CHRONOLOGY OF THE NICARAGUAN INSURRECTION

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP83T00966R000100030027-9
• Release Decision: RIPPUB
• Original Classification: K
• Document Page Count: 7
• Document Creation Date: December 20, 2016
• Document Release Date: October 17, 2007
• Sequence Number: 27
• Publication Date: March 1, 1982
• Content Type: OPEN SOURCE

Approved For Release 2007/10/19: CIA-RDP83T00966R000100030027-9
Copies provided
4/8/82
Approved For Release 2007/10/19: CIA-RDP83T00966R000100030027-9
 Approved For Release 2007/10/19: CIA-RDP83T00966R000100030027-9
I.
,rovided to
4/8/82
J -he voregone Conclusions of thee
Fourth Estate
Tomas Borge is a very important
man in Nicaragua. He is the only sur-
viving founder of the Sandinista Na-
tional Liberation Front. A Marxist
who spent most of his adult years in
the bush before reaching power, he is
Fidel Castro's oldest friend and
Muammar Gaddafi's newest friend in
Nicaragua.
In the nearly three years since
Anastasio Somoza Debayle fled the
country and the Sandinistas took
power, Tomas Borge has become one
of the most important of the former
guerrilla commanders who now run
Nicaragua-the Sandinista Front. His
empire is the Interior Ministry which
includes the security police. Younger
members of his faction organize the
neighborhood defense committees-a
kind of a cross between the PTA and
the Ku Klux Klan.
It is Borge and his people who
killed one business leader, who throw
others into jail for criticizing the gov-
ernment, who send mobs to attack the
newspaper La Prensa and radio news
programs they do not like and keep
their regular charges of plots allegedly
Among students of Latin Ameri-
can guerrilla movements, Borge has
achieved an almost mythical stature in
the last two decades. And yet, the
Shirley Christian is a Latin-American
correspondent for the Miami Herald. In
1981, she won the Pulitzer Prize for in-
ternational reporting.
Washington Post, the New York Times
and CBS television barely mentioned
him in their coverage of the Nicara-
guan insurrection in 1978 and 1979.
Despite Borge's historical impor-
tance to the Sandinista movement since
its beginnings, reporting by correspon-
dents from these three news organiza-
tions virtually ignored him as a poten-
tial post-Somoza power. Nor was
Borge's Marxist ideology, or that of
most of the other top Sandinistas, given
much attention in the few stories they
wrote about the kind of government
that would succeed Somoza.
The important news of the insur-
rection, as reported by the American
press, was not Tomas Borge or others
like him. The issue was Anastasio
Somoza Debayle, the corruption and
cruelty of a regime that had stayed in
power too long. Somoza was easy to
hate. When he cried wolf-that com-
munists were trying to take over Nica-
ragua-reporters either contradicted
him or said it simply did not matter.
His opponents, by contrast, seemed-at
least in their public face-easy to love.
Tomas Borge was only rarely part of
that public face as it was reported by
correspondents for American newspa-
pers avid television.
Why did the American press fail
to see the coming importance of Tomas
Borge and others like him' Did Ameri-
can newspaper and television reporters,
in their acknowledged enthusiasm for
ridding Central America of Somoza,
misrepresent the Sandinistas to the
American public, or in other ways fait
Awaiting counterattack by National Guard in llatagalpa.
Approved For Release 2007/10/19: CIA-RDP83T00966R000100030027-9
 Approved For Release 2007/10/19: CIA-RDP83T00966R000100030027-9
their obligations as objective reporters? W war's battlefronts restricted. The
To find out, I studied 244 Wash-
ington Post stories, 239 New York Times
stories and 156 CBS broadcasts on
Nicaragua from January 1, 1978 to
July 21, 1979. The time frame opens
with the assassination of Pedro Joa-
quin Chamorro, publisher of La
Pren..sa, which was a major event in
unifying Somoza's opponents. It closes
with the Sandinistas taking power.
First, some personal disclaimers:
Nicaragua was not my war. I was liv-
ing in Chile which is farther, geo-
graphically and culturally, from Nica-
ragua than almost any corner of the
continental United States. I had not
previously read or heard the coverage
of Nicaragua by the Times, the Post
and CBS. I approached this critique
somewhat like the juror who has not
previously read or heard accounts of
the case she is about to try.
