Rev Left Radio - Nicaraguan Revolution: The Sandinistas, The Contras, & The CIA

Episode Date: June 14, 2019

Alex Aviña is a professor of Latin American history in the School of Historical, Philosophical and Religious Studies at Arizona State University. His book, "Specters of Revolution: Peasant Guerrillas in the Cold War Mexican Countryside", was awarded the Maria Elena Martínez Book Prize in Mexican History for 2015 by the Conference on Latin American History.  Alex joins Breht to discuss the Nicaraguan Revolution of 1979, the Somoza Dictatorship, the Sandinistas, the CIA and the Reagan Administration, US imperialism in Central America, the 1954 Guatemalan coup, Marxism-Leninism, National Liberation, Indigenous resistance on both sides of the revolution, and much more!  Follow Alex on Twitter @Alexander_Avina Learn about, support, or contact Alex here: https://alexanderavina.com Check out the film "¡Las Sandinistas!" here: https://www.lassandinistas.com/ SUPPORT REV LEFT: https://www.revolutionaryleftradio.com/ Outro Music: "Reagan" by Killer Mike Check out his music here: http://killermike.com/ ----------- Our logo was made by BARB, a communist graphic design collective! You can find them on twitter or insta @Barbaradical.  Intro music by Captain Planet. Find and support his music here:  https://djcaptainplanet.bandcamp.com --------------- This podcast is affiliated with: The Nebraska Left Coalition, Omaha Tenants United, Socialist Rifle Association (SRA), Feed The People - Omaha, and the Marxist Center. Join the SRA here: https://www.socialistra.org/

More than 200 young Nicaraguans died fighting the National Guard. One of them was this woman's son, Julio. Her name is Lapita, and she carried her son's tortured body back from the front line, and buried it in this, her small dirt garden. Her other son Manuel, simply, disappeared. My personal opinion about the aggression is that these people have no feelings whatsoever because they lived exactly as they pleased for 50 years. We are poor and we really are poor, we struggled to earn our daily bread with the pittance we were paid. Yes, I have an opinion about this aggression.

Let President Reagan spare a thought that he has children. Let him think that he is supporting genocide. They were murderers here. They had no pity for the young people. It was a crime in Nicaragua to be young. Those brutes, we don't want them in Nicaragua. They carry on killing young men on the borders. Hello everybody and welcome back to Revolutionary Left Radio.

On today's episode, we have Professor Alex Avima, who is going to be talking about the Sandinista Revolution, the Reagan administration, the CIA, and all issues surrounding that topic. Before we get into the episode, we have a brand new website, and the idea behind the website is it's very simple, easy to navigate, and it really combines everything, all that one convenient spot. So that is Revolutionary Left Radio.com. I also wanted to say really quickly before we get into this episode that my comrades over at the Indigenous Anarchist Federation gave me a really interesting concrete step that I can take to try to make Revolutionary Left Radio a little more conscious about indigenous issues and help educate our listenership on those issues. And what they said is that one of the things that I as an accomplice can do is to ensure that non-Indigenous guests are thinking about how indigenous people fit into their conceptions of history and theory. and one of the things they said I could do

would be to ask one question regarding indigenous issues to every guess that I possibly can. And so taking this concrete recommendation from the Indigenous Anarchist Federation seriously, I do that in this episode and I'm going to try to do that whenever and wherever I can moving forward because I really appreciate this as a step that I can take to do a little better on that front specifically.

So shout out to the Indigenous Anarchist Federation for that. And as always, if you like what we do here in Revolutionary Left Radio, If you want access to a bunch of bonus content, including live calls, Q&A episodes, and just bonus episodes broadly, definitely support us at patreon.com forward slash rev left radio. It means the world to us. This is how Dave and I are paying back that $10,000 loan we took out to make this show expand and do what we're doing today. And so any help on that front really helps us pay our bills and pay back that loan and is deeply appreciated. So definitely go check that out. And with all of that said, let's go ahead and get into this wonderful episode on the Sandinista Revolution with Professor Alexander Avina.

My name is Alexander Avina. I'm an associate professor of Mexican and Latin American history at Arizona State University. I'm a historian of modern Mexico. I focus on the political left. I have a book on Mexican guerrilla movements during the 1960s and 70s, and now I'm researching the links between the Mexican state and drug trafficking in the 70s. Yeah, and for longtime listeners of Rev Left Radio, you will probably remember Alex from our episodes on the Mexican Revolution in the early days of Rev Left, and then almost one year ago to the day. We did our episode on Chile, Allende, Pinochet, et cetera, and Alex was the guest for both of those. So he is coming back for the Rev Left hat trick, and we're excited to have Alex.

I love having Alex on. I love bringing him in specifically with regards to these questions because this surrounds his sort of expertise. and we've built up a rapport over the last couple years, which makes these episodes more engaging, I think, when the guest and the host sort of have a background and know each other, and that rapport sort of shapes the way that this conversation goes. So thank you so much for coming back. I really appreciate you having you here.

No, thank you. I'm honored to be completing the hat trick, and as a football mad fanatic, I like the soccer analogy. So let's do it. Perfect. All right. So we're covering a big topic. today. We're covering the Sandinista Revolution, the CIA-backed Contras, Reagan. We have a lot of

ground to cover. We're going to do our best to cover as much as we can. We're not going to be able to cover every single element, and we're not going to be able to catch anybody up on the contemporary situation in this country. But we really wanted to focus on this period of time, bring some clarity to this historical event, and, you know, really fill out exactly how U.S. imperialism operates. And then at the very end, we're going to connect it up to, like, the quote-unquote border crisis and the situation happening in Venezuela currently to sort of point out to people how these same patterns sort of replicate themselves over time. And anybody who's heard our episodes on previous anti-imperialist episodes, previous historical events where there's some

sort of socialist revolution in the U.S. gets their hands bloody trying to crush it, you'll start to see these patterns emerge. You'll start to understand how the U.S. Imperial War machine works, you know, the sort of manipulations and tricks that it always brings to the fore and I think having that clarity of understanding about U.S. imperialism will also help us understand how it operates to this day. So let's go ahead and get into the questions. And to begin tackling this topic, let's start with some historical contexts. Specifically, I really want to talk about the 1954 CIA orchestrated coup in Guatemala because I think it really sets the tone for this entire era of U.S. imperialism in Central America.

So, Alex, can you please tell us about that coup? why it happened, and just some of the history there? Yeah, for sure. Before I get into the Guatemala discussion, I really want to start by talking about the man who the FSLN, the Frontes Sanista Liberation Nacional, is actually named after, right? So Augusto Cesar Sandino was a Nicaraguanese guerrilla leader that during the late 1920s and up into the early 1930s

led a guerrilla resistance battle struggle against U.S. Marines that had been sent into the country. country on behalf of the ruling political coalition. Sandino is a really interesting figure, right? He's the one who the Saninistas in the 70s, 80s, and now referred to as kind of like a founding father type figure. He was a really interesting character. He actually had been expelled from Nicaragua in the 1910s. He goes to Mexico in the late 1910s, early 1920s, And as if you recall our episode, our conversation previously on the Mexican Revolution, there's actually a revolution in Mexico going on that time.

And he ends up meeting all sorts of really interesting people. He spends a lot of time on the eastern oil coast of Mexico, and he hangs out with a bunch of anarcho-sendicalists and anarchist oil workers. He engages with really progressive Protestant Christian missionaries who are in the area as well. And that starts to form an interesting political and eclectic political ideology. He returns to Nicaragua, and he ends up leading this peasant guerrilla army against the invading U.S. Army, right? So, U.S. Marines, sorry. The seal of his resistance army that we shared on Twitter yesterday is this image of a Nicaraguense Campesino with a machete about to decapitate a U.S. Marine.

This is a really brutal violent struggle. I mean, horrific human rights violations were committed by the U.S. Marines against a Nicarguenza civilian population. This is one of the first instances of the U.S. military using aerial bombing in a counter-insurgency campaign, right? The first had been in Mexico when the U.S. Army was chasing Pancho Villa in northern Mexico. The second time was domestically, right, the Battle of Blair Mountain when the miners went on strike and launched this insurgency in the early 1920s, and they used airplanes against them. Sandino was waged a really effective guerrilla campaign, but he was also, wage a really effective propaganda campaign, right? He had pro-Sandino committees throughout Latin America and throughout even the United States. His half-brother actually lived in New York,

and he would organize these pro-Sandino propaganda sessions and committees. So the story of this crazy little army, as Chilean poet Gabriel Amistral referred to them, became internationally well-known. So in a Latin America that was already impacted by the economic nationalism represented by the Mexican Revolution. The political nationalism of Sandino created a really fervent political atmosphere throughout the continent. There was a famous 1929 international conference against imperialism, and the Mexican delegate to that conference stood up, and he started waving around a tattered American flag that he had received from Sandino soldiers who had captured it after a battle in Nicaragua. So in the words of historian Greg Grandin, who I'm drawing a lot of this information from,

He says that both the Mexican Revolution and the Sandinista insurgency of the late 1920s saved the United States from itself. In other words, these two moments of insurgency taught the U.S. a constant military intervention in Latin America, which they had done so from the Spanish-American War of the late 1800s up until the early 1930s, was way too costly politically and economically, and this then would lead to Roosevelt's so-called good neighbor policy of the 1930s. Sandino gives this really interesting interview to an American journalist in the late 1920s,

and I just want to read a really interesting quote that he gives to this journalist. He says, let me repeat that we are no more bandits than was George Washington. If the American public had not become callous to justice and to the elemental rights of mankind, it would not so easily forget its own past when a handful of ragged soldiers marched through the snow, leaving blood tracks behind them to win liberty and independence. If their consciences had not become doled by their scramble for wealth, Americans would not so easily forget the lesson that sooner or later every nation, however weak, achieves freedom

and that every abuse of power hastens the destruction of the one who wields it. And it's a really interesting quote for me because he's calling out, obviously, the hypocrisy of the United States, but also states clearly what his one demand was, and that was the protection of the national sovereignty of Nicaragua. And that's who becomes a figure for the later FSLM that we'll talk about in a bit. Now, moving fast forward quickly to 1954 and what happens in Guatemala. Alex?

So, yeah. Really quick, before you move into the 1954 coup in Guatemala, I just wanted to mention really quickly that, you know, Sandino using U.S. history and mythology against the U.S. to show the hypocrisy is also something that Ho Chi Minh did with varying effect as well. he would send letters to the White House during that, during the ramp up to the, you know, the Vietnam War, trying to plea with the U.S. leadership along those exact same lines, pointing out how, you know, where they came from and what they went through and that they're just doing the same thing in Vietnam that the U.S. did with regards to to the British Empire. And so I just think that's interesting. It always falls on deaf ears, right? But there's always this attempt by these people to bring that up and to point that out. I'm sorry, though. Go ahead. No, no, no, and that's, it's really interesting because it's all more or less around the same time period, right? Also, in the 30s, you have a famous story where Fidel Castro allegedly writes a letter to FDR, congratulating him on the New Deal and then asking him for some money. Or, you know, in his famous trial, Fidel Castro in 1953, he's continuously sliding the Declaration of Independence as justification for his right to rebel in the face of tyranny. So this is, it's interesting how that legacy of U.S. history has been used by, by anti-colonial revolution. revolutionaries throughout the middle of the 20th century. Absolutely.

So the reason why we want to move to Guatemala in 1954, it's, it's, historians generally refer to the overthrow of democratically elected president Hako Warrens in 1954 as the beginning of the Cold War in Latin America, to a certain extent. Obviously, during World War II, there was what some historians referred to as a democratic springtime in Latin America. So from like 1944 to 1947, the continent went democratic, right, amidst this global struggle against fascism. Guatemala gets its own October revolution in 1944.

