unnamed "foreign analyst" who explained that Vene­ zuela's and Costa Rica's support for the Sandinistas was designed" 'to show that the alternative to military dictatorships-not only in Nic­ aragua but throughout Latin America-need not be Communism.' "51 The New York Times was the only paper whose reportage on the danger of Communism in Nicaragua consisted almost entirely of this kind of quotation, but other papers carried such quotations, too. Reporting from Monimbo in Masaya, the scene of a much-publicized rebellion in 1978, the Washington Post's Karen DeYoung described a typical resident: ''Asked about Somoza's charge that Nicaraguan peas­ ants are being brain-washed by a Communist-dominated opposition, Garcia folded his arms and leaned back in his weathered rocking

14 NATURE OF THE SANDINISTAS chair. 'I don't know what communism means,' he said. 'They say it's a community where everybody is equal.' "52 The Los Angeles Times's Frank del Olmo reported from Esteli: "Time and again I was taken aside by a young man or young woman who would tell me, as one did: 'We're not Communists. You must report that. This is not a Communist rebellion, but a rebellion of the people of Nicaragua. We are poor people, starving to death. We are fighting because it is the only hope we have of making our lives better!' "53 The repetitiveness of these denials and protestations is striking. Over and over, rebel fighters told reporters, unsolicited, that they were not Communists. This may be accounted for in part by the fact that Somoza and the Nicaraguan media he controlled repeatedly characterized the opposition as Communist. In part, though, it also probably reflected a coordinated strategy by the Sandinistas to put out this line to the press. As the Economist alone reported: "The radicals still hope for support from moderate groups in order to project a non-Communist image should the guerrillas succeed in toppling General Somoza."54 The several other explicit references to Communism in the Los Angeles Times included an editorial urging Somoza's resignation and warning that the alternative "is likely to be continued guerrilla warfare and an eventual takeover by hard core C·ommunist elements in the Sandinista rebel movement";55 and an article from the city of Matagalpa quoting a native-born nun who had returned to the city to do relief work. "'I came too late,' she said bitterly. 'The Communists had been working here for two years. They worked hard to convert the young.' She shook her head. 'I hope some day the young people will understand the solution for Nicaragua is not communism.' "56 The nun's account strengthens the impression that the repeated claims of "we're not Communists" that young rebels made to report­ ers were part of a planned disinformation campaign. The Washington Post carried several other items that discussed the question of Communism in Nicaragua or the possibility that Nic­ aragua could become "another Cuba," a euphemism for Communism that did not soften the issue much. At least twice in editorials the Post said that this possibility was real. In August of 1978 it said: ''A 'second Cuba' in Central America? It is not out of the question";57 and in June 1979: "The United States does not have to apologize for being ap­ prehensive about the possible appearance ... of a Cuban-type or Cuban oriented regime."58 The bulk of the Post's coverage of Nicaragua during the year leading up the 'Sandinistas' victory was written by correspondent Karen DeYoung. Her periodic feature stories about the Sandinistas

15 NEWS COVERAGE OF THE SANDINISTA REVOLUTION took up the question of Sandinista ideology. These stories always contained both the accusations against the Sandinistas by their oppo­ nents and the Sandinista denials, but they were also invariably shaded, albeit subtly, in favor of the denials. An early such piece reported that "Somoza has called the Sandi­ nistas Havana-controlled and Moscow-backed communists" and then went on to quote Sandinista rebuttals.59 DeYoung did not tell her readers whom to believe in this dispute, but elsewhere in the piece she gave them a clue. The Sandinistas, she said, "carry an assortment of U.S.-made World War II vintage rifles and the new, dull-grey Israeli and European automatic weapons bought on the black market or 'liberated' from the National Guard." If they really were "Havana­ controlled and Moscow-backed," wouldn't they be getting weapons from Communist sources, a reader might wonder. (An especially careful reader, however, might wonder how DeYoung could know how the weapons were acquired. Did she take the Sandinistas' word for it?) DeYoung also reported that "U.S. congressional conservatives have labeled them 'Marxist revolutionaries' who seek to turn Nic­ aragua into 'another Cuba.' She went on to give a sympathetic portrait of FSLN leader Nora Astorga, including this quotation: "'We are first Sandinistas,' she said. 'That means, among other things, that we are fighting for a new Nicaragua. It doesn't mean a new Cuba.' "60 In context, Astorga's reponse had much more ring of conviction and authenticity than the vaguely attributed congressional accusation. (Little in DeYoung's portrait of Astorga would have prepared the reader for her emergence a year later as the chief prosecutor of the "new Nicaragua," hauling some 7,500 suspected former National Guardsmen and civilian Somoza sympathizers before "people's tri­ bunals" for sentences of up to thirty years.) The second part of DeYoung's 1978 feature portrait of the FSLN ran the next day, also on page I, with the headline "Sandinistas Disclaim Marxism" and the subhead "Nicaraguan Rebels Reject Cuban Model."61 The headline referred to Sandinista claims. But the subhead shaded over into an endorsement by the Post of those claims. The Sandinistas, as we all now know, do not reject the Cuban model at all; they were merely pretending to reject it. They were lying, but the Post's subhead put its imprimatur on their lie. DeYoung's story began as follows: According to President Anastasio Somoza, the Sandinista National Liberation Front is a gang of foreign-supported Marxist terrorists who want to turn Nicaragua into a base for international communism to conquer Central America.

16 NATURE OF THE SANDINISTAS

Even the Carter administration-whose sympathies now lie more with Somoza's opponents than with his 44-year-old dynasty whose U.S. roots have become an embarrassment­ fears that the Sandinistas seek to build another Cuba in Nicaragua. Sandinista political leaders interviewed here recently de­ nied that they are Marxists. They denied that they want Cuban-style communism in Nicaragua. Instead, they said, they are fighting for a "new Nicaragua" that will be a "plu­ ralist democracy" built on the ashes of the destroyed Somoza dictatorship. While U.S. congressional conservatives remind each other and Carter that Fidel Castro, in the years before his takeover in Cuba, also denied he was a communist, the Sandinistas say the proof of their sincerity is in their past deeds, their current actions, and in the future they plan for Nicaragua.

Superficially, these paragraphs present both sides of the picture, and yet they present it with a slant. In the first paragraph, Somoza's accusations appear in their most exaggerated form, almost in car­ icature. The tone of mockery returns in the fourth paragraph when DeYoung speaks of congressional conservatives who obsessively "re­ mind each other" about Castro. The most damning thing about the Sandinistas in the whole article is the assertion in the second para­ graph that "even the Carter administration" has "fears" about the Sandinistas, but the fact that these fears are not large enough to overcome the administration's preference for the Nicaraguan opposi­ tion suggests that they are balanced by hopes that the Sandinistas will not turn out so bad after all. In sum, the accusations against the Sandinistas are all made to look either tentative or silly while the Sandinistas' response comes across as earnest, plausible, and co­ herent. The article continued for another twenty-nine paragraphs mostly given over to an explication by Sandinista spokesmen of their response to the accusations. The heart of it was this:

One of the main problems the Sandinista leadership has in convincing even those already against Somoza of their ulti­ mate goals is the origin of the organization. Its inspiration was the Cuban revolution, which coincided with the Sandi­ nistas' own beginnings-as with the beginnings of similar movements throughout Latin America nearly two decades ago. "Many of our leaders were influenced by the Cuban revo­ lution," said one Sandinista, "because it made them believe such a thing was possible in Nicaragua." At various times,

17 NEWS COVERAGE OF THE SANDINISTA REVOLUTION

Cuba has given asylum, and small amounts of training, to a number of Sandinistas. In the past, said Daniel Ortega Saavedra, 36, a founder of the Sandinistas and a member of the organization's current national directorate, "there were those who wanted a more radical change to follow the fall of Somoza." "Now," Ortega said, "we see that this is not possible for a number of geopolitical reasons, and our position now is for the imposition of a democratic government . . . a govern­ ment that joins together all those who fought against Somoza." ... "It's a shame that the United States doesn't understand this revolution," Ortega said, "because that was so much a part of their own history. They can say whatever they want about us, but the truth is found in deeds. "We are, and have always been, for one very calculated goal-the fall of the Somoza dictatorship. We want the in­ stallation of a popular, democratic government that responds to the people's needs, that gives the people work, that gives land to the peasants, and health services." Nowhere in this article or in any other (except for opinion col­ umns) run by the Post in the two years examined in this study were the detractors of the FSLN given a comparable opportunity to explain the case against them. Another feature portrait of the Sandinistas by DeYoung eight months later when they were on the brink of power showed the same imbalance. There she wrote: While Sandino in his time-like the Sandinistas today­ claimed to carry the banner of nationalism and self-deter­ mination, the Communist label is pinned on both. One difference, of course, is that Sandino's fight was long before Fidel Castro's triumphant descent from the Cuban mountains made nationalist and Marxist revolutions syn­ onymous to much of the fearful Western Hemisphere.62 While it was true that both Sandino and the Sandinistas were called Communists, one could say the same thing about, say, Eisenhower and Stalin. The relevant difference was that Sandino had rejected Communism and the Sandinistas did not. Thus the reality was almost diametrically opposite DeYoung's analogy. Sandino was a nationalist falsely labeled a Communist; the Sandinistas were Com­ munists masquerading as nationalists. Other discussions of Communism appeared in the Post's opinion columns. One, a Sunday contribution by outsider Smith Hempstone, detailed the FSLN's ties with other Communist and terrorist groups

18 NATURE OF THE SANDINISTAS and called the Sandinistas Communists.63 Another Sunday contribu­ tion, this one by free-lancer Tad Szulc, provided perhaps the best portrait of the FSLN that appeared in the Post. It described the FSLN as a "highly organized and ideologically motivated revolutionary movement," whose members "left no doubt about their admiration for the Cuban revolution." Szulc added: "While the movement's lead­ ers indicated that they would be prepared to cooperate with 'demo­ cratic' groups in Nicaragua in a post-Somoza transition period they envision, their ultimate ambition is to assume power alone" and "if they come to power, they said, they would establish a revolutionary state."64 (This article also ran, credited to the Post, on the same day in the Los Angeles Times.) In November of 1978, however, the Post ran a series of four columns by one of its regulars, Jack Anderson, that gave a very different picture. In the opening column, titled "Portrait of Nic­ aragua's Sandinistas," Anderson wrote:

Nicaraguan Dictator Anastasio Somozoa tells anyone who will listen that the Sandinista rebels are left-wing, Cuban­ trained terrorists who would lead his country down the primrose path to communism. ... We sent reporter Bob Sherman to Central America for a first-hand look at the Sandinista National Liberation Front. He spent several days in a remote, secret guerrilla training camp, where he ate and slept with the rebels and watched them train....

He came away with these conclusions: • The Sandinistas are, as they claim, a politico-military or­ ganization that cuts across all classes and ideologies. ... • The guerrilla group has agreed to support the establish­ ment of a democratic provisional government once Somoza is kicked out. • The Sandinistas do not seek an official position for them­ selves in a provisional government. ... • Left-wing influence on the Sandinistas is minimal. Of the three main political groups that make up the rebel camp, the only avowedly leftist group-the Proletariat [sic]-appears to have little or no influence among either the guerrillas or the population at large. • The dominant political group in the Sandinista movement calls itself the "Third Party." It is pledged to establish a free, democratic government and has so informed President Car­ ter. • The Sandinista training camps are located in remote areas

19 NEWS COVERAGE OF THE SANDINISTA REVOLUTION

near the Honduran and Costa Rican borders, not in Cuba, as Somoza suggests. • There is no evidence that any communist country is sup­ plying arms to the guerrillas. 65

These themes were sounded again by Anderson in the three columns that followed in the Post. In "the anti-Somoza revolution in Nicaragua," he wrote, "conservative business elements have taken a leading role and ... even among the Sandinista guerrillas, commu­ nist sympathy is rare."66 "The Sandinistas are enthusiastically hetero­ geneous politically," he said in another. 67 And there was more in this vein. Two weeks before the FSLN took power, the Post's own Stephen Rosenfeld chimed in with a column that explained that "the wrong reason" for U.S. concern about Latin America "lies in an overblown perception of a Communist threat."68 Despite the overall paucity of their coverage of Nicaragua, all three television networks made several references to the question of Communism. Given that the sheer volume of coverage, measured by the number of words, in any of the major print outlets was perhaps a hundred times greater than the coverage by any TV network, the references to Communism on the air were much more frequent, albeit not necessarily more lucid. (Perhaps the television news organiza­ tions were less hesitant about using the word "Communism" because they have fewer pretensions to "sophistication" than the news­ papers.) John Scali of ABC News reported that "the Marxist-led rebels ... seem intent on turning Nicaragua into another Cuba" and that the Carter administration feared that by his intransigence, Somoza "is virtually inviting a Communist-led takeover."69 On another evening, ABC's Bob Sirkin reported that Nicaraguans live under "a right-wing dictator" and "under the threat of a Communist takeover."7o On the eve of the Sandinista victory, ABC reported on Somoza's warnings "that the armed opposition to his government is Communist led" but introduced it with a comment by Peter Jennings that "their offensive has a single aim: the removal of President Somoza."71 CBS reported almost a year before Somoza's final fall that Nic­ araguan "business leaders want a change now because they believe that if given enough time, the increasingly popular left-wing guer­ rillas could overthrow Somoza and bring about a Communist govern­ ment."72 A week later, CBS's Richard C. Hottelet reported that after taking power in Cuba, "Castro fanned the flames of rebellion wher­ ever there was tinder. Nicaragua's rebels took the name of Sandino.

20 NATURE OF THE SANDINISTAS

Some were Communists. Some were not."73 As the civil war reached its climax, CBS twice reported Somoza's charges that the Sandinistas were Communist,74 on the second occasion pairing this comment with an interview with an American resident of Nicaragua who said: "I don't feel that the pendulum will now turn from fascism to commu­ nism. I feel it will now stop a little to the left of center." NBC carried reports both of Somoza's accusations that the Sandi­ nistas were Communists and of Eden Pastora's denials. 75 In the last weeks of the civil war, NBC broadcast the clearest report of any on the television news of the danger of Communism in Nicaragua. First, John Chancellor reported, based on conversations with "some Amer­ ican officials," that "it may all end with a Communist government in charge" and that "it is possible that Nicaragua may soon be in the Communist camp." Then NBC's State Department correspondent, Richard Valeriani followed, reporting that "administration analysts believe that if the Sandinistas win a military victory, they'll establish a Communist government in the heart of Central America, exposing Guatemala, Honduras, and EI Salvador to the threat of a radical takeover, as well. That is why the administration is working so hard to find a political solution."76 The day that Somoza fled from Nicaragua, Valeriani reported that State Department spokesman Hodding Carter stressed the positive about that development but "also cautiously pointed out that nobody can predict with assurance what's going to happen in Nicaragua, reflecting a concern here about an eventual extreme left-wing takeover."77 Notes 1. August 24, 1978, p. A21. 2. November 21, 1978, p. A20. 3. "What's News," September 18, 1978, p. 1. 4. September 2, 1978, p. AI. 5. September 19, 1978, p. 22. 6. August 24, 1978, p. II 6. 7. September 14, 1978, p. II 6. 8. February 13, 1979, p. 114. 9. February 2, 1979, p. I 14. 10. June 20, 1979, p. I 8. 11. June 14, 1979, p. I 7. 12. Leonard Greenwood, August 30, 1978, p. I 6. 13. October 5, 1978, New York Times News Service expanded edition published while Times employees were on strike and the paper itself did not appear. 14. November 19, 1978, section 4, p. 1. 15. Ibid.

21 NEWS COVERAGE OF THE SANDINISTA REVOLUTION

16. June 10, 1979, section IV, p. 2. 17. Omar Cabezas, Fire from the Mountain, translated by Kathleen Weaver (New York: Crown, 1985), p. 12. 18. CBS, April 3, 1979 (this and all subsequent references to network reports refer to the evening news). 19. AP, August 23, 1978, p. I 1. 20. Leonard Greenwood, August 31, 1978, p. I 1. 21. Leonard Greenwood, September 10, 1978, p. V 2. 22. Frank del Olmo, September 2, 1979, p. I 11. 23. Frank del Olmo and Leonard Greenwood, September 24, 1978, p. I 5; "Marxist-led" (editorials, August 24, 1978, p. II 6 and February 13, 1979, p. II 4; David F. Belnap, April 17, 1979, p. I 10; and Oswald Johnson, June 28, 1979, p. I 8); "Marxist-dominated" (David F. Belnap, December 2, 1978, p. I 12, and April 15, 1979, p. I 1); or "Marxist-oriented" (Belnap, May 2, 1979, p. I 1). 24. P. A26. 25. August 23, 1978, p. AI. 26. August 25, 1978, p. AI. 27. August 31, 1978, p. A17. 28. September 30, 1978, p. A4. 29. December 20, 1978, p. A16. 30. December 31, 1979, p. AI. 31. July 7, 1979, p. A10. 32. July 8, 1979, p. C6. 33. June 28, 1979, p. AI. 34. July 18, 1979, p. AI. 35. June 21, 1979, p. A13. 36. July 8, 1979, section IV, p. 3. 37. September IS, 1978, strike edition. 38. September 25, 1978, strike edition. 39. August 25, 1978, strike edition. 40. November 12, 1978, p. AI. 41. July 8, 1979, section IV, p. 3. 42. Ibid. 43. Ibid. 44. No by-line, September 9, 1978, p. 72. 45. John Huey, June 19, 1979, p. 10. 46. December 6, 1978, p. A3. 47. Tom Fenton, AP, September 15, 1978, strike edition. 48. Issac A. Levi, AP, September 25, 1978, strike edition. 49. June II, 1979, p. AI. 50. June 15, 1979, p. A7. 51. September 21, 1978, strike edition. 52. July 24, 1978, p. A12. 53. October I, 1978, p. VI 2. 54. "Our Central America Correspondent," April 14, 1979, p. 69. 55. Editorial, September 26, 1978, p. II 4. 56. Leonard Greenwood, September 3, 1978, p. I 1.

22 NATURE OF THE SANDINISTAS

57. August 3, 1978, p. A22. 58. June 23, 1979, p. A20. 59. October 15, 1978, p. AI. 60. Ibid. 61. October 16, 1978. 62. June 24, 1979, p. AI. 63. December 3, 1978, p. C8. 64. September 3, 1978, p. C1; this article also ran, credited to the Post, on the same day in the Los Angeles Times, p. I 22. 65. November 7, 1978, p. B17. 66. November 19, 1978, p. C7. 67. November 20, 1978, p. B16. 68. July 6, 1979, p. A19. 69. September 1, 1978. 70. September 7, 1978. 71. July 11, 1978. 72. Bruce Hall, August 25, 1978. 73. September 1, 1978. 74. July 11, 1979, July 17, 1979. 75. June 18, 1979, October 31, 1978. 76. July 6, 1979. 77. July 17, 1979.

23 2 Sources of Confusion

The main purpose for seeking to identify the Sandinistas' ideology was to foretell how they would behave if they achieved power. An­ other way to get at the same question was to examine the Sandinistas' declared goals. The weakness of this approach, however, is that without considering the Sandinistas' ideology, the only ready source of information about the group's goals is its own statements-and these may be misleading.

Deception

The three major newspapers whose coverage of the FSLN was most thorough differed sharply in their assessment of Sandinista ideology and in the attention given to the Sandinistas' proclaimed goals. The Los Angeles Times had the most frequent references to Sandinista ideology and was most forthright about calling the Sandinistas Com­ munists or Marxists. It devoted virtually no space to reporting on the FSLN's goals, perhaps on the assumption that if they were Commu­ nists, their goals were self-evident. In contrast, the Washington Post and the New York Times-the two outlets most reluctant to characterize the ideology of the Sandinistas as Marxist or Communist-devoted a great deal of space to reporting their proclaimed goals. In September 1978, the Post's Karen DeYoung reported on a communique issued by the FSLN, proclaiming "their 'total backing and approval' to a provisional government and eventual democratic election proposed by the opposition to President Anastasio Somoza."l Two weeks after that the Post ran her two-part feature porttait of the Sandinistas, which quoted extensively their claims to democratic objectives.2 In May 1979, DeYoung took special note of the fact that Commaridante Tomas "Borges [sic] has been considered one of the doctrinaire Marxists within the pluralistic Sandinista lead­ ership. Yesterday however, he pledged that the Sandinistas 'do not propose a socialistic scenario, but rather a democratic one,' with early elections."3 Two weeks later, an article by DeYoung focused on the painful effects of the fighting on the citizenry. It contained just one

24 SOURCES OF CONFUSION interview, with a college professor who "said most of his students had joined the Sandinistas. Himself a Social Democrat, the professor said he believed that the Sandinistas were willing to let a moderate civilian government replace Somoza and are not planning to take control themselves."4 The next day she reported: ''As for the politics of the Sandinistas, while some of the leadership avows Marxist beliefs, others describe themselves as 'democratic pluralists.' A lengthy San­ dinista program announced several months ago emphasizes that their struggle is to overthrow Somoza and establish a 'people's govern­ ment.'" She added that junta member Moises Hassan "said he ex­ pected the provisional government to take 'two to four years' to stabilize the devastated country and that 'early elections' would be held."s Three days later, in a feature story on the FSLN, she wrote: "Last March, the three bickering Sandinista factions signed a unity pact. They declared their solidarity with all groups seeking Somoza's over­ throw and their dedication to representative elected government."6 The next day, continuing her feature, she wrote: Following a pact in March that united the 3 bickering Sandi­ nista factions under a banner of ousting Somoza and estab­ lishing democracy, the guerrillas have said very little specifi­ cally about politics. While leaders of 2 of the factions profess a Marxist philoso­ phy adapted to Nicaraguan needs, and all three believe some sort of socialism is the best long-range future for the country, the united Sandinistas agree that Nicaraguans first need a chance to live in democratic peace. They say they would support free elections.? A few days later, DeYoung wrote about the five-member junta appointed by the FSLN. "They have declared their goal to be the creation of a transitional democratic government to replace Somoza and have pledged early elections," she reported.8 The next day she reported on a press conference held in Panama City by three of the junta members, who outlined plans for their administration, which foreign diplo­ mats here described as "surprisingly moderate." The junta proposed the formation of a 3D-member legis­ lative council under their executive authority that would in­ clude all of Nicaragua's political parties, union and civic federations and business groups-except those directly al­ lied to Somoza. They said they hoped for early free elections following an unspecified period for reconstructing the de­ stroyed economy. ...