I have, however, been covering
Nicaragua since Somoza fell and the
Sandinistas came to power, and I have
been covering civil wars and guerrilla
movements elsewhere in Central
America. As a result, much of what I
say constitutes as much a soul-search-
ing of my own work as an analysis and
criticism of the work of others. It is
done, I admit, with the brilliance of
hindsight and without any particular
scientific expertise. Finally, I do not
know whether I would have done it
differently or better had I been there.
Some cool-minded historian of the
future will undoubtedly conclude that
Somo:za got a raw deal from the for-
eign correspondents who covered his
downfall. Somoza said his National
Guard was fighting a bunch of com-
munists, and he turned out to be partly
right. He said Panama's Omar Torri-
jos was shipping them arms and men,
and he turned out to be right. He said
the president of Venezuela was sending
arms and ammunition, and he turned
out to be right. He said his democratic
neighbor, Costa Rica, was giving the
guerriillas bed and board and tender
loving; care, and he turned out to be
right. Finally, he said that Cuba, too,
had jumped in with weapons and am-
munition, and he turned out to be
right.
A future revisionist historian,
however, will not have known this
third, and last, member of the Somoza
family to reign over Nicaragua or why
reporters came to hate him. Somoza
did not do the things that traditionally
make reporters hostile. He was, by the
standards of most national leaders, ex-
tremely accessible to foreign correspon-
dents. (One reporter who covered the
war in Nicaragua for an American
wire service has told me he could get
Somo::a on the telephone in five min-
utes, day or night.) Nor was access to
only limits on a reporter
Somoza's war were courage,
initiative.
covering
time and
The American press disliked So-
moza because of the corrupt way they
had seen him run the country for years
and because he was Somoza. A big,
blustery man who spoke in World War
II American slang, he used anti-com-
munism as his rallying cry and bought
everyone around him. He was called,
disparagingly, The Last Marine, in a
country that was once a United States
Marine fiefdom. Add the brutality of
his National Guard, witnessed by
American reporters during his last year
in power, and you have a kind of
leader that 99 percent of American re-
porters cannot stomach. -
The antagonism of American re-
porters towards Somoza was no secret.
In May, 1978, Somoza's public rela-
tions representative in Washington
wrote a letter to the New York Tintes
accusing Alan Riding, the 7iraes corre-
spondent in Nicaragua, of trying to be
the "Herbert Matthews" of Nicaragua
-a reference to. the Times correspon-
dent of 25 years ago who searched out
Fidel Castro and his small band of
guerrillas in the Sierra Maestra and,
some think, resurrected Castro's cause.
Given this press hatred, by no
means limited to Riding, it perhaps
was not surprising that reporters cover-
ing the war saw Somoza's opponents,
the Sandinistas, through a romantic
haze. This romantic view of the Sandi-
nistas is by now acknowledged publicly
or privately by virtually every Ameri-
can journalist who was in Nicaragua
during the two big Sandinista offen-
sives, the general strikes and the var-
ious popular uprisings. Probably not
since Spain has there been a more open
love affair between the foreign press
and one of the belligerents in a civil
war.
That was the mood of the time.
Since then, the mood has changed
abruptly. There have been many an-
guished second thoughts both inside
Nicaragua and in Washington about
the Marxism of the Sandinistas, about
whether their victory could have been
prevented, whether their policies and
goals can now be modified.
How the Sandinistas and other
opponents of Somoza were described
ideologically is not the only standard
by which to judge. American press cov-
erage of the period, but given the con-
troversy that has since arisen about the
government now in power in Nicara-
gua, it would seem to be the central
one. This is not to suggest that Ameri-
can reporters should constantly drum
home that a political or guerrilla figure
is Marxist and has ties to Cuba. It is
to say that these are elements that can-,
not beWored or lightly dismissed.
There was remarkable similarity
in the tone of reporting in the New
York Times and the Washington Post on
the ideology of the Sandinistas. (CBS
did not take up the ideology issue seri-
ously until a month before the Sandi-
nistas took power in mid-1979.)
Neither the Times nor the Post de-
nied or ignored the Marxist roots and
Cuban ties of the Sandinista Front
since its founding in 1962. There was
a distinct tendency, however, to stress
the reassuring impression that the San-
dinista movement had been taken over
in recent years by non-Marxists, many
of them the sons and daughters of the
bourgeoisie who had become guerrillas
after seeing their parents frustrated in
their efforts to defeat Somoza peace-
fully. Faced with this, the Marxist old-
timers in the movement had supposedly
given up their plans for installing a
socialist state immediately after taking
power. The sources quoted on this
trend were primarily the non-Marxists
themselves, most of whom are now in
exile or otherwise disillusioned with
the government.