And it's going to be this really interesting 10-year period of revolutionary experimentation that ends with the CIA launching its first subversive intervention in Latin America in 1954. Now, what happens throughout the continent and Guatemala is kind of like the microcosm of what's going on is you have a left liberal alliance of peasants, of middle class, of students who generally push for their countries to institute some form of social democracy. So it's not enough to have political democracy, but they want social and economic rights. And this happens in Guatemala. You have the expansion of enfranchisements for its majority Mayan peasant population. you have access to education. The centerpiece of this reform is an agrarian reform program that was actually pretty mild in practice. It was, if anything, it was trying to stimulate capitalist production by redistributing lands to small peasant holders

who are actually interested in making the land productive, unlike large landowners who held on to land in a feudalistic way, or lands that belong to the infamous United Fruit Company. that a grain reform program in combination with president hako war vans having some prominent Guatemalan communists in his cabinet leads to president Eisenhower ordering this this this covert operation in which the CIA helps Guatemalan opposition figures to overthrow Hakobar vans they essentially convinced the army to turn against our bends through psychological operations and really this is the beginning at least for Guatemala it's the beginning of three decades of horrific bloodshed. The consequences of this action, right, the one time that

Guatemala had a broadly democratic moment gets completely snuffed out in blood. And Guatemala is going to be probably the darkest part of Latin America's dark history of the Cold War. And we can talk about what happens in the 70s and 80s later on. But what this unleashes is a process of radicalization throughout the Americas, right? So Che Guevara was actually in Guatemala. He was involved some of these reform campaigns, and he barely escaped Guatemala with his life after the coup gets implemented because he sought refuge in the Argentine embassy, and he eventually makes his way to Mexico, and we know what happens to Che Guevada in Mexico. He meets another guy who had been exiled from his island nation, Pia Castro. So this, any sort of goodwill that

the U.S. had accumulated from the good neighbor policy of the 1930s and through its struggle against fascism in World War II, it's eradicated by this very overt, meddling an overthrow of a Democratic elected president in Guatemala. And it unleashes a process of radicalization throughout the Americas. We get the Cuban Revolution of 1959, which further stimulates this radicalization. When we get the Bay of Pigs invasion in 1961, Che Guevara and Fidel Castro would taunt the U.S. by saying we are not Guatemala, right? Like, we know how to defend our revolution. We are going to defend our revolution. We're not going to let you guys overthrow. The United Fruit Company of Boston owned half a million acres of land, the railroad, the port,

and telecommunications. But most Guatemalan peasants found it difficult to survive. In 1950, Hakobo Arbenz was voted president. He wasn't a communist, but some of his close allies were. A former military man,

Arbens sought to modernize Guatemala's backward society. Washington was alarmed. Howard Hunt. CIA chief in Mexico. We're faced here with the obvious intervention of a foreign power because these homegrown parties are not really homegrown. They're being funded or advised by a foreign power, i.e. the Soviet Union. Nikolai Leonov, KGB officer, Mexico.

The Arbenz government, which had been in power from 1940, didn't enjoy any logistical support from the Soviet Union. We didn't even have diplomatic relations. There was no Soviet mission in Guatemala. President Arben started a land reform program, buying up fallow land to distribute to peasants. In compensation, he always, he offered the landowners the values they had themselves declared for taxes.

United Fruit was offered just over a million dollars for its land. When Arbenz declared nationalization, the company, backed by the United States, claimed $16 million. Jose Manuel Fortuny, communist party of Guatemala. He saw that I didn't look very pleased. He said, aren't you happy about the news? And I replied, now we're going to have to fight on two fronts. We're going to have to fight internally against the landowners

and also against the United States. My counterpart of Guatemala Chiefs, Guatemala City Chief of Station, was sending in reports too about communist infiltration in the government. And, of course, he mentioned Jose Manuel Fortuni and some of the old-time Stalinist communists who were gaining favorable positions in the Arbenz regime. In this impasse, the U.S. named John Purifoy as its new ambassador. Purofoil had had experience of communist efforts to gain power in Greece.

Purifoy said to Arbenz, Mr. President, We can sort out all this business of the United Fruit Company, so that you can come to a satisfactory agreement with them. The United Fruit Company is not the problem. The problem is the communist that you have in your government. Alfonso Bauer, Agrarian Bank, Guatemala. No less a figure than John Foster Dulles,

head of the State Department, was part of the firm of lawyers acting, for the United Fruit Company. His brother, Alan, was the head of the CIA. So it didn't take much of an effort on their part to persuade their president, a military man, Mr. Eisenhower, to give them the green light to overthrow Arbenzi's government. US Secretary of State Dulles takes the roster

to urge United Action by the Americas to outlaw international communist intervention. in the Western Hemisphere. This conference was shocked by the dastardly attack on members of the United States Congress by those who professed to be patriots. They may not themselves have been communists, but they had been subjected to the inflammatory influence of communism, which abowedly uses extreme nationalism as one of its tools.

Arbenz once again put on his colonel's uniform as Guatemala prepared for war. In Esquipulas, an important religious shrine in a very Catholic country, the church helped organize the opposition to Arbenz. A CIA operation, codenamed P.B. Success. P.B. success, mobilized disaffected exiles and peasants into action. What we wanted to do was have a terror campaign to terrify our bents, particularly, and terrify his troops, much as the German Stuka bombers terrified the population of Holland,

Belgium, and Poland at the onset of World War II, and just rendered everybody paralyzed. The UN met in emergency session. Guatemala City was strafed from the air. Rebels invaded from Honduras. The CIA spread panic. Washington denied responsibility. Henry Cabot Lodge, U.S. ambassador to UN.

The information available to the United States that thus far strongly suggests that the situation does not involve aggression. but as a revolt of Guatemalans against Guatemalans. The Soviets were warned. Stay out of this hemisphere, and don't try to start your plans and your conspiracies over here. The American P.B. Success campaign brought the government down

and drove Arbentz and his wife into exile. 9,000 of his supporters were arrested. Many were kept in jail without trial for years. They even set up anti-communist committees where anyone could go and give the names of people who had been loyal to the revolution. His people would then be mercilessly kidnapped, killed and so on. Among those who fled was a young Argentine doctor,

Ernesto Che Guevara, who went to Mexico and there met Fidel Castro. Fidel Castro, President of Cuba. I remember my talks with him. He was terribly indignant and embittered by these events, which had interrupted an endeavor which wasn't even radical. It was a relatively simple change, land reform, which was very just and necessary. It's in this moment of the late 50s and early 60s, in this moment of revolutionary effervescence unleashed by the human revolution in which you have young, educated university students in Nicaragua who start to resist against a dictatorship that had been in power in Nicaragua since the 1930s.

So before we go back and talk about the specificity of Nicaragua and what happens after Sandino, it's important to note that you have, The Cuban Revolution fired the imagination of many emergent new leftists in Latin America who viewed arms struggle as the only legitimate way of gaining radical reform. So, yeah, so that's incredibly interesting and incredibly crucial for this entire sort of epoch of U.S. imperialism. And for those who want to hear more specifically about the atrocities and the history in Guatemala with the CIA orchestrated coup and this sort of the depravity that followed, I would recommend people go check out our friends over at Pearls of the Roundtable, they did an episode called The Silent Holocaust, which really covers that history in depth, and I urge people to go and check that out. Before we get on to

the Sandinista Revolution, Alex, do you want to say anything else about the, specifically the 60s and 70s in Central and South America and more context historically that led up to the Sandinista Revolution in 79? Sure. And generally, what the Cuban Revolution unleashed is in terms, with regard to political groups, organizations, individuals who are interested in armed struggle, is that it provided, in retrospect, this was, you know, now we know it was gravely mistaken and accurate, but it seemingly provided a route to revolution, right? And a lot of these ideas are encapsulated in Che Guevada's manual on guerrilla warfare, right? These ideas that the popular forces can beat an army, the idea that you don't have to wait for objective

conditions to form to launch revolution, that the actual revolution can form, can push through those conditions, and the last one being that the revolutionary struggle has to take place in the countryside. With the exception of Cuba, all those efforts to mimic or to, or inspired by Cuba and by Che Guevara's writings fail throughout the region. And Nicaraguenses are no exception, right? We have the formation of the SLN in the early 1960s, and they fail more or less trying to use this strategy, this focal or folkista type strategy, the end of this strategy really gets, it's marked by the death of Che Guevada in Bolivia, right, in 1967, in which he's trying to practice what he wrote, and it fails miserably in Bolivia. What you happen, what you then start to see

throughout the region is a shift of political, radical political organizing and revolutionary organizing to the cities. And it's interesting to see the emergence of urban guerrilla war in urban guerrilla groups in places like Brazil, Argentina, and Uruguay is the famous case with the Tupamaros as a way to correct what some of these groups saw as some mistakes represented by Che Guevada's writings and the Cuban Revolution. But it's, and the FSLN undergoes that. And we can talk about that as we move into the 1970s. But the FSLN was part of this process, right? They get founded in 1961. It's mostly middle-class university students, people like Carlos Fonseca, Thomas Borges, and they try to apply this, with some Cuban help, they try to apply this focal-based rural

insurgent struggle model, and it fails by, I mean, by 1967, 1968, they're thoroughly routed. They're not extinguished, right? They survive and they go underground, but that strategy for them represented, the failure of that strategy represented a need to switch. Yeah, and from a Marxist perspective, sort of thinking about experimentation and thinking about, you know, trying to view this stuff in a scientific way, which we've had many recent episodes on, you know, the FOCO theory put up by Che Guevara was one of these experimentations, right? One of these possible theoretical breakthroughs. And time and time again, it sort of hit that wall and ended in the ways that, you know, was not predicted by the theory. And so we look at that as like an interesting experimental phase in Marxist guerrilla warfare strategies. but one that was ultimately proven wrong objectively in different conditions,

whereas something like the protracted people's war that came out of Mao and China is something that has had more success. That's neither here nor there. I'm just kind of connecting that up to recent episodes. But let's go ahead and get into the Sandinista Revolution itself. On October the 25th, 1983, the United States invaded Grenada. It was, some believe, a forerunner to a much bigger invasion of Nicaragua. Imagine for a moment that you and your family live in one of the poorest regions of the world,

Central America, often call the backyard of the United States. It's likely your home is in the countryside, a one-room shack in which there's no lavatory, no electricity, no clean drinking water. And imagine that at least two or three times in your life you watch helpless as a brother or sister or a small son or daughter falls ill with something simple and preventable like diarrhea or measles and dies. In your community there's hardly anyone who can read or write except the priest and the money lender.

If you're lucky you may get a few months' work picking cotton or cutting cane for 40 pence a day from dawn to dusk. And perhaps you'll wonder why your labour produces luxury goods and food for export to self-sufficient countries like the United States and Britain, while you and your family are permanently hungry.

But if you wander aloud about this, you put yourself at great risk, and you may even end up on a rubbish tip murdered. That is what happens in the small nations of Guatemala, El Salvador, and Honduras. Until 1979, it also happened in Nicaragua. Then almost all the people of Nicaragua rose up against the tyrant called Somosa, whose family had been in power for more than 40 years,

put there by the United States Marines. That uprising cost 50,000 lives, almost as many as died for America in Vietnam, but out of a population of less than 3 million people. We've sort of historically contextualized it, and now we're going into this period of revolution, and I think the place to start here is to talk about the dictatorship that the Sandinista revolution ultimately overthrew.