25 NEWS COVERAGE OF THE SANDINISTA REVOLUTION

The three maintained that the Sandinistas would have only one vote in the junta-[Daniel] Ortega's-and that they expected to maintain only a "modest" armed force. "Honest" National Guard soldiers, they said, would be welcomed into the new army, while those charged with corruption, murder and other crimes against the people, including Somoza, would be turned over to an "institutionalized judicial sys­ tem." Foreign policy will be nonaligned, they said, and their government will seek open relations with all countries who "respect Nicaragua's sacred right of self-determination."9 In the last days of the civil war, there were more frequent reports of the FSLN's benevolent intentions toward members of Somoza's National Guard. A week before the war's end, DeYoung reported that the junta "called for a joint armed force including members of the National Guard and Sandinista guerrillas and promised safe passage out of the country for military and government officials 'not found involved in crimes against the people.'" It was promised, she said, that "those guardsmen who respect the cease-fire and junta authority 'can integrate themselves into the new army or civilian life as they desire.' "10 Five days later she elaborated: ''Although the junta has said all guardsmen involved in 'crimes against the people' will be brought to trial, this is interpreted to refer to those guilty of years of repression and corruption rather than those who have merely participated in the war."ll A day earlier, the Post's Terri Shaw reported on an interview with junta member Sergio Ramirez: Ramirez explained what he said was the junta's plan for returning the country to democracy after more than 40 years of authoritarian rule by the Somoza family. He said the electoral system will be reorganized and elections will be held in 3 stages-first municipal elections, then the choosing of a national assembly to draft a constitution and finally election of a new president. He said the process should take less than 2 years. 12 To be sure, the Post was not vouching for the Sandinistas' claims. It was merely reporting them. But several things about the Post's coverage lent credence to those claims. One was the sheer volume of attention that the Post gave them. Why report over and over again the FSLN's assertions of democratic intentions unless one believes that those assertions are to be taken seriously? Reference to these asser­ tions became a standard part of the Post's descriptions of the FSLN equivalent to the phrase "Marxist-led" or "Marxist-dominated," pre-

26 SOURCES OF CONFUSION ferred by the Los Angeles Times. And Post correspondents never chal­ lenged the Sandinistas' claims in print the way they often do the claims of U.S. officials, although Post reporters knew enough about the Marxist-Leninist roots of the FSLN to raise doubts about its declarations of democratic intent. Finally, the Post obliquely put its own imprimatur on the FSLN's democratic claims in two different editorials in September of 1978. In one, the Post wrote: "The guerrillas apparently realize that, though they could crack the old order, they cannot by themselves create a new order."13 Ironically, this was exactly backwards. The Sandinistas intended to create a new order entirely by themselves-that is, with­ out sharing decisions with anybody-but they realized they could not bring down the old order without an alliance with other anti-Somoza forces, hence their "democratic" posture. In the second editorial the Post said, liThe Nicaraguan opposition, including the guerrillas, seems ready to work to install democracy promptly."14 Here, in its own voice, the Post registered acceptance, qualified only by the word "seems," of the Sandinistas' democratic pretensions. Nine and a half months later, on the day after Somoza fled from Nicaragua, a Post editorial sounded a different note. The United States, it said, is "hoping to gain Nicaraguan and other Latin accept­ ance of a democratic process before any Sandinistas who may be so minded manage to preempt it. Notwithstanding the assurances of democracy and justice offered by the Sandinista five, the effort is a long ShOt."IS Long shot? Had the Post changed editorial writers, or had the immediacy of Sandinista triumph concentrated its mind about the front's democratic inclinations? Like the Post, the New York Times, especially its Nicaragua corre­ spondent Alan Riding, gave repetitious coverage to Sandinista pro­ nouncements of democratic intent. In August 1978, Riding reported: ''Although many members of the Sandinist guerrillas are Marxists, they have frequently said that socialism could not come immediately to Nicaragua and that a return to democracy is their aim."16 A week later he wrote: "For the first time, the leftist guerrillas belonging to the Sandinist National Liberation Front decided to join forces with a broad spectrum of non-Marxist opponents of the regime to seek the early overthrow of Somoza and the establishment of democracy, argu­ ing that socialism could not come to Nicaragua overnight."17 The next month he wrote: "The rebels have repeated [sic] stated that their immediate aim is the establishment of democracy and not socialism in Nicaragua."18 Two months later he wrote: "The Sandinist group, created in 1962 along Marxist lines, has grown rapidly in strength and popularity over the last year since abandoning the goal

27 NEWS COVERAGE OF THE SANDINISTA REVOLUTION of immediately bringing socialism to Nicaragua."19 In short, in 1978, Riding made little effort to distinguish between what the FSLN stood for and what it claimed to stand for. As the civil war grew hot in June and July 1979, Riding regained his journalistic distance, while continuing to report FSLN claims. In early June, he wrote: The rebels say that while several top guerrilla leaders are Marxists, their immediate objective is the restoration of de­ mocracy in Nicaragua, which has been ruled by the Somoza family for 46 years. They say their first measures once in power would be the expropriation of the Somoza family's $500 million business empire and the reorganization of the National Guard. Free elections would follow soon after, they say. 20 A week later he wrote: "By insisting that their immediate aims were the overthrow of the dictatorship and restoration of democracy, and objecting to being labeled 'leftist,' the Insurrectionists [one faction of the FSLN] ... have won financial and political support abroad."21 The Times's Warren Hoge also reported Sandinista claims: Sergio Ramirez, a 36-year old lawyer and writer who is the apparent leader of the five-member provisional junta pro­ claimed by the rebels, said his group would create a demo­ cratic regime with a foreign policy of non-alignment. It would adhere to the human rights resolutions of the United Nations and the Organization of American States, he said, recognize the separation of executive, legislative and judicial powers and guarantee freedom of speech, religion and as­ sembly.22

Ten days before the Sandinistas took power, although Riding still seemed to accept at face value the democratic claims of one Sandinista faction, he was also pointing to the possibility of a different outcome. He wrote: "While the moderate 'Insurrectional' group is merely seek­ ing to restore democracy, the so-called 'Proletarian Tendency' and the 'Prolonged Popular War' factions favor more rapid transition towards socialism. Significantly, the more radical rebel units have fared better during the war."23 Rarely did the Times carry anything that cast doubt upon the FSLN's democratic pronouncements, and such items that did appear were rarely in news reports. Two weeks before the end of the civil war, William Safire wrote in a column: "Our secret intelligence reports that when Fidel Castro met with the Nicaraguan Communist leaders

28 SOURCES OF CONFUSION in March, he 'urged them to play down the Marxist nature of their program at this point and to offer to join with non-Marxists in forging a broad coalition.' "24 Although in a two-week period the Times had carried three news stories touching on this intelligence report, all had focused on accusations and denials of Cuban material aid to the guerrillas, and none had mentioned this question of Sandinista strat­ egy, which was so germane to events the Times was covering. An interview with Sandinista leader Ernesto Cardenal submitted to the Times op-ed page by Sandinista supporters unwittingly cast doubt on the front's democratic aims. Cardenal explained that the revolution aimed to establish "a popular government-a popular democracy­ not a false democracy that's ruled by only one class, the bour­ geoisie."25 At least to the initiated, Cardenal's rejection of "false de­ mocracy ... ruled by ... the bourgeoisie" was a signal that the Sandinistas intended no democracy at all. And a Sunday "News of the Week in Review" article by Alan Riding late in 1978 cast doubt on the democratic line almost by inadvertence. The thrust of Riding's essay was to debunk the Carter administration's efforts to arrange a plebiscite to determine Nicaragua's future, efforts that put Sandinista claims of democratic intent to the test. Carter's efforts would fail, argued Riding, because, "tens of thousands of Nicaraguans are fight­ ing for a new society as well as a new government. By refusing some Sandinist participation in a reformist government, Washington is risk­ ing a possibly greater danger of continuing conflict."26 There was inaccuracy in this. The numbers of rebel fighters did not begin to approach "tens of thousands," and the issue at stake was not whether "some Sandinist participation" would be tolerated by Washington. But most important, in all the times that Riding had relayed FSLN claims to seek only the restoration of democracy, he had never before hinted that thousands of the rebels were fighting for a "new society" and would not therefore be satisfied merely by a "new government." Of all the news outlets examined in this study, none except the Post and the New York Times paid much attention to the Sandinistas' proclaimed objectives. The Wall Street Journal never made mention of them, nor did the Los Angeles Times, except in an editorial published the day after Somoza fled, which referred only to the pledges of the new junta, not those of the FSLN. It said: The junta has also promised free elections, a place for younger elements of the National Guard in a new army, and respect for the human rights of persons tainted by associa­ tion with the Somoza dictatorship. Whether these promises are respected depends ultimately

29 NEWS COVERAGE OF THE SANDINISTA REVOLUTION

on the heavily armed Sandinistas, who have resisted U.S. pressures to broaden the junta membership to assure a mod­ erate majority. 27 One article on this subject in the Economist in August 1978 sounded very much like Riding's "Week in Review" reference to guerrillas fighting "for a new society" (and very much unlike most of the other New York Times and Washington Post reports on this subject). The Economist reported: "The people who are fighting and dying are demanding more than the removal of Mr. Somoza and his replace­ ment by a different set of conservative rulers. The guerrillas, although willing to co-operate with the 'bourgeoisie' in order to overthrow the regime, have also said they will not lay down their arms until there is a government committed to social reform."28 Of the TV networks, ABC carried but one reference to this sub­ ject: Peter Jennings's remark that the FSLN "offensive has a single aim: the removal of President Somoza."29 CBS ran an interview with Sergio Ramirez, in which he said: "We are going to establish in Nicaragua the full observance of the human rights, and the members of the Somocista party, the members of the National Guard are not the exception."3o NBC, after a battlefield interview with Eden Pastora, carried this qualified statement: "Pastora ... says the Sandinistas are not Communists and will set up a provisional government after the takeover. He says then the people can elect new leaders. Not all Sandinistas agree to this plan, but they all feel the Somoza regime must end."3! The day after the Sandinistas took over, NBC correspon­ dent Ike Seamans reported: ''A number of Sandinista leaders are Communist, but provisional government leader Moises Hassan says that does not necessarily mean Nicaragua will be Communist." The camera then switched to Hassan, who said, "Our main goal now ... is to bring democracy [so] that the people can express their will and choose what they want."32

Misunderstanding

One thing that complicated reporting about the FSLN was that the movement consisted of three sometimes-competing factions. This was confusing to reporters and facilitated the Sandinista efforts to mislead them. In April 1979, the Post's Karen DeYoung described the three factions: The Sandinistas in the early 1970s split on both ideological and tactical grounds. The Prolonged Popular War faction, led

30 SOURCES OF CONFUSION

by Marxist ideologues Tomas Borges [sic] and Henry Ruiz, held to its mountain strongholds, while the Proletarian fac­ tion, led by Jaime Wheelock, took to the cities to organize cadres. The Insurrectionalists faction, led by brothers Daniel and Humberto Ortega and Mexican-born Victor Tirado, gradu­ ally assumed international prominence as the group most capable of waging direct war against Somoza. Describing themselves as "democratic pluralists," the In­ surrectionalists formed alliances with the political and civil opposition groups, promised elections, organized last Au­ gust's attack on the National Palace in Managua and played a large part in the September uprising. As a result of those actions, the Insurrectionalists won hundreds of new members and opened international arms supply pipelines while the other two groups accused them of "selling out" to weak-willed politicians and foreign powers. Last week, however ... La Prensa published photos said to have been taken "somewhere in Nicaragua" of a March 7 secret ceremony in which leaders of all three factions signed a unity accord. In a "safe house" interview last week, Proletarian leader Wheelock and Humberto Ortega of the Insurrectionalists said that the Sandinistas had "seen the difficulties of trying to confront the dictatorship" while separated. "We've always had a common goal," Wheelock said, "but the factions operated under different leaders." The Sandi­ nistas, he said, now have a nine-member "national board of directors" composed of three chiefs from each faction. Wheelock said that what now interests the guerrillas is "not a complicated discussion of theory or ideology, but the end of the Somoza dictatorship. It's a very concrete situa­ tion."33 In a subsequent article DeYoung wrote that "leaders of two of the factions profess a Marxist philosophy."34 In another she listed the Proletarians and Prolonged Popular War factions as those that "fol­ lowed essentially Marxist political lines" and she placed the Insurrec­ tionalists in a different category.35 Neither DeYoung nor any other Post correspondent appears to have asked Wheelock how he could say "we've always had a common goal," if one group comprised "democratic pluralists" while the others were Marxists. Nor did they ask when and how the Ortegas had become "democratic pluralists," having spent their entire adult lives as professional members of a Marxist-Leninist group. At issue was whether the Sandinistas who formed the Insurrectionalist group had

31 NEWS COVERAGE OF THE SANDINISTA REVOLUTION experienced a genuine philosophical transformation that would have important bearing on their behavior if victorious or whether they were engaged in merely a tactical ploy. The New York Times also failed to ask these questions, although Times correspondent Alan Riding made more frequent mention than did DeYoung of the factional split and was even more credulous toward the claims of those the Post called "Insurrectionalists." (That faction's name had various translations.) In a story for the Times Sunday Magazine in July 1978, Riding wrote that "one group ... decided to join forces with other, non-Marxist organizations opposed to Somoza, with the immediate objective of overthrowing the regime through a popular insurrection and instituting democracy; two other factions, known as the 'populists' and the 'proletarians' spurned contact with 'bourgeois' groups and remained committed to the armed struggle for socialism."36 In October 1978, Riding wrote: "The moderate or 'insurrectionist' faction of the guerrillas also includes many non-Marxist students, peasants and workers, and its leaders have frequently stated that their immediate objective is the establishment of democracy and not so­ cialism in their country. This faction is the strongest guerrilla military force."37 In subsequent stories, Riding referred again to "the moder­ ate or 'insurrectional' faction of the guerrillas";38 "The moderate Terti­ ary group, which includes many non-Marxists"39 (Tertiary or tercerista was another name for the insurrectionists); and "a moderate faction" of the FSLN. 40 Riding's repeated references to the non-Marxist members of the Insurrectionists were not false, but misleading. Although the Insur­ rectionists did indeed enroll non-Marxist members, these were not admitted to its top leadership ranks. It remained a top-down organi­ zation ruled by the Ortegas and Tirado, and there is no evidence that the three of them ever deviated, then or since, from an ideological commitment that was not merely Marxist, but Marxist-Leninist. Riding repeatedly used the label "moderate" to characterize the Insurrectionists, while both the Los Angeles Times and the Economist characterized the Insurrectionists as "the most militant" FSLN fac­ tion.41 This apparent contradiction can be easily explained. While the Proletarian faction was dedicated to instilling socialist revolutionary consciousness in the proletariat and the Prolonged Popular War fac­ tion wanted to do something similar among the peasantry, the Insur­ rectionists wanted an immediate uprising against Somoza. They were therefore willing to work with anyone who would help them over­ throw the regime, in contrast to the other factions that were more concerned with revolutionary purity. This willingness to work with

32 SOURCES OF CONFUSION others is what made the Insurrectionists "moderate." They were, however, the ones who insisted on immediate all-out military action, while the other factions were more concerned with indoctrination and base building. In this sense the Insurrectionists were the most "mili­ tant." The contradiction in the characterizations of the Insurrectionists points up how tricky it is in such circumstances to use such terms as "moderate" or "militant." The real issue was what kind of society the Sandinistas or their Insurrectionist faction intended to create. The Los Angeles Times discussed the factional divisions within the FSLN in its news column only once in the period covered by this study. Correspondent David F. Belnap reported in April 1979: The unsuccessful attempt by guerrillas. .. to seize and hold the northern city of Esteli. .. has led to bitter recriminations among guerrilla factions. One faction charges that the group responsible for the attack on Esteli, the Proletarian Sandinistas, moved pre­ maturely, aborting a larger plan aimed at the fall of President Anastasio Somoza. That faction, the Tercerista Sandinistas, says the Pro­ letarians deliberately forestalled the success of the wider plan because they did not think the country was ready to accept their goal of a Marxist government.42 Belnap went on to describe the factions this way: The Tercerista (Third) faction is more moderate than the Proletarians in the sense that they are willing to accept any committed fighters against the Somoza regime, Marxist or not, in the guerrilla struggle. The faction wants to force a change in the government as quickly as possible and to take part in whatever regime succeeds it. The two other factions ... aim at installing a Marxist system to succeed the Somoza regime. 43 The Los Angeles Times also referred to the factional divisions in two editorials during the last month of the civil war. In one it said that "the guerrilla movement is itself split into moderate and anti-U.S. Marxist factions. "44 In the other it said that "it is not clear that the pro­ Castro Marxist faction of the guerrillas would, in the end, be able to dominate a Sandinista government."45 In the only article in which it made more than passing reference to FSLN factions, the Economist made a muddle. It reported that "the Sandinist guerrilla army ... has recently been reunited with its dissident Marxist-Leninist faction," then noted that "a majority of Sandinists are probably Marxists of one hue or another," and con-

33 NEWS COVERAGE OF THE SANDINISTA REVOLUTION

cluded that the United States might still "succeed in keeping the moderate Sandinists moderate, and denying the more dogmatic Marxists the leverage they need to take command of the country."46 What was the reality behind all these accounts of the FSLN factional divisions? It has been explained in David Nolan's work on the subject, The Ideology of the Sandinistas and the Nicaraguan Revolu­ tion. 47 The tercerista or Insurrectional faction did welcome non-Com­ munists like Eden Pastora into its fighting ranks but never into its top decision-making positions. The greater flexibility advocated and prac­ ticed by the tercerista leaders did bring them into conflict with the other FSLN factions, but in these internecine disputes the terceristas proclaimed their ideological purity, insisting that their flexibility was only tactical. The difference between the terceristas and the other factions was that the others wanted to prepare the revolution slowly in the hope that once it came, Communist rule could be achieved in one swoop, while the terceristas sought to instigate the revolution imme­ diately, leaving some of the work of consolidating Communist rule for after the revolution. Whatever the significance of these tactical dis­ putes, all nine members of the directorate (three from each faction) that has ruled the FSLN since it reunited in 1979 are Marxist­ Leninists. Ironically, although the newspapers repeatedly characterized the terceristas as moderates or non-Marxists by comparison with the other factions, when the top leader of one of the other factions emerged in a very powerful position just on the eve of the Sandinista takeover, the same papers reported this in a favorable tone. Only a few days before Somoza fell, the five-member junta appointed by the FSLN an­ nounced the cabinet that would assume office as soon as it took power. Only one acknowledged Sandinista was on the list, but a crucial one. Tomas Borge, the oldest, longest-serving FSLN comman­ dante and the head of its most orthodox faction, was named interior mInIs.er.•• f­ This was a brazen move by the Sandinistas if they wanted others to believe that they intended to participate in good faith in a coalition government. A generation earlier, Communists in Eastern Europe had used coalition governments as the stepping stones to dic­ tatorship. Their classic tactic was to insist on controlling the interior ministry and to exploit its police powers to consolidate their rule. Borge's appointment should have appeared ominous to anyone hop­ ing that Nicaragua would not go Communist. But the New York Times and the Washington Post both reported it as an encouraging develop­ ment! Alan Riding reported in the Times that "sources close to the junta ... said that, as head of the 'prolonged popular war' faction of

34 SOURCES OF CONFUSION the guerrilla movement, Mr. Borge should be in a position to control the most radical elements among the rebels."48 The same day, the Post's Karen DeYoung sounded the same theme: Perhaps the most interesting on the [cabinet] list is Sandi­ nista leader Tomas Borges [sic] as interior minister. Borges, a self-declared Marxist, is considered a pragmatist. He heads the Prolonged Popular War faction of the Sandinista National Liberation Front.... As interior minister, political analysts said, Borges will also serve as director of police functions and thus will be in a better position to keep mavericks from his faction in line. 49 The Los Angeles Times that day also ran DeYoung's story, credited to the Post without a byline. It corrected the spelling of Borge's name and omitted the sentence about keeping mavericks in line, while retaining the information that Borge "is considered a pragmatist."so The description of Borge as a "pragmatist" was of a piece with the descriptions of the Ortegas as "moderates." Both seem to be the products either of clever news management by the Sandinistas or of an eagerness on the part of some journalists to believe the best about them. The terceristas had been described as "moderates" precisely in comparison to the likes of Borge. Therefore, those who had described the terceristas this way ought logically to have characterized Borge not as a pragmatist but as an immoderate or an extremist. Moreover, as these same reporters had explained, the split between the terceristas and Borge was essentially over Borge's commitment to withholding the big push against Somoza until the peasantry had been won over to Marxism-Leninism. Given that Borge had been working at this for twenty years with nary a glimmer of success, by what measure was he a "pragmatist"? This illustrates that it is not clear what among Communists con­ situtes a "pragmatist" nor whether "pragmatism" among Communists should be viewed as a virtue by non-Communists. In China, the "pragmatic" Deng Xiaoping is no doubt preferable to the "idealistic" Mao Zedong, but in the USSR it was Stalin who was the pragmatist and Trotsky the idealist, while in Yugoslavia Tito was the pragmatist and Djilas the idealist. Nor can much more sense be made of the reference to "mavericks." Mavericks are not a common problem in Marxist­ Leninist bands, whose hallmark is iron discipline. To the extent that there were "mavericks" among the Sandinistas, they represented part of the hope that Nicaragua could escape totalitarian rule. The most notable maverick among the Sandinistas, in fact, was Eden Pastora. DeYoung thus in a sense was right: with his police powers Borge was

35 NEWS COVERAGE OF THE SANDINISTA REVOLUTION in a position to keep Pastora "in line." But why should she have reported this as reassuring news? It is also interesting that Riding's unnamed "sources close to the junta" and DeYoung's unnamed "political analysts" both put out the same absurd line. Were these reporters using the same source? If so, what accounts for the discrepancy in describing it? If not, were they victims of an orchestrated Sandinista campaign of disinformation?