Riding of the
probably the most
Times, who was
informed on the
Sandinista structure and the move-
ment's internal disputes, explained in
an analytical piece on May 14, 1978:
"Ironically, the current offensive
against the regime began last fall after
a faction of the country's guerrillas,
known as the Sandinist (sic) National
Liberation Front, concluded that they
alone could not overthrow General
Somoza.. They therefore abandoned
their immediate objective of bringing
socialism to Nicaragua and formed a
loose alliance with numerous non-
Marxist groups that were also disen-
chanted with the corruption and re-
pression of the Government, agreeing
to work together for the ouster of the
regime and the establishment of de-
mocracy."
Riding went on to say that the so-
called Tercerista faction, which in-
cluded most of the non-Marxists, had
in recent months seen the protest
movement slip from its hands and into
the control of the more radical factions,
the Prolonged Popular War group
(headed by Tomas Borge) and the Pro-
letarian group. These groups, he said,
were "placing the battle against the re-
gime clearly within the broader context
of a `class struggle.' "
But later, in a Times Sunday mag-
azine article in July, 1978, Riding ig-
nored the importance of the two other
groups and wrote a finely detailed
story of how the Terceristas whose
leaders, the Ortesa brothers, were
themselves Marxists, had made their
appeal to non-Marxists. He also told
how those people, in turn, had formed
a WASHINGTON JOURNALISM REVIEW
r
Approved For Release 2007/10/19: CIA-RDP83T00966R000100030027-9
 Approved For Release 2007/10/19: CIA-RDP83T00966R000100030027-9
an alliance with a respected group of
business and professional men of center
and center-left views. The latter group,
known as The Twelve, was later to
supply several Cabinet ministers and
two junta members to the Sandinista
government.
In a passage that explains why
many moderates were attracted to that
alliance, Riding wrote: "In May 1977,
the well-to-do lawyer, Joaquin Cuadra
Chaniorro, flew to Honduras for a se-
cret meeting with his son, the guerrilla
officer. 'He explained to me that so-
cialism was not immediately possible,
and that struck me as sensible and re-
alistic,' the older man recalled. `He
said the guerrillas wanted to ally them-
selves with other groups and that I
could play a role. So we reached an
agreement with the clear understand-
ing that socialism was not possible for
Nicaragua. I saw my role as trying to
rescue our youth from radicalism.' "
Karen DeYoung, who did most of
the reporting from Nicaragua for the
Washington Post, gave this explanation
of the Sandinistas a few months later,
on September 25, 1978: "Somoza has
generated some nervousness in such
countries as the United States by call-
ing the Sandinistas terrorists and com-
munists, bent on turning Nicaragua
into another Cuba. The Sandinistas,
however, have never been terrorists in
the mold of the Red Brigades or
Baader-Nleinhof gang.
"Rather, they are revolutionaries
in the Cuban sense whose activities
have been politically oriented and di-
rected toward Somoza and the Na-
tional Guard.
"At the same time, it is not at all
certain, despite their open advocacy of
nistas have either the will or the power
to effect that transition rapidly. They
have maintained fairly close contact
with the conservative political opposi-
tion and say they would participate in
The following month DeYoung
gained access to a Sandinista training
camp and wrote three widely acclaimed
front page of the Post under the head-
line, "Sandinistas Disclaim Marxism,"
she wrote: "Sandinista political leaders
interviewed here recently denied that
*_-period could be
fingers of one hand.
When he was named to the cabi-
net of the provisional government a
few (lays before Somoza fled, Riding
wrote: "Only one Cabinet member,
Tomas Borge, named to be minister of
the interior, is a leader of the Sandinist
National Liberation Front. The
sources said that as head of the 'pro-
longed popular war' faction of the
'there= also many among us dedi-
cated to representative democracy as
practiced in the United States.' "
The question, Rather concluded,
was not easy to answer.
In the coming days, CBS took
longer looks at the Sandinista move-
ment, including discussions between
Marvin Kalb, CBS State Department
correspondent in Washington, and var-
ious correspondents in the field. In
Somoza opening new session of National Congress, June 1978.
guerrilla movement, Mr. Borge should
be in a position to control the most
radical elements among the rebels."
