Nicaragua: following Venezuela into the depths of ruin

Hugely important article right now at National Review by Jay Nordlinger on the current state of society, culture and politics in Nicaragua.

Actually, there are two NRO Nordlinger pieces about this published so far this month.

A key figure in both of them is Felix Maradiaga, whose personal story is as compelling as anything I've come across in some time:

Felix Maradiaga was born in 1976, three years before the triumph of the Sandinista revolution. His family was like the country at large in that it was split, politically: Some were pro-Sandinista, some were anti-. “My mother was very resentful of the revolution, particularly in its attack on the private sector and private property. She was a schoolteacher but also an entrepreneur. My father was an idealist” — someone who had suffered under two dictatorships: that of Somoza in his home country, Nicaragua, and that of Pinochet in Chile.

He died in 1985, in an accident. Then, the Sandinistas took away the family’s property. When Felix was twelve, he was confronted with a choice: join the Sandinista army or join the Contras. Either way, he was going to be conscripted into the country’s civil war. At this point, his mother made the most difficult decision a mother can make, as Felix says: She sent him away.

Twelve-year-old Felix joined a group of Central Americans traveling north. In Texas, he asked for asylum. He was placed with a foster family — Nicaraguan Americans — in Florida. They cared for him for two years. In 1990, when democracy came to Nicaragua, he went home. And he wanted to do whatever he could to ensure that Nicaragua never experienced civil war again.

He studied political science. In due course, he was at Harvard and Yale. When protests broke out in Nicaragua last April, the regime made a bogeyman of Maradiaga: He was the mastermind, he was a CIA stooge, he was causing all this disruption and destruction. Maradiaga dodged a few assassination attempts. Then, along with some colleagues, he was beaten to a pulp by an orteguista gang. He had his teeth knocked out, for example. He could not stay alive in Nicaragua much longer. So, with great reluctance, he joined the 80,000 others in exile.

He's not alone. The Ortega regime is doing a lot of this kind of thing:

Paramilitaries roam the country, looking for enemies of the state. These thugs are, if anything, worse than the “official” thugs. The Sandinista Youth are a particular menace. We have seen these situations in other times, in other places, such as the Duvaliers’ Haiti and the Castros’ Cuba.

The Ortegas and their lieutenants routinely denounce their opponents as “bloodsuckers” and “vampires.” (Nicolás Maduro, Chávez’s successor in Venezuela, uses just this language, especially “vampires.” In Cuba, the Castroites have always called their opponents “worms.”) They also denounce reports by human-rights groups as “noticias falsas,” or “fake news.”

Another key figure in Nordlinger's latest piece about this is Edepcia Dubon:

. . . [She is] a former legislator. “I never thought I would be an exile,” she says. Last May, she traveled to the Oslo Freedom Forum in Norway. On her way, she stopped in Miami and met with her fellow Nicaraguans. She also gave interviews, including to CNN. This got the attention of Laureano Ortega Murillo, the singer, who issued a tweet. He called Dubón an enemy of the state, basically — which made it too dangerous for her to return home.

She was born in the 1980s and named after one of her grandmothers (now deceased). Is there another Edipcia in the world? Edipcia Dubón does not know of any. Politically, her family was split, just like the country at large: Some were pro-Sandinista and some were anti-. Her father was pro-. He had come from a humble background. Was Edipcia herself pro-? “Sí, claro,” she says — “Yes, for sure.” Her uncle was a Sandinista soldier. The Sandinista soldiers who came to visit the Dubón farm were very kind to her.

“When I was little,” says Edipcia, “I slept in a T-shirt that had a heart on it and said, ‘I love Daniel Ortega.’” The memory of it makes her weep. We stop talking for a bit.

Young Edipcia, her dad, and many others had great hopes for the Sandinistas. The poor needed a fair shake. They needed literacy and opportunity. They had been kept down for so long. But Ortega’s government turned out to be a corrupt dictatorship — yet another one — and Edipcia and her dad both fell away.
In college, she studied economics, because she wanted to attack poverty: Nicaragua is the second-poorest country in the Western Hemisphere, after Haiti. She joined a party called the Sandinista Renovation Movement and ran for office. She was elected a deputy in the National Assembly. She would serve less than five years.