Disinformation

Disseminating disinformation about their political identities, not re­ stricted to the terceristas' false presentation of themselves as '~democratic pluralists," was an integral part of Sandinista strategy. In June 1979, the FSLN announced the appointment of a five-member provisional junta that would take power upon their victory. It con­ sisted of one open Sandinista, Daniel Ortega, two undeclared Sandi­ nistas, Sergio Ramirez, who is now the vice president of Nicaragua, and Moises Hassan, who is now mayor of Managua after having served as deputy minister of the interior, and two anti-Somoza demo­ crats, Violetta Chamorro----widow of slain publisher Pedro Joaquin Chamorro----and Alfonso Robelo, both of whom are now in the op­ position. The composition of the junta was designed to appear broad based, while ensuring that the FSLN remained firmly in control. The deception here was not very deep. Ramirez and Hassan had both functioned in prominent capacities for several years that were clearly, although not officially, part of the Sandinista movement: Ramirez as organizer of the Twelve, a group of prominent Nic­ araguans who declared themselves in alliance with the FSLN, and Hassan as director of the United People's Movement. Immediately recognizing the significance of the junta's composition, the U.S. gov­ ernment focused its diplomatic efforts during the last weeks of the civil ,var on trying to secure the addition of two more non-Sandinistas to the junta in exchange for getting Somoza to step down. But the FSLN would not budge on this question. Although the deception was not deep, all four daily newspapers examined in this study-the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, and the Wall Street Journal-fell prey to it on at least some occasions. The New York Times's Alan Riding reported that the Sandinistas "acknowledge that the Somoza regime was undermined as much by the businessmen's opposition as by rebel violence and that the next government will need economic aid from Washington and political support from Latin American democracies. They have therefore named only one guerrilla leader to the provisional govern-

36 SOURCES OF CONFUSION ment." A few paragraphs later, Riding reiterated that "the only Sand­ inist member of the junta [is] Daniel Ortega." This misleading account was compounded by Riding's assertion in the same article that the Sandinistas "have expressed willingness to expand the junta to in­ clude more moderates."51 Some Sandinista source may well have expressed such willingness to Riding, but in all the negotiations the Sandinistas appear to have been quite unyielding on this point. A week later the Times carried a feature portrait of Sergio Ramirez, which misrepresented him and consequently the political balance of the junta. The Times explained that Ramirez is "the bridge within the group, balancing two members of the Nicaraguan establishment with two leftists." The story said Ramirez "possesses that intangible quality that suggests depth of character and commands attention without soliciting it." As far as characterizing Ramirez's political stance, the article limited itself to this: "The Rev. Ernesto Cardenal, a Nicaraguan priest and poet who has watched his ascent, attributes it to his intel­ ligence and balance. 'He has great prestige as an intellectual,' Father Cardenal said. 'He is known to be honest. He is progressive and moderate, but not excessive.' "52 The Times did not tell its readers that Cardenal, who is now the minister of culture, was himself a Sandi­ nista who had written two years earlier that "not only can a Christian be a Marxist, but in order for him to be authentically Christian, he must be a Marxist, with emphasis on 'must.' "53 If Ramirez had in fact been "moderate," Cardenal would have had no use for him, and the deception was given added piquancy by Cardenal's declaration that Ramirez, who concealed his FSLN membership, "is known to be honest." Two days later, the Times carried sketches of all five junta mem­ bers and reiterated that Ramirez "is described as a 'progressive and moderate' who could be a bridge between 'establishment' and leftist members of the junta."54 The Times's enthusiasm for Ramirez was matched by a Wall Street Journal story that appeared two days before the junta assumed power. Indeed, the Journal's story went further, matching praise for Ramirez with praise for the junta as a whole. Although still in exile in Costa Rica pending their triumphal return to Managua, the five "already were moving to heal the wounds" of civil war, said the Journal. 55 The story went on to explain how well qualified the junta members were for this task. Ramirez, said the paper, is "a Managua lawyer [who] has long experience in sensitive mediation among diverse groups." "Daniel Ortega ... also has useful experience reconciling different factions.... He coordinated the coalition six months ago of the three Sandinist factions into one unified army," it said. And Moises Hassan

37 NEWS COVERAGE OF THE SANDINISTA REVOLUTION

"is leader of the National Patriotic Front, a strong coalition of student, labor and political groups acknowledged by the Sandinistas as their political arm." The story continued: Despite wide reports that the junta's politics lean left-or fall as far as Marxism-the new government claims there isn't any predominant political influence. "The new Nicaragua will be a non-aligned country," insisted Manuel Espinosa Enriquez, press secretary for the junta. Insiders said Messrs. Hassan and Ramirez are fairly so­ cialist, that Mr. Robelo and Mrs. Chamorro both favor a form of free enterprise system, and that only Mr. Ortega favors a Marxist government. The Los Angeles Times was clearest about the junta, at least when David F. Belnap was reporting. When the junta was first unveiled, Belnap wrote that it included "five prominent opposition figures, mainly Sandinistas."56 The next day he described the five in more detail, listing Ramirez as "a Marxist poet who heads the so-called Group of Twelve, the political arm of one of the three factions of the Sandinista guerrilla movement" and Hassan as a "Marxist university professor and one of the leaders of the self-styled United People's Movement, the political arm of another of the Sandinista factions."57 A few days later he described the junta as "including three Marxists and two members of Somoza's democratic opposition."58 Even the Los Angeles Times, however, sometimes told it dif­ ferently. By the time Somoza fled, David Belnap ceased reporting from Nicaragua, and on the eve of the junta's assumption of power, the paper ran an AP feature profiling the junta members. Ramirez, it reported, "recently described himself to close friends as 'a leftist of non-Marxist views.' " Moises Hassan, it said, "is described by friends as a non-Marxist leftist of moderate views." It also identified him as "one of the two Sandinista representatives in the junta." It described Chamorro as "a conservative" and said of Robelo that "friends de­ scribe him as a man of moderately conservative views." Curiously, though this story carried such misinformation, or disinformation, about the other four junta members, it did not do so about Ortega, whom it described as "an avowed Marxist" and "one of the hard-core guerrillas of the original Cuban-trained Marxist organization."59 Throughout the period examined in this study, the Los Angeles Times Sunday commentary section frequently carried lengthy analy­ ses by academic Richard Millett. Although these were guest pieces, they appeared with some regularity, and because almost no other guest pieces about Nicaragua were used on Sunday, they took on an aura of authority greater than that of most guest articles. These con-

38 SOURCES OF CONFUSION veyed not only a strongly pro-Sandinista point of view, but also a version of the facts in accord with the Sandinista line. In one of these Sunday pieces, Millett described the junta: "Despite the fact that only one of its five members is from the Sandinista Liberation Front, and he belongs to the most moderate of its three factions, Administration fears persist that this might prove an instrument of Marxist domina­ tion. At least three members of the provisional government, however, are clearly not Marxists."6o The Washington Post's coverage of the junta, all of it by correspon­ dent Karen DeYoung, was enigmatic. Although DeYoung almost never called any of the junta members Marxists (she reported in her first story on the group that Moises Hassan "described himself in an interview as a socialist who does not adhere to the 'Marxist model' "61), she at least initially gave a fairly clear image of where they stood, largely by referring to the views of the U.S. administration. "The Carter administration fears Sandinista control over [the junta] and a possible hard swing to the left," she reported soon after the junta was announced. "While two members of the Sandinista provi­ sional junta are moderate political figures, the other three are a Sandinista Front leader, a leftist intellectual and a Socialist union leader," she added.62 In a subsequent story she referred to "the leftist­ dominated provisional government" containing "two politically mod­ erate members," and she described Ramirez as "an author and univer­ sity professor one U.S. official described as 'far too much to the left for the American public.' "63 On another occasion she wrote that "while the junta membership covers a range of left-of-center political beliefs, it excludes a number of important moderate groups."64 A week later she wrote: "Several of the junta members have had strong ties to the Sandinista organization, but since the announcement of the provi­ sional government they have repeatedly tried to distinguish them­ selves from it. "65 Apparently they succeeded, at least with DeYoung, for her characterizations of them grew more equivocal. She wrote a few days later that U.S. "concern revolves around three of the junta's five members who are considered allied to what are believed to be Marxist factions of the Sandinistas." Then she added:

Junta and Sandinista defenders, however, point out that only one of the five junta members. .. is a Sandinista and that he belongs to the most moderate faction, which advocates a pluralist democracy. The two others provoking concern, au­ thor Ramirez and university professor Moises Hassan, are considered here [that is, Nicaragua] to be social democrats or socialists. 66

39 NEWS COVERAGE OF THE SANDINISTA REVOLUTION

Two days later she wrote that the junta contains "one Sandinista and two representing leftist or left-center groups allied to the guer­ rillas."67 And three days after that she wrote that the junta contains "one Sandinista, one hardline socialist, a center-left academic and two moderates."68 As in the case of her descriptions of the FSLN itself, DeYoung's descriptions of the junta exhibited a traceable shift, growing pro­ gressively more favorable to the Sandinistas. It is possible that this shift reflected direct efforts by overt or concealed Sandinista "sources" to influence her coverage. Notes 1. September 30, 1978, p. A4. 2. October 15, 1978, p. AI; October 16, 1978, p. AI. 3. May 30, 1979, p. A28. 4. June 15, 1979, p. A20. 5. June 21, 1979, p. AI. 6. June 24,1979, p. AI. 7. June 25, 1979, p. AI. 8. June 28, 1979, p. A24. 9. June 29, 1979, p. A17. 10. July 12, 1979, p. A21. 11. July 17, 1979, p. AI. 12. July 16, 1979, p. A2. 13. September 8, 1978, p. B6. 14. September 27, 1978, p. A22. 15. July 18, 1979, p. A14. 16. August 25, 1978, strike edition. 17. August 31, 1978, strike edition. 18. September 21, 1978, strike edition. 19. November 12, 1978, p. AI. 20. June 2,1979, p. AI. 21. June 10, 1979, section IV, p. 2. 22. June 28, 1979, p. A2. 23. July 8, 1979, section IV, p. 3. 24. July 5, 1979, p. A17. 25. June 30, 1979, p. A19. 26. December 17, 1978, section IV, p. 3. 27. July 18, 1979, p. II 4. 28. "Our Central America Correspondent," August 12, 1978, p. 57. 29. July 11, 1979. 30. July 15, 1979. 31. November 24, 1978. 32. July 20, 1979. 33. April 5, 1979, p. A22.

40 SOURCES OF CONFUSION

34. June 25, 1979, p. AI. 35. June 24, 1979, p. AI. 36. July 30, 1978, section VI, pp. 14 and following. 37. October 27, 1978, strike edition. 38. December 17, 1978, section IV, p. 3. 39. March 21, 1979, p. A2; July 1,1979, section IV, p. 3. 40. Los Angeles Times: Leonard Greenwood, August 27, 1978, p. I 7; Econo- mist, "Our Central America Correspondent," September 2, 1978, p. 58. 41. July 1, 1979, section IV, p. 3. 42. April 27, 1979, p. I 17. 43. Ibid. 44. June 20, 1979, p. II 6. 45. June 26, 1979, p. 114. 46. No by-line, June 30, 1979, p. 12. 47. Coral Gables: Institute of Interamerican Studies, University of Miami, 1984. 48. July 15, 1979, p. AI. 49. July 15, 1979, p. A3. 50. July 15, 1979, p. I 11. 51. July 8, 1979, section IV, p. 3. 52. "Special to the New York Times," July 16, 1979, p. A3. 53. (Bohemia), November 18, 1977, pp. 48-49, cited in Nolan, The Ideology of the Sandinistas, p. 75. 54. No by-line, July 18, 1979, p. AID. 55. Beth Nissen, July 18, 1979, p. 10. 56. June 17, 1979, p. I 1. 57. June 18, 1979, p. I 6. 58. June 20, 1979, p. I 1. 59. July 18, 1979, p. I 7. 60. July 1, 1979, p. VI 2. 61. June 21, 1979, p. AI. 62. June 23, 1979, p. AI. 63. June 24, 1979, p. A12. 64. June 25, 1979, p. AI. 65. July 2, 1979, p. A16. 66. July 6, 1979, p. AI. 67. July 8, 1979, p. AID. 68. July 11, 1979, p. AID.

41 3 The Views of the U.S. Government

The principal goal of the Carter administration's policy toward Nic­ aragua in the last year of Somoza's rule was to oust him. As early as July 1978, the Washington Post's Karen DeYoung was told by a State Department source: "We are not intriguing against any opposition faction. The fact is, we're against Somoza."l During that last year of Somoza's rule, news coverage of the Sandinistas-especially in the New York Times and the Washington Post-tended to understate the degree to which the FSLN was com­ mitted to Communism or Marxism or Leninism and the likelihood that a Sandinista triumph would lead to the emergence of a Commu­ nist government in Nicaragua. This misunderstanding invites the question of whether the news reports had a deleterious effect on policy. Did the innocuous portrayal of the FSLN in parts of the press lead the administration to adopt too benign a view of the prospect of the FSLN's coming to power?

Media and Government Differences

The answer, so far as it can be gleaned from studying the news media themselves, is no. The same newspapers whose correspondents were portraying the Sandinistas in "moderate" or democratic or Social Democratic colors were at the same time reporting that U.S. officials viewed the Sandinistas in a less favorable light. From these news stories, it appears that U.S. officials were indeed concerned about the Marxist or Communist or Castroite stance of the FSLN but that they had no plan for dealing with this problem except to hope that some­ how Somoza's fall would not bring the Sandinistas to power. Thus, U.S. policy may be accused of ineffectiveness, but the ineffectiveness did not come about because the news media misled the government. Conversely, in those newspapers whose own correspondents often rendered a benign image of the FSLN, reports about Wash-

42 VIEWS OF THE U.S. GOVERNMENT ington's concerns helped to convey a more balanced impression, at least insofar as their readers trusted the views of the U.S. govern­ ment. The Post and the New York Times, however, sometimes accom­ panied their reports of American officials' worries with indications of their own skepticism about them. Not surprisingly, the news outlet that carried the most frequent references to the views of the U.S. administration was the Washington Post. Stories datelined in Washington by Post correspondent John Goshko, for example, citing "informed sources," described "U.S. con­ cern that the violent overthrow of Somoza would lead to control by Sandinista extremists and a possible Communist government."2 In another story Goshko reported that "at least some groups making up the Sandinista Front are regarded [by the U.S. government] as Marx­ ist and pro-Cuban. Washington fears that these forces would emerge on top in any Sandinista government and turn Nicaragua into a Cuban-controlled bastion in Central America."3 Other times, Goshko reported that "the Carter administration is known to be skittish about the possibility of a Sandinista takeover because the movement contains strong Marxist, pro-Cuban ele­ ments"4; or that Washington wanted "to prevent an eventual takeover by radical guerrillas of the leftist" FSLN. 5 A month before Somoza's fall, the Post carried a wire service story saying that "the Carter administration has made clear that it feels a takeover by the Sandi­ nistas would be likely to result in domination by Marxist-Leninists in their ranks."6 And when the FSLN announced the appointment of the provisional junta, Karen DeYoung reported that "the United States ... believes [it] is too heavily weighted to the left."? The Post also occasionally gave its readers the impression that U.S. government fears about the Sandinistas were unwarranted or exaggerated, however. For example, Stephen Kinzer reported: Concerned that a post-Somoza government proposed by left­ ist guerrillas would be too radical, U.S. diplomats are work­ ing to shape a moderate, more pro-U.S. alternative.... The U.S. effort has been rebuffed, however, by moderate business and political groups who insist they will continue to support the five-member "Provisional Junta of National Reconstruction" named by the Sandinista guerrillas. The U.S. State Department perceives the junta as con­ taining three leftists and two moderates...... Most Nicaraguans appear to support the junta and are suspicious of American efforts to supplant or alter it. ... "The Americans are mistaken in their fears of a radical takeover here," said one businessman, reflecting widespread sentiment.8

43 NEWS COVERAGE OF THE SANDINISTA REVOLUTION

Karen DeYoung reported two weeks before Somoza's fall that "the United States is concerned that at least a portion of the National Guard structure be retained to avoid a complete takeover by what it feels are radical elements within the Sandinista organization."9 The words "what it feels are" in this sentence had no function except to convey skepticism. The strongest item in the Post casting doubt on U.S. concerns about the FSLN was a column by Jack Anderson, who declared that the United States was "trapped by ... an often hysterical fear of 'leftist' or 'Communist' takeovers" and as a result "may have booted its best chance to be an influence for moderation in the anti-Somoza provisional government in Nicaragua."lo The American error, accord­ ing to Anderson, was not to have supported the Sandinista-appointed junta, which, he said, "represents a broad political spectrum of Somoza opposition." "The Carter Administration seems to have bought Somoza's line," said Anderson, "that he is the only one stand­ ing between Nicaragua and the Communists," adding that "despite evidence to the contrary, Somoza apologists in Congress ... claim that two thirds of the anti-Somoza rebel force are Communists." In the New York Times, correspondent Alan Riding reported the administration's worries while casting a skeptical eye on them. In late 1978, for example, Riding wrote: "Ironically, while the Carter admin­ istration seems to be guided largely by its fear of 'another Cuba' in Nicaragua, the principal faction of the Sandinist guerrillas continues to insist that its objective in Nicaragua is democracy and not Commu­ nism. ... One result of Washington's policy is therefore that, while being unwilling to 'risk' Sandinist influence over a successor govern­ ment, it is 'risking' a continuation of guerrilla activities after the fall of Somoza by trying to ignore the enormous popularity and influence of the rebel movement."ll The real irony here lay in Riding's suggestion that Sandinista assertions of democratic intent should have allayed fears of "another Cuba." In Cuba itself, after all, Castro had ridden to power proclaiming democracy. When the United States sought to broaden the composition of the junta, Riding wrote a "news analysis," which concluded:

Most puzzling to some Nicaraguans, however, is the fact that, with the Sandinists' provisional government endorsed by all major opposition groups, Washington should now be trying to undermine its authority and even provoke its anger by charging Cuba with deep involvement. Because most top Sandinist leaders were trained in Cuba, there is anxiety in some United States circles that a Sandinist victory could lead Havana to enjoy excessive influence over 44 VIEWS OF THE U.S. GOVERNMENT

any future Managua government. But all evidence available in public here suggests that the Castro regime has preferred to see such countries as Venezuela and Panama aiding the rebels. President Fidel Castro has been quoted as saying: "The best help I can give the Sandinists is not to help them." Opposition sources said that Mr. Castro had also urged the Sandinists to move cautiously and to do their utmost to maintain warm ties with Washington. In several recent inter­ views, members of the provisional government, which in­ cludes only one Sandinist leader, have insisted that their objective is democracy and not socialism and they have ex­ pressed the wish for good relations with Washington. "We can't understand why the Carter Administration is being so hostile," one opposition leader said.12 By leaving his readers with the opposition leader's views, Riding was signaling his own concurrence. Riding's suggestion that Castro's statements ought to be taken as evidence of U.S. folly was striking. Castro was merely counseling the Sandinistas to dissemble, as he himself was doing in denying involvement in Nicaragua. It is equally peculiar to find Riding arguing that this appeal to systematic decep­ tion ought to have been reassuring to the United States. On occasion there seemed to be a running debate on Central America in the Times. Only five days earlier, following the leak of a U.S. intelligence report, the Times had carried a page-one story by Richard Burt that began: "Carter Administration officials said today that Cuba was heavily engaged in supplying arms and training in­ structors to guerrilla forces in the civil war in Nicaragua."13 Burt continued: "In some cases the evidence of Cuban involvement that was cited seemed sketchy, with Administration officials maintaining that Havana's role in the conflict had been confirmed by 'intelligence reports.' Nevertheless, several officials contended that Cuba's inter­ vention represented the most active role that the Communist nation has played in Latin America in 15 years." The next day's Times carried a story by Riding devoted to Sergio Ramirez's denial that Cuba was aiding the Sandinistas. Ramirez said that the administration had falsely alleged that junta members had been educated in Cuba, and he pointed out that three had been educated in the United States. The disingenuousness of this response was transparent: the issue was not where junta members had been educated but rather where they had received training, an issue on which Ramirez apparently did not pronounce. Rather than press Ramirez on this, Riding's story bolstered his evasion by providing details of the academic careers in the United States of junta members. Then, a week later, the Times ran a story by Graham Hovey that

45 NEWS COVERAGE OF THE SANDINISTA REVOLUTION

seemed designed to minimize Burt's story on Cuban involvement. Hovey said: "Early news reports based on the [intelligence report] emphasized the parts dealing with Cuba's expansion of arms supplies and military training for ... guerrillas from Nicaragua and other Central American countries beginning last fall. But a recurring theme in the analysis is that Cuba is proceeding cautiously in Central Amer­ ica, warning the Sandinists not to expect early victory in Nic­ aragua."14 Hovey's reference to "early news reports" apparently meant Burt's story, for there had been few other stories on this subject in the major news media. Hovey's correction of Burt was contrived, how­ ever: the scope of Cuba's aid to the rebels was more newsworthy than Castro's counsel to proceed with caution. On several occasions, Riding reported that the U.S. administra­ tion's concern about the Nicaraguan rebels stemmed from domestic political worries. In June 1979, Riding reported that U.S. "officials believe" that an FSLN victory "could cause political problems for President Carter if there is a debate about 'who lost Nicaragua?' "15 Two weeks before the junta assumed office, Riding wrote about U.S. diplomatic efforts to secure the addition of more moderates. He re­ ported that "one U.S. official ... said the junta had 'to look moderate for us to be able to sell the package back home.' "16 While the admin­ istration probably did have domestic politics in mind, such reports also cast doubt on the substantive validity of its concerns about the aims of the Sandinistas.

Differences within the Administration

Complicating the picture further was the ·fact that the administration did not always speak with one voice on the subject of the Sandinistas. The Economist reported that "the Carter administration is convinced that Cuba is meddling in Nicaragua, although it has so far produced no evidence beyond vague reference to intelligence reports."l? Then it added: "There is disagreement within the administration about the extent of Cuban intervention in Nicaragua [and] the influence of left­ wingers within the rebel camp." The Economist said that "the disagreements pit state department bureaucrats against Mr. Zbigniew Brzezinski, Mr. Carter's White House adviser on national security." But the fissures within the ad­ ministration were more complex than that. The clearest reports on U.S. government worries about the FSLN among all the news reports examined in this study were those broadcast on NBC TV news by that network's State Department correspondent, Richard Valeriani. Dur-

46 VIEWS OF THE U.S. GOVERNMENT ing the last month of the civil war, Valeriani reported that "officials here are worried that Sandinista rebels will win a military victory and then establish a Marxist government in Nicaragua";18 then again that "administration analysts believe that if the Sandinistas win a military victory, they'll establish a Communist government in the heart of Central America, exposing Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador to the threat of a radical takeover, as well";19 and that "officials here confirm that Cuban advisers have been seen with the Sandinista rebel forces, although not in combat."20 Reports on this topic were rarer and less clear on CBS and virtually nonexistent on ABC. Had the networks decided to play the story differently, or were they relying on different sources within the State Department and getting different stories? If Valeriani's sources were giving him a rather clear warning about the dangers of an FSLN victory, the Wall Street Journal's John Huey was speaking to people in the department who gave a very different picture, at least as he reported it. In one lengthy analysis a month before Somoza's fall, Huey wrote: Most State Department analysts believe that pressures from Nicaragua's neighboring military regimes-Guatemala and El Salvador-would make it extremely difficult to establish a purely Marxist government in Nicaragua. They also note that Nicaragua's capitalists have acted in a "legitimate manner" in the eyes of the guerrillas struggling to overthrow President Somoza. They concede, however, that a post-Somoza Nicaragua will very likely fuel opposition to the oppressive regimes of £1 Salvador and Guatemala, and they don't rule out the possibility of cordial relations between a new Nicaraguan government and Cuba's premier, Fidel Castro. "We want as broadly based a government as possible," says one State Department observer, "but we mustn't con­ sider a friendship with Cuba the apocalypse."21

Each sentence of this passage begged a question. What is a "purely Marxist" government, and how could neighbors prevent its occur­ rence? What can it mean for capitalists to act in a "legitimate manner" in the eyes of Marxists? And to whom was the question of mere "friendship" or "cordial relations" with Cuba a main concern? It is of course impossible to know whether the tendentiousness in all this stemmed from Huey's source or from Huey himself, for elsewhere in the same piece Huey exhibited an ideological bent. He described Cuba as "the only Marxist revolutionary government in a region dominated by repressive military dictatorships,"22 implying that Cas-

47 NEWS COVERAGE OF THE SANDINISTA REVOLUTION

tro's government was neither repressive nor a dictatorship. Huey went on to portray the stakes in Nicaragua quoting Harvard scholar Abraham Lowenthal: " 'The real threat is to American hegemony. ... The U.S. doesn't want to lose ability to control the rules of the game.'" This formulation echoed the view of the radical left that American imperialism was at the root of the conflict between the United States and the Sandinistas. And because it was not balanced by any quotations from scholars of contrary opinion, it seems to have echoed Huey's views, as well. Although reporters with this kind of ideological bent had little trouble finding American officials who would reinforce it, the prevail­ ing interpretation within the government was less sanguine about the Sandinistas. The Carter administration has been criticized for failing to prevent the Sandinistas from seizing power. And some have sug­ gested that the press lulled it into indifference about the FSLN. Although press reports about the Sandinistas in the year before they took power were indeed often misleading, I have found little evidence that the administration-which had its own sources of information­ was misled. It failed to prevent the Sandinistas from coming out on top in Nicaragua not because it did not wish to do so but because it did not know how to do so or because this was not its paramount objec­ tive. If the press had little influence on the views of the U.S. govern­ ment, it is equally interesting that the government seems to have had little influence on the press. While reports out of Washington men­ tioned the worries of American officials that the Sandinistas might lead Nicaragua to Communism, reports out of Central America re­ flected a more optimistic view of the nature and goals of this FSLN and continued to do so right through the revolution's triumph on July 19, 1979. Notes 1. July 23, 1978, p. A26. 2. February 1, 1979, p. AI. 3. June 22, 1979, p. AI. 4. June 23, 1979, p. A17. 5. June 19, 1979, p. AID. 6. June 14, 1979, p. A41. 7. June 28, 1979, p. A24. 8. July 1, 1979, p. A27. 9. July 5, 1979, p. A17. 10. July 8, 1979, p. C7. 11. November 3, 1978, strike edition. 12. June 27, 1979, p. A3. 48 VIEWS OF THE U.S. GOVERNMENT

13. June 23, 1979. 14. July 4, 1979, p. A3. 15. June 21, 1979, p. A13. 16. July 6, 1979, p. AI. 17. No by-line, June 30, 1979, p. 44. 18. June 26, 1979. 19. July 6, 1979. 20. July 13, 1979. 21. June 19, 1979, p. 10. 22. June 19, 1979, p. 10.

