Lloyd Billingsley
May 21, 2012
Tomas Borge, center, helped to found the Sandinista movement. (Photo credit: MSN.com) |
Tomas Borge, the last living founder of Nicaragua’s Sandinista movement, died at 81 last month. Overall Borge did not get much ink but the Latin American left broke out the plaudits.
Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez recalled Borge as a “paradigm of revolutionary militancy” and Evo Morales of Bolivia hailed “Comrade Borge” as a man who dedicated his life to struggle against “imperialism” and in favor of the “emancipation of the people.” Another side of the man did emerge.
“Borge’s bloody term of office as Nicaragua’s interior minister from 1979 to 1990 was an unrelieved reign of terror,” wrote Miami Herald columnist Glenn Garvin. “Thousands of political opponents disappeared into his gulag of prisons (human-rights groups counted 800 in just the first 18 months), never to be seen again. Those who did reappear often did so as corpses, hideously disfigured by torture.”
That is not an exaggeration and there’s a back story here. That calls for a look back to a time when cognitive dissonance prevailed. In Breaking Faith: The Sandinista Revolution and its Impact on Freedom and Christian Faith in Nicaragua, former Sandinista Humberto Belli lamented that outsiders’ views were seldom based on the Sandinistas’ own statements.
Comandante Humberto Ortega, for example, said that “our doctrine is Marxism-Leninism.” FSLN boss Bayardo Arce said “What a revolution needs is the power to enforce. This power to enforce is precisely what constitutes the defense of the dictatorship of the proletarian – the ability of the class to impose its will using the instruments at hand, without going into formal or bourgeois details. From that point of view, the elections are bothersome to us.”
The FSLN national anthem invoked “the Yankee enemy of mankind” and one of their chants went: “Over hear, over there, Yankees will die everywhere.”
In 1985, when Soviet Communist Party boss Konstantin Chernenko died, the FSLN proclaimed three days of national mourning for the “great statesman and untiring fighter for the cause of world peace and solidarity.” All that is hard to misinterpret but outsiders were up to the task and worse. They seldom based their views on FSLN actions.
The FSLN smashed dissent, jailed and tortured political opponents, shackled the press, repressed free trade unions, and waged a murderous campaign against the Miskito Indians of the Atlantic coast. In one action, FSLN forces trapped 13 Indians inside a church and set it ablaze killing all.
Human rights groups, writers, filmmakers (Werner Herzog) and statesmen alike denounced those actions. Russell Means of the American Indian Movement (AIM) spoke of organizing an international brigade of warriors to defend the Miskitos. The response from the religious left was quite different, with good reason.
The Sandinistas, particularly Tomas Borge and Minister of Culture Ernesto Cardenal, a priest, were adept evangelists of “liberation theology,” Marxism-Leninism tricked out in biblical terms. It tendered a “preferential option for the poor,” in reality a preferential option for the FSLN, portrayed as divine liberators ushering a reign of social justice. The demonology was the Yankee enemy of mankind.
Liberation theology gained a following in the United States among Catholics and Protestants alike. Asked if the forced relocation of the Miskitos was a violation of human rights, Maryknoll missionary Pat Hynds said “the Sandinistas had no other choice. Militarily, it was a move that had to be made.” She conceded that villages were burned and that people were “bitter and upset,” but it was all done to “protect their lives.”
Sandinista “divine mobs” chanted anti-Semitic slogans outside of Nicaragua’s only synagogue, firebombed during a religious service in 1978. Once in power the FSLN confiscated the synagogue along with the property of Jewish families, and arrested Abraham Gorn a leader of the Jewish community. Facing threats, many Jews fled Nicaragua. The National Council of Churches (NCC) failed to address FSLN anti-Semitism and other oppressions.
Arie Brouwer, NCC chief executive, conceded only “mistakes” by the government, the default position of liberation fundamentalism when confronted with FSLN atrocities already denounced by Amnesty International and other groups. The NCC funded the Evangelical Committee for Aid to Development (CEPAD), a pro-FSLN front group that justified attacks on the Miskitos as “a plan to guarantee their rights.”
On October 25, 1985 FSLN comandante Daniel Ortega gave a speech at the Riverside Church in New York. NCC brass responded with two standing ovations. That would confirm the observation of Tomas Borge that “the battle for Nicaragua is not being waged in Nicaragua. It is being fought in the United States.” Maryknoll nun Peggy Healy talked up the FSLN to powerful American politicians such as House Speaker Tip O’Neill. Borge described her as an “angel.”
The NCC and groups like Witness for Peace were not alone in the alibi armory. Sojourners magazine essentially ignored censorship of La Prensa and campaigns against opposition leaders and religious dissidents. According to Sojourners, “The young Sandinistas who now govern Nigaragua have made some serious errors of judgment, have sometimes hung on to their control too tightly, and have at times been insensitive to racism and injustice.” Further, “Nicaragua is trying to be a light. Like any candle, it sputters sometimes.”
Other Christian periodicals ran some pro-FSLN news stories, but nothing to compare with the liberation theology fundamentalists. That theology liberated nobody and never won the hearts and minds of Nicaraguans, who dubbed the foreign apologists of their oppressors “sandalistas.”
In the elections of 1990 Nicaraguans booted out the FSLN, who proceeded to loot the country in the infamous piñata campaign, on a scale Somoza would have envied. That criminal campaign did not prompt the religious left to review their support for the FSLN but the legacy is clear.
Any oppressive regime, whatever its creed, can count on Religious Left support as long as it opposes the United States and its allies. Witness the current religious left ignoring massive Iranian human-rights violations but opposing efforts to keep a militant theocracy from obtaining nuclear weapons.
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