Merry Christmas from Nicaragua via Great Britain

I recently ordered a collection of Roger Sanchez’s cartoons published by Nicaragua Solidarity Campaign, a British solidarity organization. The cartoon above highlights Israel’s role in the conflict in Central America in the 1980s. Israel was one of the region’s largest arms providers, even giving substantial amounts of weapons, many seized from the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) during the 1982 invasion of Lebanon, to the Contras. Between 1982 and 1984 the U.S. Congress attempted to limit the amount of U.S. weaponry going to the Contras, but the Reagan administration turned to Israel who acted as a middle man, allowing Reagan to sidestep the Boland Amendment and continue arming the Contras. A Honduran soldier is shown at the base of the tree because the Contras operated out of Honduras and much of the arms being used against Nicaragua moved through that small country.

Although international solidarity sought to strengthen and protect the Nicaraguan Revolution, there existed an international counterrevolutionary consensus bent on crushing it. The Reagan administration stood at the vanguard of this counterrevolutionary current, often aided by Israel, Honduras, and other proxies. However, that is not to say that both revolutionary solidarity and counterrevolutionary consensus were monolithic in nature: fissures existed within each.

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Killer Cartoons

Between the spring of 1986 and the fall of 1987, the presidents of five Central American states came together in Esquipulas, Guatemala in order to find a solution to the region’s military conflicts. The cartoon above shows the five presidents who signed the Esquipulas Peace Agreement, or Esquipulas II. From left to right, the signers of the peace agreement were: Vinicio Cerezo of Guatemala, José Napoleón Duarte of El Salvador, Daniel Ortega of Nicaragua, José Azcona Hoyo of Honduras, and Óscar Arias Sánchez of Costa Rica. The cartoonist apparently believed that Cerezo, Duarte, and Azcona were using the peace process as a means of hiding their misdeeds, while Arias organized the meeting out of his own vanity and desire for a peace prize. The cartoonist’s bias is quite evident considering Ortega stands with nothing to hide. However, the indigenous peoples of the Miskito coast might have disagreed with this portrayal. After the Sandinistas came to power they sought to incorporate the Miskito people of Nicaragua’s Atlantic Coast, who had historically enjoyed a large amount of autonomy. This led to a Miskito revolution against the Sandinistas, which culminated in the return of Miskito sovereignty in 1987. Ironically many who supported the Sandinistas in their struggle against the United States, such as Gabi Gottwald, also supported the Miskito Indians in their struggle against the FSLN, revealing that for many connected to the solidarity movement a conviction to supporting human rights often trumped political considerations.

“The European Left and Central America” by Guy Hermet

I ran into a beautiful bit of doublespeak this morning. In his critic of the European and Latin American left during the 1980s, the French political scientists Guy Hermet referred to Peru’s “progressive military dictatorship” and noted a “redefinition of democracy in Ecuador, Argentina, Uruguay, Brazil, Honduras, and Guatemala” since 1979. I am going to say that a “progressive military dictatorship” is an oxymoron and to call the actions of the murderous regimes in Central America and the Southern Cone a “redefinition of democracy” is an act of mental and moral gymnastics.