So, Alex, can you explain to our listeners who Anastacio Samosa was and why there was mass opposition to his regime? Sure. So Anastacio Somosa Garcia was the son of a wealthy planter family. He becomes the leader of the U.S. trained National Guard in Nicaragua in the early 1930s. Before they withdraw, they train and outfit a military organization referred to as a National Guard in their view to maintain stability in the in the country uh anastacio samosa garcia emerges the leader of this unit and he eventually becomes dictator in 1936 a couple years after he orders the ambush and

the assassination of augustos cessar sandino right so that also helps make sandino not only into a revolutionary figure but also a martyr figure as well so the samosa with with some exceptions and and not wanting to go into these very specific years when these Samosas are not technically dictators, more or less a Samosa family, three Samosas will rule Nicaragua from 1936 up until 1979. So the father Samoso Garcia will rule from 1936 until 1956. He's assassinated by a poet, which is a really interesting story. His son, Luis Samosa de Baile, will take over from from 1956 until 1967, after which he suffers a massive heart attack at the age of 44, and he's out. And then you have Anastasio Somosa de Vaila, or also known as Tachito. He ends up being

the last of the Samosas in power from 1967 to 1979. Both of the sons are schooled in the United States and the best boarding schools and the universities. So Tachito, the last one to rule, actually attended and graduated from West Point. So he has U.S. military experience and training from that perspective. So it's a dictatorship. It's a family dictatorship that treats the country as if it were its own fiefdom, right? The first Samosa Garcia, the first leader, Somosa Garcia, does attempt in the 1940s and 50 some sort of like populist measures to win over support from rural poor, from landless peasants. And he essentially gives them land or encourages them to align themselves in official state-owned unions as a way to check local

oligarchs, right? So it's actually, he's trying to co-op the rural peasantry, both landless and the agricultural workers, as a way to check his rival's power. But as we get to his sons, by the 60s and 70s, the Samosas end up turning against their one-time allies, and they just start unleashing massive repression in the countryside. Once the strategy of rule reached its limits, right, like that populism, that so-called populism that Samosas tried to apply in the 40s and 50s becomes exhausted, and peasants actually go beyond that and start to diminish. land and start to demand better working conditions and political rights, they respond, the family responds with violent repression and violence in the 60s and 70s, helping set the

groundwork for the FSLN insurgency that will break out successfully by the end of the 1970s. Just to give you an example of the last leader, Tachito, the guy who was in power from 67 to 79, he's credited with this really infamous quote in which he says, I don't want an educated population, I want oxen. And I think, like, that gives you an idea of what this dictatorship, this family, how they conceptualize the country that they were controlling, right? This guy, Tachito, owned a blood plasma company in which he would pay very little money to poor Nicaraguenses who would come and give their blood and blood plasma. That Tachito would then, through his company, would then sell this blood plasma at elevated prices in the United States and in Europe. It's like he was like quite literally a vampire, right?

It evokes Marx's famous quote about capital and vampires. So a really important moment happens in 1972 when there's an earthquake and it just levels the capital city of Managua. And Tachico being the vampire that he is will not, will start taking a lot of the international aid that's flowing in and either selling it to his own people or then selling it on the international market. Something like 10,000 people died. half of the city's population is left homeless. I think this is actually what causes the death of famous Puerto Rican baseball player, Roberto Clemente. Like he dies on the way, flying a plane, you know, bringing aid to the people of Nicaragua. And this earthquake does a lot to completely delegitimize the Somosa-Garcia family, in this case, Tachito, the family, as the rulers of Nicaragua.

And for the rest of the decade, you have the FSLEN's power increasing gradually until we get to this dramatic moment in 1979 when they unleash their final offensive and they're able to overthrow that chito. Yeah. And so once again, we see a pattern, right? When we're talking about Venezuela, we're talking about Cuba. We're talking about numerous countries all over the world. You have a U.S. puppet dictatorship who is brutally cruel to the people of that country and which uses the power that they have to either ciphon. in their money to U.S. corporations or to do the sort of gangster kleptocracy shit of, you know, taking in that aid and then just giving it to your people. And like that, the wreckage and disaster from that earthquake was never, was never fixed, right? The Samoza government never went in and rebuilt that, you know, no disaster relief whatsoever. All that money was just put into the pockets of him and his goons. And so you had mass poverty all across the country, especially in the countryside. And then, yeah, so there was popular anger and resentment, seething, bubbling and

boiling over, and that ultimately culminated in the formation of the Sandinistas, aka the FSLN. So can you talk about who the Sandinistas were and how they came about as an organization? Sure, just that before we get there, just to mention it from a U.S. perspective, their reaction to the Cuban revolution was twofold. Was one to provide covert military training to a lot of these Central American countries, right, through the school of the Americas, right? Essentially, they're training butchers and killers. But then there's a nicer face of U.S. intervention in the form of Alliance for Progress, this program that gets implemented in 1960s where they're giving economic aid and economic development to these countries. Nicaragua ends up being a recipient of some of

these funds. All it does is raise expectations for the working poor in the cities and in the countryside. And it further delegitimizes by the 70s how the population views this dictatorial ruling family. But I mean, from the perspective of the U.S., there's a famous quote that's probably misattributed, but it keeps making the rounds amongst Latin Americanists attributed to FDR, in which he's referring to one of these Central American dictators, and he says, you know, he may be a son of a bitch, but he's our son of a bitch. And I think that captures U.S. foreign policy perspective to these dictators of Central America

during the 60s and 70s, right? They're terrible. They're all terrible. They're repressive. They're death squads. They're killing and mutilating, raping, and exploiting. and exploiting their own people, but they're our son of a bitch is in this broader context of a global Cold War.

Yeah, exactly. I think Nixon talked about Samoza and said that he was a good anti-communist. He's our guy, and he's a good anti-communist, and that just really sheened over the brutality by which, you know, he operated. But anyways, go on about the Sandinistas. So the San Dinesas I mentioned earlier, they get formed in 1961 by people like Carlos Fonseca, Thomas Borges, Silvio Magorga. They're mostly university students.

they have a focal, they're operating on the focal theory. They're a Marxist-Lenn and this vanguard party based in the countryside. In 1967, they're routed at a famous battle of Pankasan, and they have to regroup and re-strategize. But the fact that the last Samosa took power that year showed them that even though they had lost the battle, they still viewed armed struggle as the only appropriate way of getting rid of these dictators. So what they do in 1967, 68, 69, is a switch strategy. and they adopt something called prolonged popular war, right?

And you actually mentioned this, you already beat me to it a couple of minutes ago when you mentioned the Chinese example. Right, so they had this idea of, quote, accumulation of forces in silence in which they were going to organize in the countryside, but gradually and in prolonged fashion, and they were going to extend their organizing to rural peasant organizations, those very organizations that the Samosas had tried to support or co-op, but had completely broken away from the official.

people in power. So that's their strategy up until the 1970s. So it's a gradual accumulation of forces in silence. In the early 1970s, they will randomly go into provincial cities or towns. They'll temporarily occupy the places. They'll capture and execute hated local, political, and economic officials. They'll read their manifesto to the townspeople, and then they'll disappear and they go back into the countryside. In 1969, they produced what is referred to as a historic program at the FSLN, and it's a really important program, if you want, we can like share it online because the demands and the goals for revolution that the FSLN postulate are, I think, are really ahead of its time for that moment. They're talking about things like

indigenous rights. They're talking about things about women's rights. They're talking about national sovereignty, anti-imperialism, economic justice. So many historians who look at these armed movements of the Cold War Latin America tend to be pretty harsh in their evaluation of them, is saying they're vanguardist, they're masculinists, they're racist, and they're not all entirely wrong. But the FSLN represents

something different, right? And I find it striking that they're calling for things like women's rights, indigenous rights in 1969 as they're in the mountains in the countryside silently organizing and trying to expand their reach. By the middle of the 1970s, they start to up their military operations.

So they start to ambush National Guard patrols. They start to There's a really famous episode in 1974 when FSLN commandos kidnapped 12 of Somoza's closest allies at a Christmas party, and they exchanged him for 14 political prisoners, including Daniel Ortega, who had been in prison. This really, Somosa, as in response, unleashes really brutal repression with aid from the United States. He places the country under martial law. To a certain extent, the country was always under martial law, but this stepped up the type of violence that will occur later. In 1976, it's another important year because the historic leader of the FSLN, Carlos Fonseca, is killed in an ambush, right?

And the FSLN has to, they have to regroup and they have to reconfigure not just their political leadership, but there's also questions about what they're going to do in terms of strategy. So actually in 1975, 1976, especially after the death of Fonseca, there's three tendencies, three splits within the FSLN that emerge. There's still the tendency that views prolonged popular war as it based on the country. countryside is the appropriate route to wage revolution. There's another tendency that emerges that says, actually, we should be in the cities organizing amongst industrial workers. They're called the proletarios or the proletarian tendency.

And the third one emerges, and people like Daniel Ortega will be a part of this, they're called the terseistas. It's like the third way. And with their idea is that we still have to wage arms struggle to gain victory, but we have to do it in a broad, popular front style alliance with other anti-Somosa opposition groups. that aren't necessarily part of the FSALN. They all split off and start doing different operations, even though there's still some coordination,

there's some communication, but they all three tendencies have very rigid ideas about how the revolution against Somosa should be conducted. The official FSLN offensive, with separate tendencies operating on their own, really starts to heat up in 1977, 1978. There's an infamous assassination in 1978 of Pedro Chamorro, who was a popular journalist.

He's a figure of the bourgeois opposition to the Samosa clan. He's gunned down in the street. And that starts to push some of the urban upper middle class in bourgeoisie into the consideration that the Samosas have to be removed. Yet their idea is something that will be more in line with what Jimmy Carter wants to do from a U.S. perspective in which they want Somosismo to continue but without Samosa. And that's something, it's a really interesting thing that we can talk about in a little bit. By 78, by the summer of 1978, the tendencies start to talk more about coordinating their actions

and they start to organize better, they start to work better with one another. In August of 1978, you have another, a really famous operation in which FSLN commandos take over the National Palace while the legislation was in session. So they took like 1,500 prisoners, more than 1,000 government officials, and the commandos were able to get planes and they're able to flow to safety. One of the commanders of that operation was a guy, Eden Pastora, who will be really famous, important for our story later on, and also a woman, Dora Maria Thayez,

who it was and would continue to be an FSLN commander. And this is something really important about the FSLN that distinguishes it from other Latin American guerrilla groups, but places it more in line with what was going on with some of the Central American groups, is that women occupied a really important political and military place within the organization. The Sandinistas had women in leadership commando positions within the military. And Dora Maria Thais is one of the more famous examples of this. Yeah, absolutely. And we're going to get into an entire question on indigenous people and the role they played in a

little bit because I think that deserves a question in its own right. But you're mentioning this, the women's role in the FSLN. And there's a documentary that I was watching in prep for this. And I encourage people to go check it out that covers the women in the FSLN and their leadership roles. really focuses on their experience in the revolution. It's called Los Sandinistas. It's relatively new, but you can find it online. I'll link to it in the show notes. People definitely go check that out because that edge of women's liberation is absolutely fascinating. And you see it crop up again and again, these revolutions, you know, they're fighting for women's liberation. And not only that, but they realize that, you know, women are amazing leaders and that they need to take part in the

revolution and women, you know, take those roles. And then once they're in those roles, whether it's the Black Panther Party or the Sandinistas or in Burkina Faso, the women's leadership, that that role that the women play also begins to act as a force against, you know, machismo or patriarchy or chauvinism from the men in that organization. It's not always perfect, but that is that countervailing force. And this women's liberation has always been deeply wedded to these revolutionary movements. Before we move on, though, I want to ask you a question and make a point about it, which is, you know, I've heard the sort of popular front or the coalition that the FSLN put together as being, you know, predominantly made up of three distinct groups, right?

