THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Thursday, November 9, 1995 TAG: 9511080019
SECTION: FRONT PAGE: A14 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Another View
SOURCE: By NEAL HERRICK
LENGTH: Medium: 74 lines
Hillary Clinton recently traveled to four Latin American nations. In each she saw misery, poverty and disease. In Nicaragua, with Haiti one of the two poorest nations in our hemisphere, some of this misery, poverty and disease were inflicted by her own country through acts of terrorism and war.
Sixteen years ago the Nicaraguans overthrew their dictator, Anastasia Somoza. He was our man. As FDR put it when describing Somoza's father, he was ``an S.O.B., but he was our S.O.B.'' Somoza escaped, taking with him much of the country's wealth and leaving it with a $1.6 billion debt. The revolutionary party, the Sandinistas, established a provisional government.
Five years ago, the Nicaraguans got tired of the Sandinista administration, mainly because it couldn't get along with the United States. This time they didn't need to revolt. They simply voted the Sandinistas out of office and elected an administration they thought could get us off their backs.
During the years between the 1979 revolution and the 1990 elections, our CIA recruited, trained, armed, supplied and directed a force of mercenaries which terrorized the Nicaraguan countryside. They crossed the border from their bases in Honduras to terrorize. They blew up schools, hospitals, and power plants and ran back to Honduras.
Congress passed laws making support of this terrorism illegal. When CIA mercenaries mined the Nicaraguan harbors, the Congress rebuked our president. The World Court found the United States in violation of international law.
President Reagan and the CIA paid little attention. The Nicaraguan government favored the redistribution of land and wealth and accepted aid from the U.S.S.R. This was enough to enrage Reagan and make him vow he would bring the Nicaraguans to their knees. Make them ``cry uncle.'' This they did in 1990 by voting the Sandinistas out and the conservative-coalition party of Violeta Chammoro in.
So President Bush called off the CIA, disbanded the mercenaries and lifted the embargo. But the revolution and the 10 years of terrorism which followed it left the Nicaraguans with a crushing national debt and virtually no infrastructure - roads marked with potholes, postal and telephone systems in disarray, polluted reservoirs. As a result, the country is still suffering massive unemployment (upward of 60 percent) and - to make matters worse - an epidemic of the dengue virus.
It is time for the people of the United States to do something. It took us 10 years to make our government stop the killing. Is it going to take us another 10 years to convince it to make restitution?
Facts are not an issue. You can read them in the Congressional Record, in the Report of the Independent Counsel for Iran-Contra Matters (Walsh) and in the Iran-Contra Declassified History (Korn-bluh and Byrne). Let's do something about them!
First, let's forgive all Nicaraguan debts and encourage the international community to follow suit. Outright. No quibbling about structural readjustment. Then, let's mount a massive humanitarian-aid program aimed at rebuilding the Nicaraguan infrastructure. For a country of 3 million people, a massive program won't cost all that much. Not compared, for example, to intervening in Bosnia.
And let's get involved personally. Let's establish a special peace corps for Nicaragua. This corps could begin by providing some of the labor needed to construct in Managua (where one-third of the 3 million Nicaraguans now live): (1) a sewage and water-treatment system and (2) a public-transportation system based on a sub-system of extensive bike paths. These projects could provide both employment for many Nicaraguans and a basis for them to improve their own health and economy.
They would also give us, especially young people, a constructive way of saying, ``We're sorry for what our country has done!'' MEMO: Mr. Herrick co-produced an award-winning documentary, ``Voices from
Nicaragua,'' in 1987. He resides in Norfolk.
by CNB