Black Book of the Sandinistas

Daniel Ortega, the former leader of Nicaragua’s Sandinista Marxist regime (1979-1990), has regained power after winning his country’s presidential election last Tuesday.

Fears abound in Washington that Ortega will join the anti-U.S. bloc in Latin America being manufactured by Hugo Chavez.

Many questions remain. One of them: why was this ruthless dictator voted into office by a people who once threw him out? There are no simple answers, but a peoples’ support for their own tormentors is, obviously, no new phenomenon. Russia, for instance, is currently experiencing a resurgence of nostalgia for Joseph Stalin -- as new monuments are being erected in several Russian communities to honor the former genocidal dictator.

Aside from the economic and political frustrations facing Nicaraguans, another factor clearly played a key role in the election drama: young Nicaraguan voters had no real memory of who the Sandinistas were and what crimes they perpetrated against their own people.

Upon capturing power in Nicaragua in July, 1979, the Sandinistas immediately Stalinized the country and aligned themselves with Castro and the Soviet Empire, making their country a base for the export of Marxist revolution throughout Central America.

Like all of its communist role models, the new regime constructed a fascistic apparatus to maintain rigid control. Following in the footsteps of Castro’s Cuba, it set up neighborhood associations as local spy networks for the government. Each neighborhood had a Comité de Defensa Sandinista (CDS - Sandinista Defense Committee) that served the same totalitarian purpose as the Cuban CDR and the Nazi regime’s block overseers --although the power of the CDS extended far beyond the Nazis’ model. [1]

In emulating Castro and their other communist heroes such as Stalin and Mao, the Sandinistas took control of everything in the country: mass organizations, the army, police, labor unions, and the media. They censored all freedom of speech, suspended the right of association and ruthlessly crushed the freedom of trade unions. Faithful to their Marxist ideology, the new tyrants seized the means of production. State controls and nationalization spread, aid to the private sector and incentives for foreign investment disappeared. To put it plainly, another 20th-century experiment with socialism annihilated a nation’s economy along with a peoples' prospects for a better life.

Thousands of Nicaraguans who attempted to protect their property -- or who simply committed the crime of owning private property -- were imprisoned, tortured, or executed by the new despots.

Unlike the previous regime of Anastasio Somoza, the Sandinistas did not leave the native populations on the Atlantic coast of Nicaragua in peace. In Khmer Rouge style, they inflicted a ruthless, forcible relocation of thousands of Indians from their land. Like Stalin and Mao, the new regime used state-created famine as a weapon against these "enemies of the people." [2] The Sandinista army committed myriad atrocities against the Indian population, killing and imprisoning approximately 15,000 innocent people. The Sandinista crimes included not only mass murders of innocent natives themselves, but a calculated liquidation of their entire leadership -- as the Soviets had perpetrated against the Poles in the Katyn Forest Massacre, when the Soviet secret police executed approximately 15,000 Polish officers in the spring of 1940.

The Sandinistas quickly distinguished themselves as one of the worst human rights abusers in Latin America, carrying out approximately 8,000 political executions within three years of the revolution. The number of "anti-revolutionary" Nicaraguans who disappeared while in Sandinista hands numbered in the thousands. By 1983, the number of political prisoners inside the new Marxist regime’s jails was estimated at 20,000. [3] This was the highest number of political prisoners in any nation in the hemisphere -- except, of course, in Castro’s Cuba. By 1986, a vicious and violent Sandinista “resettlement program” forced some 200,000 Nicaraguans into 145 “settlements” throughout the country. This monstrous social engineering program entailed the designation of “free-fire” zones in which Sandinista government troops shot and killed any peasant of their choosing. [4]

The Sandinista Gulag also institutionalized torture. Political prisoners in Sandinista jails, such as Las Tejas, were consistently beaten, deprived of sleep and given electric shocks. They were routinely denied food and water and kept in dark cubicles known as chiquitas (little ones), that had a surface area of less than one square meter. These cubicles were too small to sit up in, were completely dark, and had no sanitation and almost no ventilation. Prisoners were also forced to stand for long periods without bending their arms or legs; they were locked into steel hot boxes exposed to the full force of the tropical sun; their daughters or wives were sexually assaulted in front of them; and some prisoners were mutilated and skinned alive before being executed. One sadistic Sandinista practice was known as corte de cruz; this was a drawing-and-quartering technique in which the prisoner’s limbs were severed from the body, leaving him to bleed to death. [5]

The result of all of these horrifying cruelties and barbarisms was yet another mass exodus from a country enslaved by communism with tens of thousands of Nicaraguans escaping and settling in Honduras, Costa Rica and the United States. [6]

As most Marxist regimes, the Sandinista despotism accompanied its internal repression with external aggression. With Soviet and Cuban aid, Sandinista Nicaragua became the biggest and best armed force in Central America. In attempting to export its Marxist revolution, it posed a serious threat to the U.S. and to stability and democracy in the whole region. It was in response to this threat that the Reagan administration backed rebels in Nicaragua, the “contras,” who sought to bring democracy to their homeland. The Contras were mostly peasants led primarily by former Sandinistas who felt betrayed by the totalitarian turn of the revolution.