You had the Marxist-Leninist as sort of the vanguard offering the leadership, but you had also huge roles played by the Christian left, right, the Democratic Christian left in that country. Clergy were a part of the movement and the subsequent government after the revolution. And then you also had nationalists. And I want to make this point, really quick about nationalism, because when a lot of leftists hear that term, they sort of recoil a little bit. But there's a distinction between reactionary nationalism of the type you see in imperialist countries, in white supremacist countries like the U.S. and Ukraine, Poland, these right-wing populist nationalist movements. There's a huge distinction between that and these

revolutionary liberation nationalist movements in these countries dominated by U.S. imperialism, which used nationalism as a rallying cry and a center of gravity around which the people in these countries could organize and fight for their liberation. So did you want to say anything about that? Or am I right in breaking it down along those three big groups of people in the FSLN? Yeah, I think within, not necessarily within the FSLN, but within the broader revolutionary coalition that starts to emerge in 70. Yeah, so you're right. So something else that distinguishes the FSLN from other revolutionary movements is liberation theology plays a really, important role in this revolution. So you have, you have radical Catholics, you have

peasant Catholics, you have even a small group of evangelical Christians who are radicalized and who participate in a really important way in this revolutionary movement against Somosa in 1978 and 79. And you're right about the nationalism, right? The nationalism that the FSALN is appealing to is one directly related to Sandino of the 1920s, right? It's a nationalism, it's a national liberation idea forged against foreign invaders, forged against imperilists who have come into the country. And Nicaragua, that has a history that goes even beyond Sandino, right? Like the famous southern filibuster William Walker actually took over Nicaragua in the 1850s and re-instituted slavery because he wanted to make Nicaragua a southern slave state as part of the United States.

And eventually all the Central American nations got together and they defeated him and executed him. Nice. So these smaller countries, nationalism can function. in a revolutionary way as a way to coalesce a broader coalition against a dictatorial rule. The question, though, is when they start to populate that nationalism, right? And they start to define

what form the nation state is going to take. But at the beginning, when you're trying to bring together a group of people against a dictatorial ruler or a tyrannical government, I think it's really effective way of bringing disparate groups together. Especially when you have a figure like Sandino in that history to bring these different groups together.

Definitely. And in the Middle East, where national boundaries were just really created by Western imperial influences, and that nationalism doesn't really hold folks together. A lot of people organize around religion to combat U.S. imperialism, and that can obviously take, you know, progressive forms or it can take very reactionary forms, but this idea of using the historical and cultural context you already exist in and finding what can get a lot of people with perhaps a lot of different interests rallied around a singular cause. I mean, that obviously is an advantage and a strategy that people employ to great effect at times. And I think this is another example of that. Right. And one more thing I think

to add is that there's varying definition of nationalism when you break it down to class, right? So the definition of nationalism that FSLN Campesinos in the north in the mountains had differed, I think, radically than some of the urban bourgeoisie represented by the Chamorro family, right? And I think once those competing visions of nationalism start to go at one another, that's when you get to see what the real struggles about. But initially, I think it's really helpful in creating a coalition against this tyrannical ruler, Tachito. And I think in throughout Latin America, there's a promise of nationalism, but there's also certain pitfalls, right? Yeah. And I think one of the most influential writers in this regard would be Franz Fanon, right?

And I think he's like the warning, especially in Wretched of the Earth, about the pitfalls of nationalist consciousness. Yeah, exactly. I very much plan on doing an entire episode covering Wretched of the Earth at some point because I think that's a crucial text and people could really learn a lot from it. Yes. But let's move forward and let's talk about the revolution itself. So, you know, how did the revolution sort of play out? How did it go? How did it happen? How long did it last, et cetera? So by the end of 78th, the FSLNC, is that despite their offensive, Tachito is still in power, right? Like he's getting weapons from the U.S. He's getting weapons from the military junta that was ruling Argentina at the time

disappearing tens of thousands of its own population they begin a final offensive in the middle of 1979 and what really helps them grow at this point is that that Chico's response to the FSLN's initial offensive was just the raising of entire community suspected of belonging to the FSLAN they use aerial bombing against civilian population and essentially they created more guerrillas that sought the overthrow of this tutorial regime. So the final offensive begins of

June 1979, the U.S. withdraws support after the assassination of an ABC American journalist is caught on camera, an assassination that was committed by the National Guard. I mean, you can look it up on YouTube. It's crazy. Brutal. So similarly to the Cuban Revolution, a key moment of the M26 victory, right, was when Eisenhower pulled support and pulled weapons from the Batista regime in 1958. Something similar happens to the San Luis. in the Sainista revolution. The withdrawal of U.S. support and army really helps the Sainistas roll into Managua in July of 1979, and they win, right?

Tachito has to flee the country. He ends up in Paraguay, and he thinks he's going to live a life of comfort and luxury is protected by the Paraguayan dictator, but a small group of, and I always make a point of mentioning this in my classes. This story is, Tachito is in a Mercedes-Benz or some luxury. luxury car driving outside of his home and a small commando team of Sandinistas and other South American guerrilla movements, essentially bazook him to death. I love it.

Which is like, the Sandinistas were like, no, we're not going to let you, like all these are the dictators. We're not going to let you enjoy a life of luxury after all the violence and horrific deeds that you committed against your own people. They followed him to Paraguay and they used RPGs to assassinate him with, which I think it's pretty, uh, yeah, yeah, that's essentially what I try to say. my class is good um so the initially the the group that emerges victorious is a broader coalition right but the fsln is obviously the spearhead right the vanguard and they they will soon start taking power

and they will soon start directing the in which way the revolution is going to go eventually what we'll get is they pretty quickly on marginalized or piss off the the bourgeois opposition right the conservative opposition that was anti somosa again their idea was to have somosismo without Somosa. So what that entailed would be, you know, keeping the National Guard around, keeping an economy that in which 85% of the land was owned by less than 5% of the population, in which illiteracy was around 50 to 75%. And you would have a ruler subservient to U.S. foreign policy interests and concerns in the Caribbean basin and in Latin America in general. Once the Sundanistas kind of sidelined that thought, that perspective, which was really pushed

by Jimmy Carter. You have a nine-man, all-male, nine-man ruling junta, all from the FSLN, rule and coalition over Nicaragua. So the Saninista revolution is generally considered to last from 1979, up until 1990, when they lose elections to the opposition political party and Violeta Chamorro. In that time, they managed to do a lot. I mean, I think one of the first things that they try to do, and this is something that's common within Latin American revolutions, and I find really interesting, is one of the first things they try to do is to expand, to create and expand a literacy program. We see this with the Mexican Revolution. We see this with the Cuban Revolution. We see this in other revolutionary efforts. The importance of literacy, right? And the Saninas were

really clear about why literacy mattered to them, because there was a way of helping people achieve some level of political awareness. It helped people learn that they had things called rights. And it was a way to start instigating processes of critical thinking. So something that, like we, and I tell this to my students all the time, something that we take for granted, something like literacy, is actually a potentially revolutionary endeavor and process. Because if you know how to read, that at least enables a possibility of starting critical thinking.

It gets you to start thinking critically about the way that Nicaragua wants to start is to ask that basic fundamental question. Why are we poor? And if we're not poor because God. destined that. Okay, so let's find out the sources of that. And that leads through a process of critical thinking that can lead to radical and revolutionary transformation. So by all accounts, this first literacy campaign that they unleashed in 1980 manages to greatly reduce illiteracy from 50 to 75 percent of literacy rates down to like 12 percent. And they'll continue

to engage in these literacy campaigns throughout the decade that they're empowered. Something like 100,000 Nicaraguenses volunteer and participate in these efforts. It was a way to to transcend that divide between the urban and the rural. So it brought urban, Sandinista activists into the countryside. These literacy brigadistas, who were teaching people out of read, would stay with Campesino families. They would stay in their communities. So it was a really, so beyond just the literacy component, it allowed a momentary transcending

of class and geographic differences that were really marked in Nicaragua. Just like, I know you really spoke beautifully about the importance of literacy. And that's one thing you see from all of these revolutions, from China to Cuba, to Venezuela, you know, to all these countries is that once these left-wing revolutionaries take power, they focus on literacy and there's amazing gains, not to mention all the other gains with health care and broader education and infrastructure development, et cetera. But you really can't understate how important literacy is exactly to the development of the self, to the development of individuals, to their consciousness raising, and to self-actualization, being able to read. You know, again, you said it right. We take it for granted. But imagine not having that. And imagine, you know, a revolution happening and then somebody comes into your village

and teaches you and your entire family how to read. Your consciousness just exploded, you know, it just blew up. And now it encompasses so much more of the world. It can lead to much deeper understandings of your own predicament. And that educational role is absolutely essential in any revolution. It, you know, it imbues the people with revolutionary agency. And as Fred Hampton never tired of pointing out, education is a crucial, component of any revolution because if people aren't educated and they just, you know, want to

topple a regime because it's bad to them, that could lead to, you know, revenge killings. It could lead to a whole state of decay, but it's education that really gives that movement focus and precision and guidance and direction that can actually make these material benefits for people over the long term. And once you're taught to read, no matter what happens next, you'll always have that skill. And, you know, that contribution by these revolutionaries is really beautiful thing. Yeah. And the way, I mean, in all these revolutionary processes, it's a prerequisite to achieve the broader revolutionary transformation that they seek. I mean, if one thing stands out in the study of definitely Latin American revolutions is that the quote-unquote easy part of the

revolution is to defeat the dictator or to defeat the tyrannical government, right? The hard part of the revolution is the morning after when you're trying to make manifest these revolutionary ideas into the everyday behavior, thinking, and interactions of people. And you can't get there without literacy, right? I think that's why I think it's such an important thing. There's a reason why, you know, slaves in the American South were not, it was illegal to teach them how to read, right? And Frederick Douglass talks, like, in an amazing way about how important it was for him

to learn how to read in terms of his political consciousness in an American South in the 19th century, right? And definitely Fred Hampton is someone else who's spoken brilliantly about. this. But I think that's why it was such an important thing. And that's why it was one of the first things that the Sandinistas did when they get in power. But they also take over a country that's devastated, right? So it's devastated economically because of war. Something like 50,000 people died in the war against Somosa. 100,000 people are wounded. This is a country that like 2.8 million people. So it's a huge percentage of the population either died or was wounded in the struggle

against Somosa. And then right away, they're going to face a hostile regime with the election of Ronald Reagan, the United States in 1981, right? So there's all these challenges that they're trying to tackle internally at the same time that they're going to face hostility and terrorism, state-sponsored terrorism, by the country that Sandino originally referred to as, quote-unquote, the colossus of the North. It is also about a threat which, according to President Reagan,

this tiny country presents to the most powerful and richest nation on earth. This threat, says Reagan, is communist penetration in Central America, but the real threat is this. Children once denied education under the samosas now have the same right to school as do children in Britain. This botany class did not exist while Somosa was in power, when even the youngest children laboured in the fields. In the past four years, two and a half thousand new schools have been built. And this is the threat. These middle-aged peasant women can read and write for the first time in their lives. In the past four years, illiteracy has been cut to less than 10% of the population.

And this is the threat. This is the threat. Polio has been wiped out. Infant mortality has been cut by a third. Serious malnutrition has been dramatically reduced. A national health service has been established, in spite of pitifully meager resources. And this is the threat. Open roads, freedom of movement.

In a region of turmoil there's no curfew, no menace from within. It is ironic that Nicaragua is one of the few countries in Latin where the United States ambassador is able to stroll in safety through the streets. So the idea of the FSLN's revolution was based on three concepts, right? National sovereignty, social justice, and anti-imperalism. They defined their revolution as nationalist, democratic, and anti-capitalist. I think throughout the 10 years that they're in power, they never officially designated the revolution as socialist,

like the Cubans did in the early 1960s. But this was a more or less socialist revolution, but the Sandinistas would say theirs was a humane revolution, right? They were not going to have public trials and executions of Somosistas. They were trying to create a form of government that respected political plurality without losing sight that the revolutionaries had won, and they deserved to kind of guide this revolutionary process. Religion, because it had been such an important component in the revolution through liberation theology,

you know, Catholicism fueled to a certain extent this revolution as well, right? some of the first ministers were actually churchmen, right? So people like Miguel Descoto was a marion old priest, was the minister of, I think, like, foreign relations. The minister of culture was Ernesto Cardinal, and his brother was like the minister of education. Ernesto Cardinal was a trappist monk and priest and a poet, and he's a really interesting figure.

