"The Observer" : a Nicaraguan day out for genocide's Boswells
by toni solo, January 29th 2008
On January 11th, the UK's Observer newspaper published an article on Nicaragua.(1) The Observer is one of a group of prestigious social
democrat European newspapers who all tend to filter news on Latin
America via fiction, half-truths and downright lies. The Observer
article sticks faithfully to that habitual propaganda modus operandi,
breaking into the truth about Nicaragua, rifling everything worth
knowing, leaving the reader with nothing worth having. A quick review
of the current international context will help, before looking at the
article itself.
Right now, North America and Europe are in the process of losing the
economic and political advantage they inherited from the colonial era.
For more than fifty years, since 1945, they sustained that advantage
via a neocolonial system of measureless brutality, hypocrisy and
cynicism. The recent zionist massacres of Palestinians in Gaza are the
latest in a long history of European and North American genocide
against the peoples of the world, carried out either directly by their
own armed forces or indirectly by client-aggressors like Israel in
Palestine, for example, or Ethiopia in Somalia recently, or Rwanda in
the Democratic Republic of Congo.
Other writers have noted the massacres perpetrated by the French in
Madagascar or in Setif in Algeria. One might also point to the
massacres in Korea under the command of US Army General John R. Hodge
who wrote in 1946 "our imperialism hasn't been a bad imperialism".
Hodge wrote just months after the US attacked defenceless civilian
populations in Hiroshima and Nagasaki with atomic bombs, killing
hundreds of thousands of people. Two years later Korean forces under US
command massacred around 80,000 people on the island of Cheju. That
genocide was all of a piece with the earlier US military record in the
Philippines or in Nicaragua, for example.
Madagascar, Setif, Cheju are just a few instances of the systematic
genocidal violence applied for centuries by the imperialist powers
against populations who resisted them. In Latin America and the
Caribbean over the last fifty years or so, that violence has generally
been applied by imperialist clients. But the intellectual authors have
always been the same : the North Americans and the Europeans. Their
fundamental attitude never varies : they are superior, their lives are
important, the lives of the rest are not important, because they are
inferior.
Bloodthirsty servants of the imperialist powers, like Augusto Pinochet,
the Argentinian generals who ran that country's dirty war, the Central
American oligarchs, narco-terror gangsters like Alvaro Uribe in
Colombia - all of them have had at the very least tacit approval of the
imperialist governments. By contrast, revolutionary governments never
have. The North Americans and Europeans have collaborated for decades
so as to maintain a status quo favourable to their corporate interests.
Just in the last ten years they have overthrown President Jean Bertrand
Aristide in Haiti, tried to overthrow President Hugo Chavez in
Venezuela, attempted to foment civil war in Bolivia, supported a
destabilizing strike in Argentina, actively promoted State terrorism in
Colombia, ignored gross human rights violations in Mexico and Peru and
maintained a permanent criminal blockade of the people of Cuba.
So it is completely normal for the corporate media of those imperialist
countries to reflect the very same hypocrisy and cynicism as their
governments. The two elements - government and corporate media -
complement each other. They are part of the same global neocolonialist
system that has sustained the historical privilege and domination of
the old imperialist powers and their peoples since the Second World
War. Here, we return to the Observer's article on Nicaragua.
Most of the article consists of the reporter's subjective impressions,
false accusations treated as fact, minimal concrete data and no firm
statistics. It is based almost entirely on comments from opposition
political figures and anonymous sources. The mixture of truth and
falsehood can be seen in remarks like "International donors have
slashed aid and business confidence has collapsed." It is true that the
Commission of the European Union, along with Holland and Finland have
said they are suspending aid - the context of that is very instructive.
Other important donor countries like Germany and Spain have explicitly
not done so. But to report that business confidence has collapsed is
completely untrue. The opposite is the case.