49 4 After Somoza's Fall: The New Nicaragua

"The character of the new government is the big question mark now," said the Washington Post the morning after power had been formally handed over to Nicaragua's triumphant rebels. 1 Would it become democratic or Communist or something else? Who would wield effec­ tive power? Would Nicaragua become nonaligned or join the Eastern bloc? These questions were more complicated than the question of identifying the ideology of the Sandinistas before they came to power. Not surprisingly, significant discrepancies appeared between, even within, news organizations in the pictures drawn of Nicaragua in its first year under Sandinista rule.

Media Portrayals of the Regime

In the Washington Post, Karen DeYoung's reports tended to give a somewhat rosier image of Sandinista Nicaragua than did those of her colleagues. When the junta was inaugurated amid a huge rally in Nicaragua, DeYoung reported: While the junta's program remained vague, today's inaugu­ ral and victory speeches contained little to sustain fears shared by the United States and conservative Nicaraguans that the country will move far to the left. Rather, the junta members and guerrilla leaders spoke of unity, the elimination of vestiges of Somoza and the hard task ahead of reconstructing a devastated country. 2 The New York Times's Alan Riding, covering the same rally, chose to quote a portion from the speech by the FSLN leader and new

Interior Minister Tomas Borge: 1/ 'The war against the National Guard was difficult and bloody,' he said. 'Now a new war starts, a war against backwardness, against poverty, against ignorance, against immorality, against destruction. This war is more difficult, tough and prolonged than the previous wars.' "3 Riding offered no interpreta-

50 THE NEW NICARAGUA tion of this statement (which DeYoung did not mention at all), al­ though it might have given pause to careful observers. The key issue, after all, was whether the victors would allow a democratic process to begin or whether the FSLN had its own blueprint for the "new Nicaragua" and was determined to remake the country according to its specifications. Borge's declaration clearly suggested the latter. Two days later, DeYoung reported: As the first successful Latin American revolution since Cuba, won by guerrilla fighters whose leadership is openly leftist, and in some cases Marxist, Nicaragua is well aware that the world is watching it. In building a new society here, the five-member guerrilla­ appointed junta has stated that its aim is to be democratic. ... The big questions concerning Nicaragua's future re­ main.... Among them are when the junta will hold prom­ ised elections and what will be done with the thousands of National Guard soldiers now in makeshift jails or designated refugee centers.4 In the same article DeYoung reported on an initial group of decrees announced by the new government. These, she said, "autho­ rize prison sentences of from three to ten years" for various crimes, including "revealing state secrets relating to defense or matters of foreign policy." Even more alarming, DeYoung reported that "lesser punishments ... are prescribed" for a second list of crimes including "issuing 'verbal or written expressions that intend wounding popular interests or taking away prestige from the conquests achieved by the people.'" Although DeYoung pointed out that this last crime was "vaguely worded," she otherwise conveyed little alarm about where such laws might lead. Her summary judgment was this: "The laws project the new government as highly moralistic, concerned about state security, [and] politically liberal in a social democratic mold." This was characteristic of much of DeYoung's reporting, which often mentioned worrisome things about the Sandinistas but in a reassuring light. Several days later she wrote a feature story on Tomas Borge. "U.S. officials consider Borge one of the most radical Sandi­ nistas because of his lengthy fight against the Somoza dynasty, his cordial relationship with Fidel Castro, and his strident denunciations of imperialism from the north," she reported. "They are concerned that the minis~ry he operates has control over national security and police forces." Then she added: "But while his background, style and ideology resemble the Cuban leader, Borge so far has conducted himself as a model representative of the new coalition government." And she quoted Borge: "'Some of us have distinct ideologies, but we

51 NEWS COVERAGE OF THE SANbINISTA REVOLUTION are working together for the reconstruction of the country.'''5 De­ Young's appraisal missed the main point. Borge may have conducted himself cooperatively with his colleagues and decorously in public, but the real question was whether he would use the Interior Ministry to establish an apparatus of political coercion. It was perhaps too early to tell, but DeYoung's profile did not even discuss the question. After July 1979, DeYoung stopped covering Nicaragua regularly, but she returned there four months later to file a feature series in which she described the country as "neither Communist, nor total­ itarian, nor particularly democratic."6 It was, she said, a "jumbled semi-socialism" where "radical rhetoric fights a daily battle with harsh realities." She wrote that "while it remains unclear who is running the country, and by what rules, the Sandinista organization has placed itself in a position to do so, by any rules it wants." She reported that "the government has put off elections indefinitely [and] postponed ... the creation of a promised legislative council." Then she added: "The government maintains that the original makeup of the council, conceived to reflect wartime coalitions, is no longer an accurate reflec­ tion of political reality and that the list will have to be reworked. It also argues there is neither time nor energy at this point for the risky business of electoral politics." DeYoung neither endorsed nor chal­ lenged these explanations in her own voice, nor did she quote any critics who were alarmed by this turn of events. This was rather low­ key treatment for what amounted to flat abrogation by the Sandinistas of the most important proclaimed goal of their revolution, to establish democracy, a goal that DeYoung herself had repeatedly reported. DeYoung's feature also contained capsule descriptions of FSLN leaders Daniel Ortega and Jaime Wheelock. She wrote: "Stiff, unsmil­ ing and given to harsh 'anti-imperialist' statements in public, Ortega is described by both the government's civilian members and foreign diplomats as a shrewd pragmatist in private." Of Wheelock she said: "Soft-spoken and studious, he is known as a militant socialist scholar. But outsiders tend to consider Wheelock the most 'intellectual' and 'reasonable' of the Sandinistas." Given her earlier profile of Borge and the fact that Wheelock, Ortega, and Borge were respectively the heads of the three FSLN factions, a reader of DeYoung's might con­ clude that the three factions were the soft-spoken reasonable intellec­ tuals, the shrewd pragmatic moderates, and the pragmatic model coalitionists. For much of the year following the FSLN victory, most of the Post's coverage of Nicaragua was written by Charles A. Krause. Krause's stories gave a more disturbing impression of what was going

52 THE NEW NICARAC;UA on in Nicaragua than did DeYoung's. Only three days after the new government was installed, Krause reported: The Andean countries ... are hoping ... that Nicaragua, after a period of rebuilding, will become another liberal de­ mocracy like its neighbor, Costa Rica.... This view, however, is considered naive by many Latin observers, including the respected English-language Buenos Aires Herald, [which said recently] "Should they behave as Marxist Leninists always have ... the day may not be very distant when it will be realized that, evil as Somoza's one­ man dictatorship was, it was less evil than the systematic totalitarianism ... which may soon be established in Nic­ aragua."7

On August 1, less than two weeks after the rebels took power and only days after DeYoung had written about how nicely Tomas Borge was cooperating with his colleagues, a Post story by Krause, titled "Sandinistas Indicate They Will Keep Power in Nicaragua," clearly foresaw the painful direction in which Nicaragua was headed. Krause wrote: In two sessions in the last four days, televised for the nation ... the top Sandinista leaders ... showed that they know what kind of society they want to create and that they have every intention of retaining sufficient control-through the army, national police and trusted lieutenants in each key ministry-to ensure that their revolutionary ideas are carried out by the civilian junta government they placed in power. "There are many people asking who is the government of Nicaragua," Daniel Ortega, a member of the Sandinista di­ rectorate, said ... "the Sandinista National Liberation Front or the Junta of National Reconstruction. "It is wrong to think that the Sandinista Front was only a military organization. It was, is and will continue to be a political organization," he said.... "We are going to stay until our program is fully accom­ plished," Ortega said. At least for the moment, they seem to be tempering their decidedly leftist and possibly authoritarian views with rhet­ oric and actions designed more to reassure their potential enemies than their supporters-both inside and outside Nic­ aragua. But it was evident throughout both of the sessions that the Sandinistas see their current conciliatory positions and state­ ments as only a first stage in what they have always said will

53 NEWS COVERAGE OF THE SANDINISTA REVOLUTION

be a far more sweeping revolution than what they have proposed for the present.... Bayardo Arce, a former journalism professor and member of the Sandinista directorate, explained that until now the new Government of National Reconstruction and the Sandi­ nista directorate thought it best to allow only one news­ paper, one radio station and one television channel-all controlled by them-to operate. "We support freedom of the press," Arce continued. "But, of course, the freedom of the press we support will be a freedom of the press that supports the revolution." On the subject of national unity, especially during the crucial months ahead when Nicaragua must undertake ex­ traordinary measures if it is to rebuild, Ortega warned that those who disagreed with the decisions made by the junta and the Sandinistas might fall into the category of trai­ tors.... The kind of society they have planned and are beginning to explain may not be what everyone had in mind. It will favor the workers, the peasants and the poor, the Sandinistas said, those who were so long neglected during the Somoza years. It will also entail sacrifice, which the Sandinista leaders acknowledge has thus far meant restrictions on certain liber­ ties considered important in Western democracies but often abridged in revolutionary situations. "Those who did not understand the revolution," Arce said, "thought that half an hour after Somoza's fall there would be absolute liberty."8 Krause's story on the two televised sessions of the FSLN National Directorate was important and insightful. Surprisingly, although these sessions must have been viewed by other U.S. correspondents stationed in Nicaragua, as far as I can tell none of the other news media examined in this study carried stories about them. A few weeks later, Krause reported on the reopening of Nic- aragua's public schools:

For the next month, the schools will be open and their teachers will be in place but the normal curriculum will remain suspended. Instead of learning how to read, write and do arithmetic, the children will spend their time learn­ ing about the Sandinista revolution, its history, principles and goals...... The system's ten thousand teachers ... spent the last two weeks attending special courses designed to teach them how to present the material. ...

54 THE NEW NICARAGUA

... At the heart of the month's activities will be the courses about the revolution. Their content will undoubt­ edly be of great interest to local and foreign observers, who will be watching to see whether it explains or indoctrinates.9 A few weeks later, another Krause story reported that "moderates within Nicaragua's victorious guerrilla movement formed the Sandi­ nista Social Democratic Party today, saying that it will work for a Western-style democracy here. In doing so they raised a challenge to Marxists within the Sandinista guerrilla movement who have said they intend to work for a Communist-style 'dictatorship of the peo­ ple' in Nicaragua."lo Krause went on: "Even before the party officially announced its formation at a press conference this morning, Interior Minister Tomas Borge criticized the new political group as potentially divisive. The Social Democrats' slogan is 'Sandinismo, si! Commu­ nismo, no!' " Krause added: "The new government has, in the opinion of most observers, pursued a moderate course.... Within the National Lib­ eration Front and the civilian government, however, are dedicated Marxists who have made no secret of their view that the current phase of the revolution is simply a step toward creation of a 'dictatorship of the people.' " Within several months after seizure of power in July 1979, U.S. press coverage of Nicaragua diminished radically until April 1980, when Violetta Chamorro and Alfonso Robelo, the two moderate members of the junta, resigned. The crisis sparked by their resigna­ tions propelled Nicaragua back into the headlines. That crisis was covered for the Post mostly by Christopher Dickey, who gave a rather upbeat account of the Sandinistas' efforts to patch up the damage. In retrospect, we can see that the resignations of Chamorro and Robelo marked a crucial turning point: little room was left for hope that the revolution's democratic promises would be kept. But it is hard to fault Dickey, who wrote without the benefit of hindsight. For the Sandi­ nistas did pull back at that moment, at least cosmetically, offering several concessions and filling the vacant junta seats with two other respected moderates, Arturo Cruz and Rafael Cordova. By July 1980, the first anniversary of the Sandinistas' victory and the end of the period covered in this study, Dickey was still reporting on the concessions made by the Sandinistas but also on some ominous portents. Dickey wrote: "Since the resignation of two non­ Sandinistas from the governing junta in April, the private sector and the Sandinistas have come a long way toward reaching an under­ standing about their mutual contributions to Nicaragua's develop­ ment."ll But he also said that "by failing to announce a date for 55 NEWS COVERAGE OF THE SANDINISTA REVOLUTION municipal elections, as the still-influential private sector here has demanded, the Sandinistas may have laid the groundwork for a major internal crisis in the coming weeks." Dickey also reported: A preoccupation with security has been building here for the past few weeks. All cameras, tape recorders and radios were searched at the Managua airport. One cab driver said he and his colleagues were required to report where they drove correspondents, and three jour­ nalists in a private car who visited the house of an opposition leader were tailed from the time they left the leader's home. Sandinista junta member Moises Hassan, asked to name the major accomplishments of the first year, listed the organ­ ization of the state security forces, the Army, the militia and the police. Whereas at the Washington Post, the change from Karen DeYoung to Charles A. Krause had brought a change in perspective, the New York Times continued with the same main correspondent in Nic­ aragua, Alan Riding, the year after the Sandinista victory as the year before, and he continued to present an optimistic picture. A few stories filed in the first weeks of Sandinista rule by corre­ spondent Warren Hoge offered some contrast to this optimism. The day after the junta was installed, for example, Hoge filed a story based on an interview with junta leader Sergio Ramirez. The story was not at all critical of Ramirez but contained important clues about where the government was heading. Hoge quoted Ramirez as saying: /I ~t the moment I am less concerned about representative democracy than in finding ways to give people food and jobs. Those two things are the only bases for stability.' " And later in the story Hoge allowed Ramirez to elaborate on his no-elections theme: /I 'This is an authentic revolu­ tion,' he continued. 'There are lots of boys who fought for a real revolution, and we can't just hold elections and say, "That's that.'" "12 The Times did not comment on the irony that these antidemocratic sentiments were expressed on the morning after taking power by the very junta member whom the Times, the Post, and even the Los Angeles Times had described during the previous months as a non-Marxist Social Democrat. Nor did the other papers take note of this. Something else in Hoge's report offered a revealing glimpse of Sandinista public relations strategy. He wrote: "Mr. Ramirez said he did not expect problems with the United States. 'What would make them react against us?' he said. 'If we were to say we're Marxist­ Leninist, but we're not going to do that.'" Ramirez's emphasis on not saying they were Marxist-Leninists and his avoidance of denying that they were Marxist-Leninists were profoundly suggestive.

56 THE NEW NICARAGUA

A week later, Hoge filed another eye-opening story from the city of Leon, which had been captured by the rebels weeks before their final victory over Somoza and hence had been under Sandinista rule longer than the rest of the country. Hoge reported: The five-week-old Sandinist government here in the coun­ try's second largest city has installed a tightly controlled administration based on communally shared property. ... In Leon, the people receive essential supplies from the central military command through a series of committees that have the power to expropriate and requisition without compensation. Money is not officially used and all labor is organized by the Sandinist forces. The arrangement departs significantly from the "mixed economy" outlined by theoreticians of the junta in which private enterprise would be encouraged in sections not run by state-owned institutions. The Leon plan is nominally to remain in effect only through the postwar "emergency," a period of about a month, or a year, depending on the source of information. But the leaders here are clearly hoping to make the emergency more permanent. Oscar Melendez, a 29-year-old mathematics teacher who directs the office of supplies for the region said, "I think that Leon can be the model for all of Nicaragua." "The junta is pushing for normalcy," he added, "but I think that sounds just like what we had before. We don't want reforms; we want socialism. We want something better, something organized." Mr. Melendez said he was a Marxist and that "there are a lot of people here who would like this to be a Marxist state."13 Later in the article, Hoge noted that "the Sandinist leaders of Leon live in a commandeered mansion with gardens and a swimming pool in the city's wealthy Santa Maria section." Hoge's occasional counterpoint was, however, overshadowed by the prevailing tenor of Riding's reporting and Times editorials. Their theme was captured in a Times op-ed article by free-lancer Tad Szulc, titled "Relax, Nicaragua Isn't Cuba,"14 dismissed "easy (and hys­ terical) analogies or conventional-wisdom conclusions" and declared that "Nicaragua will be a leftist, nonaligned nation, but this should not be equated with Communism." "While principal members of the Sandinist leadership in Managua are of Marxist persuasion, they belong to different tendencies, with Marxist moderates probably in ascendance-certainly for the time being." The most important of these, said Szulc, is Tomas Borge, "a pragmatic, experienced politician

57 NEWS COVERAGE OF THE SANDINISTA REVOLUTION

... , the oldest and most mature of Sandinist chiefs, a Marxist mod­ erate." Although Szulc contrasted his view with the "conventional wisdom," no op-ed piece that I can find appeared in the Times that year presenting that alleged conventional wisdom. A month after the new government took power, Richard Meislin reported in an upbeat piece in the Times that "military control is yielding to civilian rule around the country" and that "interviews with Government and military officials, diplomats, businessmen and workers indicate that the immediate needs for reconstruction far out­ weigh any interest in ideological sparring to define Sandinism as it moves beyond the tenet that brought it to power-opposition to the Somoza regime."lS This, too, was wide of the mark, because if the Sandinistas were Leninists, they would not move to consolidate their power by means of ideological sparring but by forging tools of coer­ cion and seizing positions of power. Meislin went on to report that: So far, local governments are being established by a loose democratic process in which thousands of citizens gather in a town square and indicate by a show of hands whether they approve or reject candidates for three- and five-member local boards. Most candidates have been approved, but when nominees have been rejected, the junta has abided by the will of the people. But because Meislin cited no example of such an exercise of independent popular will, it was impossible to know whether he was describing something he had actually witnessed or something he had been told. A week later, the Times editorialized: "The hardest tests still lie ahead for the new rulers of Nicaragua.... But in recent days the Sandinists have shown signs that their interest in pluralism is not merely rhetorical." Five months after the new government took power, Alan Riding surveyed its progress in an article in the Times Sunday Magazine. "For the former rebels," wrote Riding, "the consuming interest in their lives has switched overnight from destruction to construction." Riding wrote that "the segments of the population that are feeling the revolution most keenly are the city slums.... The barrio, for­ merly a breeding ground for disease, crime and despair, has today developed a new sense of purpose and unity." Later in the article he said that "the government worked quickly to form communes and give possession of the farms to landless peasants. Thousands of landless peasants are now working their 'own' land, and the cheerful mood of the countryside contrasts sharply with that of the cities."

58 THE NEW NICARAGUA

Riding also quoted Sandinista Commandante Bayardo Arce: "'The bourgeoisie thought we were a bunch of brave, dedicated boys who would fight to the death to overthrow Somoza and then say, "Here you are. Now give me a scholarship to finish my degree." ... Now they're surprised we have a political project.' " The meaning of this statement was that the FSLN had no inten­ tion of instituting democracy as they had promised so often. Instead, they intended to keep power in their own hands and remake Nic­ aragua according to their own preferences: this was a hint from the Sandinistas' own lips that they intended to turn Nicaragua into a Communist state. But Riding did not see it this way and instead reassured Times readers that "the objective, say revolutionary leaders, who aspire to transform society without eradicating political freedom, is to build 'another Nicaragua'-and not another Cuba, Yugoslavia or Costa Rica."16 A month later Riding reported: "While the Government has re­ stored stability without eliminating individual freedoms or con­ doning reprisals against followers of the ousted Somoza regime, it is still struggling with a problem of confidence."I? Businessmen were not investing, and the poor were growing disillusioned at the lack of "dramatic improvement in their living conditions." Riding quoted Sergio Ramirez as saying: "'We have to solve the economic crisis, but do so in political terms.'" This was a typically opaque Sandinista formulation: it contained a real message but required some interpreta­ tion. In this case the message was that the FSLN was determined that its economic policies would be guided by ideology, not by economic considerations. But Riding said: "Significantly, the Government has refused to define its revolutionary model, arguing that it is guided more by pragmatism than by Marxist theory." And then he went on to suggest that the fate of Nicaragua rested not in the hands of the FSLN, but in those of the businessmen: More than the Cuban presence, many foreign diplomats believe, the performance of the Nicaraguan economy will be crucial to defining the ideological profile of the Sandinist revolution. "If the private sector does its bit, then it will help secure the political pluralism that it wants," a well-placed ambassador noted. The April 1980 resignations of junta members Robelo and Cham­ orro went unreported in the Times, save for a single paragraph in the "Week in Review" section a week after the event. Then a month later Riding expanded on the subject: Nicaragua's Sandinist government has turned out to be more radical than some of its original supporters had hoped, yet

59 NEWS COVERAGE OF THE SANDINISTA REVOLUTION

the regime's pragmatic response to its first big political crisis suggests that it is still committed to building its own brand of socialism, one that includes both political pluralism and a private sector. ... Visiting Managua in January, President Jose Lopez Portillo of Mexico suggested that the Sandinists were forging a new path between the justice without liberty of Cuba and the liberty without justice of his country. If this occurs, he said, a new model for all of Latin America will be born. That pos­ sibility is still alive. 18 By choosing this formulation of Lopez Portillo's to express his own assessment of the Sandinista revolution, Riding revealed not only tenacious optimism about where the FSLN was heading but also a generous evaluation of Castro's Cuba. The optimism about the FSLN was echoed by a Times editorial a few weeks later: ''A sharp swerve to the left is always possible, but f~r the moment there seems a genuine commitment to pluralism at home and nonalignment abroad."19 On the first anniversary of the FSLN victory, Riding wrote: "The regime's commitment to socialist revolution continues to be tempered by recognition that no ideology provides simple answers to Nic­ aragua's complex economic and social challenges.... Their rhetoric, above all in foreign policy, remains leftist, but their policies are prag­ matic or, at times, even conservative."20 Unlike the New York Times and the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times devoted less space to Nicaragua after the Sandinistas came to power than it had during the time of war against Somoza. Explicit analyses of the new Nicaragua were relatively rare. One exception was an editorial about three weeks into the new regime, which said that the new "government's words and deeds add up to a very mixed picture, thus far."21 The paper spoke of "disturbing cross-currents," citing the "talk of postponing elections for three years" and the crea­ tion of "committees for the defense of the revolution [which] sound distressingly similar to the watchdog system used effectively by the Castro regime." But, it concluded, ''American interests would not be served by seeing spooks under the bed before we are even sure that they are there." A week later the paper carried a column by Georgie Anne Geyer, which reflected no such ambivalence. She wrote: This new dialectic of revolutionary pragmatism-this new equation in which the "best" is not what is ideologically most nearly perfect but what is economically most workable-is what most dramatically sets apart this revolution.