DeYoung wrote on the same day:
"Perhaps the most interesting on the
list is Sandinista leader Tomas Borge
as interior minister. Borge, a self-de-
clared Marxist, is considered a prag-
matist. He heads the Prolonged Popu-
lar War faction ...
alysts said, Borge will also serve as di-
be in a better position to keep maver-
CBS generally dealt with the
question of the Sandinistas' ideology in
simplistic terms-referring to them in
they are Marxists. They denied that
they want Cuban-style communism in
Nicaragua. Instead, they said, they are
will be a `pluralistic democracy' built
on the ashes of the destroyed Somoza
dictatorship."
As for Tomas Borge, the Sandi-
nista Marxist and father figure who
has been so prominent since the change
of government, the brief mentions of
him by both newspapers during the
passing as leftwing or Marxist guerru-
1979, when Dan Rather began a
morning news commentary by asking,
"The Sandinistas themselves flatly
deny that they are Communists. `Yes,'
their leadership says, `there may be
Communists among us. But,' they say,
general, Kalb, perhaps reflecting the
concerns of many in the U.S. govern-
ment, was more suspect of the Sandi-
nistas' motives, while those in the field
were more open-minded. (These dis-
cussions, it should be noted, followed
by a few days the killing of ABC cor-
respondent Bill Stewart by a member
of Somoza's National Guard, an event
that had further solidified the animos-
ity of foreign journalists toward
Somoza, even though the shooting had
obviously been outside his control.)
1979, the day Nicaragua officially fell
to the Sandinistas, Bob Schieffer asked
Chuck Gomez in Managua whether he
agreed with Kalb's assessment that the
Gomez replied that it was "inaccurate,
many non-Marxists who had been
They included two of the five members
iunta and the majority of the cabinet.
Approved For Release 2007/10/19: CIA-RDP83T00966R000100030027-9
 Approved For Release 2007/10/19: CIA-RDP83T00966R000100030027-9
.Sandinistas were or would become.
Much of the difficulty lay in under-
standing the amorphous nature of the
opposition to Somoza. As Alan Riding
wrote early on, it was a national mu-
tiny more than anything else. The San-
dinistas were the only ones in the mu-
who had guns. The others--husi-
nessmen, labor unions, political parties,
the church leadership-made so much
noise and played such a dominant pub-
lic role in the mediation attempts that
it was easy for most reporters to as-
sume they would share power when
Chronology of the Nicaraguan Insurrection
January 10, 1978. Murder of Pedro Joaquin Chamorro, publisher of
opposition newspaper La Prensa. Despite lack of concrete evidence linking
President Anastasio Somoza to killings, a national strike and demonstra-
February 1978. Anti-Somoza uprising in Indian artisan village of Mo-
nimbo; continues for months in face of efforts.by National Guard to crush
Jully 1978. Return from exile of "TheTwelve," the prominent profession-
als, businessmen, and priests who backed the Sandinista National Liber-
August 22, 1978. Sandinista guerrillas led by Eden Pastora-Commander
Zero-capture National Palace, -taking more than 1,500 hostages. whom
they trade. for the freedom for 58 prisoners, .,many of them other Sandinis-
September 1978. Uprisings and fighting in cities of Masaya, Esteli, Mana-
gua, Leon, Chinandega, and Matagalpa, coupled with national strike called
by business groups. 4 .
October 1978' thru January 1979. United . States, with backing of OAS
States, conducts unsuccessful 'mediation effort- intended to bring about
Sornoza's resignation through 'a plebiscite.
'March 1979. Three factions of Sandinista movement announce unity pact,
reportedly forged at urging of Fidel Castro,- and name a nine-man director-
April 1979. Fighting resumes in various towns.-
Laite May 1979. Sandinista column 'invades from Costa Rica for final
offensive- Business and unions begin new general. strike and lockout.
'Early June 1979: Towns begin -falling, to Sandinistas.
in Costa Rica.
Late June-'1979., United. States, acting on-' OAS resolution, 'proposes to
Sornoza that. he step aside for-interim' government.. United States also begins
an attempt to, expand junta- in -Costa, Rica so rion-Marixists will be domi- -
July 17, 1979. Somoza resigns and flies to Miami.