Business confidence in Nicaragua has recovered dramatically since 2006,
with export growth of over 30% in 2007 and over 20% in 2008. The 12
hour daily power cuts that characterized the previous government of
Ing. Enrique Bolaños - coddled and cosseted by the Europeans and the
North Americans - have gone. There is more than sufficient electrical
energy for the country now - a stunning achievement in just two years,
due entirely to the vigorous policies of the FSLN government under its
President, Daniel Ortega. The Observer's reporters need to explain how
it is that a leading right wing banker and economist like Francisco
Mayorga, former head of Nicaragua's Central Bank under President
Violeta Chamorro, suggested recently that Nicaragua might well be
better placed than other countries facing into the deepening
international economic crisis.
The government has managed to control inflation at levels slightly less
than in neighbouring Costa Rica. Foreign currency reserves are well
over US$1bn - a good level for Nicaragua historically. Compared to the
situation two years ago the economy is in incomparably better shape,
despite the international crisis. For a more realistic perspective, one
has only to ask where in North America or Europe business confidence
has not collapsed. Looked at that way, one can see that Nicaragua is in
relatively good shape to face the coming challenges. By contrast, for
example, the British leader of the opposition has suggested that Prime
Minister Gordon Brown may end up going begging for help to the IMF.
The most obvious dishonesty of The Observer article is its use
of
comments from a group including the novelist Sergio Ramirez, the
journalist Carlos Fernando Chamorro, the politician Dora Maria Téllez
and the feminist activist Sofia Montenegro. What unites these four
individuals is their membership of, or enthusiastic support for, the
social democrat political alliance led by the Sandinista Renewal
Movement (MRS). In the most dishonest way possible, the Observer
studiedly fails to mention that fact, which casts the comments of those
individuals in a completely different, less plausible, light. They are
not random individuals who all happen to think the same. They are a
ruthless, close-knit clique of political losers trying to compensate
for their domestic political failure by leveraging their professional
prestige abroad.
Sofia Montenegro is the perrenial leader of the Autonomous Women's
Movement (MAM), part of the MRS political alliance. In 2008, an
investigation by Nicaragua's Office of Public Prosecution discovered
that foreign governments had funded MAM under the table via donations
triangulated via OXFAM and the CINCO non-governmental organization run
by Carlos Fernando Chamorro. The annoyance of the foreign governments
involved at having being caught red-handed funding part of the
country's political opposition probably had much to do with the
hardening of their feelings against Nicaragua's Sandinista government.
But none of that highly relevant context appears in the article in The
Observer. It does not mention that Sergio Ramirez founded the MRS. Nor
does it note that Dora Maria Tellez, as President of the MRS at the
time, worked for years with the FSLN as part of the National
Convergence political alliance. All this information puts a very
different aspect on the remarks of these individuals against President
Daniel Ortega and his FSLN government.
The most important information about the MRS, for anyone reading the
Observer article, is that now the party's national support is
certainly less than
5% of the country's electorate. It has progressively lost support since
its humiliating defeat in the presidential elections of 2006. In fact,
in 2008 it reached the point where it could not sustain its legality as
a political party after repeated requests from the national electoral
authority for the MRS to supply basic details specifying its
departmental and municipal organizational structure. Just prior to the
2008 municipal elections both in Managua the capital and in various of
the country's provincial departments, important sections of the MRS
party's activist base deserted back to the FSLN because they resented
the dictatorial imposition by the party leadership of a tactical
electoral alliance with the extreme right wing.
Absolutely none of that vital context appears in the Observer report.
By means of that dishonest omission, the Observer absurdly overrates
the
importance of remarks by MRS leaders and supporters whose influence
dwindles almost by the day within Nicaragua. If they are influential,
it is because Carlos Fernando Chamorro is a member of a family media
dynasty that dominates the newspaper business in Nicaragua. Any mention
of that fact by the Observer would have chimed ill with the MRS
leadership's bogus
claims of a Sandinista dictatorship, which they have been putting about
for two years now. So, despite admitting, reluctantly, that Nicaragua
shows none of the signs of a police state, the Observer report
implicitly sustains the false accusation that Daniel Ortega wants to
impose one.
