Free Republic

Daniel Greenfield, a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the Freedom Center, is an investigative journalist and writer focusing on the radical Left and Islamic terrorism. In the 80s, the Sandinista Marxist terrorists were hotter than pastel suits and shoulder pads. Sandinista! by The Clash was eating up the music charts and Hollywood celebrities like Ed Asner and Mike Farrell bypassed Cuba for the exciting new socialist nightmare in Nicaragua. When Marxist butcher Daniel Ortega appeared at a New York Athletic Club reception in 1984, CBS' Mike Wallace, Michael Douglas, and the entire media showed up to give the terrorist and his...

Nineteen Eighty Four is the name of a book warning of the dangers of Soviet Communism and totalitarianism in general. It was also the year the Communist Sandinista government of Nicaragua was bombing and shooting the indigenous Miskito Indians to steal their land. Nineteen eighty four was also the year that Bernard Sanders, then Mayor of Burlington, Vermont, went to Nicaragua to show his support of the Communist dictator, Daniel Ortega. That was also the year Sanders made Burlington a sister city to the Nicaraguan port city of Puerto Caveza.

His attitudes toward Cuba are generating Monday's headlines, but Bernie Sanders's record on another communist authoritarian state, Nicaragua, might be even more problematic for the 2020 Democratic presidential front-runner. Where Sanders supported the Castro regime with words, he spent the 1980s providing active logistical and moral support to the Sandinista regime in Nicaragua. Sanders and his supporters present this effort as simply humanitarian in nature — as support to an impoverished nation rising from the ashes of an authoritarian dictatorship. But that's not the true story. Consider what happened in 1986, for example, when Sanders, then the mayor of Burlington,...

Pope responds to an attack by Sandinista troops against the nuncio and bishops in Nicaragua - Edit: the Church is no stranger to hostility from the Communist Sandanista regime. And none of the news stories I see are covering the Communism angle and the apparent end of the romance. Managua (kath.net) On Monday, in Nicaragua, in an attack by pro-government thugs on the Cardinal of Managua, the apostolic nuncio and several bishops, including Managua suffragan bishop Silvio Baez, were injured. Demonstrators against dictator Ortega and his wife's government, who were attacked by Sandinista paramilitary groups, retreated to the Basilica of...

MANAGUA: At least 121 people have been killed in a wave of protests since Apr 18 against President Daniel Ortega's government, Nicaragua's main human rights group said Tuesday (Jun 5), calling it a "human tragedy." The Nicaraguan Center for Human Rights (CENIDH) said another 1,300 people have been wounded in the protests, which have met with a violent crackdown from the government. "This is now a massacre, a human tragedy where the goal is to exterminate all those young people who think differently than or are critical of the government," the group's executive secretary, Marlin Sierra, told AFP. "It amounts...

Given all the attention which liberal media outlets love to shower on New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio for his progressive agenda and “reforms” in the Big Apple, it’s amazing how little attention is given to the many scandals which have engulfed his administration.

What is it about worn-out socialist "worker paradises" like the old Soviet Union and Cuba that bring out the romantic in American radical politicians? After Vermont senator Bernie Sanders announced his run for president, Britain’s Guardian newspaper pawed through old archives in his home town of Burlington, Vermont where he served as mayor in the 1980s. They discovered that Sanders really did practice the socialist solidarity he preached about rhetorically. During Bernie's mayoral tenure, Burlington formed an alliance with the Soviet city of Yaroslavl, 160 miles northeast of Moscow. When in 1988 he married his wife, Jane, the mayor decided...

---SNIP--- The disturbing revelation comes just days before the 13th anniversary of the 9/11 terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center. A law enforcement source said Tuesday that if de Blasio does ­apply for clearance, he will have to endure an arduous vetting process that would include questions about his 1991 trip to Communist Cuba and support of the Marxist Sandinista regime during his visit to Nicaragua in the 1980s. “He would automatically be questioned about his visit to Cuba and his contacts with the Sandin­istas. Maybe he didn’t apply [for clearance] because he doesn’t want to go through that,”...

We used to call young Americans who went to Sandinista Nicaragua in the ’80s “Sandalistas,” a name of derision meant to mock the sandal-wearing leftists looking to help Daniel Ortega build the socialist future in Central America. As we all know, what was going on was a fight for freedom against the Marxist-Leninists, which included most of the Sandinista leadership, by those who wanted to defeat their attempt to build a second Cuba in this hemisphere. Bill de Blasio, who most likely will be the next mayor of New York, is not just a simple run-of-the mill “progressive.” The New...