He has some brilliant writings that I highly recommend. So there was no outline of Catholicism or religion. There was freedom of the press, even though the opposition press hammered away at the Sunnisters, particularly as things got worse in the 1980s as the Contra War heated up. So their idea was to have a pluralistic political system, a non-aligned foreign policy, and a mixed economy. So if anything that what the Sunniista revolution would look like

was something more akin to like Scandinavia than Cuba. The goal of the Ronald Reagan administration, in contrast, was to make the Saninistas act like Cuba to justify the horrific things that they would do to the country of Nicaragua that we can talk about later. They instituted an aggressive agrarian reform program. The fact that it wasn't aggressive enough actually caused a lot of aggrayan conflict

and it alienated a lot of landless peasants, particularly in the north, who eventually would end up siding with the contras. Again, because their idea is more of a mixed economy and not an outright socialist or a communistic economy at the outset, a lot of the landless peasants and agricultural workers were really dissatisfied with the pace

of aggrine reformed throughout the 1980s, And on the other hand, you had small and medium-sized coffee and coffee farmers and cattle ranchers who were scared that the Sananese were going to nationalize their properties, and then they would join the contres as well. So I don't know what kind of lesson we want to derive from that, but they tried to go the medium, the safe route, and they ended up alienating the people that they were supposed to be their base, and they definitely aliening the people who they expected to turn against them at some point. Another really unpopular thing that emerges, again, in the context of war, in the context of constant attacks and violent from the outside, was a military drafting conscription program that continuously reduced the age, right? So you had teenage boys 15, 16, 17, at times being conscripted, forcibly conscripted into the Sandinista Army. Any forcible conscription was going to be unpopular in the countryside. But because of the type of war that they're facing, you know, finance and organized by the United States from beyond, this was an economic and a military necessity. They provided housing, they improved education, they provided access to health, they provided social assistance.

Right. So Nicaragua was always seen as, was always seen as one of the poorest nations in Latin America, probably second only to Haiti. And the Sunnisza did a lot of work to reduce the type of extreme poverty that had festered. under the long-ruling Somosa family. The other thing I think that emerges in some of the writings of not just scholars who look at the Sandinistas empowered throughout the 1980s, but also with some of the Sandinista dissidents

who emerged in the mid-1990s is their criticism of the FSLAND becoming, particularly after Daniel Ortega assumes a more protagonistic role in the late 1980s, becoming much more authoritarian and centralists and less responsive to popular demands from below. And we can really see this

in the agrarian reform program, right? So that the Sandinistas is in charge of the agreement have their ideas about what they think is best for the countryside, many of which actually had no experience or very little experience in the countryside. But then you had popular demands from below from very specific peasant communities determined by their class position, whether they're small holding peasants or whether the agriculture labors, coming into conflict with this top-down relationship, right? And I think that's one of the things that ends up leading to the splitting up of the FSLN in the mid-1990s. What they perceive as this authoritarian tendencies to think that the state always knows what's

right and to discount popular initiatives from below, even though they're enjoying mass popular support throughout the 1980s. So like other revolutions in Latin America, you have a revolution from above, but you also have a revolution from below that sometimes can contradict the official revolution, can often go faster than the official revolution, or tends to be even more. more radical. We see this in Cuba, we see this in Chile, and we definitely see it with the Sandinistas throughout the 1980s. Yeah, absolutely. And so I have a lot to say here. It's really interesting because what that begs for is a sort of, is a sort of mass line, right? This

creative tension, it can be creative from the top down and the bottom up, right? And many experiments, socialist experiments of the past, that creative tension has led to really wonderful things, even though the bottom up did chafe against the top down and vice versa. You can look at the collectivos in Venezuela and the Maduro government. You can look at Mao's China and the peasantry and the revolutionary agency of the Chinese people and the cultural revolution. But it really highlights the overall pitfalls of a socialist transition. One thing I want to say is that, you know, I'm not against using markets in a transitionary

phase. The Bolsheviks did it with the NEP. And in many cases, it's the wrong. right thing to do, especially in a context where the treasury is ransacked, right? Both in, both under the Samoza regime and the Batista regime in Cuba, when those dictators fled, they ransacked the treasury. And so I know the country only had like three million dollars left and all of its banks around the country and, you know, Somoza ran off with the rest. So having markets for consumer goods and food items while, you know, the big, you know,

commanding heights of the economy are nationalized is not a bad thing. But, you know, but but the underside of that is that there's still a bourgeois class. You know, you see this with the Ku Klux in Russia. You can see it with the bourgeoisie in Venezuela. When they're given that continuing ability to, you know, take profit in and build up their wealth and build up their power, that will eventually come back to bite any socialist movement in the ass. It's really hard to navigate that.

And then the last thing I'll say before I toss it back over to you is this idea of, of, you know, liberalizing with regards to social rights, right? So you talked about the idea of the FSLN implementing free speech and even allowing opposition newspapers to basically lie or slander or do whatever they can to work against the movement. And, you know, that leads to a lot of problems, right? If a socialist movement goes the other route and says, no bourgeoisie, no fascist, no reactionaries, we don't give a fuck about your free speech rights. You're not allowed to use, you know, your platforms to agitate against the revolution

they're called authoritarian blood-soaked tyrants, you know, but if they don't do that and they try to play by the liberal rules of the game, while being attacked by the very, you know, center of global imperialism and capitalism that likes to pretend it's all for these rights, then you allow that opposition to gain a foothold to build up a mass movement, largely based on lies, and then to reconnect with global imperialist powers to fight back against your movement. So you're really in a catch-22, no matter which way. And then you're still called blood-soaked tyrants. Exactly, exactly. So, yeah. There's no winning. You cannot win these games with the U.S. You can't play their democracy and their freedom game and come out on top.

They will still find every way to lie about you, to slander you, and to pin you to that crucifix called authoritarianism and make the rest of the world believe it. And one of the examples of that was the Catholic Church globally compared to the Catholic Church inside the country, right? We talked about this huge Christian presence in this revolution, but outside. side, the Vatican was largely convinced by Western propaganda that this was an authoritarian regime, and they took a more or less pro-Western stance against the Sandinista revolution because they were so confused by the propaganda and misled by it. So it's really a powerful tool globally as well. Oh, definitely. Yeah, I mean, I think Ernesto Cardinal, the Trappist monk, who becomes a minister of culture, he ends up being excommunicated in

1984 by the Pope, right? I mean, I think there's, yeah, you're exactly right in the religious angle. I think the Catholic Church under John Paul II did a lot to destroy liberation theology, and they harassed and persecuted liberation theologians like Ernesto Cardinal. I mean, there's one story of the Pope visiting Nicaragua right after the overthrow of Somosa, and the mothers of fallen Zanina Girol has approached the Pope and asked him to, like, bless their fallen kids or to do some sort of like service for their kids that died in the strogan Samosa, and he refused to do So, right? So, yeah, there's the immoral authority of that Pope, which is a contradiction in terms, but whatever. But, you know, you're right. I think it is a catch-22. I think one way to look at this is that the revolutionary form that emerges in the 1980s and the Sandinistas, it's organic, right? It's not that they were trying to impose this model from beyond or from foreign sources, right? The reason that the Sunnihita revolution emerges in this way, despite the criticisms of the FSLN becoming more authoritarian in the context of a, of a, of a, of a war, it's, it, this is what fueled the revolution to begin with, right? This is what was going to

allow a revolution to actually grow and to expand and to survive. Um, so things like, so the fact that they're, they're trying to do a mixed economy, a plural political system, a non-aligned foreign policy with an important role for liberation theology for women's rights, right? That was another huge thing that they, that happens in the sun in the east of 80s with, with women's rights. That's organic. That had a foothold in this country, in this country's history, and in this country's politics and political radicalization that had happened over the course of the 1960s, 70s, and 80s, right? So I think that's another way to look at this, right? But yes, once you, once you, these revolutions don't happen in a vacuum globally, right? And the moment that this one emerges

victorious, there's already massing nations in Washington, D.C., beginning with Jimmy Carter, the so-called human rights president to this bloodthirsty tyrant Ronald Reagan. I can't stand when I hear things about good things about Ronald Reagan because the first thing I think about in Central America, there's like no way you could ever give any sort of hey geographic or even say one nice thing about that guy. But whatever, we can do an entire different episode on shitting on Ronald Reagan. So another thing, another thing that I wanted to bring up, and this is because it brings up, this ends up being used as a propagandistic tool by the U.S.

is that the Sandinistas did have real severe issues with Nicaragua's indigenous communities located on the Atlantic coast. This part of Nicaragua has a radically different history from the rest of the country. The dominant indigenous group in the Atlantic coast, they referred to the Mesquito. They tended to view Spanish-speaking Sandinista soldiers

as they call them the Spaniards. That's because for a long time in the 19th century, this part of Nicaragua was actually occupied by the British. So it has this radically different historical trajectory than the rest of Nicaragua. And the San Anizas had a serious issues dealing with the mesquitos early on. The mesquito and other indigenous groups in the area wanted cultural autonomy. They wanted territorial autonomy.

There was no way to come to an agreement early on. And some of these prominent Mishquito groups and leaders ended up collaborating with the Contras. So it's not until the mid-1980s when the Sandinistas and representatives of the indigenous groups actually sit down and start to hatch out some. sort of agreement that gets implemented in the late 80s in which cultural and political and territorial autonomy would be respected by the Sandinistas vis-à-vis these indigenous groups. But there was actually pretty brutal combat in the early 1980s primarily because the Contras were in that area recruiting amongst the Mesquitos as a way to hit at the Sandinistas.

So you have, and we mentioned this before we started recording, you have this really interesting issue in which a prominent Native American activist, Roxanne Dunbar-Artees, working with the Sandinistas trying to engage the Mishkitos, she's obviously pro-Sandinista, but then you also have Russell Means, who was a prominent leader of AIM, the American Indian movement, working with the Contras and working with the other, the Mishkito groups aligned with the contras. And you have this weird back and forth in terms of whether the Sandinistas were committing genocide or whether the Sandinistas were doing nothing wrong. That was one of the biggest challenges.

In addition to aggraring reform and the inability to incorporate what the peasants themselves were demanding in terms of how they saw production. and relations of production being reorganized in a radical way in the countryside and this indigenous issue in the Atlantic coast with groups of people who said, look, we want our cultural political and territorial autonomy. By the late 80s, they do come to an agreement.

But there was some, it was pretty ugly early on, and definitely the United States used that as a propagandistic too. At one point, Ronald Reagan said that he was a Mesquito Indian, which is like, I mean, yeah, again, we can just talk about Reagan in one episode. episode. Yeah. So that's like more or less the internal stuff that's going on. So yeah, that's really important. This whole idea of the role that indigenous people played and how they were treated throughout this revolution before the revolution and after. And in fact, the comrades over

at the Indigenous Anarchist Federation recently were engaging with me over these topics and they gave me advice on how to use my platform here at RevLeft to help contribute to decolonization and foster consciousness among the left about indigenous issues. And their advice was, you know, in every episode that you possibly can, you know, at least put in one question about the indigenous people of that area and how they were affected. So I'm really trying to do that and shout out to the IAF for talking to me and sort of giving that constructive advice. It really means a lot and helps guide, you know, how I can be better on this front. So, you know, in that spirit and with that in mind, can you just talk a little bit more about these issues, specifically how they fared before the Sandinista regime under the Samoja regime and the role. they played in the revolution itself before we get into the whole the contras and all of that yeah for sure

so uh this is the the north atlantic coast uh where most of these indigenous communities live they were more or less neglected by by the samosa regime with the exception of you know anytime they organized to demand any sort of cultural autonomy or territorial autonomy then the national guard would go in there and commit atrocities it was a neglected region right it was one of the poorest, most impoverished regions of the country. It's actually really difficult to get to this region via the interior of Nicaragua and the west coast. To a certain extent, from what I know, and I could be completely wrong about this, I'm not aware of any large-scale Michito or indigenous participation in the final offensive to overthrow Somosa, because that's based right in the west,

and it's based in the city of Managua. But the conflict starts really early on in 1981, when mischitos start to see what they look at what the Sananista program for revolution is, and they start to fear that their demands for cultural, political, and territorial autonomy are not going to be respected. And that you're going to have a state come in and violate those demands. So as early as 1981, you have some prominent Mishkito leaders joining the anti-Saninista opposition, which ends up becoming the contras. Now, the contras have no, they don't give a shit about what the Mishkitos have been fighting for since the Nenis. 19th century. I mean, they're using these people for their own ends. The Americans as well.

