THE IDEOLOGY OF THE NICARAGUAN REVOLUTION IN THE PRESS by Peter Maiden For many in my generation of Leftists, the Sandinistas, whose Revolution in Nicaragua was victorious in 1979, offered the greatest hope for the future. 50,000 Sandinistas died in ahieving the triumph. The dictator Anastasio Somoza, the third Somoza in a dynastic line—gathered nearly all Nicaraguan wealth and power into his hands and the hands of a few cronies. When the Sandinistas overthrew him by force of arms, they took control of almost everything the small Central American country had to offer in one fell swoop. This allowed them to rewrite the rules for politics, the economy, education, culture—everything. The revolutionary moment was enticing to people around the world, many of whom came to Nicaragua as internationalists, to learn and help. I took the first chance I had to go to Nicaragua, although there were constraints on the revolution that I did not fully understand at the time. It is a very small country, and one of the poorest in Latin America. It turned to the Soviet Union for some basic aid when it became clear that the United States would become violently hostile. The U.S. propaganda machine made the most of that “betrayal,” turning out disinformation about Nicaragua, claiming it had become a Soviet satellite, and was furthering Soviet designs for control over Central America. The Contra War, which started soon after the Revolution, was managed by the Central Inteligence Agency and set an army of mercenaries—along with alienated and disaffected Nicaraguans—against the Sandinistas. Hope for grassroots revolutionary democracy and culture faded as Nicaraguan resources were taken up by the war effort. Prior to heading to Nicaragua, I had absorbed a lot of Latin American influences. I learned Spanish, followed Latin American politics and music, and worked for causes such as César Chávez’s United Farm Workers Union. I developed a love for the fiction of Julio Cortázar, who turned out to be a great friend of the Sandinistas. He died while I was in Managua. As a college senior I wrote and published about media in Chile, where the CIA had intervened to topple legitimacy. So I applied to and was accepted into the master’s program in Latin American studies at UC Berkeley. Right after New Year’s of 1984 I left to do field research for a thesis. The two months that followed were to be the formative years of my profession. Once in the capital, Managua, I settled into a pension arrangement with a local family. I went about many interviews freely, with the assistance of various functionaries, and even managed to collect every single edition of all the daily newspapers published during the two months I was there. The experience of doing my research, although overwhelming, exceeded my expectations. The environment was like a pressure cooker, but I managed to keep my tape recorder working, schedule appointments every day, wear out a good pair of shoes on the cobbled streets, and learn a great deal about media work. There were three daily newspapers in Managua: the Sandinista Party Barricada, the independent and pro-Sandinista El Nuevo Diario, and the anti-Sandinista La Prensa. All were professional, lively, and widely circulated (225,000 newspaper copies were printed daily, in a city of half a million). Sports was featured prominently in each of them. I spoke to their editors, a group traditionally dominated by the powerful Chamorro family, who were divided in their political loyalties. I later put together a tape of the editors facing off against each other for a KPFA-FM documentary called “The War of Ideas.” I hadn’t originally intended to speak to people in such high positions. I had wanted to talk to reporters and photographers on the ground. But those folks referred me over and over again to their superiors, kicking me upstairs, as it were. The Sandinistas certainly recognized the importance of the media. In the course of the Revolution, La Prensa struggled against Somoza. The paper’s editor, Pedro Joaquín Chamorro, was murdered, martyred, and the insurrection that ensued became the final stage of the Revolution. It was after the Revolution took place that La Prensa became anti-Sandinista. The right-leaning staff of La Prensa took control of the newspaper, and its pro-Saninista staff left en masse to form El Nuevo Diario. When fighting began at the Hoduran and Costa Rican borders in what became known as the Contra War, the Sandinistas began to censor La Prensa. La Prensa covertly favored the contras, and for that reason needed to be kept in check. Before the Revolution, Somoza censored La Prensa. Stories would be taken out at the last minute before publication, and that would leave gaps in the pages where editor Pedro Joaquín Chamorro had tried to place articles that were critical of the dictator. Legend has it that at one point the enterprising Chamorro filled the gaps with photos of Hollywood film star Ava Gardner: the newsboys yelled “Ava Gardner! Ava Gardner!” and the papers sold out. The Sandinistas were aware that the CIA had poured millions of dollars into right-wing media in Chile to bring down and assassinate Socialist President Salvador Allende, a decade earlier. The Sandinistas expected the counter-revolutionaries and the U.S. to try to manipulate the media as part of the Contra War. President Reagan went on television and denounced Sandinista censorship, using it as a rationale for military intervention. The sensational story of Nicraguan censorship was a staple in the U.S. press, which rarely if ever, mentioned any other Nicaraguan media issues. The Sandinista censorship was carried out by a young Army Lieutenant, Nelba Blandón. An Australian college professor I knew secured an interview with her, and found that her method of decision-making as censor was based in very localized, culturally Nicaraguan ideas of what was necessary for defense against the contras and was typically hard to explain to North Americans. For example, while I was there fear had increased about a U.S. invasion because of Grenada, and primitive air raid shelters had been dug in the ground, La Prensa wanted to publish an article claiming that for no apparent reason holes had appeared around town, filling up with trash and causing a nuisance. This was disingenuous and belittled the public mood, and it was censored. Along with top-down censorship, the Sandinistas experimented with a bottom-up effort to educate newspaper readers. This was done in part through the neighborhood committees organized by the Sandinistas—the CDS’s, or Committees for Sandinista Defense. There was discussion of La Prensa in CDS meetings, in order for readers to be able to understand the right-wight ideological role of that newspaper. I attended some of those meetings and spoke with a couple of the organizers. The people involved were serious and purposeful. This was not a broad-based effort, it seemed tentative, but it was a useful experiment in protecting a vulnerable, popular revolutionary government. An interview with Lily Soto, jefa of the pro-Sandinista Nicaraguan Journalists’ Union, furthered my support for Sandinista media policy. Incidentally, the Journalists Union, furthered my support for Sandinista media policy. Incidentally, the Journalist’s Union spoke up from time to time against the censorship of La Prensa (although none of La Prensa’s staff were among its members). Soto and I spoke for half an hour in her office, which like most in Managua, was noisily air-conditioned against the burning heat outside. She told me: “The practice of the Journalists Union consolidates the Nicaraguan Revolution, and mantains freedom of expression as a right of the people, incorporating, through a program we call ‘Popular Correspondents,’ the right for [working people] to have access to the means of communication. The program consists of compañeros who work on the weekends to train union and mass organization members in how to have access to the media.” Her concept was to encourage journalists to carry the ideas of working people into the press, and to help some working people learn to practice jounalism. As she spoke I felt I had found the radical journalism I was looking for. I took back to Berkeley three concepts. The Nicaraguan Revolution was the most ideologically advanced movement in the world at the time. Its being threatened was also one of the crimes of the century. Finally, it was bound to lose. Also, it was the last of the national revolutions. Never again would a struggle be less than world wide. Every aspect of Gramscian Marxism, however, was advanced. I will never forget the experience of going to war, which at this age I will never again see.
Posted on: Sun, 28 Dec 2014 23:25:10 +0000
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