July 18, 1979.-Three of five members of new junta fly from Costa Rica to
rebel-held, town of'. Leon where fourth member waits. Acting President
Francisco Urcuyo, after less than two days. in office,.. resigns and flies to
Guatemala;- National Guard breaks up, many members flee.
July 19,,1979. Sandinistas take'capitalcitywith little resistance.
July 20,',1979. The. junta is installed as Government of National Recon-
struction-in mass celebration in front of. National Palace.
the r tion was over.
To of the sources quoted in the
Post and the Times about the nature of
the Sandinistas or the likely future
government were not Marxists, but
members of the so-called moderate or
conservative opposition to Somoza,
most of whom, significantly, have since
broken with the government. Some
have left the country altogether; others
are now internal dissidents.
The most startling example is
Eden Pastora, the famous Sandinista
leader during the war. the man who
caught the world's attention when, as
"Commander Zero," he captured the
National Palace in August, 1978 and
bargained the lives of more than 1,500
hostages to win freedom from prison
for Tomas Borge and a number of
other Sandinista guerrillas.
The stories of the war period that
I analyzed inevitably described the
charismatic Pastora as the main guer-
rilla leader, almost ignoring the shad-
owy presence of the nine other top
commanders. It was the nine others
who eventually were named to the uni-
fied directorate-formed at the insis-
tence of Fidel Castro, who also report-
edly insisted that Pastora be excluded.
Presumably this was because Pas-
tora, as -he told many journalists who
interviewed him, was not a Marxist.
The Washington Post once described
him, in his own words, as a conserva-
tive Roman Catholic. When DeYoung
visited him at his camp, he told her he
wanted to lead a Nicaraguan govern-
ment modeled after Costa Rica's social
democracy and said the only thing he
had in common with Castro was that
both had been educated by the Jesuits.
Today, Pastora is in exile. He had
very little power in the new govern-
ment and left Managua last July un-
der mysterious circumstances. Though
the Sandinista Front suggested he had
gone off to fight on behalf of guerrillas
elsewhere, stronger evidence indicates
that he has been in Costa Rica, Pan-
ama and Venezuela trying to make up
his mind whether to challenge his
former colleagues for control of Nica-
ragua.
Aside from Pastora, the over-
whelming majority of sources quoted
by CBS, the Post and the Times about
the nature of the rebels were the busi-
ness leaders, opposition politicians,
professionals, and intellectuals who
were, by their own admission, hoping
to wean the Sandinista Front away
from its Marxist-Leninist ideology and
had no idea whether they would suc-
ceed. The. man, for. example, who was
regularly called upon to respond to
charges of Cuban involvement with the
Sandinistas was millionaire industrial-
ist Alfonso Robelo, who was probably
not even taken into the Sandinistas'
Approved For Release 2007/10/19: CIA-RDP83T00966R000100030027-9
 tional Guard reinforcements enter IlIasaya.
fidence about the subject. tured or bombarded by the National marched, single file with their
This raises questions about the Guard. DeYoung's reporting on kill- on each other's shoulders, th.au =;
iculties confronting journalists who ings by the National Guard in the nagua's central l jail compound" er guerrilla wars and popular front town of Leon during the September, David D of , vements. Should such movements he 1978 offensive appeared to have from Masaya during the s;a=e ?=:L
en at face value? Does, or will, the prompted the U.S. government to re- sive, interviewed a teacher w is '
n out in front have real power? Or quest an OAS investigation of atroc- ported on the torture of a d out in front because he looks re- mities. That ajor factor sthe rest of Latin Amer- down then rebellion there- t' i eZ `
ct
xtable to the West? facto
In Nicaragua the respectable look- ica eventually lining up against tured him," t hest acher s:~d- =
Sandinista was Pastora. Appar- Somoza. took testi ay not a Marxist, he was always Deloung's story reported that 14 glove, and they pressed-tb '?t s s _~~'
-ntified by reporters as the top guer- young men had, according to family know. After that they tool:=-
la commander. There were also members, been executed by the Na- tric shocks . . . After that they
Aerates in the five-member junta in tional Guard as they begged for mercy. the barrel of the gun in h.- a t=- :=
ile set up by the rebels in Costa Rica "The eyewitnesses' story of the know."