60 THE NEW NICARAGUA

So, when the two key questions are asked, there must be new answers: Is Nicaragua inevitably to become a Cuban­ style, Marxist revolution? Absolutely not. Should the United States, with consideration, support the Nicaraguan revolu­ tion? Absolutely yes.... It is not that people like Borge ... do not want a Marxist state. They do. But the Sandinista movement is a movement of many groups, most of them some form of social democ­ racy or democratic socialism. It is the first revolution in history where the byword is not "purity" or "ideology" or "victory" but, in Spanish, compro­ miso. This means roughly, "obligation," sometimes "compro­ mise," and it refers to the early promise the various factions made to one another to reconstruct Nicaragua on a mixed public-private democratic basis. As Sergio Ramirez, a democratic member of the junta told me, "Here we are not two groups, we are groups with a compromiso on a project. .. ." Or, in the words of Daniel Ortega, an impressive young man who is the only person on both the junta and the Sandinista directorate: "This revolution has a compromiso with the entire country. That is about the national recon­ struction, and we're going to comply with it." ... So what Nicaragua really uniquely reflects today is the new pluralism in the world. It is an international reflection of the kinds of pluralism within the United States and within other developing, complex countries.22

In May 1980, the Los Angeles Times ran an editorial titled "Bad Signs in Nicaragua."23 The editorial cited human rights abuses, the resignations of Robelo and Chamorro from the junta, the postpone­ ment of elections, and the recently signed party-to-party accord be­ tween the Sandinistas and the Communist party of the Soviet Union. It concluded: "Premature judgments should be avoided. But, if the Sandinistas do insist on building a Communist revolution not through the democratic electoral process but through armed force and repression, the United States and the democratic governments in Latin America will face a painful new dilemma as to what can or should be done about it. "Fortunately, there is still a good chance that the Sandinistas themselves will find it prudent not to force the issue." Approaching the anniversary of Somoza's ouster, the Los Angeles Times's Sunday opinion section carried another of its periodic analyses by Richard Millett, this an enthusiastic account of the first year of Sandinista rule. It read in part:

61 NEWS COVERAGE OF THE SANDINISTA REVOLUTION

The institutionalized system of graft and nepotism which had dominated virtually every facet of government and com­ mercial life has been largely eliminated. Basic programs of agrarian reform, health care and education have been launched.... To the Sandinistas' credit, there was no blood bath follow­ ing Somoza's fall. There have been scattered acts of ven­ geance, but official policy is to deal with former Somoza supporters through imprisonment or exile. Conditions in Nicaraguan jails, as might be expected, leave much to be desired and trial procedures are often questionable. But by the standards of prior revolutions this one has been remark­ ably lenient. ... Moreover, significant segments of the Roman Catholic and Protestant churches continue to work with the Marxist-influ­ enced Sandinistas. Two priests serve in the cabinet and an­ other directs the national literacy campaign.... During this first year, both political pluralism and stability have been maintained.... Providing the bulk of the population with such basics as education, health care and sufficient agricultural land headed the Sandinista agenda. Their most impressive ac­ complishment has been a massive national campaign to stamp out illiteracy.... Nearing its six-month end, the drive will apparently be a major success. ... Peasants and urban slum dwellers can see the state's positive interest in them. Of perhaps equal importance, tens of thousands of urban, middle-class "teachers" have been directly exposed to the realities of poverty, isolation and ignorance which charac­ terize the lives of a majority of their nation's population. The participants have been inculcated with a sense of respon­ sibility for changing such conditions and with a feeling of pride and positive accomplishment. They have become a significant, enthusiastic source of political support. Agrarian reform has also begun to have positive social impact...... The revolution's first year must be rated a success in political, social and even economic terms. But both domestic and international pressures on the Sandinistas are likely to increase during the coming year. However, the possibility that the revolution can both respect individual rights and still meet the needs of the mass of its citizens remains very real. 24 The Wall Street Journal also carried very little explicit analysis of the new Nicaragua. A rare exception was an article by correspondent Beth Nissen evaluating the first six months of Sandinista rule. It said

62 THE NEW NICARAGUA that "Nicaraguans are beginning to question-politely, but with in­ creasing intensity-the actions and intentions of their Sandinist gov­ ernment."25 After listing some of the questions, Nissen said: "There are clues, however, and many of them are encouraging. The collective Sandinist government, for all its ideological factions, continues to function with surprising harmony and tranquillity." Nissen con­ cluded with this: Members of the new Nicaraguan government insist the Sandinist revolution and its ultimate results will prove unique. "We keep telling the whole world we are not another Cuba," says moderate junta member Alfonso Robelo, who is clearly weary of the comparison. "North Americans once had a revolution, too. Why is it no one asks if we will follow their model?"

Two months later, Robelo resigned from the junta, charging the Sandinistas with taking Nicaragua in a totalitarian direction. The Journal reported his resignation in a single sentence. The Economist, although it gave only a tiny fraction of the amount of coverage to Nicaragua that was given by the U.S. newspapers, did carry several articles assessing Nicaragua's future in the year after the FSLN came to power. A few weeks after the takeover, the Economist ran a story titled "Who Inherits Nicaragua?"26 The paper said that the question was: "Will the Sandinists turn out to be gringo-baiting na­ tionalists with little bite, like Panama's rulers? Or social democrats like those recently in power in Costa Rica or Venezuela? Or, living up to their neighbours' worst fears, mini-Castros in the making?" It said there had been good signs and bad. Among the bad it included the emergence of Tomas Borge, who "may prove to be the ruler. He is the interior minister ... , one of the founders of the Sandinist movement and the leader of its 'prolonged popular war' faction-that is, the Marxist-Leninist wing closest to Fidel Castro's Cuba." Then it added: "Mr Borge may not be representative of the whole Sandinist move­ ment. The larger Tercerista wing has much vaguer ideas of the kind of socialism it would like to see come to Nicaragua. But in the land of the vague, the clear-eyed Marxist is king." In early April 1980, before Robelo and Chamorro resigned from the junta, the Economist asked, "What is the evidence from Nic­ aragua's nine-month-old revolution?"27 It answered that the evidence on whether Nicaragua would "go the Cuban way" was mixed. But even the encouraging evidence had to be qualified with the recollec­ tion that "10 months after Fidel Castro's victory in Cuba in 1959 there were still moderates in the Cuban government; political pluralism had

63 NEWS COVERAGE OF THE SANDINISTA REVOLUTION not yet been completely suppressed; the show trials of non-Commu­ nists had not yet begun. Nicaragua's early revolutionary appetites seem much the same as Cuba's." The article concluded that "the evidence from Nicaragua is still mixed, though it seems to be tilting the wrong way." A few weeks later, the Economist reported: "The resignation this week of the two non-Marxist members of Nicaragua's junta ... marked the first open break between the Sandinista National Libera­ tion Front and its less radical allies who also fought for the overthrow of the Somoza regime last year. Relations between the two groups have been steadily deteriorating as the Sandinist leaders showed themselves to be more anticapitalist and less tolerant of criticism than had been expected."28 Two weeks later, the Economist elaborated on this story, alluding to Robelo's accusation "that the revolution was moving in a 'total­ itarian direction'" and saying that "the revolution stands at the crossroads between collectivism and pluralism." But much of the article suggested that it may have already passed the crossroads. "The revolution's canter towards Cuban-style socialism turned into a gallop last month," it said.29 Of the three television networks, only NBC, which gave the most coverage to Nicaragua in the time frame of this study, had stories assessing the direction of the new Nicaragua. Immediately after the takeover, NBC's Art Kent reported: "The main question seems to be whether this nation's new leaders will make it into another Cuba."30 He then interviewed Sergio Ramirez, who replied that the new gov­ ernment's goal was "no right, no left, just Nicaragua." Then he con­ trasted Ramirez's view with that of a National Guard captain who "thinks all of Central America will go Communist." In the next weeks, NBC aired two stories about revolutionary Nicaragua: one, an inter­ view by Kent of a Nicaraguan psychologist who claimed that the black and red Sandinista bandana was valuable in the psychological reha­ bilitation of Nicaraguan children;31 and the other, a special report by Jon Alpert, a pro-Sandinista free lance whose amateurish and pro­ pagandistic broadcasts were aired several times by NBC during this period.32 But in April 1980, before Robelo and Chamorro resigned from the junta, NBC broadcast an extraordinary, hard-hitting "special segment" titled "Nicaragua Turns Left." This report dwelt on human rights violations by the FSLN government, including "mass execu­ tions"; government control of information; and the growth of Soviet and Cuban influence in Nicaragua. The segment ended with the disconsonant suggestion that things could still be put right in Nic­ aragua if "the United States steps up its aid and support."33

64 THE NEW NICARAGUA

Domestic Issues

From the time the revolutionary government took power, the ques­ tion of the direction or nature of the Nicaraguan revolution has divided into two main issues: what kind of political system was being put into place internally, and how was Nicaragua aligning itself exter­ nally, especially in relation to Cuba and the USSR on the one hand and the United States on the other? The domestic question has been judged by several different barometers.

Who Rules? Was the five-member junta, the official government of the country, really in charge, or was it just a facade behind which power was held by the FSLN commandantes? The importance of this question was that the junta, although Sandinista dominated, con­ tained two non-Sandinistas symbolizing the revolution's pledge of political pluralism. In contrast, the Sandinista directorate was uni­ formly Marxist-Leninist. Moreover, the junta, though unelected, was to some extent legitimized by its widespread international recogni­ tion, while the directorate held its position solely by authority of the gun. Of the news outlets examined in this study, only the Economist and, to a lesser extent, the Washington Post, showed any appreciation of this issue. In a story soon after the takeover, the Post's Karen DeYoung said that "a key to how far left Nicaragua will go is how much influence Sandinista militants have over the junta."34 This was not quite right, because the problem did not concern merely Sandi­ nista "militants," it concerned the Sandinistas as a whole, and the issue centered less on who wielded influence over the junta than on whether the junta itself would have any influence. Still, DeYoung was pointing in the right direction. Eight days later, the Post's Charles A. Krause reported that "Nicaragua's new rulers took steps that demon­ strated that the Sandinistas themselves-and not the five-member junta they named to govern the country-will keep control of Nic­ aragua's security apparatus at least for now."35 Krause reported that "Defense Minister Bernardino Larios, a former officer in the National Guard who is considered a moderate, was conspicuously absent at a press conference last night at which the new general command was announced." At the press conference, said Krause, "Sandinista lead­ ers ... made clear that they, rather than the defense minister or the junta, will keep control of the country's new security apparatus for the foreseeable future. They refused to discuss what political role the new army and police force might have." Four months later, DeYoung explained in a feature story: "While

65 NEWS COVERAGE OF THE SANDINISTA REVOLUTION it remains unclear who is running this country, and by what rules, the Sandinista organization has placed itself in a position to do so by any rules it wants." And she added: "Sandinista military commands paral­ lel new civilian administrations in every municipality in the coun­ try."36 In contrast, the only explicit reference I could find in the New York Times to this question of the relative weight of the junta and the FSLN was the assertion that the problem no longer existed. Times reporter Richard J. Meislin reported one month after the new government took power that "the perception that the Sandinist military leadership and not the five-member junta was running the country, which was preva­ lent in diplomatic circles and among some junta members themselves only two weeks ago, has virtually disappeared."3? The Los Angeles Times had little if anything on this, until running a Reuters story in April 1980: "Robelo ... said he resigned because government policy changes had been made without consensus," it said.38 But considerably more was at stake than the absence of con­ sensus, as the Economist made clear. The Econonlist reported in its first issue after the takeover that "the junta will be trying to assert its authority over the 9-member Sandinist directorate."39 Two months later it reported: The social democratic member of the junta, Alfonso Robelo, says that the junta takes its decisions by majority vote and that Commander Daniel Ortega, the only junta member who also sits on the Sandinist directorate, merely informs his colleagues of the Sandinist view: he says he has no right of veto. Mr Robelo insists that the power of the Sandinist army, which was decisive in time of war, is diminishing in time of peace: "Every day the junta has more control". It may be so, but few observers doubt who would win a confrontation between the junta and the directorate.4o Then, when Robelo resigned from the junta, the Economist car- ried this account: Mr Robelo ... makes no bones about why he went. "The last drop", he told your correspondent, came when the Sand­ inists announced the composition of the new council of state, a body with legislative powers, whose membership had been strictly laid down in the Sandinist "bible"-the programme of government agreed upon when they took office last July. The Sandinists proposed to tear up the July plan, which entitled them to 13 out of 33 seats on the council, and instead helped themselves to 24 seats out of a council expanded to 47.

66 THE NEW NICARAGUA

When the junta came to vote on this proposal, Mr Robelo and Mrs Chamorro opposed it, while Mr Ramirez and a Sandinist leader Mr Moises Hassan, supported it. But in place of the fifth member of the junta, Commander Daniel Ortega, who was swanning round Africa, three Sandinist leaders turned up to tilt the vote 5:2. Mr Robelo describes this procedure mildly as "irregular". The junta has long been treated with contempt by Sand­ inist leaders. "There were many other cases when the junta did not make the final decision," says Mr Robelo. "I did not want to be a puppet". When, for example, the junta decided to back the United Nations resolution condemning the Rus­ sian invasion of Afghanistan, its leading Sandinist, Com­ mander Daniel Ortega, asked for time to refer the question to the nine-man Sandinist directorate. To their astonishment, junta members were later told that Nicaragua's ambassador to the UN had abstained on the vote-on the instructions of the directorate.41 Nothing like this eye-opening account of the inner workings of the Nicaraguan government appeared in any of the U.S. news outlets examined in this study, although Robelo must have been as accessible to their correspondents as he was to the Economist's.

Elections and Civil Liberties. The most important indicators of the kind of political system that was emerging in Nicaragua were whether the new government would hold free elections as it had repeatedly promised during its fight for power and whether it would allow freedom of the press and other liberties. If the fundamental question was whether the new Nicaragua would be democratic or dictatorial, these issues constituted the "bottom line." Yet few news reports focused on these issues. During the first year of Sandinista rule, the TV networks carried nothing at all on these subjects and the Wall Street Journal carried almost nothing. The clearest reporting on the all-important question of elections was in the Economist. In September 1979, it reported:

Commander Borge says that an election could come sooner than people expect, but that its main purpose is to put "its juridical stamp" on Sandinista rule. The Sandinists are al­ ready putting together a political party. "Counter-revolution­ ary" parties will not be allowed to stand. The commander thinks that the Sandinists' main opponent will be a social democratic party, but pours scorn on any suggestion that it could win. 42

67 NEWS COVERAGE OF THE SANDINISTA REVOLUTION

The same article also reported that "the junta is committed to an independent judiciary and a free press, within limits that have proved ominous elsewhere: 'We must not allow the freedom of expression we enjoy today to attack the revolution,' says Commander Humberto Ortega." In May 1980, the Economist reported:

Mr Ramirez breezily told your correspondent that no date had been set for the election originally promised by the Sandinists because elections "are not a priority for the gov­ ernment: literacy, housing and health are". Mr Ramirez says that it will take years to make arrangements for an election in a country which has hardly had a free election before. The election, he says, can be held only when Nicaraguans are literate and educated enough to know how to make proper use of their ballots. Mr Ramirez claims that the Sandinists would anyway win an election by an overwhelming majority. "Yes," says Mr Robelo drily: "a 99.9% majority."43

Of the U.S. dailies examined in this study, the Washington Post had the most frequent coverage of the election question and other civil liberties issues. The day after the junta was installed, the Post's Terri Shaw reported that "the junta's nominal leader, Sergio Ramirez, said in an interview this week that elections for local governments, a constitutional assembly and a new national government would be held within two years."44 A few weeks later, the Post's Charles Krause reported that "the junta said it had begun a series of municipal 'elections'-which will use a system that probably would be consid­ ered undemocratic by Western standards."45 The system Krause de­ scribed, citing Moises Hassan as his source, involved town meetings at which those attending were given the opportunity to vote yea or nay on a slate presented by leadership groups. Several other articles by Krause in the ensuing months gave glimpses of civil liberties problems. In mid-August 1979, Krause re­ ported on Nicaraguans' unhappiness with the long lines and delays involved in getting permits to exit the country. "In order to obtain [a permit] a citizen must first find three witnesses to vouch for his personal data and then obtain the signature of the head of his neigh­ borhood Sandinista defense committee and the Sandinista military authority in his city or region," wrote Krause. "The new government here," he said, "does not want to appear to be restricting the right of emigration ... which might give the unwanted appearance of the beginnings of a totalitarian state. At the same time the Sandinista-

68 THE NEW NICARAGUA backed junta is determined to stop certain Somoza supporters from leaving Nicaragua."46 A week later Krause reported that "the ruling revolutionary junta put into effect today a provisional bill of rights that provides for almost all the basic rights guaranteed in the United States and promises social programs that would go beyond those available in many Western democracies."47 But Krause also noted that the rights included "freedom of expression except in situations affect­ ing national security, the country's economic well-being or public order," and he observed that "most Latin American countries have constitutions at least as sweeping that, however, are subject to breach when it comes to specifics." The next month, Krause wrote a story on specific incidents of human rights abuses under the new government based on accounts that appeared in the independent newspaper, La Prensa. 48 In her November 1979 feature, Karen DeYoung reported that "the government has put off elections indefinitely," in light of which her characterization of the government as "no[t] particularly democratic" seems understated.49 In early April 1980, before Chamorro's and Robelo's resignations from the junta, the Post carried an important story by Terri Shaw tying together the absence of elections with other ominous developments. She reported on "a growing political polar­ ization" in which "Nicaraguans who are not firmly committed to the Sandinistas' plans to remake Nicaraguan society have begun to accuse the government of restricting political freedoms and to demand elec­ tions."so Shaw also reported: A leader of the [non-Sandinist] labor federation ... said his office has been shot at, leaders had been detained and Sandi­ nista commanders had tried to break up union meetings. Leaders of all the opposition parties complained that they have no access to the Sandinista-run TV network and have difficulty getting their opinions broadcast on radio.... In a well-attended rally here two weeks ago, Robelo told a wildly enthusiastic crowd his party believes in "Ideological pluralism, effective democracy ... electoral freedom, the free interchange and publication of ideas and freedom to organize." The Sandinista Front has taken a hard line in re­ sponse.... It has said that instead of 'bourgeois freedom' of traditional democracies, the revolution is providing a new kind of freedom.... It has said opposition parties represent only the interests of the bourgeoisie.... After Robelo's widely publicized rally, the nine-member Sandinista National Directorate called on him to "reflect" on his "errors."

69 NEWS COVERAGE OF THE SANDINISTA REVOLUTION

Shaw returned to these subjects three weeks later in a story about Robelo's resignation from the junta. "People who are unhappy with the Sandinista government have complained of restrictions of free­ dom of expression, the failure to set a date for elections and growing ties with communist countries," she said.51 The New York Times had less coverage of civil liberties issues, although it too covered the junta's August promulgation of the bill of rights, and reporter Richard J. Meislin observed that "the bill of rights includes a right to freedom of expression.... But it also allows these rights to be limited in cases where their exercise might harm public, national or economic security; defense of order and prevention of crime; protection of health or morals, and the 'dignity of people and the reputation and rights of others.' "52 Another Meislin story touched briefly on the emigration issue. He said that "damaging to the economy is the continued absence of many businessmen and middle managers who fled during the heavy fighting that ousted Mr. Somoza. They are discouraged from returning, businessmen say, because of limits on free exit from the country-which the Govern­ ment says are necessary to prevent Somoza allies from escaping-and because they are waiting for a clearer sign of what political direction the Government will take."53 Notable in the Times's coverage was the almost total absence of reporting on these issues by its major Nicaragua correspondent, Alan Riding, and by the lack of coverage of the all-important question of whether elections would be held. A rare exception appeared in Rid­ ing's Times Magazine article of December 1979, where he wrote: "The Government remains committed to holding full elections within per­ haps four years, although it seems inconceivable that it will involve more than a legitimization of the Sandinists' power." The words "remains committed" in this sentence were strange, since what was being reported was not the continuation of a commitment so much as the abrogation of one. The government had pledged often to hold elections sooner, and the Times had not previously reported that it had lengthened the timetable. And what did it mean to hold "full elec­ tions" in which a transfer of power "seems inconceivable"? ("No doubt, by 1983 [the FSLN] will have an unbeatable machine," ex­ plained Riding.) He continued: "Other parties would likely be given seats in Congress. If such an arrangement comes about, it will be more analogous to Mexico's system, where the long-ruling Institu­ tional Revolutionary Party permits opposition parties and media, than to Cuba's one man rule."54 The one other time that Riding gave a good glimpse of civil liberties problems in Nicaragua seems to have been inadvertent. In a

70 THE NEW NICARAGUA generally upbeat story about church-state relations titled "New Nic­ aragua Regime Recognizes Church's Potent Role," he quoted Daniel Ortega: "You have to remember that the participation of the church in our revolution was exceptional. ... This gives the revolutionary church deep roots in our society. The revolutionary church will sur­ vive because it is compatible. What cannot survive is a church that cannot understand the revolution."55 In fact the Sandinistas have labored to undermine the church in favor of a state-sponsored "peo­ ple's church," but none of this was explained by Riding. The Los Angeles Times also had very little coverage of the Sandi­ nistas' abandonment of their promises about elections or on civil liberties issues. Two days after the junta took office, the Los Angeles Times carried a UPI story about an initial batch of laws promulgated by the junta including one that "set jail sentences of three months to a year for broadcasting slogans hostile to the new leaders."56 A week later it carried another UPI story about how the junta had closed down a dissident left-wing newspaper, which it accused of Somocismo, but the correspondent flatly contradicted that, saying: "El Pueblo apparently ran afoul of the junta for other reasons. Its final edition Monday published a communique urging all who took part in the revolution against Somoza to keep their weapons, against the new government's order, to 'guarantee' the rights they gained in the civil war."5? A month after the new government took over in Managua it promulgated a new press law that allowed some independent media that had been silenced since the civil war to resume functioning. But the long-term consequences of this law were ambiguous. Richard J. Meislin of the New York Times broke the story first, apparently having gotten an advance briefing by a source in the government. He re­ ported that "Nicaragua's new government plans to announce tomor­ row that it is ending most restraints on the country's news organizations.... Under 'general guidelines' to be issued by the five­ member ruling junta, some restrictions would remain in effect. Papers and magazines would be barred from printing articles favorable to the ousted President Anastasio Somoza Debayle."58 The problem with writing from an advance briefing like that was that Meislin apparently had not seen the fine print of the press law. The Los Angeles Times ran a UPI story on the same subject ten days later. It gave a very different impression of the scope of the restrictions:

Sergio Ramirez and Daniel Ortega ... announced the press freedom law while stressing the importance of what they considered responsible and objective journalism.

