Reflections on the Death of the Sandinista Leader
Editor’s Note: As is the case with Cuba, the history of Nicaragua’s Sandinista revolution in the US is larded with filthy lies shamelessly propagated by the media on cue from the falsifications that emanate from the political directorship of the United States, from the White House on down. Sometimes, as when we observe the material disseminated by Fox News, the lies and innuendoes are difficult to miss (although easily swallowed by the audience). More “respectable” mainstream media, like the New York Times, Washington Post, etc., spread their venom a bit less obviously. In the case of the Miami Herald, which certainly belongs in the latter category, but opportunistically further bends its reporting to comply with the repugnant gusano and reactionary Latino environment that prevails in the Miami/Southern Florida area, the stiletto can’t be avoided. Consider the following excerpt from the Miami Herald‘s obit on Borge (bold ours). The lies are so thick, the insinuations so flagrant that it should make any decent knowledgeable person puke, but such is the reporting that passes for journalism in America:
In an uprising led by the Sandinistas, Somoza was finally toppled in 1979. The Sandinistas installed themselves in government, with Ortega as president, and set about creating a sometimes-harsh pro-Cuba system that swiftly earned the ire of the administration of President Ronald Reagan.
Over the following decade, the United States spent millions of dollars to build and arm the Contra rebel forces that unsuccessfully fought to oust the Sandinistas. The Contras turned out to be a fractious, unruly army; the war, meanwhile, gave the Sandinistas a pretext for tightening repression at home.
That task fell most often to Borge, a short, stocky man with large ears and narrow eyes. He commanded the state security and intelligence apparatus from an imposing building housing the Interior Ministry. Outside hung a banner with the Orwellian slogan: Guardian of the People’s Happiness.
Borge was considered the most rigid member of the nine Sandinista comandantes who oversaw Nicaragua. Dissidents and opposition figures were frequently jailed or harassed, sometimes even killed. Especially targeted were clerics in the Roman Catholic Church and the Miskito Indians on Nicaragua’s Atlantic coast. Borge repeatedly shuttered or censored the opposition press.
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by DANIEL KOVALIK
I just read the news that on Monday, April 30, 2012, Tomas Borge had passed away at the age of 81 in Managua, Nicaragua. Tomas Borge helped found the Sandinista National Liberation Front (FSLN) in 1961, and, through years of arduous struggle, helped lead the rag-tag Sandinista guerillas to victory against the heavily-armed Somoza dictatorship – a dictatorship armed and supported until the bitter end by the United States which had installed it in the first place in the 1930’s. Continue reading »
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