The MRS leadership still enjoy the prestige they earned as members of
the first Sandinista revolutionary government in the 1980s. They also
maintain friendships they forged in those years with leading
intellectuals like Noam Chomsky, José Saramago, Salman Rushdie and
others. These internationally famous personalities occasionally make
ill-informed pronouncements about Nicaragua based on those friendships.
Their remarks contribute no worthwhile information about Nicaragua but
conveniently serve the propaganda requirements of media outlets like
The Observer so as to smear the Sandinista government.
It is worth asking why the Observer is so ready to retail the crude
personal insults and avowedly political accusations it quotes against
Daniel Ortega and his wife Rosario Murillo. It quotes the opinion of
Sofia Montenegro that Ortega is another Robert Mugabe or Papa Doc and
that the FSLN party he leads is like the mafia. But, after all, it was
Montenegro who was discovered, along with Carlos Fernando Chamorro,
abusing the norms of financial transparency on development cooperation
funding, with the aim of financing Montenegro's organization, a part of
the MRS political alliance.
The FSLN government has dramatically improved the situation in
Nicaragua in very concrete ways. This is evident, to take a few
examples of many, from the greater number of people with access to
drinking water, much higher numbers of people receiving public health
care, a dramatic decline in maternal mortality, a marked decline in
scholastic desertion in the public education system, much lower figures
for illiteracy, greater macro-economic stability, very important
advances in Nicaragua's food security, a decisive increase in credit
for previously excluded economic sectors and the very high percentage -
around 40% - of women in executive positions in the government.
The Sandinista government has achieved all that in just two years. But
for power-obssessed individuals like Sofia Montenegro and their media
accomplices, none of that exists. As Harold Pinter might have put it,
it never happened. That denial of readily verifiable improvements in
standard socio-economic indicators is to be expected from people like
Montenegro and Chamorro. These are individuals who refused to cooperate
with an investigation by the public prosecutor's office
because they were desperate to cover up
funding for Montenegro's party-politically aligned organization with
money intended for development cooperation. In that context, the
government emerges with more credibility than either Montenegro or
Chamorro, which is presumably why The Observer failed to report the
facts.
In the same way, Montenegro and her MRS colleagues slander Rosario
Murillo, who runs the Nicaraguan government's public relations. Murillo
is a constant target of insults and attacks. Montenegro, supposedly a
feminist, instead of celebrating Murillo's unarguable success as a
talented politician and leading public figure, strings along
with Nicaragua's machista politicians and right wing media,
who all hate
Murillo. In the Observer article, Montenegro compares Murillo to Sarah
Palin, John McCain's running mate in the last US presidential election.
But Palin is someone who supports the death penalty, the wars in Iraq
and Afghanistan and the genocide of the Palestinians - the very
antithesis of Murillo's humanitarian, anti-imperialist, democratic
political
positions. One has to stop and wonder at this irrational and absurd
comparison.
Here, one is very close to the deep psychological springs of the
Nicaraguan opposition's hatred for Daniel Ortega and his government.
If one looks at political life in the Central American region for a
politician more talented, influential and capable than Daniel Ortega,
it is hard to see a likely candidate. Neither Toni Saca of El Salvador,
Manuel Zelaya of Honduras nor Alvaro Colom of Guatemala match up to
Ortega in terms of experience or achievement. Possibly Oscar Arias.
Oscar Arias can certainly compete with Ortega in terms of international
prestige. But in the majority world of Asia. Africa and Latin America,
Ortega probably enjoys more prestige than Arias, the darling of the
Europeans and the North Americans.
If one tries the same experiment in the case of Rosario Murillo, it is
impossible to find a woman politician in Central America more
successful or influential in the political life of their country than
Murillo. Like it or not, Daniel Ortega and Rosario Murillo stand head
and shoulders above their Central American counterparts, with the
possible exception of Oscar Arias. That is why their enemies hate them
so desperately. Mediocrity and failure loath talent and success. Ortega
and Murillo have notched up political achievements their enemies cannot
match. All this explains a great deal of the false and fictitious
content of the article in The Observer which, despite the FSLN
administration's impressive record, fails to admit any significant
achievement by the Sandinista government in Nicaragua.