71 NEWS COVERAGE OF THE SANDINISTA REVOLUTION

"Information must express a legitimate preoccupation with the defense of the conquests of the revolution, of the recon­ struction junta and for the problems of the Nicaraguan peo­ ple," the five members said. They warned that news articles should not express "anti­ popular interests."59 None of this, as far as I can tell, was in the New York Times, but the Washington Post's Karen DeYoung reported much of it some days later, albeit in a reassuring way: The new press law contains none of the restrictions and provisions for government-imposed censorship and shut­ down in what journalists here called the "black code" of the Somoza government. It does, however, order that publications display a "legiti­ mate concern for the defense of the conquests of the revolu­ tion, the reconstruction process and the problems of the Nicaraguan people" and serve as "vehicles for the develop­ ment and cultural and educative process" of the country "when necessary." It mandates that "critical commentaries on [government] functions, as well as all news, should be based in con­ structive ends and provable facts with which those responsi­ ble have been objectively confronted."60 Thus, once again DeYoung reported key facts embarrassing to the Sandinistas that the New York Times omitted-but, typically, she presented them in a way that softened their impact. The same article had two other examples of this pattern. Further on the press law, she wrote: "As in the United States, ownership and regu­ lation of the nation's airwaves are delegated to the state." The gratuitous first phrase made the Nicaraguan rule sound innocuous, but it was not. Although the government may "own" the "airwaves" in the United States, it does not own any broadcasting facilities and has no power over broadcasting; for all practical purposes, broadcasting in this country is in the hands of highly independent networks that scrutinize and criticize the government. In Nicaragua, in contrast, at the time DeYoung wrote her story, and ever since, television broad­ casting has been a tightly held monopoly of the government, ex­ ploited relentlessly for purposes of propaganda and indoctrination. The second example was DeYoung's description of the Sandinista newspaper Barricada as "an unblushing propaganda organ of moder­ ate socialist politics and Third World news." By calling Barricada "an unblushing propaganda organ," DeYoung appeared to be pulling no punches toward the Sandinistas, but her characterization of what it

72 THE NEW NICARAGUA was a propaganda organ for reflected a stubborn adherence to her conviction that the Sandinistas were mostly "moderates" and "so­ cialists," despite ample and mounting evidence to the contrary. De­ Young did not mention what her colleague Charles Krause reported elsewhere: for its third world news, Barricada relied mostly on run­ ning stories from Prensa Latina, the news wire of the Cuban govern­ ment. In the spring of 1980, La Prensa was closed temporarily. Although it was closed in a labor dispute, the dispute was not about labor issues. It was part of a tug-of-war between Violetta Chamorro, who had just resigned from the junta, and the Sandinistas for control of the paper, and the shutdown was obviously instigated by the govern­ ment. The closing went largely unreported in the media examined in this study. It was mentioned in the Los Angeles Times in a single line61 and briefly in the Economist62 but not at all, as far as I can see, in the New York Times or anywhere else except the Washington Post. While the Post did not carry a story on the subject, it publicized the closure effectively by running a small "for the record" box on the editorial page excerpting a statement by the Inter American Press Association condemning it. 63

Prisoners. Another important indicator of the nature or at least of the style of Nicaragua's new government was its treatment of supporters of the old regime. President Somoza, many of his key associates, and the top echelon of the National Guard managed to flee the country before the new government took over. But thousands of guardsmen as well as hundreds of civilian Somoza supporters were left behind. In the weeks before they took power, Sandinista spokesmen had said that they would seek retribution against only those National Guard members who were guilty of specific serious crimes, but once in power their definition of which guardsmen were subject to prosecu­ tion expanded. Within a few months, it was widely reported that approximately 7,500 people were being held for their alleged activities or sympathies under the old regime. By the end of the first year of the revolutionary government-the endpoint of this study-very few of these cases had been disposed. There were great variations in the way this story was reported. The most thorough coverage appeared in the Los Angeles Times. Two weeks after the new government was installed, the paper carried a long story by correspondent Leonard Greenwood that gave a mixed impression of the government's behavior. On the one hand, the article said that "it is generally believed that the most wanted men, the top officers who ran the guard and often spread terror among Nicaragua's

73 NEWS COVERAGE OF THE SANDINISTA REVOLUTION

2.5 million people, got away to other countries." This suggested that there might have been little reason to hold those who were being held. On the other hand, Greenwood added, graphically, "In the prison at the military barracks adjoining the bunker that was Somoza's headquarters, there are underground cells with blood-spattered walls," apparently a place where the National Guard once abused its prisoners. Greenwood quoted an Interior Ministry official: "'We be­ lieve there were several hundred members of the guard involved in torture and violent repression in the last 5 to 10 years.'" On the situation of those now being held, Greenwood's story was also mixed. He quoted one prisoner, a former National Guardsman, saying that the prisoners were treated well, but he also observed that "there are more than 3,200 men crowded into the prison, which was built to accommodate 1,000."64 The most damning part of Greenwood's article was from an interview with Ulrich Bedert, the regional delegate of the Interna­ tional Red Cross: Bedert said that after Somoza's departure the Red Cross set up a refuge near the Managua airport where national guard soldiers could surrender. Families of the men visited them there. "One day the [rente came in and took away all the males 15 and older, including civilians and relatives who were only visiting the guardsmen," Bedert said. "It was an extremely arbitrary action, and they are still holding those men and boys. Some of them had nothing to do with the guard, and they should be released." Bedert said the new government has demanded that the Red Cross hand over all the men who have surrendered to the agency, and to transport the men directly to prison. "They'd like us to collect their enemies, deliver them to prisons and then feed them," Bedert said, "but those tasks are not the duty of the Red Cross. People know that men who have surrendered to us ended up in jail and they get angry with us. We've had cases of our vehicles being as­ saulted." In October, the paper carried a Reuters story praising the Sandi- nistas' treatment of those it had vanquished. It said: Nicaragua's new rulers admit that there have been excesses since victory, but, as Tomas Borge, interior minister ... commented: "We worked a miracle to prevent heads rolling in the thousands." ... Most independent observers in Nicaragua agree that the new regime is doing everything it can to prevent revenge 74 THE NEW NICARAGUA

killings, anarchy or looting, and that they have been remark­ ably successful. The key is perhaps the slogan constantly repeated by Borge: "We shall be implacable in battle but generous in victory."65 A month later, Greenwood wrote of a press conference held by Interior Minister Tomas Borge, who acknowledged that there have been numerous abuses of power in Nic­ aragua, including some torture and a few cases of murder, since the Sandinista National Liberation Front ousted Presi­ dent Anastasio Somoza in July. Borge ... vowed to end the new abuses and to bring torturers and murderers to justice...... Borge said the abuses "must stop immediately because the revolution was fought to end abuses and ill-treat­ ment." ... Borge said those who committed crimes during the 44 years of the dictatorship of the Somoza family would be severely dealt with under the law. "But we cannot override justice nor abandon the basic moral principles for which so many people died," he said.66 Toward the end of November, the paper reported: ''A spokesman for the Nicaraguan Supreme Court also said 'public tribunals' for 7,500 prisoners of war would begin next week. He said the prisoners included former national guardsmen as well as civilian supporters of Somoza."67 A week later, Greenwood reported on grave accusations against the new government regarding human rights abuses involving the prisoners. The article began: Illegal executions by Sandinista guerrillas and their allies since they took power under a junta here in July now number at least 500 and might be as high as 1,000, Jose Esteban Gonzales, president of the Nicaraguan Permanent Commission on Human Rights, said in an interview.... "We now know that in the last two weeks of July between 300 and 400 people were executed in the Granada area," Gonzales said. "They were all people known to be prisoners (of the Sandinistas) and they were not killed in the heat of fighting. They were killed by their captors days or weeks after they had been arrested."68

According to Greenwood, Gonzales listed a handful of other cities where mass graves had been found. "'Our experience is that this went on all over the country,' he said."

75 NEWS COVERAGE OF THE SANDINISTA REVOLUTION

Then the article concluded: The human rights commission president said he and his organization had been under considerable pressure from the revolutionary government not to disclose details of the ex­ ecutions. "They have told us to close down the commission, they have tried to oblige me to resign, they have threatened other officials in other parts of the country and some of our people have resigned," he added. But Gonzales, a theologian and philosopher educated by the Christian Brothers religious order here and in Europe, has refused to bow to the pressures. "We are a permanent commission to defend human rights, no matter who is in power," he said. "We defended the victims of Somoza. Today, there is tremendous fear in this country and a tremendous fear of admitting that this [fear] exists. But we in the commission will not keep silent." In April 1980, the paper carried an AP wire story saying that "an estimated 7,500 persons accused of crimes linked to Somoza's govern­ ment and his national guard are still being held in jails throughout the country."69 In June, after the regime had slowly begun trying some of the prisoners, the Los Angeles Times returned to the subject in a front page story by Juan M. Vasquez, which reviewed some of the history of the problem and focused on the interrogation of a single prisoner. Vas­ quez wrote:

More than 3,000 prisoners [were] detained at Tipitapa, a prison ... that had been built to accommodate 1,000. In the beginning, there were illegal executions. Jose Es­ teban Gonzales, president of the Nicaraguan Commission on Human Rights, estimated that by the end of the year at least 500 people had lost their lives at the hands of the Sandinistas or their allies in acts of vengeance after the fight­ ing ceased. Interior Minister Tomas Borge, however, put the number of illegal executions at no more than 100. In the last few months, as the government has extended its control over the countryside and over its own troops, the executions apparently have ceased, but there is still a contro­ versy over the issue of political prisoners-a "scandal," one Western Hemisphere diplomat called it. ... The government appears to be in no rush to bring all the prisoners to trial. According to government and diplomatic estimates, about 500 of those arrested have been released

76 THE NEW NICARAGUA

and 500 others have been tried, convicted and sentenced to long prison terms. Both sides estimate that 6,500 prisoners are in jail awaiting the trial. 70 In his account of the interrogation that he had witnessed, Vas­ quez conveyed no opinion about the guilt or innocence of the ac­ cused, but he left the reader with questions about the fairness of the procedure. The New York Times also carried several stories that made refer­ ence to the prisoner question, although these were much more spo­ radic. The first story focused on a man who headed the Nicaraguan Red Cross in the town of Esteli. It was not clear whether he had assumed this position only under the new government or had held it pre­ viously. The story said that he had been arrested a year earlier for taking part in a businessmen's protest against Somoza and had been tortured by the National Guard. Now he was in charge of National Guardsmen held prisoner, some of whom may have been his tor­ turers, but, wrote the Times: " 'It doesn't matter,' he said. 'If anyone tries to torture them, I will be the first one to protest.' "71 A week later, a Times story about a series of decrees issued by the new government said that Daniel "Ortega directed that anyone ar­ rested by the military or the police must be charged with a crime or released within 24 hours."72 And a few days after that, the paper carried a short Reuters story in its "World News Briefs" section ap­ plauding the Sandinistas on the subject of prisoners. It said: The International· Committee of the Red Cross said today that the Nicaraguan Government had imprisoned about 5,000 people since it had come to power last month but had promised to free all except war criminals. ...A Red Cross delegate who returned to Geneva ... after two weeks in Nicaragua, said the new Government was living up to its promise of humane treatment for members of the defeated National Guard.... Authorities of the ruling Sandinista movement enabled Red Cross representatives to visit all detainees who were being treated as prisoners of war under the relevant Geneva convention, according to [the delegate]. "This is an example of the Government's very marked good will, for it is not obliged to extend prisoner of war status to captives in a civil conflict such as Nicaragua," he told reporters. 73 The delegate named in the story was not the same one cited in the Los Angeles Times story of only twelve days earlier, who had complained

77 NEWS COVERAGE OF THE SANDINISTA REVOLUTION about Sandinista behavior, and nothing that I can find in either paper accounts for the discrepancy. In October, three months after the new government took office, the Times ran this one-sentence Reuters story: "Dozens of people were arrested for questioning here today in what was officially described as a security operation by the Sandinista Liberation Army to weed out suspected 'counter-revolutionary elements.' "74 And five days later, another one-inch-Iong story appeared in the Times, this time by UPI, saying, "Soldiers have arrested 120 people in a weeklong campaign to root out sympathizers of the ousted President, Anastasio Somoza Debayle."75 The significance of these items was the implication that those arrested were political prisoners, yet, as far as I can tell, none of the other media examined in this study reported these arrests, nor did the Times carry any additional detail about them. In late November the Sandinistas announced their intention to try the prisoners in "people's trials" before "special tribunals," and this was reported in several Tinles stories. 76 In December, Alan Riding's upbeat account in the Times Sunday Magazine of the first months of Sandinista rule discussed the prisoner question. As Riding told it, the Sandinistas had not wanted or planned to hold these prisoners but had been forced to do so by pressure from the masses and by provocations by Somocistas: In the early weeks, the "generous revolution" also included the release of several hundred former National Guardsmen and Somoza aides who were among 10,000 trapped by the sudden collapse of the dynasty. Anxious to draw a sharp contrast, not only with the Somoza regime but also with the Cuban and Iranian revolutions, commander Tomas Borge ordered that no prisoners be mistreated.... But this policy infuriated the population, particularly slum dwellers, who were the most frequent target of Government brutality.... Early in the new regime, a middle-aged woman appeared on television sobbing. "What kind of jus­ tice is this?" she cried. "Justice for them, not for us." She said the guardsman responsible for killing her three sons had been released and was already threatening her. ... And in Leon, a group of guard victims' mothers dem­ onstrated against the policy of "generosity" in front of the Sandinist military command.77 Riding did not ask how the outspoken bereaved mother could have appeared on the government's tightly controlled television sta­ tion if what she was saying was truly at odds with what the govern­ ment wanted. His story continued:

78 THE NEW NICARAGUA

After a number of attacks on Sandinist posts were traced to former guardsmen, the Government finally reversed its pol­ icy. The death penalty has not been reinstated and the max­ imum punishment for convicted political "criminals" remains 30 years' imprisonment, but none of the more than 5,000 guardsmen crowded into Somoza's old jails are to be released prior to a more complete investigation. Riding returned to this theme in a story in February about the first trials of some of the prisoners. "Pressure for 'revolutionary jus­ tice' from families of the 35,000 people who are thought to have died in the last two years of the dictatorship led the new Government to suspend an announced policy of generosity and to accelerate the formation of the tribunals," he wrote. 78 Riding reported that "during the first month of the trials all 91 persons brought before one tribunal were found guilty of at least one charge, but 58 cases sent to the special prosecutor's office were dropped for lack of evidence." And he also said: Although the junta called on the population to avoid re­ prisals, several provincial commanders, taking the law into their own hands, ordered summary executions of captured guardsmen.... [Since the first days after the overthrow] reports of "disappearances" and abuses of authority have diminished sharply, while several rebel leaders believed re­ sponsible for acts of brutality have been jailed. The Government has restored the right of habeas corpus to prevent arbitrary arrests. Curiously, this statement that reports of abuses had diminished was, as far as I can determine, the first time that Riding or the Times had mentioned that there were such reports. Never, I believe, had the Times mentioned Jose Esteban Gonzales's accusations that hundreds had been executed by the Sandinistas nor Tomas Borge's acknowledg­ ment that one hundred had been. Nor, as far as I can tell, was any of this reported in the Washington Post, which made little mention of the prisoners at all. One exception was Karen DeYoung's feature article of late November, in which she wrote: "Borge argues that [prisoners are not] mistreated, and that Somoza-style torture, which he himself suffered in National Guard prisons, is gone forever. Visits to the prisons seem to bear him OUt."79 This was only three weeks after the Los Angeles Times had reported on Borge's press conference, which seems to have gone unmentioned in the Post, at which he acknowledged various abuses; and it was only five days before the Los Angeles Times, in a second story, carried

79 NEWS COVERAGE OF THE SANDINISTA REVOLUTION

Borge's acknowledgment that one hundred prisoners had been ex­ ecuted. DeYoung's story implied that executions had not occurred. She acknowledged the existence of the prisoners but seemed to go out of her way to excuse this. She wrote: The Sandinistas took over a country with problems that could cause even the most well-intentioned, well organized administration to stagger. Their enemies are part of the problem. ... Despite the dire warnings of Somoza and someD.S. pol­ icymakers, there were no mass executions. But as real se­ curity problems and a high level of psychological and political insecurity continue, more than 5,000 former Na­ tional Guard soldiers, along with approximately 2,000 mostly uncharged civilians picked up for suspected and vaguely defined "counterrevolution," remain in jail. In January 1980, a story by Terri Shaw about the sentencing of a single prisoner was the only other story about the prisoners that I could find in the Post. Shaw reported that "an informer for the secret police of ousted dictator Anastasio Somoza was the first to receive sentencing among an estimated 7,500 political prisoners awaiting trial by the new government."80 Although Shaw's piece was not in the main critical of the sentencing she had witnessed nor did it suggest that the prisoner was innocent, two points in it might have alarmed civil libertarians. The first was that "neither the defendant nor his attorney was present last weekend when a 3-member special tribunal sentenced Emilio Paez Bone to 30 years, the maximum penalty under law." The second was that "although no concrete evidence was pre­ sented that any of the people he had informed about were killed, Paez Bone was convicted of mass murder, criminal association and instiga­ tion of crimes." CBS TV seems never to have mentioned the prisoner issue, while the Wall Street Journal, as far as I can tell, mentioned it only once, when Beth Nissen reported: "Public trials begin Dec. 17 for more than 7,500 former members of the National Guard and the Somoza govern­ ment who are accused of war crimes. Dealing firmly-but equitably­ with the old guard has been considered an important test for the Sandinist government. And so far it is doing well."81 This endorse­ ment came two months after the Los Angeles Times had reported Jose Esteban Gonzales's accusations of Widespread killings and Tomas Borge's acknowledgment that one hundred had been executed, nei­ ther of which was reported in the Journal as far as I can tell. The only news outlets other than the Los Angeles Times to report

80 THE NEW NICARAGUA allegations of serious abuses by the Sandinist government, including torture, execution, and the discovery of mass graves, were NBC, in its April 1980 segment, "Nicaragua Turns Left,"82 and the Economist, which ran one substantial account of the problem. It said that Nic­ aragua's Permanent Commission on Human Rights now has on its books a list of 600 people reported to have been taken away by the Sandinist security forces since the fighting last July, and who have since disappeared. Some 60 bodies found in a common grave ... are thought to have been the victims of a mass Sandinist execution. The commis­ sion is attempting to identify the remains. ... Some 30 people are being arrested each month, charged with "associating illegally to commit crimes"-a eu­ phemism originally applied to members of General Somoza's national guard which has now taken on wider meaning­ and for "crimes against the international order." ... There are thought to be up to 20 secret detention centres around the country. ... The commission has recorded 10 cases of torture, some of them administered by the same instruments that were re­ ported in use under General Somoza. Released prisoners report they have frequently heard torture being applied to prisoners in other cells. The number of actual complaints is low, says the commission, "because people are fright­ ened".... Some 7,000 members of Nicaragua's national guard are still being held in conditions which at first were "lamen­ table". ... Some 12 of the guardsmen died of malnutrition in the six months prior to December. Conditions have since improved....83 These grave allegations reported by the Los Angeles Times, NBC, and the Economist were virtually ignored in the other news outlets examined in this study.

Indoctrination, Coercion, and Control. During its first year in office, the Sandinista government took certain steps that were less dramatic than the mistreatment of political prisoners or the postponement of elections but that were worrisome signs of a push toward total­ itarianism. Three notable ones were a mass literacy drive, the creation of neighborhood Committees for the Defense of Sandinism, and the use of land expropriated from Somoza for the creation of agricultural communes. Because these were not dramatic steps, they were not extensively covered by the news media, but there were stories on each subject. A large portion of Nicaragua's poor were indeed illiterate

81 NEWS COVERAGE OF THE SANDINISTA REVOLUTION under Somoza's neglectful rule. But what made the Sandinistas' liter­ acy drive controversial was that it gave signs of being designed more for indoctrination than for teaching. The Economist reported: The campaign seems long overdue, since half the population is illiterate. But some ask why literacy is getting a priority higher than those of rehousing the homeless victims of the civil war, fighting widespread malnutrition, or rebuilding Nicaragua's bombed-out factories. Some 60,000 secondary schoolchildren and some 4,000 university students, labelled brigadistas by the government, are fanning out through the countryside to live with, and to teach, peasant families. In five months, says the minister of education, 40% more Nicaraguans will know the rudiments of reading and writing.... The sort of thing illiterate Nicaraguans can be expected to know at the end of the campaign is contained in the basic teaching manual, which is called "The People's Tomorrow". From the first sentence to be learnt: "Carlos Sandino, guide of the revolution", to the last, "The Sandinists are the van­ guard organisation of the Nicaraguan people", there is scarcely a phrase which does not ram the Sandinist message home. The reader is taken through eulogies to land reform, to nationalisation and to "people's power". At the end of the campaign, many peasants may know no more than how to scribble and shout a handful of political slogans. 84 The Washington Post's Christopher Dickey ran a story on the drive that, though not as pointed as the Economist's story, gave a picture that was not very different: A volunteer came to his house and showed him how to read his first word: "revolution." Now Alvarado can ... sound out such sentences in the government-supplied primer as "The violin is new" and "The guerrillas vanquished the gen­ ocidal National Guard." ... To critics of the government, the effort represents a means to achieve Marxist totalitarianism. The plan calls for the virtual eradication of illiteracy. ... The parallel goal of the campaign is political and social indoctrination. ... It is the content of the lessons that has raised a storm among opponents of the Sandinistas such as former junta member Alfonso Robelo. They see the campaign as compromised by Sandinista propaganda. These critics note, for instance, that while "bourgeois" and "imperialism" are part of the basic text, "pluralism" and "elections" are nowhere to be seen. 82 THE NEW NICARAGUA

The most vocal critics tend to come from what is left of the middle and upper classes, and they object to such reading exercises as, "The popular Sandinista revolution initiated true democracy. The privileged classes are finished."85 The New York Times, in contrast, covered the literacy campaign in a long story by Alan Riding that was palpably enthusiastic. Riding briefly mentioned the criticism of the campaign in the fifteenth para­ graph of his story but then went on to defend it: In the method being used here, developed by the Brazilian teacher Paulo Freire and known as "conscientization" or "lib­ erating education," the words selected for practice are rele­ vant to the pupil's social and political reality. "If you ask a peasant why he is poor, he will say because he is," Father Cardenal explained. "This method teaches him his dignity, his reality, his history. There is no education that is not political. An apolitical education is also political because it is purposefully isolating." The textbook, illustrated with pictures of victorious guer­ rillas as well as scenes of reconstruction, is unquestionably Sandinist. Among early phrases to be learned, for example, are, "The F.S.L.N. led the people to its liberation" and "The Sandinist defense committees defend the revolution." But the book makes no reference to Cuba or Marx and is essentially nationalistic in content.86 The assessment of such a program clearly requires some time, for one has to measure the effect on the students. But Riding was so enthusiastic that he concluded his piece, with the aid of anonymous sources and some statistics that he could hardly have verified himself, by pronouncing the whole effort a success: The results so far ... are highly encouraging. The dropout rate among teachers is only 3.6 percent, more and more illiterates are signing up for classes and, despite the recent murder of one young rural teacher, parents of all political persuasions seem to be proud that their children are par­ ticipating. "I frankly thought they had taken on too much," a Western diplomat said, "but it's going to be much better than anyone expected. It's going to be a considerable success." The Los Angeles Times and the Washington Post both gave their readers a glimpse of the danger implicit in the rise of Nicaragua's Committees to Defend Sandinism; not so the New York Times. The new government was only three weeks old when a Los Angeles Times editorial observed that the Sandinistas "have begun building grass­ roots committees for the 'defense of the revolution,' whose main