Two weeks later. ? $r~c~e ._~ ~~
at supposedly would run the future executions is supported by physical evi- rF_
veri ment. As it turned out, Pastora dence on the scene and by countless CBS reported from E-te~.-.
d his followers were largely excluded similar reports, primarily here in those killed were civilians-
)in jobs of influence after the victory, Leon, of National Guard atrocities the crossfire. There v, ere re=p ~= '
A the junta became little more than during nearly four weeks of civil war," aa tr citiesrby b,tthuthe hen ce d r administrative organ answerable to she wrote. ,,: he^e _,
agonized the how States in Leon last week,
e nine-man Sandinista Directorate. mMuch ent later,
it Cross says several hundred' ~~M~ =--
Much =
of the war coverage which I goven o
:amined did not ponder what kind-of should go to save part of the National have been executed by t~ae
rvernment would succeed Somoza but Guard as a possible counterbalance to Guard."
an govern-
esrand CBS f,`
article the There
welt instead on the brutality of his the Sandinistas suggested n tefuture
ational Guard and its bombardment ment, DeYoung ~.~---_-Post, Tim-
civilian areas, and on efforts to re- on July 9, 1979 that it was not worth or noncombat t brutattt*.e"~
rove him. Coming face to face with saving. forces agains :enes and stories of atrocities commit- After writing of the daily discov- One paragraph in a
:d by the Guard apparently made the eries of the bodit, of young men in the charge that the Sandimi .= ="'= ed~ olitical coloration of the Sandinista tall grass on the- Pge oident f Lake Mana- reprisals after they ihad
rout seem pale by comparison.
DeYoung of the Post and various Somoza says the National Guard does There- were 'also b+=:ef-s`
:BS correspondents gave vivid ac- not carry out summary executions. Yet "government informers-
ns and similar groups of young men-shirtless threatened.
visits to tow
aunts of their eighborhoods that had been recap- and blindfolded-are seen daily being One reason, un
Approved For Release 2007/10/19: CIA-RDP83T00966R000100030027-9
 Approved For Release 2007/10/19: CIA-RDP83T00966R000100030027-9
that nearly all Nicaraguans gave re-
porters the impression of being, if not
in favor of the Sandinistas, at least
against the National Guard. More im-
portantly, virtually every journalist I
know who covered the war was con-
vinced that the overwhelming share of
the unnecessary violence was commit-
ted by the government troops. Every-
thing they saw or heard first hand con-
vinced them of that.
There is another consideration,
that has to do with our capabilities as
journalists to cover adequately guerrilla
wars and popular insurrections. While
it was undoubtedly true that the Na-
tional Guard reacted with the heaviest
hand imaginable, it is also apparent
that the Sandinistas, by their strategy,
almost invited the Guard to attack the
provincial towns and the poor neigh-
borhoods of the capital.
They used two kinds of actions. In
one, a few of them with the help of
local muchachos-the sympathetic and
unemployed neighborhood youth-
would actually set off the "insurrec-
tion" by setting a few fires or throwing
a few small bombs. In the other, larger
groups of Sandinistas would set up
barricades to take over a town or
neighborhood.
The Guard soon learned that it
was easier to fight the Sandinistas with
heavy bombardment or even bombings
than face them in the streets. The re-
sult was that mote: civilians were killed
than Sandinistas, who had the mobility
to quickly withdraw when things be-
came hot. This also meant that the ci-
vilians were left behind to bear the
brunt of the Guard's animosity when it
reclaimed the area..
It may not have been intentional
on the part of the Sandinistas to force
civilians, to suffer, but Riding suggested
in an analytical piece in the Times
early in 1978 that some guerrilla
movements had as their objective the
provoking of repression by authoritar-
ian regimes as a means of increasing
popular discontent. He suggested that
the thesis had more validity among
guerrilla groups in El Salvador and
Guatemala and said that it had been
rejected by the Sandinistas in Nicara-
gua. His quoted source, however, was
a member of the Pastora camp.
One of the reasons the violence in
Nicaragua had such an impact on re-
porters was that the press was much
closer to the Nicaraguan war than it
had been to. others. Nicaragua, an agri-
cultural nation of fewer than 2.5 mil-
lion people, is somewhat like an ex-
tended small town where everybody
seems to know everybody else or to be
related. Most of the newspaper corre-
spondents and some of the television
people spoke Spanish at a level ranging
from adequate to excellent. Som,inkad
WASHINGTON JOURNALISM REVIEW.