In the end, the contras played a vital role in helping Nicaraguans oust their oppressors. On February 25, 1990, under massive pressure, and intoxicated by their own propaganda in regards to their popularity, the Sandinistas staged an election in an attempt to prove their “democratic” stripes. But the dictators fundamentally misjudged the mindset of the Nicaraguan people, revealing a pathetic inability to gauge what the people were really feeling. As a result, the Ortega-led Sandinistas were embarrassingly ousted from power by the victory of the Coalition of Nicaraguan Opposition Parties, headed by Violeta Chamorro.

While Nicaragua obviously did not heal overnight, the Sandinistas could no longer torture their own people with the vicious power made available by a monstrous regime. They made sure, of course, to fulfill their Marxist legacy by swiftly “privatizing” the huge property holdings they had confiscated in the revolution and making themselves the sole recipients. As the Sandinistas clamoured to ensure that they remained multi-millionaires with swollen bank accounts, their reign of terror was cut short; democratization spread within the nation and the lives of Nicaraguans became freer and more prosperous.

It was no surprise, of course, that the Sandinistas served as models of veneration for the Western Left throughout their tyranny. Their despotic policies and adversarial disposition toward the U.S. won them high marks among leftists, for whom adversarial regimes are always the symbols that merit unadulterated worship and adulation. Just as previous fellow travelers had journeyed to the Soviet Union, communist China, North Vietnam and Cuba to pay homage to their totalitarian idols, leftists of all stripes flocked to Sandinista Nicaragua to pay homage to their new totalitarian deities. The Hollywood likes of Ed Asner, Michael Douglas and Susan Anspach served as the perfect examples of these new political pilgrimages. [7]

Despite the Left’s lies about the Sandinistas and its attempt to impose historical amnesia on their crimes, their unholy alliances, and the dire threat that they posed, the historical record stands for all to see.

As the former despot now grabs power through elections that U.S. policies helped create, the ball lies in his court in terms of what kind of Nicaragua he hopes to build: the anti-American and despotic Nicaragua of the past -- or a new and improved Nicaragua that seeks to be a member of the community of free and civilized nations.

If Ortega chooses the Castroite-Chavez road, the U.S. will by necessity have to protect the liberty, security and prosperity of the region.

It is Nicaraguans themselves that lie in the balance -- for they have the biggest stake in whether there will be new dark and terrifying chapters in the black book of the Sandinistas.

It's called "Leftist Infiltration" in the form of "Socialism" from indoctrinated/ ill-educated victims of the leftist/libtard agenda for the last 100 years or so!

It's happening in this Country faster than ever!

The Propaganda tool is television, the propaganda fools in this country have been driven by TV/ the Educational Government supported system.. aka the NEA/ College Tenured Idiots/ the Drive by Media/ the DNC/ George Soros 527's /Hollywood etc.

Any Questions?

WE are OPRAH nation! We will sob at the drop of a dirty illegal diaper in the park / We are all evil Americans and we are wrong.
P.S. Did I mention that we HATE the Military for saving our sorry asses?

/RANT OFF!

"The Sandinista Gulag also institutionalized torture. Political prisoners in Sandinista jails, such as Las Tejas, were consistently beaten, deprived of sleep and given electric shocks. They were routinely denied food and water and kept in dark cubicles known as chiquitas (little ones), that had a surface area of less than one square meter. These cubicles were too small to sit up in, were completely dark, and had no sanitation and almost no ventilation. Prisoners were also forced to stand for long periods without bending their arms or legs; they were locked into steel hot boxes exposed to the full force of the tropical sun; their daughters or wives were sexually assaulted in front of them; and some prisoners were mutilated and skinned alive before being executed. One sadistic Sandinista practice was known as corte de cruz; this was a drawing-and-quartering technique in which the prisoner’s limbs were severed from the body, leaving him to bleed to death."
_____________________________

And Amnesty International called Abu Ghraib the "Gulag of our Time"?

Is that what we were doing in Abu Ghraib?

Amnesty Int'l diminishes the real suffering that took place in real hellish gulags, like the Sandanista Gulag.

BTW, looks like Reagan was right again.

...why was this ruthless dictator voted into office by a people who once threw him out?

Because Jimmuh Carter was "monitoring" the election of Ortega, just like he does for his other Communist pal, Chavez in Venezuela.

I remember as a member of the silenced majority not keeping up with the news of Nicaragua's Sandinista v. Contra conflict. I had no idea of which were the bad guys. Would I have to do a lot of research?

No.

Just tune into the network news that evening.

It worked.

The Sandinistas got glowing coverage and the Contras were virtually cursed and damned. I now knew who the bad guys were: the Sandinistas -- Danny with his sunglasses and his admiring American media and Democrats notwithstanding.

Folks, there was no Internet and modern talk radio had yet to emerge fully (the Fairness Doctrine was still in effect).

Free speech, free press are worth spilling blood for; our free speech and press, their (the Fairness Doctrine advocates') blood.

[ One of them: why was this ruthless dictator voted into office by a people who once threw him out? There are no simple answers, but a peoples’ support for their own tormentors is, obviously, no new phenomenon. ]

Right and "we" just gave the Congress to the Democrats..
After 75 years of programs that refuse to work...

Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.