If one analyzes the coup d'etat in Haiti in 2004 or North American and
European conduct in Palestine or perhaps in Somalia too, there is a
common approach. The majorities in those countries choose a government
not to the liking of the imperialist powers. Aghast at real demcracy in
action, the imperialist powers
then make alliances with ruthess local anti-democratic minorities. They
feed them and build them up. They exaggerate their claims and
influence. They fund them and help them consolidate. They even equip
them with weapons. On the other hand, to the freely chosen governments,
they deny resources and aid. They trash their achievements. They do
everything possible to weaken and undermine them. If necessary they
will attack them. That same pattern has occurred in Venezuela, in
Bolivia, in Nicaragua.
Despite the efforts of the imperialist governments to date, the list of
achievements by Nicaragua's Sandinista government is long and explains
on its own the stunning defeat of the opposition parties in the
municipal elections of 2008. The FSLN now controls 109 out of a total
of 153 municipalities in the country. The article in the Observer
touches on those municipal elections but offers no plausible facts on
which to base its insistent suggestion that they were fraudulent.
That is to be expected. No such plausible facts exist. The same
electoral authorities, using the same procedures, supervised the
postponed elections in seven municipalities in the Autonomous Northern
Atlantic Region that took place on January 18th this year. The area is
traditionally opposition territory politically, but the FSLN still won
four out of the seven municipalities. The opposition did not claim
fraud. Just as there was no fraud in the elections of January 18th 2009
nor was there in the elections of November 9th 2008.
Not one concrete argument the opposition have offered to back up their
allegations of fraud stands up against the explanations given by the
electoral authorities. The opposition have failed to substantiate
claims that legitimately accredited party officials were unfairly
denied access
to the count process, that there were no election observers, or that
the election observers were biased, that the official results were
corrupted. They have exploited ignorance and confusion about the
country's electoral law and the process of administrative challenges of
results in specific voting stations to the electoral authorities at
municipal and departmental level. They perpetuate the downright
falsehood that the Supreme Electoral Council is controlled by the FSLN.
The Observer fails to note any of that context. Nor does it note other
relevant incidents relating to the bitter conflicts between different
factions of the Nicaraguan opposition. In one incident José Marenco an
opposition magistrate of the Supreme Electoral Council was so enraged
at comments by fellow party member José Pallais that he rang up the
phone-in programme Pallais was appearing on and tackled Pallais's
falsehoods on air. Marenco accused Pallais and his colleagues of being
hypocrites. His clear meaning during the exchange was that the
opposition leaders admitted their electoral defeat in private but
falsely denounced fraud for public consumption so as to justify their
categorical electoral defeat.
There is plenty more context like that around the aftermath of the
controversial elections of November 9th, all of it ignored by the
Observer. The Observer came to Nicaragua with its script already
sketched out. All it needed was some lines for its characters to speak.
Another example of vital context ignored by the Observer is its
assertion, "Téllez, a health minister in the first elected Sandinista
administration, staged a hunger strike last year to protest at the
banning of her party, a breakaway Sandinista group, from the
elections." But the report does not make clear that it was the right
wing PLC opposition party that initiated the legal administrative
procedure culminating in the disappearance of the MRS as a political
party. The Observer report implies government skulduggery. But the
government did nothing.
The reason for that right wing opposition manoeuvre vis-a-vis the MRS
was
to clear the way for an undivided opposition vote in the all
important municipal election in Managua, so as to favour the extreme
right
winger Eduardo Montealegre, preferred candidate of the US
embassy
and the European Union. It was only to be expected when Tellez and
fellow MRS leader Edmundo Jarquin then brazenly urged their supporters
to vote
for right-winger Montealegre, since that had almost certainly
been strategy all along. The Observer explains none of this
context
, essential to even begin to grasp what was going on in Nicaraguan
politics around the municipal elections.