But they use this, they use the Sandinista repression of Michito communities as a propagandistic tool. So there are instances in which the Saninista army goes in there. They forcibly displaced mischito communities away from that theater of fighting, right, as a way to like prevent these contras from gaining any sort of popular support. And they relocate them to camps farther south in the in the atlantic coast where um you know they're given things like like like medical care and health and land and in houses and stuff but they're still like what they're being reconcentrated they're being forcibly displaced right so you have and i think this is a this is an issue that that's it really starts to emerge in 1960s and 70s in broader revolutionary discussions

in central america in particular like how can you be in a country like and we said we see this in Guatemala law with the people's army of the poor. Like we are in a majority indigenous country, but your revolutionary project presumes some sort of non-ethnic or non-indigenous revolutionary subject that should be the protagonist in some sort of revolution, revolutionary transformation. This is a blind spot in some of the revolutionary projects that different Central American groups possess in the 60s and 70s. Now in Guatemala, the revolutionary guerrilla coalition that ends up forming in the late 70s, early 80s, they are Actually, if you read some of their writings, they go a great length to re-formulate or re-theorize certain Marxist Leninist theory to include or to place indigenous subjectivity at the center of their idea of revolution.

But it's definitely a challenge that some of these groups face. The Sainainis face this challenge as a revolution that actually succeeded in taking state power and having to deal with a group of people who want nothing to do with them. Yeah. And if the left here in this settler colonial hellscape known as the United States of America ever succeeds, it will have to succeed, you know, with decolonization in mind, with our indigenous comrades by our sides, and with this at the forefront of how we strategize and how we think. And I think you can look at a more constructive example like the Zapatistas with the indigenous Mayan people in southern Mexico as a good example of how to wed a revolutionary movement that takes. stuff from anarchism and Marxism and Leninism and integrates it into an indigenous sort of culture and society in a healthy way. Would you agree with that? Yeah, no, I totally agree. I think my friend Josie Salania Portillo has this book called Revolutionary Imagination in the Americas. And she has a chapter on the Sandinistas and their agrarian reform. And she actually, if I'm correct,

she actually participated in the revolution in the 80s. She was there as an international observer and participant. She has this, the way she critiques some of the these revolutionary and guerrilla movements is that she says that they consider the peasants and the indigenous peoples as subjects in waiting, that they're somehow awaiting revolution to be brought from without, that they're waiting for radical political theory to be brought from without, when in reality they have their own political processes, right? They have their own ideas about radical and revolutionary transformation. What makes it difficult is how do you integrate those with the ideas that the revolutionary organization, or in this case the

revolutionary state is trying to put into practice. And the Zapatista, the way they do it is essentially by taking the back seat, right? They say we are the, the Ladino, the white Mexicans that participate with the formation of Zapatistas, they consciously say we are, we lead by obeying, and we are going to step back, and this is an indigenous movement, and they're the ones who are leading, creating, theorizing, and providing models of revolution or radical transformation. But they're not in state power, right so that that's a different dynamic as well yeah it adds a whole other layer of of challenges on top of it but i really respect that approach um yeah that leading by obeying that taking a back seat to the indigenous folks and and they're already exactly as you said they're already

established political systems and worldview they don't need to have their you know subjectivity enhanced by by outsiders it's already there and it just needs to you know be loud to flourish and blossom in a beautiful way and so yeah again i think it's incredible incredibly important for especially the U.S. left right now to be thinking about those issues and this is not a side issue. This is not, you know, some subsection of an issue you care about. This should be a foremost important issue. And, you know, the forefront of all of our strategizing and are thinking about building a revolutionary movement in North America. No, I totally agree. I think even not just in the U.S., but any sort of revolutionary project

in the Americas needs to place analyses of settler colonialism at the very center. Yep. it's obviously going to take different particularities depending on context country and region and obviously the u.s has it has to be no matter what for the u.s but this is a conversation that will be fruitful for most of these latin american countries as well yeah and i i'll even admit myself that i'm often ignorant of these issues and i'm learning about these issues um as the show goes on i talk to new people um so i'm not by any means perfect on this issue myself but i am really trying my hardest to to be better at it um and again i appreciate the i a f for

for giving me this constructive criticism. But let's move forward and let's talk about the Contras, the CIA and the Reagan administration. Let's start with the Contra. So who were the Contras? How did the Contra war begin? And also what were some of the most brutal crimes committed by the CIA-backed Contras? I think that's important so you can really get a sense of the absolute brutality of not only the Contras themselves, but of their puppet masters in Washington and just how far they'll go to dominate resources and siphon wealth. north and crush any movement that tries to do the opposite. So, I mean, if you're going to ever, if you're ever interested in reading about the history

of Central America in the 70s, 80s, and 90s, you have to have like a strong stomach for it because it is, it is the most brutal, the most violent part of Cold War Latin American history. I mean, the things that that you read about the massacres, the techniques, it's just horrific, right? So in the specific case of the Contras, their official name is like the Democratic, the Nicaragua and Democratic Front. A lot of ex-national guards, a lot of disaffected highland peasants who, in the north, right? So the Contras are located in the north. Their bases are in Honduras, so Honduras is north of Nicaragua.

And there's also some Contra forces who will be in the south located in Costa Rica, striking into Nicaragua from the south. They start as a bunch of ex-national guard, ex-somoista. Eventually, they'll start to grow, right? So there will be a Michito contingent. They will have some highland peasant movements who become anti-Sandinistas because of agrarian reform. They'll join the group. You even have someone like Eden Pastora,

who was a prominent FSLN commander, who ends up turning against the FSLN, and he starts to lead a contra group from the south. And actually, it's Edin Pastora's group that gets really heavily linked to cocaine trafficking in the CIA. but we can talk about that later on. The idea of the contras was to take the revolution out of the hands of the revolutionaries. The idea was to force the Sandinistas to act in a way that the U.S. could use internationally

and say, look, we told you that these guys are like the Soviet Union. We told you that they're like Cuba. They don't have a humane revolution. They're tyrants, and we need to overthrow them. So the contras were sent in to try to attempt that. The thing about the contras was that they rarely attack this. the Sandinista army. They hit civilian targets. So while Reagan referred to them as the moral equals of our founding fathers, which in a, in a way, he's kind of right, depending on a few of

the morning family fathers. A U.S. advisors to the Joint Chief of Staff referred to the Contras as, quote, just a bunch of killers. A private mercenary who worked with the Contras referred to them as, quote, they slaughtered people like hogs. One of their favorite sports, in quotation mark, one of the favorite acts was sexual violence and rape. They had a tendency to kidnap young girls, according to one U.S. military official who was embedded with them. They committed hundreds of civilian murders, mutilations, tortures, and rapes, all of which CIA superiors were well aware that they were doing.

So by 1985, the Contras are responsible for the execution of 4,000 civilians. They've wounded 4,000 more, and they've kidnapped about 5,000. And what they would do is they would, from their bases in Honduras or from their bases in Costa Rica, they would slip in, they'd cross the border, and they would attack soft targets. They would attack medical clinics. They would attack agricultural cooperative, schools. One of their favorite things to do was to use spoons to gouge out the eyes of medical

officials and teachers. They would castrate male teachers that they would capture. They used acid. The goal of the contras was to terrorize the population into not supporting the Sandinistas, but then also forces Sandinistas to act more authoritarian. in an effort to get rid of this well-financed, well-funded counter-revolutionary force. Their stories are, you know, similar to what the U.S. is trying to do in other Central American countries.

So the difference is that in Nicaragua, the U.S. is trying to destabilize a successful revolutionary government, whereas in places like Guatemala or El Salvador, you know, they're supporting desquad regimes trying to keep out or prevent revolutionary coalitions from gaining state power. So at the very same time that the contras are committing these horrible atrocities in Nicaragua, you have U.S. finance and trained Army battalions in El Salvador, you know, massacring 1,000 people over the course of three days in 1981 in the town of El Mosote, which is probably the most famous, right? Over the course of three, four days, the Atlacato battalion that had a U.S. military official embedded with them, raped, killed, tortured over a thousand people. They left one survivor. In Guatemala, at the same time, from 1981 to 1983, they're supporting a military dictator who engaged in the genocidal extermination of more than 100,000 Mayans.

And if you read the reports of the specific massacres that they conducted, they would rip out the fetuses of pregnant women. They would grab little children by the feet and smash their heads against rocks. They would grab little kids and throw them into the rivers and say things like, adios, muchacho, goodbye, little boy. So this extreme level of ferocity is not just limited to the Contras in Nicaragua. It's part of a broader regional plan that's been financed, trained, and supported by Ronald Reagan's administration, and is being carried out by guys, in some cases, some military people who were involved in the Phoenix program in Vietnam in the 1960s, right? The CIA paramilitary operation that executed 20 to 30,000 sympathizes with the North Vietnamese or the Viet Cong, right? guys who had been out of work because of the failure of the U.S.

but defeat of the U.S. and Vietnam, they're brought back into the fold in Central America in the 1980s, and they're helping train, assess, finance, and arm these terrible death squads and official militaries in conducting horrific atrocities throughout the region. And they don't go away. Like one of the things, one of the book, and I highly recommend anyone who wants to learn more about this, one of the books that I'm drawing a lot of this information from is by Greg Grandin called Empire's Workshop. And part of the point of his book is to show that all these people in the Reagan administration who did terrible things in Central America during the 80s

will come back with George W. Bush in the Iraq War. So someone like Colonel James Steele, who is a special forces trooper who was in Salvador training and working with these death squads, will reappear in Baghdad in 2004 and 2005 training ex-Bathist paramilitaries who are waging sectarian warfare and who are doing things like torturing people with electrical drills on their knees and engaging in rape, wholesale rape, systematic rape. So these fuckers don't go away because they're never brought to justice, right? Elliot Abrams is another one that's currently in the Trump administration. Yep.

Elliot Abrams is another one who was John Negroponte was another one who actually was like, he was, I think his official title was ambassador of the U.S. to Honduras. But from that position, he was essentially leading the Contra War against Nicaragua. He'll reappear in the Bush-W administration, and he's still around, I think. I don't think he's dead. He's also a friend of Hillary Clinton. I think Hillary Clinton bragged about getting Negroponte. He was one of the never-trumpers.

That's right. Elliot Abrams gets pulled in by the Reagan administration with no experience, but he's made like assistant deputy secretary of inter-American affairs. and he ends up being actually charged and he gets charged and he's proclaimed guilty for his role in the Iran-Contra scandal that we can talk about as well.

But this, one of the, as a Latin American, it's one of the most surprising and gratifying moments there's few in between in U.S. politics was when Representative Ilhan Omar called him out. Yeah. Elliot Abrams, right? And she said, why would we trust what you're doing in Venezuela? He's the envoy of Venezuela,

which to me blows my mind. Oh, God. Why do we trust what you have to say? Venezuela when you were committing war crimes in Central America in the 80s. Yeah. I mean, that made, you know, I probably disagree with her in a lot of things, but that made me a fan of hers. Absolutely.

Because we finally had someone using their position to call out a war criminal. And what happened right after that? The bipartisan consensus really rallied the Democrat and the Republican troops, and then that's when the smears about anti-Semitism started flying Omar's way. That's not a mistake. Empire is always bipartisan, right? And when you start to challenge empire, and when you start to challenge the practitioners of empire on the ground, that's when you see the ranks closing, right?