Approved For Release 2007/10/19: CIA-RDP83T00966R000100030027-9
worked in Nicaragua off and on for
years and had acquaintances there on
all sides of the issue. The Hispanic-
Indian, Roman Catholic culture of the
country was not totally foreign to them.
As a result, this war was covered
from a more personal level than wars
in Third World countries on other con-
tinents, where the language and cul-
ture are more unfamiliar to Americans.
It was as easy to go among the people
in Nicaragua and find out what was
happening to them as it is in, say, Cin-
cinnati.
While stories having to do with
the structure and ideas of the rebels
were complex to write and difficult to
obtain, those having to do with the vic-
tims of violence were more vivid and
close at hand. Probably not since
World War II in Europe have Ameri-
can correspondents felt such proximity
to the victims. But in that war, news
reports were censored.
I cannot help asking whether the
horrors that journalists saw in Nicara-
gua constituted a reign of brutality and
terror by an especially repressive re-
gime or whether they were the horrors
of any kind of war, seen without cen-
sorship and language and cultural bar-
riers.
While concentrating on abuses of
power by the National Guard and of-
ten linking the abuses to the arms and
training the troops had long received
from the United States, the Post, Times
and CBS generally paid little attention
to' the question of arms and ammuni-
tion reaching the Sandinistas and the
assistance given them by other coun-
tries. Their reporters in Nicaragua
brushed off Somoza's charges that the
Sandinistas were receiving arms first
from Venezuela through Panama and
Costa Rica and later from Cuba. The
few times that these issues were raised
by correspondents in Washington they
received only slightly more serious con-
sideration from the three news organi-
zations.
Yet, it would have been relatively
easy to investigate the charges that the
guns were coming in from the south,
through Costa Rica, which is a very
open place. Costa Rican congressional
investigators have since uncovered vast
and unchallenged evidence of wholesale
gun trafficking through their country
to the Nicaraguan rebels. However
right the cause against Somoza and
however much the Costa Rican people
supported it, this was a story that de-
manded to be reported thoroughly-
and was not.
Reporters from some news organi-
zations did write that Costa Rica's
Guanacaste Province on the border
with Nicaragua was virtually occupied
by Sandinistas during the war. Every-
other things, Sandinista hospitals for
the war wounded operated openly in
the area, and not in makeshift condi-
tions but in fairly decent buildings.
Yet, the Times and the Post re-
ported on the Costa Rican link only
very late and in a very limited way,
even though they often had correspon-
dents in the Costa Rican capital cover-
ing the activities of the rebel junta and
its negotiations with the United States.
CBS, for all practical purposes, ig-
nored the situation in northern Costa
Rica.
By not digging into the gun-run-
ning charges and the rumors, even
then, of flights directly from Cuba to
northern Costa Rica, a major story of
the war was largely missed-the cutoff
of Venezuelan guns to Pastora and his
followers after the new Venezuelan
president took office in March, 1979
and the nearly simultaneous beginning
of Castro's shipments of ammunition
and guns to the Marxist factions of the
Sandinista movement. This is most
likely what cost Pastora a stronger
hand in Nicaragua's post-war power
structure.
Reporters missed or underre-
ported other important stories of the
insurrection, such as the very effective
organization set up by Sandinista sym-
pathizers to control poor Nicaraguan
neighborhoods, the Sandinista lobby in
Washington, and the feuding between
the National Security Council and the
State Department over how far the
United States should go in forcing
Somoza to resign during the first. medi-
ation period, in late 1978, a good six
months before he finally left.
The sad truth, however, is that
almost no one in the American press
cared about how the Sandinistas got
their supplies, or that the main foreign
government source had suddenly
changed from Venezuela to Cuba. The
American media, like most of the
United States, went on a guilt trip in
Nicaragua. The U.S. government, for
its part, was so burdened by half a
century of mistakes in Nicaragua that
it could not deal with the present.
Journalists carried that guilt on the
one hand, and on the other the convic-
tion learned from Vietnam that U.S.
foreign policy was never again to be
trusted.
As a result, the press got on the
Sandinistas' bandwagon and the story
that reporters told-with a mixture of
delight and guilt-was the ending of
an era in which the United States had
once again been proved wrong. Ob-
sessed with the past, journalists were
unable, or unwilling, to see the tell-tale
signs of the future. Intrigued by the
decline and fall of Anastasio Somoza,
they could not see the coming of
body saw it who went there. Amon "limas Borge. ?