83 NEWS COVERAGE OF THE SANDINISTA REVOLUTION function ostensibly is to administer the distribution of scarce housing, food supplies and medical aid. But they sound distressingly familiar to the watchdog system used by the Castro regime to stifle dissent and uncover potential 'enemies.' "87 A month later the Post's Krause painted a fuller picture of the committees' ominous potential: Only three weeks after the Sandinistas took power, Maj. Victor Tirado Lopez told a cheering crowd of thousands in Matagalpa that Sandinista defense committees ... would serve as "the eyes and ears of the revolution." ... The speech was given broad coverage in Barricada, the Sandinistas' official newspaper.... It sent shivers through the upper classes and deeply troubled some diplomatic ob­ servers who thought the defense committees' role, as Tirado described it, sounded suspiciously like the beginning of the block-committee structure used by Fidel Castro to consoli­ date the Cuban revolution...... In an operating manual distributed to the defense committees they are told specifically to organize surveillance subgroups to watch out for and report "enemies of the revo­ lution." ... "It is their potential that worries us," said a business leader. "The structure is there for identifying and watching anyone who disagrees with the. .. front, even if that person played a prominent role in fighting against Somoza."88 Even the Wall Street Journal's Beth Nissen included in an other­ wise generally upbeat assessment of revolutionary Nicaragua several paragraphs critical of the Committees for the Defense of Sandinism, quoting approvingly a Nicaraguan who called them "a very dan­ gerous blurring of the line between the state and the political party."89 But readers of the New York Times received a more positive view of the committees. The paper's first reference to them was in a story by Richard J. Meislin a month into the new government, which said: "The Government offers political education through its newspaper and radio station but mainly through the 'Sandinist defense commit­ tees,' which are neighborhood political organizations that also direct emergency food distribution and clean-up and reconstruction pro­ jects."90 They were mentioned again in Alan Riding's New York Times Magazine article. Riding said: "The Government in Managua has initi­ ated a reconstruction effort that defies easy definition. In the cities and countryside, a network of block organizations-known as Sand­ inist Defense Committees, or C.D.S.'s and modelled after Cuba's

84 THE NEW NICARAGUA

Committees for the Defense of the Revolution-is attempting to re­ spond to critical local needs.... These committees also are instru­ ments for political education and propaganda."91 Later, Riding added: Popular power ... is most evident in the Sandinist Defense Committees. Now directing their energies toward solving community problems, they have begun by taking a census of the number of homes, adults, children, sick and jobless on every block. They then insure that food goes to the most needy, that all children attend school and that the sick re­ ceive medicine. Above all, during the early weeks, the C.D.S. also assumed the role of investigating and denounc­ ing those who collaborated with the dictatorship. With everyone expected to belong, the C.D.S. has rapidly come to dominate local communities. On weekends, it orga­ nizes parties for children or improvises political theater or recitals of revolutionary songs. Even without special events, the community centers are crowded most evenings as groups meet to discuss everything from the need for better drainage to the problem of alcoholism in the barrio. Although this description made the committees sound fairly good, Riding acknowledged that one group was not happy with them. "The wealthy strongly resent being pressured into joining the C.D.S.'s which they regard, since they are in need of no Government or community assistance, exclusively as instruments of political vig­ ilance." Perhaps the most enlightening indicator of the direction of the Sandinista revolution was its approach to the disposal of the land expropriated from Somoza, holdings that amounted to a considerable portion of the total agricultural land in Nicaragua. Although Commu­ nist revolutions have invariably promised land to the peasants, they have almost always created collective enterprises instead. These have functioned to guarantee centralized state control over the peasantry. In the first weeks of Sandinista rule, both the New York Times and the Washington Post had stories that focused on Jaime Wheelock, the Sandinista commandante who was named head of agrarian reform. The Times quoted Wheelock as saying that Somoza's holdings alone were enough to provide every Nicaraguan peasant family with five acres of land but that /I 'we are finding that the peasants would prefer a collective arrangement to al1 individual one.' "92 The Times story made no comment on the likely accuracy of Wheelock's surprising claim. The Post story, by Charles Krause, included much of the same but also referred to interviews with some peasants at a farm recently visited by Wheelock. Krause wrote:

85 NEWS COVERAGE OF THE SANDINISTA REVOLUTION

The peasants themselves, at least at Rancho Grande and at Granja Imporcesa, a pig farm ... that ... was turned into a cooperative, are not convinced that cooperatives are the best way to run the seized properties. Both Vega Oviedo [a local leader of the fight against Somoza who was named director of the cooperative] and Juan Berrios, a worker at the Imporcesa pig farm, said they would prefer that the properties be divided up among the peasants rather than run as cooperatives, a concept they do not fully understand.93 The New York Times's Alan Riding often wrote about the modera­ tion of the Sandinistas, both before and after they came to power. In 1980, Riding set forth the idea in several articles that Wheelock's decision to turn the expropriated land into collective farms was one more reassuring sign of Sandinista moderation, because giving land directly to the peasants would have been the really radical thing to do. Riding wrote: The expropriation of estates owned by the Somoza group has given the agrarian reform ministry control over 55 percent of all cultivable land. The regime has avoided the usual revolu­ tionary temptation of breaking up these estates and dis­ tributing plots to landless peasants, opting instead to form collective farms managed with clear economic criteria.94 Who knows what "usual revolutionary temptation" Riding had in mind? Perhaps this whole line was fed to him by Wheelock, but it revealed surprising ignorance of Communist history.

Foreign Alignments

If it took some digging to discover the real thrust of the domestic policies of Nicaragua's new revolutionary government, the thrust of its foreign policies was hard to miss. The U.S. government worked hard to ingratiate itself with the new rulers, rushing to dispatch emergency aid with a new ambassador who was overtly sympathetic to the new regime, and promising more. The United States even sought a symbolic way to accede to Nicaragua's request for military aid, even though there was no need for such aid and the request seemed designed just to test or irritate the United States. The American efforts, however, were to no avail. From its first days in office, the new government repeatedly affirmed its close identity with Castro's Cuba. At the "nonaligned" summit meeting in Cuba and in the United Nations, Nicaragua aligned itself with the Communist bloc and denounced the United States, and in early 1980 86 THE NEW NICARAGUA a Sandinista delegation visited Moscow, where it signed party-to­ party agreements with the Soviet Communist party. All this added up to a fairly clear picture, dashing any reasonable hopes that the new Nicaragua would be nonaligned or amenable to friendship with the United States. This picture was presented clearly in some, but not all, of the news media examined in this study. The three television networks and the Wall Street Journal carried next to nothing on Nicaragua's international behavior, while the other papers examined all had a fair amount of coverage. The Economist, the Los Angeles Times, and es­ pecially the Washington Post presented the picture rather clearly. The New York Times, however, seemed to get it a bit muddled. The Washington Post gave a clear signal of the way things were heading in a page-one story that appeared when the new regime was little more than two weeks old. Correspondent Krause wrote: Despite U.S. efforts to cultivate Nicaragua's new revolution­ ary government, the guerrilla-backed administration has continued to denounce "Yankee imperialism" as the root of all Third World evil and to display strong anti-U.S. senti­ ment. ... Barricada, the Sandinista newspaper that is currently the only one published here, has shown an increasing tendency to portray the success of the Nicaraguan revolution as a defeat for "U.S. imperialism." ... The only foreign news printed in Barricada is based on Prensa Latina, the Cuban wire service that freely inter­ changes references to the United States with synonyms such as "the imperialists" or "the reactionary forces." At a press conference Saturday night, junta member Al­ fonso Robelo appeared to blame the Carter administration for a shortfall in international food aid to Nicaragua, despite the fact that the United States has provided more emergency relief than any other nation. ... Barricada, which has promptly reported shipments of food and medical teams from Cuba, Mexico, Chile, West Ger­ many and other countries, waited a week before mentioning that U.S. Ambassador Lawrence Pezzullo had returned to Nicaragua with a plane load of emergency supplies sent as a gift from President Carter. ... So far, U.S. emergency assistance is continuing at ever higher levels. Chartered planes fly in every day from the United States. Land convoys are arriving from neighboring Costa Rica and Honduras, and a ship loaded with 1,000 tons of food and medicine sent by Washington is scheduled to arrive Tuesday.

87 NEWS COVERAGE OF THE SANDINISTA REVOLUTION

Still, the attacks continue, sometimes apparently based on a conscious or unconscious lack of understanding.95 A few days later the Post reported on a meeting between Nic­ araguan leaders and Secretary of State Vance and Rosalynn Carter. "Both sides said they had decided to forget the past and make a new beginning in U.S.-Nicaraguan relations," it reported, adding that "the United States held out the possibility of military as well as human­ itarian aid, and the Nicaraguans reaffirmed their pledge to respect human rights."96 When, still in the first month of the new regime, Tomas Borge visited Cuba for undisclosed purposes, the Post reported, "The visit is considered sensitive because of Borge's high position in the new government and suspicions, notably among some U.S. congressmen, that Nicaragua's revolutionary government may have closer ties to the Communist government in Cuba than previously claimed."97 Two days later, Krause reported on an interview with Nicaraguan Foreign Minister Miguel D'Escoto, which suggested that the United States had made little headway in wooing the new government: "D'Escoto said ... that if the United States wants good relations with Nicaragua's new government, it should keep a low profile, 'stop preaching' and demonstrate its good will by providing 'unconditional aid' to rebuild the country economically and militarily."98 Although D'Escoto's words were conditionally positive, their meaning was clearly negative, for the United States had not been "preaching" at the new government, and it had been maintaining a low profile and providing aid. There is no such thing under U.S. law as "uncondi­ tional" aid, a fact known well by D'Escoto, who had spent years lobbying successfully in Washington against aid to the Somoza re­ gime. According to Krause, D'Escoto also spoke of Cuba in the inter­ view as a "sister republic" of Nicaragua's. In late August, the Post ran an AP story about Nicaragua's re­ quest for military aid, saying that "some members of the revolution­ ary junta in Nicaragua have indicated they would like to ask for American weapons, posing the request as a test of U.S. willingness to support the revolution."99 Two days later, Krause reported that "Nicaragua's defense minis­ ter left ... on an arms buying trip to seven or eight European and Latin American countries, including Cuba." Krause added that the "stop in Cuba is the latest in a growing series of contacts and agree­ ments between Nicaragua and the government of Fidel Castro."IDD Less than two weeks after that, the paper reported that the U.S. government had found a way to avoid turning down flat Nicaragua's request for military aid. Reporting on a House vote to approve an 88 THE NEW NICARAGUA additional $9 million in aid for Nicaragua, Karen DeYoung wrote: "Important in symbolic terms ... is a small $23,600 military training grant that will send 20 Sandinista soldiers for several weeks to U.S. bases in Panama, and 2 Sandinista commanders on a tour of military bases in the United States."IOI When the new Nicaraguan regime was only six weeks old, the "nonaligned" nations gathered in Cuba for one of their periodic con­ ferences. The Post's DeYoung reported from the meeting: Nicaragua brought the sixth nonaligned summit to its feet today with a speech loudly defending "liberation struggles," denouncing historical "U.S. imperialism" and asking for help in consolidating its own revolution...... [Daniel] Ortega also declared support for the Palestine Liberation Organization, the independence of Spanish Sa­ hara and the "Puerto Rican people's struggle for self-deter­ mination and independence" from the United States.102 The word "historical" in this description was DeYoung's, not Ortega's, and suggested a desire to blunt the sharpness of Ortega's attack on the United States. DeYoung used the same technique later in the story when she wrote that Ortega "denounced the Camp David accords as a 'betrayal' of the Palestinians," but softened the impact of this informa­ tion with a reminder that this stance was "widely held in the Third World." DeYoung, however, offered no palliatives in a feature story a few months later, when she provided a retrospective account of Ortega's speech at the United Nations shortly after his oration at the non­ aligned meeting: When three members of Nicaragua's ruling junta visited President Carter on their way to the United Nations, Carter smilingly, but pointedly, told junta member Daniel Ortega he hoped Nicaragua would "be kinder" to the United States in its U.N. speech than Ortega had been three weeks before in Havana.... The U.N. speech, however, varied little in foreign policy terms, and included an added dig at those whose "invest­ ments, companies and loans" helped Somoza rob Nic­ aragua.I03 In early spring of 1980, a Sandinista delegation visited the Soviet bloc. The Post's Terri Shaw reported that the Nicaraguan delegation signed joint communiques with the Soviet Union and East Germany that followed the Soviet line on almost all international issues, including Afghanistan.

89 NEWS COVERAGE OF THE SANDINISTA REVOLUTION

The communique with Moscow condemned "the cam­ paign by imperialist and reactionary forces" ... to "stifle the inalienable right of the people of ... Afghanistan ... to follow the road of progressive change."I04 The report added: "While the Soviets and Nicaraguans agreed on a whole litany of issues, most of the positions ... coincide with those of the nonaligned movement. Nicaragua's government identifies closely with these Third World approaches." This point was gra­ tuitous, dubious, and incongruous with the rest of the article. It was so strikingly similar to what DeYoung had written that one wonders if it came from Post editors. A month later, the Post carried a column by Evans and Novak about the Sandinistas' Moscow visit. They reported: A secret agreement between the Soviet Communist Party and the Sandinista Marxist Party of Nicaragua, signed in Moscow in late March, points to major new Soviet interven­ tion and a possible Nicaraguan-Cuban military accord.... "The Soviet government would be unlikely to sign a party­ to-party agreement with a foreign country unless Moscow regarded that country as a reliable, long-term partner," a leading Latin American authority told us. The secret agreement between the two ruling parties is regarded by non-communist Latin nations as a dangerous Soviet intrusion into the Central American heartland. IDS A month later, however, the Post's Christopher Dickey concluded that U.S.-Nicaraguan relations were on the upswing: "There is still mistrust on both sides, but in recent weeks what some diplomats here call a maturing of the Sandinista leadership and breakthroughs in the U.S. Congress on important aid to this desperately poor nation have combined to improve the tone of relations between Nicaragua and the United States."I06 Dickey noted that "a major concern on Capitol Hill, however, is that Nicaragua is already so inclined toward the East that it must eventually become a Soviet or Cuban satellite." But he con­ cluded that "the Nicaraguans are strong nationalists and most observ­ ers here believe that it will be a balance between that nationalism and their leftist ideology that will keep them out of the Soviet camp." Dickey undoubtedly had good sources, but one would very much like to know more about those "some diplomats." Where did they come from? What had they said in the past? What were they advocating to their own governments, to the United States, and to Nicaragua (if they were not themselves Sandinistas or Americans)? One week after the new Nicaraguan government assumed power, the Los Angeles Times reported: 90 THE NEW NICARAGUA

Two members of Nicaragua's new junta celebrated the anni­ versary of the Cuban revolution with Fidel Castro. Junta members Alfonso Robelo and Moises Hassan as well as newly appointed Culture Minister Ernesto Cardenal and an officer of the Sandinista National Liberation Front, Hum­ berto Ortega, attended ceremonies ... marking the 26th anniversary of the symbolic beginning of the Cuban revolu­ tion.... [Speaking at the ceremonies,] Robelo said, "Cuba and Nicaragua will always be as they have always been, brother nations. Cuba and Nicaragua united will win."IO? The next day, the paper reported that American Ambassador Lawrence A. Pezzullo arrived ... with 25 tons of emergency aid and said the United States was interested in establishing close relations with the new Nic­ araguan government. Pezzullo was greeted at the newly named Augusto Cesar Sandino airport by Interior Minister Tomas Borge, who warned that the new government would tolerate no inter­ ference in its internal affairs. lOB This account suggested that U.S. warmth was not being fully recipro­ cated. Two days later, the paper ran a Reuters story that was perhaps its most misleading on this subject. It said: U.S. Envoy Lawrence A. Pezzullo presented his credentials as ambassador to Nicaragua's new revolutionary govern­ ment Tuesday, and a government spokesman said a Soviet mission would arrive in Managua on Sunday. These two acts demonstrated the new government's desire to switch from the resolute pro-American policy of ousted President Anastasio Somoza to a nonaligned position, diplo­ matic sources said. lo9 The thrust of the story was wrong, as seemed so often the case when reporters invoked anonymous diplomatic sources. Nicaragua was in­ deed shifting away from pro-Americanism, but it was not shifting toward nonalignment. In mid-August, less than a month after the installation of the new government, the paper ran a careful column by Georgie Anne Geyer that quoted several Nicaraguan leaders. Tomas Borge denied that Nicaragua had received U.S. aid, Alfonso Robelo belittled what U.S. aid had been received, and Sergio Ramirez complained that channel­ ing emergency aid through the Red Cross was insulting to the new government. Then Geyer evaluated their accusations:

91 NEWS COVERAGE OF THE SANDINISTA REVOLUTION

Ismael Reyes, the respected Nicaraguan head of the Nic­ araguan Red Cross, had given me figures showing American aid to be approximately 600/0 of all aid given through them. "Without the U.S.," he said, "everything else is a drop in the bucket." ... The new U.S. ambassador, Lawrence Pezzullo, a tough­ minded man who cuts a careful balance between genuine sympathy for the revolution and American.interests, asked the day he was credentialed for a meeting with the junta to define aid needs. They put it off for a week, thus losing valuable time. Meanwhile, as one American official put it, "The danger is that the rhetoric could get out of hand and put us out of business when it gets back to the States." What the Sandinista government clearly wants is for the aid to be channeled through the government to its local block-level [committees] so it will strengthen them politi­ cally. Their relations with the neutral Red Cross are strained because of this. Yet America always sends aid through the Red Cross precisely to avoid this kind of political involve­ ment. IIO There was not much else in the Los AngeLes Times about Nicaragua's international alignments, except for one major story by Leonard Greenwood in December. Greenwood reported that "more than 2,000 Cubans are now in Nicaragua, helping the revolutionary government in everything from education to security and communications, ac­ cording to well-informed sources."lll Greenwood said the Cubans had been hailed in the government press; then he continued: But at almost every level of society, there is considerable suspicion about the growing Cuban presence. And there is resentment about their behavior, especially the derogatory remarks some of them are alleged to have made about the Catholic Church. "People wonder why so many are coming here," said a leading member of the community in Matagalpa. "There is a strong feeling that we have suffered a lot to create a demo­ cratic society, not to put another collar around our necks, no matter what political color that collar might have." ... Besides Cubans who have come ~o Nicaragua, many Nic­ araguans are going to Cuba for training. These include at least 600 youths sent to Cuba in September for two or three­ year hitches. Although its coverage of Nicaragua was necessarily only a small fraction in volume of that of the American dailies, the Economist in

92 THE NEW NICARAGUA several stories offered a strong picture of Nicaragua's international stand. A story two months after the new government came to power spoke of "a pro-Cuban foreign policy." It continued: "Nicaragua's foreign minister, a Roman Catholic priest, Father Miguel D'Escoto, expressed 'total agreement' with Cuba's stand at the non-aligned summit this month, and was one of the first to side with Cuba in demanding recognition for the Vietnamese-supported government in Cambodia."112 In April, the Economist reported that "the engine of Sandinist rule-its nine-man directorate-has a made-in-Cuba look about it," and added: In foreign policy, the Sandinists are in most matters Russia's and Cuba's faithful friends, although they could not quite bring themselves to cheer on the invasion of Afghanistan (they abstained in the United Nations vote). From Cuba have come about 1,200 teachers (some reported carrying not canes but guns) and more than 800 medical workers, and there are said to be Cuban technicians at Managua's international air­ port and in the television stations. Nicaragua's largely pro­ government press has become a toastmaster for Cuban vir­ tues.113 A month later, it reported: Earlier this year, a Sandinist delegation went to Moscow to sign a treaty of cooperation with the Russian Communist party. ...A government building with offices for 300-400 people is shortly to be handed over to the Russian em­ bassy-although Nicaragua has until now had no trade or cultural links with Russia.... Some 1,200 Cuban teachers have arrived in Nicaragua, along with about 200 medical workers and some 600 techni­ cians to help organise the army, the police, the fishing fleet and communications. The telephone and communications systems are thought to be staffed largely by Cubans. Mr Robelo says that, when he belonged to the junta, he was astonished one day to find that all its civilian members had had their offices and homes "checked" by two Cuban techni­ cians "to see if they were bugged."114 The New York Times gave a more muddled picture of Nicaragua's emerging international posture in part because of frequent editorials that strained to find something good to say about revolutionary Nic­ aragua. In August, Times correspondent Meislin reported much of what Georgie Anne Geyer had written in her column in the Los Angeles

93 NEWS COVERAGE OF THE SANDINISTA REVOLUTION

Times. Nicaraguan leaders, he said, "sharply criticized" the United States for giving too little emergency aid and for giving it through the Red Cross rather than through the government. He quoted Tomas Borge as saying, "'We have only gotten aid from Europe and some Socialist countries.'" Then Meislin added: "Mr. Borge, who is emerg­ ing as one of the most powerful members of the Government, did not mention the United States contribution." Although Meislin did not confute the Sandinista allegations as vigorously as Geyer did in her column, he went on to say: ''As of last week, according to figures compiled by the Red Cross, the United States had provided about 60 percent of all the food contributed by foreign countries to Nic­ aragua."115 A week later the paper reported that Eden Pastora, who was then Mr. Borge's deputy, said that "Nicaragua would turn to 'the Socialist bloc' for weapons if the United States did not agree to a request the new regime has made for American arms."116 Although Borge had initiated the request for military aid, he quickly contradicted Pastora's threat. A Times editorial several days later took great encouragement from Borge's request: The most visible Sandinist spokesman is the Interior Minis­ ter, Tomas Borge, an avowed Marxist. But he is turning to Washington for military aid, and explicitly denies that he will appeal to Cuba or Russia if the United States says no. His Marxism apparently falls short of zealotry.... No one can say that Nicaragua will not go the Cuban route but it is significant that the junta is pressing for American economic help. II? Two weeks later, the Times's Leslie Gelb wrote an opinion piece in which he said, "The world is looking on to see if ... the United States has the political steadiness to try to establish a working relationship with a revolutionary government." He warned that if Nicaragua re­ quested, and the United States withheld, military aid, "it would mean an abrupt end to a policy shift of historic proportions and great opportunity: trying to work with and win over radical regimes rather than reflexively opposing them and condemning them, and us, to a sterile future."118 In September, Alan Riding reported on the nonaligned summit meeting. His report was less informative than Karen DeYoung's in the Post. Riding said: "Ortega detailed for the first time Nicaragua's new foreign policy, notably by offering support for liberation movements around the world. He insisted that the 'Sandinista revolution does not seek alignments' and scoffed at press reports suggesting that Nic­ aragua's recent recognition of the new Cambodian Government of

94 THE NEW NICARAGUA

Heng Samrin meant 'we had aligned ourselves with the Soviet bloc.' "119 A few days later, the Times editorialized: While Washington lags, the Cubans, more enterprising, have already begun a long-term effort to train teachers and provide scholarships in Nicaragua. So far, the revolutionary regime has shown its good faith by restoring liberties and pursuing a pluralist path. In the critical reconstruction period ahead, the United States can reinforce a promising democratic surge. The need is to move quickly, generously and imaginatively.120 While the Times exhorted imaginativeness, it also exhibited some, for neither in the editorial, nor in any other story that I can find, in the Times or elsewhere, is it apparent what constituted the "democratic surge" that the paper applauded. Little about Nicaragua's international alignment appeared in the Times during the following six months until another editorial ap­ peared urging more aid for Nicaragua, albeit this time arguing with notably diminished optimism: Chairman Zablocki of the House Foreign Affairs Committee has stated the simple truth: "We cannot provide assurance that this assistance will turn the tide toward the democratic forces. But of this I am sure: not to provide assistance would be to walk away and leave the game to the Cubans and Soviet surrogates."121 Also in March, the Times carried a Reuters story on the Sandinista delegation that visited Moscow. It said: Leaders of Nicaragua's revolutionary Government left the Soviet Union today at the end of a visit that drew the country closer to Moscow in political terms and brought it pledges of aid to rebuild its economy. ... It signed wide-ranging cooperation accords. The Tass news agency said that under the agreements Moscow would send experts to Nicaragua to develop agri­ culture, power engineering, transport and communications. The visitors also concluded a "program of cooperation" be­ tween the Soviet Communist Party and the Sandinista Na­ tional Liberation Front.122

This story had much important information in it, but it was only two column inches long and was not written by a Times correspon­ dent, suggesting to readers that it was not very important.