And I mean, that's why people still can hang. That's why Hillary Clinton and Trump and other people could still consider Henry Kissinger their friend, right? Exactly right. The prime war criminal. Yeah, and Oliver North, who is another person that was involved in this, he went on to have a long, he had to quit at the time, but he went on to have, he hosted a show on Fox News for many years, and then he was recently chosen as the president of the National Rifle Association, and Oliver North was one of these people involved in the Iran-Contra scandal,

which we're going to get to in a second. But I have a couple questions for you really quick about this stuff, and I'm going to lead it in by saying that this whole history of right-wing death squads lives on in today's fascist movement here in the U.S. Oftentimes people from like Patriot Prayer or the Proud Boys, They'll wear these shirts that people have seen probably a million times that says, Pina Shea did nothing wrong. And they'll use these helicopter memes.

They'll have a helicopter on their shirt. But if you look at those shirts closely, on the sleeve, it'll also have the initials RWDS. And what that stands for is right-wing death squads. And that verbatim, that sort of language comes out of this period of U.S. imperialism and right-wing massacres in Latin America throughout Central and South America. so that those are those are the fascist children of empire and that strain goes to to inspire them to this very day that's who antifus fighting in the fucking streets and so making those connections i think are important but i wanted to ask you a question really quick it's sort of twofold clarifying questions one is is it true that the contras sort of blossomed out of the national guard of samosa and the second thing is can you talk about the use of the volcano as an execution method that the contras and samosa would use So they did start out as a mostly ex-guard, ex-national guard unit that then expanded to include other disaffected groups. But I think the ex-national guard component and the Somosista component ended up being the dominant one throughout.

Okay. The volcano one, I've, it's a possibility. I, I, that's part of the, I don't know if it's rumor or if there's actually confirmed documentation that shows that they used, you know, the volcano to dump in people. It wouldn't surprise me. Yeah. Considering the, I mean, they're using spoons to like, guys. people's eyes out, right? Like, it wouldn't surprise me that they would do something like that. But, I mean, it goes to show that this was a ruthless, brutal group whose sole reason was of

existence was to attack civilian populations and civilian institutions and not really designed to take on the Sandinista Army. They were responsible in the end. The Contra War killed almost 40,000 people. The overwhelming majority of those people killed were killed by the Contras by 1990. The following is a summary of United States intervention. in its so-called backyard. 1898, President McKinley orders U.S. troops to invade Cuba. 1905, President Theodore Roosevelt orders the invasion of Honduras.

1912, President Taft orders the invasion of Nicaragua. 1914 to 18 President Wilson invades Haiti, Cuba and Panama. 1924-26, President Coolidge invades Nicaragua and Honduras. 1954, Eisenhower approves the overthrow of the elected government of Guatemala. 1961, Kennedy approves a CIA invasion of Cuba. 1965, Johnson invades the Dominican Republic. 1973, Nixon approves the overthrow of the elected government of Chile. 1981, President Reagan approves the CIA's secret war against Nicaragua.

1983, President Reagan orders the invasion of Grenada. Their legacy is this remarkable United States military encirclement of the region. A vast ring of Americans on land, sea and in the air, allowing a rapid deployment force to cover any eventuality. Grenada being the latest example. Since President Reagan came to power, this threat has been turned increasingly against Nicaragua. There have been bombing raids flown by insurgents based in Costa. based in Costa Rica to the south, and from Honduras to the north, the CIA directs Pays and Arms former members of Samosa's National Guard, known as the Contra, some of whom, are trained in illegal camps in Florida. Last July the Secret War came into the open, with the arrival of Nicaragua, of two American naval task forces, each with more firepower than the entire U.S. fleet in World War II.

Today, 4,000 American combat troops are poised in Honduras, near the border. Ranged against them in Nicaragua are 45 aging eastern block tanks unsuitable for mountainous jungle and which are liable to break down after 125 miles, plus three antiquated Korean war jets, two helicopters, a navy consisting of a few patrol boats, a regular army of 22,000 and 25,000 reserves, and a militia. In addition to the threat from outside, the Nicaraguans face 15,000 of these troops, the Contra, heavily armed by the Americans, and operating a hit-and-run war from Honduras. This is effectively a CIA private army.

Its original aim was to stop the alleged flow of arms from the Sandinistas to the guerrillas in El Salvador. But this was no more than a cover. No convincing proof has ever been produced in public to substantiate a continuing thing. of arms, a pretext described by a member of the Senate Intelligence Committee as a farce. The real aim of the Contra is to give the appearance of a civil war in Nicaragua by hitting economic targets and killing people like midwives. I work, for example, training traditional attendance in the north of the country. That's my work.

That's midwife attendance. Yes, midwife attendance. Because in this country, most of the deliveries have been performed by midwife. I've been working in areas where six of my students have been murdered by counter-revolutionary groups coming from Honduras. and my program was finished because of that that was in May 1982 but now we have restarted again because it's marvelous

I remember when a health worker was murdered she was a nurse and we had a meeting after the murder and 10 nurses were willing to go there and work as she did in the past The morning I spoke to Susanna, a young man, Julio Moncara, was ambushed by a gang of Contra and murdered. His job was organizing land reform, and therefore he was clearly a threat. Julio Moncara wasn't political at all.

He just loved his people. And what was the purpose of killing him, do you think? I think they want to stop technicians going to the countryside. They want to make people afraid, feel afraid. not going to the countryside to help peasants. And for that reason I think they are killing technicians now. In the past there were health workers and now they are agrarian reform technicians. These are other victims of the CIA war,

young Sandinista troops at a hospital which, when we filmed there, had two months supply of medicines left. And that was two months ago. this volunteer militia boy is 14 years old he was shot and burned while defending his village all right so going into the last question before we get into reflections and the conclusion bit of this of this interview i know you've already talked about the reagan administration and the cia and the contra war but i wonder if you could talk a little bit more about that specifically with regards to what is known today as the iran contra scandal so what was that and how does that play

into this historical event? So the, I'll start this way. So the atrocities that these death squads and militaries were committing in Latin America, in Central America in the early 80s, led to Congress passing something called the Boland Amendment, named after a Massachusetts rep, in 1983 and then in 1984, that prevented the funding of paramilitary groups, the official government funding of paramilitary groups like the Contras. So the official funding route from the U.S. government to the Contras was cut off. So in response, U.S. officials working under Reagan and also a bunch of private individuals closely linked to Reagan helped create this pipeline in which they sold secretly weapons to Iran via Israeli arms traders and then use the funds of those weapons sales to fund the Contras in Nicaragua.

So the two people who were courting this was the guy who you mentioned earlier and he's kind of perfect that he's ahead of the NRA now. He's all over north and the head of the CIA, William Casey. So now there's also evidence so that they started this way before the Boland Amendment even gets passed. Like there's evidence that they were talking about and even doing the selling of arms covertly to the Iranians as early as 1981, 1982. Because they wanted to prevent Iran from falling into the old. orbit of the Soviet Union because Iran's military weaponry was mostly American because they had long supplied the Shah before the 1979 Islamic Revolution. And also because Iran was engaged in

an existential war against Iraq at the time. So publicly the U.S. supports Iraq, but privately they're they're arming the Iranians and selling them weapons at inflated prices, then using the proceeds to fund the Contras. And it's people like Oliver North, William Casey, there's a bunch of states that are involved, like Saudi Arabia, Taiwan, Panama, Israel. There's conservative religious organizations like Pat Robertson and the 700 Club. Pat Robertson actually has a really interesting take on Latin American leaders he doesn't like. He always calls for their assassination. Fuck him.

I hate him so much. Yeah, yeah, totally. So it was this really elaborate, like private, public, covert network that illegally sold weapons to Iran. They used the proceeds to then fund the contras throughout, especially. especially after the Boland Amendment gets passed, but there's evidence such as this was happening before. A related component to this is that the Contras become involved in cocaine trafficking. And this is the decade in which cocaine explodes in the United States.

It becomes America's, quote-unquote, cup of coffee. And the Contras are involved in cocaine trafficking. And apparently the CIA knew about this, and at least pilots who were working for the CIA, helped the Contra's traffic cocaine into the United States. And the famous example of it is trafficking cocaine. into the San Francisco Bay Area and then from there selling it to the Bloods and Crips in Los Angeles in South Central LA, thereby helping spark the crack cocaine epidemic in Los Angeles using

local street dealers like Freeway Ricky Ross. So there's all that another component that I'm kind of researching in my own project is that the CIA was allegedly, based on the testimony of DEA agents, the CIA was allegedly working with Mexican drug traffickers. so they could use Mexican drug trafficker on ranches to train contras and then send them to Nicaragua. And in return, they would allow Mexican drug traffickers to operate with impunity. There was a famous execution of a DEA agent in 1985, Enrique Camarena. And allegedly, according to some other DA agents, he was executed not because he uncovered,

you know, evidence that the Mexican drug traffickers were doing something illegal, but because he stumbled upon the CIA Mexican drug connection and contra connection, and that's why he was executed by the Guadalajara cartel. So it is a mess. Yeah. Like this is a, and this is all because the U.S. cannot officially fund the contras to wage their counterinsurgency against the Nicaragua, San Luis, throughout the 1980s. Yeah, and so, you know, all these things are connected.

They're all tied in. And what you get on the American side of the border is, like you said, this big drug crisis, these these, these dumpings of these drugs like cocaine into poor neighborhoods, largely disproportionately black and brown neighborhoods. And then you have the Reagan administration launched there, just say no campaign, where they demonize drugs in the public. And then that is the beginning also of this sort of prison industrial complex, this real boom in getting black and brown folks into prisons using the drug war as the pretext. That started way back with Nixon, of course, but it was really amped up under Reagan.

Reagan is sitting here knowing, you know, knowing how all of these things are connected, knowing to some extent, or at least the CIA was knowing that there was being drug smuggled from the, you know, the Contras over the U.S. border dumped into these environments. And then that was used as the pretext to go in and use police to occupy these poor and black and brown neighborhoods and to pump, you know, people into prisons, devastating countless lives and families on the U.S. side of that border. So it's really a brutal, disgusting web of depravity. fully by the Reagan administration and the CIA and they made us well they made me go

through something called dare which was also yeah yeah same me too on a much lesser scale right obviously right but no you're right I mean that that that the hypocrisy right I mean the way we we can kind of understand this is that the means justified the ends for them at all times regardless they didn't care that if the means were desquads or drugs being trafficked into United States. The end for them was what mattered and the end was the destabilization and the defeat of the Saninista government in Nicaragua and the defeat of these really powerful leftist revolutionary movements throughout Central America at the same time. Yeah. The same system that was murdering children in Central America is the same system that was going in and brutalizing black and brown

people and poor people in America and pumping them into prisons. It's the same system. It's just different faces. It's truly disgusting. I do want to say before we move on to the conclusion bit and sort of analyzing it in terms of contemporary political situations. I did hear something when I was doing the research for this about the Sandinista special forces when they're fighting the contras and the sort of proletarian internationalism that came out of other socialist countries at the time to help the Sandinistas. And what I heard was that the Sandinistas special forces, they were trained by the Vietnamese, they were educated on Marxism by Cubans, and they were armed to some degree by the Soviet Union.

And so here we do see the importance of proletarian internationalism, the importance of big socialist countries or countries that have built socialism, turning around and helping these new movements come up. And, you know, after the collapse of the Soviet Union, after smaller countries like Cuba were sort of blocked off from the rest of the world, that ability to help fund and spread revolution globally has really taken a hit. And so I hope people really consider that and think about that when they think about the history of socialist movement. in the 20th century, because it's an essential, it's an essential component. Yeah, and the Sandinistas, once they realize that they're, I mean, they're suffering brutal attacks from the Contras, they're facing essentially a full trade embargo from the United States, right? They're suffering economic warfare.