With U.S. policymakers distracted by the situation in Honduras, Nicaragua continues to move toward authoritarianism. On October 19, a Nicaraguan Supreme Court panel overturned a constitutional provision limiting presidents to two non-consecutive terms in office. The ruling will allow incumbent Nicaraguan president Daniel Ortega--the Sandinista party leader, former Soviet client, vociferous critic of the United States, and current Hugo Chávez acolyte--to run for another term in 2011. If there were any doubts that Nicaraguan democracy is slowly being extinguished, this latest development should remove them. The Nicaraguan Supreme Court is composed of 16 members. Thanks to a political deal made...

Here’s what you’re not supposed to say about John Kerry: that he is a man of the Left; that he is a “Massachusetts liberal”; that he is the anti-Reagan (well, you can say that in some circles). No, now that he’s the Democratic nominee, he is a man of the sensible center, in contrast to those Texas-fried radicals in the White House. Kerry the Nominee even enjoys getting to President Bush’s right. Why, just the other day — appealing to Cuban-American voters in Florida — Kerry chided Bush for being a little soft on Hugo Chávez, the (democratically elected) strongman...

Adolfo Calero, who led the largest force of U.S.-backed rebels against Nicaragua's Sandinista government in the 1980s and found himself entangled in the Iran-Contra scandal, has died at age 81. Calero died Saturday of lung problems in the Nicaraguan capital of Managua, his aide Julio Romero confirmed on Sunday.

The last surviving founder of the Sandinista guerrilla movement that overthrew Nicaragua's U.S.-backed right-wing dictatorship in 1979 has died. Tomas Borge Martinez was 81. First Lady Rosario Murillo said in a simultaneous broadcast on Radio Ya and other stations that Borge Martinez died late Monday.

MANAGUA, Nicaragua (AP) — Former boxing champion Alexis Arguello, considered one of the best lightweights to step in the ring, has been found dead. Presidential spokeswoman Rosario Murillo confirmed Arguello's death early Wednesday.

The General Assembly of the United Nations voted this week to elect Miguel d'Escoto Brockmann as its new president. Readers with a long memory will recall Father D'Escoto (he's a Catholic priest) as Nicaragua's foreign minister during the Sandinista regime of the 1980s. He's also the winner of the 1985 Lenin Prize. Only at the U.N. does that count as a recommendation.continued

Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega is expressing his condolences over the death of the leader of Colombia's largest rebel group, calling him "our brother" in the fight against social injustice. Ortega spoke Sunday in Uruguay at a gathering of leftist parties and organizations in Latin America. He praised rebel commander Manuel Marulanda, who the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia confirmed died in March of a heart attack. Ortega called Marulanda an "extraordinary fighter" who struggled for decades to reverse "profound inequalities." The Nicaraguan president urged attendees at the Sao Paulo Forum to topple "the tyranny of global capitalism," and accused Washington...

The Christian Century Magazine News March 25, 2008 IRS probes appearance by Obama at UCC convention The Internal Revenue Service has notified the United Church of Christ that it has opened an investigation into possible "political activities" connected with Senator Barack Obama's speech at the denomination's national convention last year. UCC president John H. Thomas termed the investigation "disturbing," but said that church officials took great care to see that Obama's appearance at the UCC General Synod meeting last June in Hartford, Connecticut, "met appropriate legal and moral standards." Engaging in partisan political acts can endanger a church body's tax-exempt...

Nicaraguan leader Daniel Ortega is reverting to radicalism, writes JAIME DAREMBLUM. But the opposition is fighting back. When Sandinista leader Daniel Ortega returned to power as president of Nicaragua last year, there were encouraging signs that this time would be different. Ortega’s first term as president in the 1980s was marred by failed socialist economic policies, his support of Communist revolutions in the region, and a military conflict with the U.S.-backed Contra rebels. Even so, at the time of Ortega’s election in late 2006, Latin American democrats hoped this onetime revolutionary had abandoned his radical past in favor of a...

Translator - AltaVista/Babelfish: SANGTIAGO DE CHILE. - The United States had to pay 50,000 million dollars to Nicaragua by their support in the decade of 1980 to the "cons", maintained Central American president Daniel Ortega during XVII the Latin American Summit. "the United States must pay to Nicaragua a compensation of 50,000 million dollars by the sanction that applied in 1986 the Court the International to him of Is It", it affirmed Ortega Saturday in an extensive speech in which it reviewed to American interventions in the world. Ortega indicated that There is condemned It to the United States by...

Nicaragua Overwhelmingly Renews Total Abortion Ban in 66-3 Vote By Matthew Cullinan Hoffman MANAGUA, September 13, 2007 (LifeSiteNews.com)--The Nicaraguan congress voted today overwhelmingly  to renew the penal code's punishment of all abortions, striking down an amendment that would have created an exemption for "therapeutic abortion." Although there was concern that the governing Sandinista party might renege on its 2006 campaign promise to support the anti-abortion penal code, the party kept its promise and voted to maintain the law.  The three votes against were from the far-left Movimiento Renovador Sandinista (MRS), a group that split from the original Sandinista party in...