95 NEWS COVERAGE OF THE SANDINISTA REVOLUTION

In July 1980, a year after the Sandinistas came to power, the paper ran a story oddly datelined Mexico City and bylined "Special to the New York Times," that gave Times readers for the first time a good description, albeit not an alarmed one, of Cuban involvement: More than 2,000 Cubans are working in education, health, road construction, communications, military training and intelligence. Nicaraguan officials frequently fly to Havana to confer with President Castro.... But Nicaragua has also carefully avoided full identification with Cuba and has maintained strong political and economic ties with other nearby nations.... United States officials say they are [most] worried by the Cuban presence in military training, intelligence work and communications. "Intelligence is the most dangerous area," a Western diplomat said. "The Cubans may be helping the Nicaraguans, but an intelligence agent has his own game. It's an area where the Cubans can easily deceive the Nic­ araguans.... Nothing in fact annoys the proudly nationalistic Sandinists more than the suggestion that they are Cuban puppets. "We didn't go through all this to exchange American domination for Soviet domination," a member of the junta said. 123 Notes 1. Terri Shaw, July 21, 1979, p. A2. 2. July 21, 1979, p. AI. 3. July 21, 1979, p. AI. 4. July 23, 1979, p. A14. 5. July 25, 1979, p. A16. 6. November 29, 1979, p. AI. 7. July 23, 1979, p. A15. 8. August 1, 1979, p. A16. 9. August 21, 1979, p. All. 10. September 8, 1979, p. A7. 11. July 20, 1980, p. AI. 12. July 22, 1979, p. A12. 13. July 29, 1979, p. A3. 14. August 7, 1979, p. A15. 15. August 20, 1979, p. A3. 16. December 2, 1979, section VI, pp. 74 and following. 17. January 31, 1980, p. A3. 18. May 25, 1980, section IV, p. 5. 19. June 10, 1980, p. A18. 20. July 20, 1980, section IV, p. 5. 21. August 12, 1979, p. V 4. 22. August 17, 1979, p. II 7.

96 THE NEW NICARAGUA

23. May 20, 1980, p. II 6. 24. July 13, 1980, p. V 3. 25. February 12, 1980, p. 48. 26. August 4, 1979, p. 11. 27. AprilS, 1980, p. 12. 28. April 26, 1980, p. 38. 29. May 10, 1980, p. 21. 30. July 23, 1979. 31. August 8, 1979. 32. July 27, 1979. 33. April 15, 1980. 34. July 22, 1979, p. A14. 35. July 30, 1979, p. AI. 36. November 29, 1979, p. AI. 37. August 20, 1979, p. A3. 38. April 23, 1980. 39. "Our Central America Correspondent," July 28, 1979, p. 73. 40. "From Our Special Correspondent," September 29, 1979, p. 66. 41. "From Our Special Correspondent," May 10, 1980, p. 21. 42. "From Our Special Correspondent," September 29, 1979, p. 66. 43. "From Our Special Correspondent," May 10, 1980, p. 21. 44. July 21, 1979, p. A2. 45. August 10, 1979, p. A21. 46. August 14, 1979, p. A14. 47. August 22, 1979, p. A20. 48. September 10, 1979, p. A22. 49. November 29, 1979, p. AI. 50. April 3, 1980, p. A30. 51. April 23, 1980, p. A33. 52. August 22, 1979, p. AI. 53. August 26, 1979, section IV, p. 3. 54. December 2, 1979, section VI, pp. 74 and following. 55. February 8, 1980, p. A2. 56. July 22, 1979, p. I 16. 57. July 28, 1979, p. I 7. 58. August 9, 1979, p. A8. 59. August 19, 1979, p. I 5. 60. August 28,1979, p. All. 61. May 17, 1980, p. I 23. 62. May 10, 1980, p. 21. 63. May 2, 1980, p. A16. 64. August 4, 1979, p. I 1. 65. Nicholas Parsons, Reuters, October 17, 1979, p. VI 8. 66. November 15, 1979, p. I 4. 67. From Times wire services, November 28, 1979, p. I 25. 68. December 3, 1979, p. I 19. 69. April 30, 1980, p. I 22.

97 NEWS COVERAGE OF THE SANDINISTA REVOLUTION

70. June 21, 1980, p. I 1. 71. Warren Hoge, August 3, 1979, p. A3. 72. Richard J. Meislin, August 11, 1979, p. AS. 73. August 16, 1979, p. AS. 74. October 6, 1979, p. 48 75. October 11, 1979, p. A10. 76. UPI, November 28, 1979, p. A3; UPI, December 1, 1979, p. A8; AP, December 10, 1979, p. A12. 77. December 2, 1979, section VI, pp. 74 and following. 78. February 3, 1980, p. A3. 79. November 29, 1979, p. AI. 80. January 20, 1980, p. A16. 81. February 12, 1980, p. 48. 82. April 15, 1980. 83. May 10, 1980, p. 21. 84. May 10, 1980, p. 21. 85. May 24,1980, p. All. 86. June 3, 1980, p. A3. 87. August 12, 1979, p. V 4. 88. September 18, 1979, p. A15. 89. February 12, 1980, p. 48. 90. August 20, 1979, p. A3. 91. December 2, 1979, section VI, pp. 74 and following. 92. Warren Hoge, August 5, 1979, p. A8. 93. August 6, 1979, p. A19. 94. February 3, 1980, section XII, p. 58. 95. August 7, 1979, p. AI. 96. August 11,1979, p. AI. 97. August 16, 1979, p. A16. 98. August 18, 1979, p. A19. 99. August 30, 1979, p. A20. 100. September 1, 1979, p. A17. 101. September 12, 1979, p. AI. 102. September 7, 1979, p. A12. 103. December 1, 1979, p. AI. 104. April 13, 1980, p. A25; the Post's elipses. 105. May 16, 1980, p. A15. 106. June 12, 1980, p. A33. 107. UPI, July 28, 1979, p. I 7. 108. UPI, July 29, 1979, p. I 4. 109. August 1, 1979, p. I 7. 110. August 13, 1979, p. II 7. 111. December 5, 1979, p. I 1. 112. "From Our Special Correspondent," September 29, 1979, p. 66. 113. AprilS, 1980, p. 12. 114. May 10, 1980, p. 21. 115. August 6,1979, p. A3.

98 THE NEW NICARAGUA

116. August 12, 1979, p. A17. 117. August 15, 1979, p. A22. 118. August 29, 1979, p. A23. 119. September 7, 1979, p. A3. 120. September 16, 1979, section IV, p. 18. 121. March 17, 1980, p. A18. 122. March 23, 1980, p. A8. 123. July 9, 1980, p. A10.

99 5 Changes in the Government's Perception of the Sandinistas

Within the spectrum of American political opinion, both the Carter administration and most of the major news media took a relatively hopeful view of the Nicaraguan revolution. Yet there were some differences. In the year before the Sandinistas came to power, most of the press seemed willing to accept their declarations of democratic intent, while the Carter administration was more skeptical. It was eager to oust Somoza, but it clearly hoped to dilute Sandinista power within the incoming government. Once the new regime was in power, however, the roles reversed. Within a few months, while most of the major news media began to carry at least occasional stories that gave cause for concern about the direction of Nicaragua's new government, the U.S. administration remained upbeat and optimistic about revolu­ tionary Nicaragua. No doubt this was in part a deliberate strategy for wooing the Sandinistas. Occasionally press reports mentioned that some within the administration-presumably National Security Adviser Brzezinski-were more somber in their assessments. When lobbying for its large foreign aid request for Nicaragua, the administration's spokesmen would often warn that failure to provide aid would drive Nicaragua into the arms of the Cubans or down the path to Commu­ nism, but on other occasions they were consistently optimistic. A week after Somoza fled Nicaragua, President Carter was asked at a news conference if we were in danger of another Cuba there. Carter replied: "It's a mistake for Americans to assume or to claim that every time an evolutionary change ... or even an abrupt change takes place in this hemisphere that somehow it's the result of secret, massive Cuban intervention.... I do not attribute at all the change in Nicaragua to Cuba. I think the people of Nicaragua have got enough judgment to make their own decisions." This reply received the enthusiastic endorsement of the NeuJ York Times editorialists: "Presi­ dent Carter sounded exactly the right note in his news conference remarks on the devil theory of the revolution in Nicaragua," they

100 CHANGED PERCEPTIONS OF THE SANDINISTAS proclaimed. "Mr. Carter has shown refreshingly that a President would once in a while rather be right."1 When the new regime was about a month old, the Times carried a story by Richard Meislin about a variety of aid measures for Nic­ aragua initiated by the Carter administration. He wrote: These moves are part of an effort by the Carter Administra­ tion to dispel impressions that it has reservations about the Sandinist Government that took control here last month. "Our relations are as cordial and as easy as I've ever wit­ nessed with any government," said Ambassador Lawrence A. Pezzullo in an interview. "There is no great policy agony on our part as far as I know, and I'm Ambassador here."2 A month later, the Tilnes reported: Failure of the United States to supply aid to Nicaragua, whose economy was devastated by civil war, could push its new leadership toward Communism, the Carter Administra­ tion warned Congress today. State Department officials stressed in testimony ... that despite the Marxist revolutionary statements of some of Nic­ aragua's leaders the situation in the country was "fluid" and presented a major opportunity for the advancement of U.S. relations with Latin America. "Without adequate support for reconstruction, the Nic­ araguan Government may well resort to authoritarian meas­ ures to expedite economic recovery," said Warren M. Christopher, Deputy Secretary of State. 3 As far as I can find, the New York Times carried no stories like those in the Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times reporting that some within the administration (privately, at least) took a much more pessimistic view. But one Times story about El Salvador in February of 1980 hinted at some administration concern. "The Carter Administra­ tion's decision to provide military assistance to El Salvador's army despite continuing repression of opposition groups here appears aimed at preventing at all costs 'another Nicaragua,'" wrote corre­ spondent Alan Riding. 4 Obviously, if Nicaragua were judged to be acceptable, no one would worry about a spread of Sandinismo. The Washington Post characteristically had the most thorough coverage of U.S. government views. The new government had been in power in Managua only a few days when the Post's John Goshko wrote: In opting for a friendly approach to the Sandinistas ... the administration is keenly aware that it is following a line that could expose it to heavy criticism....

101 NEWS COVERAGE OF THE SANDINISTA REVOLUTION

In fact ... influential figures within the U.S. intelligence community believe ... that the hard-core Marxists in the regime quickly will begin trying to neutralize the influence of the junta's more moderate members and seize control. Of particular concern to intelligence sources was the ap­ pointment of Tomas Borge, a Sandinista guerrilla leader who has espoused Marxist beliefs and who has close ties to Cuba, as interior minister, a post that will give him control over the police and internal security forces. One member of the intelligence community has suggested that the Borge appointment may have been the first step in what he called a "textbook example" of gaining power "a slice at a time" by progressively maneuvering into control of key posts.... But, [other administration] sources add, there is also the chance that it could move toward some form of social democ­ racy that would mix elements of Marxism with western de­ mocracy.5

After President Carter's news conference denial of Cuban influ­ ence in the Nicaraguan revolution, the Post, like the Tilnes, wrote an approving editorial, but in terms far more restrained. "The admin­ istration is betting cautiously on the revolution. It is a risky bet but the right one," said the Post. 6 A few days later, an Evans and Novak column in the Post gave a different side of the story. "The president's most sophisticated ad­ visers do not doubt that, sooner or later, the Sandinista regime will be Communist," they wrote. "Present cordiality from Managua is, like Fidel Castro's smiles in 1959, an effort to shake down Uncle Sam before the true colors are shown."? One Washington Post reporter in Nicaragua, Charles Krause, ridiculed the administration's determined efforts to put the best face on the Sandinista regime. After Senator Edward Zorinsky visited Nicaragua and proclaimed the Nicaraguan government to consist of a "dedicated, impressive group of people whose driving force is Nic­ araguan nationalism,"B Krause wrote:

Despite the fact that leaders of the new government have no great love for the United States and the one government­ controlled newspaper hardly skips a day without finding some way to attack U.S. imperialism, Zorinsky and the American Embassy insist that things are going very smoothly. Nicaraguans, they say, believe that the Carter ad­ ministration was "in the vanguard of the effort to remove Somoza." It is not clear whether this is the official line for consump- 102 CHANGED PERCEPTIONS OF THE SANDINISTAS

tion back home or whether Zorinsky and the embassy of­ ficials actually believe what they are saying. But there are few Sandinista leaders who credit the United States with being in the vanguard of anything that has to do with Nicaragua. 9 Krause's Post colleague, Karen DeYoung, however, was much more receptive to the embassy's line. She wrote a few months later: Although the U.S. embassy appears to take what one diplo­ mat called "a disconcerting level" of harsh leftist language in stride, reassured by moderation privately shown by high­ level officials, there are fears that this language will cause trouble either here or in the United States.... So far there has been no evidence of Cuban military ac­ tivity here, and U.S. officials feel a strong Cuban presence in terms of teachers, physicians and a number assumed to be intelligence officers is manageable. But fear remains that identification with Cuban foreign policy, and highly visible Cuban presence here, could be­ come issues in a U.S. campaign year charged with emotion over the return of the Panama Canal and a perceived loss of U.S. prestige in a country where Washington once called the shots. IO Thus in Washington's view, the real danger posed by the Sandi­ nista regime was less to its subjects or its neighbors than to President Carter's reelection chances, and DeYoung seemed to concur. When, after two months in office, three of the Nicaraguan junta visited Washington, John Goshko once again described the inner disagreements within the U.S. administration: In some quarters of the administration and Congress, there still are fears that the Sandinistas are an inherently Cuban­ controlled force intent on turning Nicaragua into a base for communist penetration of Central America. However, the dominant policy position within the admin­ istration has been to accept the junta's assurances that it has no hostile intentions against Nicaragua's neighbors and to try to move the country in moderate directions by offering U.S. friendship and financial help in rebuilding its civil-war torn economy. 11 The administration's optimistic view about the Sandinistas con­ tinued through the first year of their rule. Reporting on the revolu­ tionary rhetoric that characterized Managua's celebration of the first anniversary of the revolution, the Post's Christopher Dickey reported: U.S. Ambassador Lawrence Pezzullo has maintained that whatever the tone of today's celebration, the realities faced 103 NEWS COVERAGE OF THE SANDINISTA REVOLUTION

by Nicaragua and its leaders are unchanged, requiring the same sort of moderation, pragmatism and compromise that he said the Sandinistas have demonstrated in growing mea­ sure during the last year. "It's like the football team that won the Saturday game," Pezzullo said. "They're going to have their dance." The San­ dinistas "have to sit down and run the country on Monday morning."12 The Los Angeles Times's coverage of U.S. government views was sparser than the Post's but not much different. In fact, it ran several stories from the Post, including Dickey's story on the revolution's anniversary celebration and Goshko's September 1979 story about differences within the U.S. administration. It also ran the same Reu­ ters story as the Post, giving the administration's belated response to the Soviet-FSLN party-to-party pact. A follow-on Reuters story ap­ peared the next day in the Los Angeles Times but not in the Post. It gave a strikingly different impression of U.S. views of the Nicaraguan situation from anything else that I can find in any of the news media in this period. Signed by Jeffrey Antevil, the story said: The U.S. goal in the Caribbean region has shifted ... to encouraging moderation and influencing changes now seen as inevitable. Officials said, however, that the shift may have come too late to keep several important countries from falling under the control of pro-Cuban Communist forces. They are particularly pessimistic about Nicaragua, where any opportunity for Washington to keep the successors to ousted President Anastasio Somoza on a moderate course may have now passed. U.S. specialists on the Caribbean and Central America said Nicaragua appeared well on the way to becoming a full­ fledged Marxist state. 13 The contrast between Antevil's report and most others may have had less to do with the reporter's own views than with his having found a source whose views were at odds with most other U.S. officials. Did the tenor of press coverage from Nicaragua influence U.S. policy during the first year of Sandinista rule? Not in any way that is obvious. Just as the optimistic view of the FSLN projected in much of the press before its seizure of power failed to allay U.S. government worries, so the increasingly skeptical tone of news reports about early Sandinista rule did little to dampen the administration's hopes that it could win the Sandinistas over.

104 CHANGED PERCEPTIONS OF THE SANDINISTAS

One instance in which the press unmistakably influenced the administration's policy, at least on a rhetorical level, was Evans and Novak's column of spring 1980 focusing on the party-to-party agree­ ment signed in Moscow by the Sandinistas. The signing of such an agreement had been mentioned in a single phrase in the New York Times just after it happened in March, but it was ignored by the administration until the column appeared in May. The day it appeared the U.S. State Department responded with a statement reported in the Post: "The signing of an agreement between the Soviet Union and Nicaragua's ruling Sandinista Marxist Party in March may signal a Soviet move to expand its influence in Nicaragua, the State Depart­ ment said yesterday."14 Conversely, it is not easy to see in the news reports themselves evidence t1:lat reporters were influenced by the administration's at­ titude, although it seems reasonable to guess that its optimistic as­ sessments may have deterred some journalists from interpreting events in Nicaragua as pessimistically as they otherwise might have. Notes 1. July 27, 1979, p. A22. 2. August 17, 1979, p. A8. 3. September 12,1979, p. All. 4. February 23, 1980, p. A2. 5. July 25, 1979, p. AI. 6. July 27, 1979, p. A18. 7. August 1, 1979, p. A21. 8. Charles A. Krause, August 8, 1979, p. AID. 9. August 10, 1979, p. A17. 10. December I, 1979, p. AI. 11. September 25, 1979, p. A6. 12. July 20, 1980, p. AI. 13. May 18, 1980, p. I A4. 14. Reuters, May 17, 1980, A14.

105 6 Conclusion

Press coverage of the Sandinistas during the year before they took power and their first year in power fell well short of the best in American journalism. Ample evidence was available before the FSLN came to power that it was a Communist organization, in the full meaning of that term, and once they took power, ample evidence showed that the Sandinistas were working to turn Nicaragua into a Communist state. This was probably the most important single fact about the Sandinista Front, and yet it was missing from much of the news coverage examined in this study. If the news media were guilty of shortcomings, however, the outlets I examined were not equally guilty. The television networks, for example, can perhaps be faulted for giving insufficient depth to their coverage of Nicaragua, but they were less guilty than the print media of misportraying the Sandinistas. Within the print media, con­ siderable variation was also evident. The Los Angeles Times provided far more accurate coverage of the Sandinistas, especially when David Belnap was reporting, than did the New York Times, whose coverage seemed far below its usual high standard. In addition, significant variations were discernible even within individual news organiza­ tions. Charles Krause, for example, furnished a far more illuminating portrait of Nicaragua during the early period of Sandinista rule than did any of his colleagues at the Washington Post. The causes of the weakness in the coverage cannot be discerned from studying the news stories alone and would require methods of inquiry that lie beyond the limits of this study. Nonetheless, certain lines of speculation suggest themselves. Why did some important reporters not see the Sandinistas for the Communists that they were? This failure can be explained in part, perhaps, because these reporters were repelled by Somoza's rule and wanted to believe the best about his young revolutionary opponents and in part, perhaps, because they had failed to do their homework. It is hard to believe that those reporters who seemed to accept most readily the Sandinistas' disin­ genuous self-portrait as Social Democrats could have been versed in Sandinista literature, which was so clear in its ideological earmarks.

106 CONCLUSION

Most inexcusably, it appears t~at some reporters were unprepared for their assignment by any familiarity with the history of Communism. How else can one explain Alan Riding's astounding interpretation that the Sandinistas' decision to create communes was reassuring news because this constituted a less "revolutionary" step than distributing land, or Riding's and Karen DeYoung's suggestion that the naming of Tomas Borge as interior minister was reassuring because this position would empower him to keep "radicals" in check? The individual reporters can hardly be blamed, however, for one of their other apparent handicaps, which may well have been the most important single cause of the journalists' failures: it seems that nothing in their professional training prepared them to cope with the elaborately planned and painstakingly executed campaign of deception that was an integral part of Sandinista strategy. 1 Every journalist cultivates skepticism. Human beings lie, wit­ nesses err, and those in public positions skew facts in self-serving ways. Journalists know to take each version with a grain of salt, whether it be, say, from a Somocista, a Sandinista, or a State Depart­ ment spokesman. They follow certain established procedures to get the fullest or most truthful picture. For example, they seek multiple sources for any second-hand information. Above all, they must rely on common sense to ask the right questions, seek the relevant data, and assess the information they receive, separating the certain from the probable, the probable from the plausible, and the plausible from the implausible. Yet the common sense and the established procedures that stand journalists in good stead in ferreting out the deceptions perpetrated by American officials or those of other democratic governments, or even of old-fashioned slipshod dictatorships, may not be adequate to coping with Communist governments or movements. Communists are different in the elaborate effort they invest in strategies of decep­ tion, in the conspiratorial nature of their movement, and in their peculiar moral framework: any serious Leninist can lie without the least twinge of conscience if that lie advances the cause of the revolu­ tion. Consider, for example, the seriously misleading descriptions that the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal presented of the first revolutionary junta named by the Sandinistas. These errors resulted from the fact that two of the junta-Sergio Ramirez and Moises Hassan-dissembled about their political allegiance and that other individuals, relied upon as sources by the newspapers, dissembled both about their own allegiances and about Ramirez's and Hassan's. The deception depended not merely on lies concocted for the imme-

107 NEWS COVERAGE OF THE SANDINISTA REVOLUTION diate situation but also on false fronts cultivated for years. It is hard to imagine that U.S. leaders could pull off such a ploy. Of course, every nation has its intelligence professionals trained in the arts of decep­ tion, but that a bevy of political leaders could collaborate in an orches­ trated long-term deception would be quite extraordinary in democratic political culture. American news organizations and schools of journalism would do well to consider whether our foreign correspondents are ade­ quately prepared for their jobs, not only in language skills and history but also in their ability to cope with the kinds of deception that they may encounter from governments far more calculating than the American government. This applies all the more forcefully to insur­ gent Communist movements, which, untainted by holding power, may exploit a certain romantic cachet in winning reporters' trust. Although the failures that this study identifies by certain news organizations confirm some criticisms voiced by conservatives and others, I have not found confirmation of one important charge, namely that errors by the news organizations gave rise to errors by the U.S. government. The U.S. government may have failed to act to prevent the Sandinista triumph or may even have facilitated it, but this was not because President Carter and those who served him failed to recognize the Sandinistas for what they were. Although the New York Times and the Washington Post may have obscured the fact that the Sandinistas were Communists, administration officials had access to other sources of information and analysis. From what can be seen in news reports of the time, they understood that the Sandinistas were Communists and this worried them, but they had no good idea what to do about it. It might be argued that had the American people been better informed about the Sandinistas, public opinion might have pressed the U.S. administration to take more effective action to prevent Com­ munism in Nicaragua. But it seems unlikely that the American public would have demanded tougher anti-Communist action so soon after America's debacle in Vietnam. The charge that can fairly be lodged against those journalists who misportrayed the Sandinistas is not that they "cost" America Nicaragua, but merely that they failed to give their audience as true a picture as was in their power to do. That is indictment enough. Note 1. See Douglas W. Payne, The Democratic Mask: The Consolidation of the Sandinista Revolution (New York: Freedom House, 1985).

108

A NOTE ON THE BOOK

This book was edited by Dana Lane of the publications staff of the American Enterprise Institute. The text was set in Palatino, a typeface designed by Hermann Zapfi Coghill Book Typesetting Company, of Richnlond, Virginia, set the type, and Edwards Brothers Incorporated, of Ann Arbor, Michigan, printed and bound the book, using permanent acid-free paper.