I mean, they turn to sources of solidarity, right? So they turn to, especially the Cubans, into a lesser extent, the Soviet Union as a way to defend their revolutionary project, which wasn't their initial idea. But when they're facing, you know, the mining, the illegal mining of the only harbor, their major harbor, when they're facing, there was a converted offshore oil rig that the CIA used as a base for groups of Latin American mercenaries, they referred to as Latino assets. They would then go onshore and blow up oil depots. They're the ones who mined the harbor and committed all sorts of other sabotage, right? So taking all that into account, the San Annesas looked. at their available options for support, right, internationalistic support, and they went to those

sources. Yeah, exactly what happened with Fidel Castro when he said, when they started the Cuban revolution, he said, I wasn't a communist, I was just trying to fight for the Cuban people and free us from this dictatorship. But after I saw the realities of capitalism and imperialism and how we are immediately attacked by trying to do anything good for our people, you know, I turned towards the Soviet Union. I turned towards a more Marxist-Lendingist strategy to be able to defend the gains that we made by the revolution. So time and time again, these people are sort of have pushed into this posture they have to take in order to defend themselves from the constant onslaught from the north right yeah and it's it's but it's the privilege of real politic is always

denied to these latin american countries particularly the revolutionary ones right so if they ever do something like that they're immediately castigated by the u.s government and press is somehow well there's more evidence of them being authoritarian in reality they were pushed from the beginning to seek the only sources of help that they could that they could locate that they could get um help from right um so it's a really interesting comment on that as well in terms of who gets to be uh real politic and who's not allowed to be yeah absolutely all right let's descend towards the end of this conversation and i like to do this by by attaching this historical event to more contemporary uh condition so before we close out can you talk about how the very imperialism

that has created so much devastation in central america contributes to modern day political situations, like the border crisis and the ongoing CIA-backed coup attempt in Venezuela? Can you sort of highlight those connections and show how that shit is still in play? For sure. So the Central American refugees started to come in large numbers, I think beginning in 2014. I mean, that's a direct consequence of these brutal civil war and death squad regimes that the U.S. supported in Central America during the 70s and 80s. On the one hand, and on the other hand, once those revolutionary movements were defeated, then the U.S. is helping to implement and push for free, so-called free trade policies, neoliberal policies that further

impoverished nations and communities that had been at war since the late 1970s, early 1980s, right? So we can't understand the Central American migration. These are refugees. They are political refugees fleeing hellscapes that were formed by U.S. foreign policy in the 1980s and then formed by U.S. neoliberal economic policies in the 1990s. Now, interestingly enough, most of those migrants that are coming are from those places where the U.S. supported desquod regimes, Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador. Nicaragua is actually provided, regardless of like the really tough economic situation that the country faces, they've provided the smallest number of migrants and refugees, right?

And that has to be connected to the fact that in the 80s, you had a revolutionary experiment there called the Saneista Revolution. So it really angers me when you see Republican or even, Democratic politicians, you know, decrying Central American migrants and saying they're not allowed to come here or someone like Hillary Clinton during her last presidential campaign saying we're going to return the kids. That to me angers me because the Americans are the ones who created this mess to begin with. Yeah, exactly. And there's a direct connection. Another example is the creation of Mara Salvatrucha, MS-13, this transnational gang that's become really powerful

in Central America. It began in L.A., in Los Angeles, in the 1980s. And the U.S. instead of dealing with this gang problem expelled a bunch of these Salvadorian gang members back to Central America where they managed to spread and grow and increase their influence. Again, this is another instance of U.S. Empire creating these problems in Central America and the people respond by migrating, by moving, by seeking a better life. And that sort of historical and dialectical perspective is obviously missing in a lot of the media and a lot of the political commentary today. Exactly. Yeah. And you have, you have like trump supporters with their absolute melted brains you know photoshopping in pictures of ms 13 behind nancy pelosi or you have these weirdos that now go to the border and try to

try to literally engage in war with these refugees coming across the border you had the full u.s state just a few months ago pepper spraying and shooting at uh at refugees trying to cross the border and there's no mention even from the quote unquote liberal mpr side of things about how the very devastation and corruption and chaos that these people are desperately fleeing is directly caused by U.S. intervention in those fucking areas. And so the U.S. creates this chaos. And then when it comes knocking at their front gate, they use the white supremacist, you know, colonialist, just belligerent chauvinism that is inculcated in American people to demonize them and to make them subhuman and to warrant brutal attacks against them.

I mean, it's a fucking truly disgusting sort of charade that is going on. And it convinces so many Americans because one thing that America doesn't do well is teach our people about history and particularly the history of the United States and other parts of the world. And so people have no understanding of the historical context. And so they lash out at these desperate people and become just another obstacle for these people who are desperately searching for a better life. I mean, it's fucking grotesque. Yeah. No, I totally agree. And I think the Venezuela example is, it's just more evidence that, like, the U.S. never stopped being an empire in Latin America.

Yeah. So, regardless of your position on Venezuela or Nicolas Maduro or the Bolivarian Revolution, the fact that someone like fucking Elliot Abrams is in charge of this U.S. operation tells you everything you need to know. You can pretty much guess that, like, you can be on the safe side by not ever siding with U.S. interoperations. in any country, especially in Latin America. Yeah. So, you know, this idea of empires being bipartisan and also this idea that the U.S. is not intervening in any of these countries for some sort of humanitarian or magnanimous reason. There's very precise reasons why they're doing it.

And then you've got to take a look at who's leading the operation. And if it's someone like Elliott Abrams, that says everything. Yeah. Now, something else that's important from the 80s, and this is something also from Grandin's book, Empire's Workshop, is that domestically, there was a lot of U.S. popular opposition to U.S. foreign policy in Central America. 100,000 Americans actually went to Nicaragua in solidarity to work with the Sandinista Revolution.

Because of this, the Reagan administration had to wage a covert domestic psychological program under the auspices of the Office of Public Diplomacy that tried to shape the media narrative of what was going on in Central America. That shit is still in play today. And you can see it with most of the media reporting on Venezuela. and even the mildly centrist, mildly critical takes on U.S. designs on Venezuela, they'd never seriously question the broader history of U.S. intervention in Latin America and how that feeds into or shapes what's going on today in Venezuela.

Exactly. And the last thing I'll say on that is, you know, back during the Contras, I mean, again, these are people that were castrating people, that were raping women en masse, that were, you know, murdering children. they were called by the Reagan administration Democratic freedom fighters, right? They were pitched to the U.S. public as the force for democracy and liberty

in that country. And to this very day, how is the Venezuelan opposition painted for us? The exact same way. They're called Democratic freedom fighters. They're told that they are the real purveyors of liberty and democracy and freedom and that the Maduro government

and the Bolivarian revolution is an authoritarian nightmare. And so many Americans just eat it up, you know, like little piggies. They just eat it up. And so it's important that we show this history and then that we use that history to to pull back the mask of what is being attempted today right now as we speak. Totally agree.

So what lessons, I know you've pointed to many throughout this conversation, but is there any last words you want to say on this or any last lessons that you think we should pull out of this history of the Sandinista Revolution, in your opinion? I mean, I think we've covered most of what I wanted to say. I mean, I think I would just urge people to read more about this history, right? So you can start with Greg Grandin's Empire's Workshop. There's wonderful scholars who work on Central America, particularly during the Cold War, people like Heather Vrana, Jeffrey Gould.

There is a lot of good work out there that focuses on the history of not just U.S. intervention in Central America, but how U.S. intervention in Central America intensifies and makes worse, a lot of local dynamics of class conflict that are already preexisting. And that's, hence my point about like, anytime the U.S. intervenes in Latin America, it's a bad thing. And there's also, I think, another thing to think about, too, and the Nicaragua example shows it, is that this intervention can take multiple forms, right? Economic sanctions, like the kind that Venezuela is suffering right now, that is a violent form. It is resulting in the deaths of tens of thousands of people. And that's what this little tiny country of three million people in Nicaragua suffered in the 1980s under the facing that against the Reagan administration, right?

So intervention takes a variety of different forms, and the economic sanctions, the embargoes, those are just as deadly as the contras we're going around and committing atrocities as well in the countryside. exactly yeah the sanctions and embargoes are sort of they're depoliticized they're seen as everyday events in the u.s media and you know the way it's presented and it's like hey we're doing things the diplomatic route it's almost like synonymous with diplomacy to do sanctions because it's not like outright military action but you're 100% right to say that these sanctions are attacks on the people of these countries and in fact in Venezuela alone since 2017 it's estimated that over 40,000 Venezuelans have died just from lack of food and health care created by the U.S. sanctions on that country.

So it doesn't affect the highest rankings of the, you know, the political class in whatever country that the U.S. is sanctioning. It directly impacts the everyday working class people in the streets in the most brutal and negative ways. You know, how many 9-11s does it take to equal 40,000 dead in a year or two? And that's what the U.S. is doing all over the globe. You know, that's just one little snapshot. So really pointing that out when we have these discussions.

in the U.S. around sanctions pointing out that and showing how brutal those things are and who they affect, I think is also an important sort of strategic route we can take to expand people's consciousness on these questions. I was going to say one final book. And this is the book that I read as an undergraduate in college. It started me on this path of learning about the Sandinistas is a book called Sandino's Daughters by Margaret Randall. And it's oral histories of Sandinista women who are involved in the revolution and in the government.

It's really interesting book, and I highly recommend it as well. Absolutely. And where can listeners find you and your work online? I'm on Twitter at Alexander underscore Avina, A-V-I-N-A, and then I just got a fancy new website, Alexanderavina.com. Thanks to the Comrade Sam Stokes and the people at Emerge Studios. Hell yeah.

We will link to all of that in the show notes. Definitely go check out and support Alex. Alex, thank you so much for coming on again. This is the Rev Left Hat Trick. but every time you come on I learn so much from you I know my audience really really loves having you on some of our most like well-known and most loved episodes are featuring you and I sincerely deeply appreciate all the work you do you come on here for free and educate me and my listenership and it really means the world to me thank you so much comrade no thank you so much and those words mean a lot to me and uh you give me the reason you guys give me the reason for one day

coming to Omaha so I hope for someone they actually meeting you guys in person oh yeah thank you for your and thank you for inviting me. I love talking about this stuff. Yeah, if you come to Omaha, we will absolutely set you up. We'll have a hell of a time. I look forward to that possibility, absolutely. Sounds great, comrade. Thank you.

All right, solidarity. Solidarity. Two months ago, I told the American people, I did not trade arms for hostages. My heart and my best intentions still tell me that's true, but the facts and the evidence tell me it is not. The end of the Reagan era, I'm like lemma 12, old enough to understand that she'd change forever.

They declared the war on drugs. like a war on terror. But what it really did was let the police terrorize whoever. But mostly black boys, but they would call us niggers. And lay us on our belly while their fingers on their triggers. Their boots was on our head. Their dogs was on our crotches. And they would beat us up if we had diamonds on our watches.

And they would take our drugs and monies as they pick our pockets. I guess that that's the privilege of policing for some profits. But thanks to Reaganomics, prison turn to profits. Because free labor's the cornerstone of U.S. economics. Because slavery was abolished, unless you are in prison. are in prison. You think I ambushed and then read the 13th Amendment. Involuntary servitude and slavery, it prohibits. That's why they're giving drug offenders time and double ditch. Ronald Reagan was an actor, not at all a factor, just an employee of the country's

real masters. Just like the Bush's, Clinton and Obama, just another talking head telling lies on teleprompters. If you don't believe the spirit, can argue with this logic. Why did Reagan and Obama both go after Gadda? We can't pay the sovereign soil, going after oil, taking countries, is a hobby paid for by the oil like me same as in Iraq and Afghanistan and I'm a dinner jar say they're coming for Iran they only love the rich

and how they load the pole If I say any more They might be at my door Who the fuck is that Staring in my window Doing that surveillance Oh Mr. Michael Rinda I'm dropping off the grid

Before they pump the lead I leave you with four words I'm glad Reagan dead Bramonald, Wilson, Raven. Romano, Wilson, Reagan. Six Wilson Six Reagan Six

One of six Wilson Six Raven Sixth Six Six Six Six