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Osorio May 1, 2002 post a comment Former President Jimmy Carters recent trip to Cuba prompted much talk among pundits over his role as an ex-president. From building houses for the poor to monitoring elections in the third world, today, more people associate Carter with Habitat for Humanity than with long gas lines and American hostages in Iran. In fact, Carter has so successfully reinvented his persona since his 1980 defeat to Ronald Reagan that few people seem to remember that there was a time when he wasnt an ex-president. So, before Jimmy malaise Carter lectures us any more on American foreign policy, let us look back at his own record when he actually ran it - specifically on a country I know a thing or two about: Nicaragua. My family and I left Nicaragua in 1979, at the height of the civil war that brought the Marxist Sandinistas to power. Jimmy Carter did not start this conflict - but his handling of it turned a bad situation into an unmitigated disaster. Carter named Lawrence Pezzullo at the time United States ambassador to Uruguay as United States ambassador to Nicaragua in June 1979 with the sole mission of pressuring President Anastasio Somoza to step down. The Carter administration was critical of Somozas human rights record, but it should have been under no illusions as to the Sandinistas true nature. In August 1978, Sandinistas disguised as Nicaraguan military stormed the National Palace, Nicaraguas capitol, and held the entire legislature hostage. In a communiqu read over television and radio as one of their demands, the Sandinistas denounced the financial bourgeoisie as an ally of somocismo that the people and other anti-somocista sectors should unmask and crush. The document also called for violent revolt and acknowledged Cuban assistance. It proudly proclaimed: The violent process initiated by the Sandinista National Liberation Front FSLN in October 1977 brought out into the open the latent political and economic contradictions among the different sectors and classes of production. Between December 1978 and July 1979, the Sandinistas received at least 60 planeloads of weapons and supplies in neighboring Costa Rica, most from Cuba. Yet, while this was going on, the Carter administration cut off military aid to Nicaragua and pressured Israel to do the same. Somoza had promised to step down at the end of his official term, in 1981, but Carter would have none of that. Under intense pressure from the Carter administration and left-leaning Latin American governments in Mexico and Venezuela, Somoza resigned on July 17, 1979. Francisco Urcuyo Maliaos, a member of the legislature, took over as interim president. Urcuyo, according to Pezzullo, was supposed to negotiate a handing over of power to a Sandinista-dominated five-member junta, but he refused to do so. The Carter administration accused Urcuyo of breaking his word, but Urcuyo was probably worried about Carter and Pezzullo keeping theirs. Through Pezzullo, Carter gave Somoza assurances that the National Guard would remain in existence. Though often derided as Somozas praetorian guard, the Guard, as Nicaraguas official military, was in fact a professional force and the only effective counterweight to the avowedly Marxist Sandinista Front - known by its Spanish initials, FSLN. The Guard, though weakened, still controlled the capital and had even made some advances in the southern part of the country. Urcuyos provisional government and the Guard were all that stood in the way of an outright Sandinista victory. But, rather than try to strengthen Urcuyos and the Guards hands as moderating, pro-American influences, Carter recalled Pezzullo to Washington in protest when Urcuyo refused to unconditionally hand over power to the junta. On July 15, two days before Somozas departure, Sandinista junta member Sergio Ramirez Mercado told reporters that special United States Ambassador William Bowdler told him the day before that the United States was ready to unilaterally recognize the junta as Nicaraguas government. He quoted Bowdler as saying: You are the new government of Nicaragua and our conversations have been cordial because the government of the United States is the only one that has sent an ambassador to talk to you. On July 19, FSLN guerrillas entered Nicaraguas capital Managua and the junta took power as the countrys new government. On July 29, Pezzullo, who had been under orders to not present credentials to Somoza, returned to Nicaragua and presented credentials to the Sandinista-led junta. The night before, junta members Alfonso Robelo and Moises Hassan returned from Havana, where they had been guests of dictator Fidel Castro for the July 26 anniversary celebration of the 1953 Moncada barracks attack that commenced the guerrilla war that brought Castro to power in 1959. Humberto Ortega, who later headed the Sandinista army, and Sandinista culture minister Ernesto Cardenal who was later berated by the Pope on the Managua airport tarmac were also in Havana for the festivities. A year later it was Castros turn to celebrate the Sandinistas victory. On July 17, 1980, the Sandinistas celebrated their first anniversary as Nicaraguas government with a rally at the Plaza of the Republic-renamed the Plaza of the Revolution-in Managua. Guests included Castro, PLO head Yasir Arafat, Iranian Foreign Minister Sadegh Gotzbadegh-this at a time when Iran was holding Americans hostage-and delegations from Vietnam, Cambodia, and Poland. Their project to build a socialist paradise had come a long way-over that one year, they had: - Established their own political military - a force named not the Nicaraguan Army, but the Sandinista Popular Army.
The Carter Administration rewarded the Sandinistas behavior with a $75 million aid package. And Pezzullo, who was at the 1980 anniversary rally, said that, the most dreadful theses about this country have not come to pass. In March 1981, the Washington Post reported that Pezzullo declined to respond when asked about reports that tons of weapons destined for Salvadoran guerrillas were stored in warehouses in Managua, and that Pezzullo knows it and knows where they are. President Reagan dismissed Pezzullo in August 1981 and took a hard-nosed approach towards the thuggish Sandinistas, who he believed were intent on destabilizing all of Central America and could not be dealt with through normal diplomacy. His administration began providing aid to both Nicaraguan anticommunist rebels the word contra is a Sandinista-coined pejorative for counterrevolutionaries and to the Salvadoran government, under siege from Cuban- and Nicaraguan-supported Marxist guerrillas. Sandinista leaders had kind words for Pezzullo on the eve of his departure from Managua. Foreign minister Miguel dEscoto, an United States-educated Maryknoll priest, called him the best United States Ambassador to Nicaragua in this century. He tried to help his Government understand the irreversibility of the process . Emphasis added Pezzullo took a teaching position at the University of Georgia in Athens, and continued apologizing for the Sandinistas. Though portrayed in the international media as sore-loser National Guardsmen, their ranks included peasants whose land had been confiscated by the Sandinistas and former Sandinistas disgusted with the regimes radical pro-Soviet turn. The Sandinistas dubbed them contras, but they shot back with their own term of derision for the Sandinistas: piricuacos piris for short, which means rabid dogs. Throughout the 1980s, the Sandinistas proved Reagans assessment of them right time and again. Their harassment of opponents made a mockery of any democratic faade - however weak - they tried to put before the world. Nicaragua had elections in 1984, but press censorship and harassment of opposition candidates by the infamous divine mobs made the campaign anything but fair.
Today the security and ideological apparatuses are more efficient. People who used to talk to their neighbors are now afraid of them. An independent observer, Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter Shirley Christian, agrees. In her book, Nicaragua: Revolution in the Family , she notes that, as authorit...
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