With a Crackdown, Sandinistas Shatter Myths

While the Sandinista government was celebrating its ninth year in power last month, the already beleaguered Nicaraguan people were witnessing a grim suppression of their first tentative gains in democratization.

In a sudden, sweeping crackdown that began in early July, security police of Nicaragua’s Sandinista government beat and tear-gassed demonstrators in Nandaime, imprisoning more than 40 of them. It decapitated the internal democratic opposition by imprisoning six of its leaders, including Roger Guevara and Carlos Huembes, the chairman and secretary general of the democratic opposition alliance. It indefinitely shut down the Catholic radio station and a popular news program on another station and suspended La Prensa, the nation’s only opposition daily newspaper, for two weeks. The government also confiscated the nation’s largest private business without compensation.

Add these latest incidents to the overall human-rights situation and the picture is bleak indeed. Nicaragua will not reveal the number of its political prisoners but estimates run in the thousands. The justice system has gone from bad to worse. Kangaroo courts, called People’s Anti-Somocista Tribunals, were abolished in January as a concession to the Central American peace plan, only to be replaced by police courts and other tribunals under the direct control of the Interior Ministry and its secret police. Thirty-five of the oppositionists arrested in the early July crackdown have since been sentenced--without trial--by these police courts to six months imprisonment, and may face eventual trials and longer sentences.

The International Labor Organization and the OAS have criticized repeated incidents of Sandinista union-busting and the suppression of labor rights, including the banning of strikes by a 1981 decree. Last spring, hunger strikes and other labor unrest prompted by hyperinflation, food shortages and wage controls were met with a harsh response--labor supporters were arrested and two communist labor demonstrators were shot dead by a Sandinista patrol. Radio news programs reporting the strikes were ordered off the air and the owner of one station was physically assaulted by Interior Minister Tomas Borge himself. Violent Sandinista mobs known as turbas resurfaced last August after a two-year dormancy and have energetically crushed dissent throughout the past year.

Sandinista repressiveness has waxed and waned over the years, with liberalizing trends during Nicaragua’s 1984 presidential elections and again last fall when La Prensa was allowed to reopen and other reforms were made under pressure of the peace plan. The Sandinistas’ erratic political course has not always made their intentions for democracy easy to read. Sudden crackdowns were attributed by observers to military threats from the Contras or to divisions within the Sandinista leadership, with hard-liners like Borge being said to prevail at times over President Daniel Ortega and other perceived moderates.

The latest crackdown shatters several key myths about the Sandinistas. First, it reveals that their greatest fear is not the Contras but a general uprising of the civilian population. The Contra threat has been all but eliminated; U.S. aid has been cut off, and the Contra movement is in disarray. Instead, the Sandinista repression is aimed at the internal democratic opposition, which has grown in numbers and boldness as general popular discontent with Sandinista rule swells. The key sources of public frustration are summarized in the June 29 statement of the Nicaraguan Catholic Bishops Conference: “dramatic deterioration in the economic situation” and a “democratization and pacification process gone stagnant.”

The crackdown also represents a policy of a unified directorate. President Ortega, the so-called Sandinista moderate, said after the wholesale arrests at Nandaime on July 10: “We cannot continue tolerating those who want to take advantage of the space the revolution has permitted them.”

Finally, the crackdown revokes most of the hard-won rights ceded grudgingly under intense, concerted international political pressure and reveals that the reforms of the past year were not institutionalized but could be revoked by a simple command of the directorate. This crackdown is more than another setback for human rights so common in Nicaragua since 1979. It is a flagrant rebuff to international opinion and the obligations assumed in the Central American peace plan signed last August and the cease-fire accord signed in March. It seems to signify a new public commitment by the Sandinistas--one to perpetuate Sandinista control and policies at any price.

Individuals and groups concerned about human rights, democracy and peace in Nicaragua should speak out against these reversals. International political pressure is the only hope left for Nicaragua’s war weary and persecuted citizenry and the only alternative to further bloodshed. The real revolution--that is, the one against oppression--has yet to be fulfilled.