Nicaragua Myths: As Fuzzy as Our Alamo Impressions

I find it fitting that President Reagan put his new propaganda campaign against Nicaragua into high gear in the same week in which Texas began its official commemoration of 150 years of independence from Mexico. Both events coincide with the anniversary of one of the most famous and widely misunderstood battles in American history--the siege of the Alamo.

In 1836 in San Antonio, 188 rebels held off Gen. Antonio Lopez de Santa Anna’s army for 13 days during the war for Texas’ independence. Although the Alamo was eventually overrun, the defenders’ stand spawned a famous battle cry and has been immortalized in American myth as a magnificent fight against hopeless odds.

And therein lies the problem, because the popular stories of that battle have been badly distorted by the American media--from dime novels to television.

The romanticized stories of the Alamo are based largely on anti-Mexican propaganda that grew out of the Texas rebellion. Not surprisingly, they portray Davy Crockett and other fighters inside the Alamo as good guys and Santa Anna and his troops as bad guys. These versions omit some significant facts, such as the presence of Mexicans among the Alamo’s defenders. There was, after all, significant pro-independence sentiment among Mexican settlers in Texas at the time.

Also, while the Alamo’s defenders were outnumbered, they had better firepower and other important advantages over Santa Anna. They had 21 cannons to the Mexicans’ 10, their long rifles were far more accurate and deadly than the Mexicans’ muskets, and they were holed in up what in those days was considered the strongest fort west of the Mississippi River.

This is not to downplay the significance of the Alamo, only to describe the battle more realistically. It was not the hopeless but idealistic fight of Hollywood sagas. The point is relevant today because it is not just dishonest to portray historic events as simplistic struggles of good-against-evil, it can also be dangerous. Look at what Reagan is doing with Nicaragua.

In his new campaign against the Sandinistas, Reagan wants Congress to give $100 million in military aid to anti-government rebels, the so-called contras. But the contras are a losing proposition. Even their boosters in the Reagan Administration admit privately that they do not have enough popular support in Nicaragua to defeat the Sandinistas. While they get some aid from peasants in the rural areas where they operate and from groups such as the Miskito Indians that have clearly been mistreated by the Sandinista regime, they have not developed the widespread popular support that a guerrilla movement needs to survive.

Congress suspects this and is resisting Reagan’s aid request. So the President is trying to sway public opinion by describing the Nicaraguan crisis in dramatic but distorted terms. Nicaragua is a struggle between “freedom fighters” and communist tyrants, he says. In fairness, some of Reagan’s critics are just as bad. They describe the Sandinistas as secular saints, while the contras are dismissed as hateful remnants of former Nicaraguan dictator Anastasio Somoza’s army. Both views are terribly simplistic or cynically dishonest.

Earlier this week Reagan showed his support for the contras by meeting with several of their leaders. One was Alfonso Robelo, a former member of Nicaragua’s revolutionary government who has since fled the country and joined the opposition forces. Robelo is a living example of how complex the reality of Nicaragua is.

When I first met Robelo in 1978, during the early days of the rebellion that overthrew Somoza and brought the Sandinistas to power, he was accompanied by an activist priest, Miguel D’Escoto. Today D’Escoto is the foreign minister of Nicaragua and a harsh critic of Reagan’s policy. That day, however, both men attacked Somoza and said that Nicaraguans supported the Sandinistas.

Although they are on opposite sides now, Robelo and D’Escoto are decent, compassionate men in a complex struggle that will not end quickly or easily. But as long as someone like Robelo is with the contras, they are more than the Somocista brutes that their critics claim. And with men like D’Escoto on their side, the Sandinistas will be more than the atheist thugs that Reagan insists they are.

This uncomfortable reality does not make for neat, simple answers to Nicaragua’s problems. Unlike the movies, the good guys don’t always wear white and the bad guys black. And things are not resolved in a few hours. That’s why the only thing that giving the contras $100 million will guarantee is more bloodshed.

These subtleties may be lost on Reagan, who apparently spent too much time in Hollywood before shifting to the complexities of foreign policy. So it would help if, the next time the President describes Nicaragua in simple and dramatic terms, we remember the Alamo. The real Alamo, not the Hollywood myth.