Defeated? Not exactly. In July 2016, she and other deputies met with Luis Almagro, the secretary-general of the Organization of American States. Their purpose was to discuss the breakdown of democracy in Nicaragua. In a speech, Ortega called them “rats.” Ten days later, Dubón learned from television that she and 25 other deputies had been expelled from the Assembly. Just like that.
She was subject to physical attacks and death threats. As we talk in Mexico City, she notes that something has changed in Nicaragua (one of many things): Women are being targeted, as never before. Among the hundreds of political prisoners are at least 77 women.

“It’s like there’s a war,” says Edipcia, about the situation overall. “But there is no war.” Every day, there are murders, disappearances, arbitrary arrests, torturings — the whole repertoire of a tyrannical regime. Nicaragua is a theater of violence.

Some background is in order. The Sandinista National Liberation Front (FSLN) was founded in 1961 by Carlos Fonseca and Tomas Borge. As a teen in 1957, Fonseca had won a scholarship from a leftist organization to visit the Soviet Union. He came back singing its praises, Walter Duranty-style, as the model for humanity's future. The group started staging guerrilla attacks and attracted two young brothers, Daniel and Humberto Ortega.

The FSLN was explicitly Marxist-Leninist from the outset. All its official documents from 1961 onward make that plain.

Resentment built in Nicaraguan society over the years toward the regime of the Somoza family, which had ruled the country since the 1930s. (The 1930s rebel who was the FSLN's namesake, Cesar Augusto Sandino, was assassinated by the Nicaraguan National Guard during a politically tumultuous period during which Juan Batista Sacasa was president and Anastasia Somoza was head of the National Guard.) 

In 1979, a broad-based coalition of forces including the business community (represented by Adolfo Calero and Alfonso Robelo), the conservative wing of the Catholic church, and the FSLN toppled the then-current president, a Somoza. The non-Sandinista elements of this coalition tried to maintain equal weight within the new government, but were quickly elbowed aside. Comandantes of the FSLN flew to Cuba and then the USSR, making clear to the world what their foreign-policy alignment was going to look like.

The FSLN also quickly lent its support to the Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front in El Salvador, which was waging civil war against that country's succession of unstable governments.

How do I know all this arcane history?

It figures into my personal conversion story.

In the mid-1980s, I was a silly young man, running a manufacturing company that my father had founded. It was a position for which I was completely unqualified. I'd majored in English in college, and I was basically a dope-addled hedonist, stuffing my regret at not seriously pursuing my musical aspirations.

I was aimless. The argument could be made that I was a poster boy of privilege.

I was attending the local Unitarian "fellowship." (The Unitarians don't call their congregations churches.)

We didn't have a minister as such, and so we brought in speakers from various community organizations to indoctrinate the attendees in various facets of social justice.

A guy from the local "peace fellowship" had just returned from a "fact-finding mission" to Central America. I forget who sponsored his little sojourn. Anyway, he gave the spiel you'd expect. "I was there. I met with peasants. I can tell you the Reagan foreign policy is imperialistic and immoral."

I'd started reading the op-ed pages in theWall Street Journal and the Indianapolis Star, which led me to check out the book-length works of some of the columnists I was encountering (Norman Podhoretz, Irving Kristol, Jeane Kirkpatrick, Michael Novak), which led me to the book Nicaragua: Revolution in the Family by Shirley Christian. 

So by the time I heard the peace-fellowship guy's presentation, I knew enough to know the was peddling lies, and I called him on it during the Q&A. 

I astonished myself. I was defending Reagan's foreign policy. 

But something had been stirred within me. There was no turning back. 

I eventually left the manufacturing world, got a master's degree in history and became president of the Indiana Council on World Affairs. I also, through some tangential connections I was making, had the opportunity to spend two weeks in the Soviet Union in 1990. 

But my main purpose in bringing up all this backstory is to point out the spiritual rot in American leftism. 

The impetus driving that peace-fellowship guy is still at work, causing Democrats like AOC to obfuscate when called upon to unequivocally denounce the despair that characterizes present-day Venezuela. 

And I'd bet you a dollar to a doughnut that the likes of her would also waffle if pressed about what's going on in Nicaragua. 

The Left is comprised of two basic levels: those who want to believe in "the vision" so badly they will swallow all manner of outrageous lies about everything, and the stratum that knows it's all a lie, but knows that those lies are how it gets and maintains power.

It's how leftism works in Venezuela, Nicaragua, post-America, and wherever you live. 

Mr. Maradiaga and Ms. Dubon can tell you all about it.