All of this gives some idea of the really deep dishonesty, the
mendacity, the truly fictional nature of The Observer's journalism in
its report of January 11th. And it is important to realise this when
considering the
issue of foreign development cooperation in Nicaragua. A faithful
report of
that issue would turn on the thoroughgoing hypocrisy of European and
North American governments. They know they are dealing with a highly
competent, disciplined and determined government in Nicaragua. They are
desperate to stymie successful outcomes for that government's
programme. All through 2008 the European Union and other foreign donors
used delaying tactics hoping to be able to use the pretext of electoral
fraud in the November municipal elections to justify not releasing long
agreed funding. They had no solid reasons to withhold that funding
right through the period up to the elections. As soon as the fake-fraud
trap was sprung by their proxies in the Nicaraguan opposition, they
acted.
Now, after the elections of the new Executive Committee in the National
Assembly one can see that one faction of the opposition - the PLC
faction loyal to corrupt ex-President Arnoldo Aleman - only used the
false allegations of fraud so as to pressure the FSLN government into
not opposing the reversal of Arnoldo Aleman's conviction on extremely
serious charges of corruption. Once that was achieved and Aleman was
free once more, everything returned to normal. The crisis vanished. The
fraud has been forgotten, except for moments when, like a malingering
dog that fakes a limp looking for sympathy, the opposition remember it
and hoping to squeeze out yet one more political concession.
Given The Observer's flagrant dishonesty in omitting highly relevant
context, it is understandable their reporter had no difficulty finding
anonymous sources from foreign development cooperation programmes to
criticize the government. The outfits – governmental and
non-governmental - involved in those programmes failed to achieve in 16
years what the Sandinista government has achieved in two. The various
elements of the governments poverty reduction programme benefit
hundreds of thousands of Nicaraguans every year now, even without
taking into account the benefits of dramatic improvements in access to
education and health care.
One has to remember that the European and North American governments
repeatedly praised the previous administration of Enrique Bolaños for
its anti-corruption struggle : blackguards puffing up poltroons.
Clearly, what they meant to praise was the Bolaños
administration's
implementation of styles and varieties of corruption more to the taste
of its North American and European patrons. The government of Enrique
Bolaños was deeply corrupt in the best hypocritical European style
paying its officials and all those foreign consultants grossly inflated
salaries and per diems, along with all kinds of superfluous perquisites.
People in Nicaragua had to wait for the Sandinista government in order
to get an administration determined on cutting to reasonable levels the
massively inflated salaries paid under previous governments. Daniel
Ortega implemented that measure the very day he and his ministers took
office. Nicaragua's Comptroller General's office, a politically
independent body, announced in September 2008 it had not needed to
process any government functionary for corruption in over 18 months.
None of that information appears in The Observer's reporting on
Nicaragua.
The horrifying events in Gaza over the last while, in Lebanon in 2006,
in Haiti in 2004 and over so many years in Palestine,
Somalia, Iraq, and Africa's Great Lakes region, all demonstrate beyond
argument the anti-humanitarian, anti-democratic, sadistic and cynical
nature of the North American and European imperialist powers. If their
behaviour has changed over the last 50 years it has been for the worse.
It makes sense that their corporate media, like The Observer, operate
with the same mendacity, the same cynicism, the same hypocrisy. These
are exactly the qualities of its January 11th report on Nicaragua.
Note
1. The original article appeared on January 11th in the Observer
section of the guardian.co.uk web site with the byline "The Observer".
Subsequently the byline changed to "Rory Carroll, The Observer".
Personally, I think various hands wrote the article because it bears
some of the stylistic touches one might expect from the Observer's
Foreign Affairs editor, Peter Beaumont. I don't refer to Rory Carroll
here because it seems to me that he and people like himself or Peter
Beaumont are mostly ciphers operating a systemic process of
industrialized ideological reproduction. It's hard to credit people
working in such a mindless system with any semblance of authorship.
They slavishly produce what they are under contract to produce within
the ideological narrative framework preferred by their employer. Real
responsibility for the false and deceitful material published by the
Observer lies with its management, who could hardly care less.