Why was the US government concerned about the Sandinistas

[CajunBlazer]

(Someone posted the entire video clip of Bernie Sanders being interviewed about his trips to Nicaragua and Cuba from which the segment shown during the debate on GD-P. It was a long clip in which Sanders described how great the Sandanista government was and how the Reagan administration was persecuting it. (you can see the clip on GD-P). The Bernie supporters were all saying how the clip shown during the debate was taken out of contaxt and how wonderful Bernie was. I posted this in response.)

I couldn't remember why the US government was so concerned about the Sandinista government back in the 1980's. I viewed and listened to the entire clip and evidently Bernie Sanders thought that they all about helping the Nicaraguan people. I began reading up on the subject and came across this entry on the Sandinista's in Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sandinista_National_Liberation_Front

Sure enough much of the entry described some of the programs Sanders described. It appeared that the Sandinista government did have many good programs. But then came across a section about how the Sandinista government aligned itself with the Cuban communist government of Fidel Castro. Now remember this was at the height of the cold war so that gave me some insight into our government's concern. But at the time Reagan was President so figured that our government may well have been overreacting. Remember it was under Reagan that Ollie North ran drugs in South America to covertly fund the Contras who were fighting the Sandinistas, so their judgement perhaps can't be trusted. Then I came across this section in the Wikipedia entry.

Relationship with eastern bloc intelligence agencies

According to Cambridge University historian Christopher Andrew, who undertook the task of processing the Mitrokhin Archive, Carlos Fonseca Amador, one of the original three founding members of the FSLN had been recruited by the KGB in 1959 while on a trip to Moscow. This was one part of Aleksandr Shelepin's 'grand strategy' of using national liberation movements as a spearhead of the Soviet Union's foreign policy in the Third World, and in 1960 the KGB organized funding and training for twelve individuals that Fonseca handpicked. These individuals were to be the core of the new Sandinista organization. In the following several years, the FSLN tried with little success to organize guerrilla warfare against the government of Luis Somoza Debayle. After several failed attempts to attack government strongholds and little initial support from the local population, the National Guard nearly annihilated the Sandinistas in a series of attacks in 1963. Disappointed with the performance of Shelepin's new Latin American "revolutionary vanguard", the KGB reconstituted its core of the Sandinista leadership into the ISKRA group and used them for other activities in Latin America.

According to Andrew, Mitrokhin says during the following three years the KGB handpicked several dozen Sandinistas for intelligence and sabotage operations in the United States. Andrew and Mitrokhin say that in 1966, this KGB-controlled Sandinista sabotage and intelligence group was sent to northern Mexico near the US border to conduct surveillance for possible sabotage.[82]

In July 1961 during the Berlin Crisis of 1961 KGB chief Alexander Shelepin sent a memorandum to Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev containing proposals to create a situation in various areas of the world which would favor dispersion of attention and forces by the US and their satellites, and would tie them down during the settlement of the question of a German peace treaty and West Berlin. It was planned, inter alia, to organize an armed mutiny in Nicaragua in coordination with Cuba and with the "Revolutionary Front Sandino". Shelepin proposed to make appropriations from KGB funds in addition to the previous assistance $10,000 for purchase of arms.

Khrushchev sent the memo with his approval to his deputy Frol Kozlov and on August 1 it was, with minor revisions, passed as a CPSU Central Committee directive. The KGB and the Soviet Ministry of Defense were instructed to work out more specific measures and present them for consideration by the Central Committee.[83]
Cooperation with foreign intelligence agencies during the 1980s

Other researchers have documented the contribution made from other Warsaw Pact intelligence agencies to the fledgling Sandinista government including the East German Stasi, by using recently declassified documents from Berlin[84] as well as from former Stasi spymaster Markus Wolf who described the Stasi's assistance in the creation of a secret police force modeled on East Germany's.[85]

This gave me some insight as to why our intelligence might have believed that the Sandinistas might have been a tool of the Soviet Union as it tried to spread its influence and political control in South America.

Also in another part of the Wikipedia article I learned the Sandinista government wasn't above dealing harshly with their political enemies. In section of the Wikipedia entry called "Civil Rights Violations" I found this:

Time magazine in 1983 published reports of human rights violations in an article which stated that "According to Nicaragua's Permanent Commission on Human Rights, the regime detains several hundred people a month; about half of them are eventually released, but the rest simply disappear." Time also interviewed a former deputy chief of Nicaraguan military counterintelligence, who stated that he had fled Nicaragua after being ordered to kill 800 Miskito prisoners and make it look like they had died in combat.[107] Another article described Sandinista neighbourhood "Defense Committees", modeled on similar Cuban Committees for the Defense of the Revolution, which according to critics were used to unleash mobs on anyone who was labeled a counterrevolutionary. Nicaragua's only opposition newspaper, La Prensa, was subject to strict censorship. The newspaper's editors were forbidden to print anything negative about the Sandinistas either at home or abroad.[107]

There's more on civil rights violations in the piece; you can read it for yourself if you would like. The bottom line is that back at the time of Sanders' visit to Nicaragua, the Sandinista Government wasn't exactly the group of saints which Bernie described in the interview.

[dlwickham]

1. they traded one dictatorship for another

a right wing one for a left wing

in my opinion, there are few differences between fascists and communists in the way they govern; you end up with a totalitarian government under either group

[SharonClark]

2. Out with the bad - In with the bad

"A left-wing Nicaraguan political organization, the Sandinista National Liberation Front (FSLN), which came to power in 1979 after overthrowing the dictator Anastasio Somoza. Opposed during most of their period of rule by the US-backed Contras, the Sandinistas were voted out of office in 1990."

Oliver North and the Reagan administration broke the law to undermine the Sandinistas. The Sandinistas, like many revolutionaries trying to stay relevant, sold their soul to another corrupt regime. Throughout history it is the little people who are always the victims of dictatorships - right and left.

[SunSeeker]

3. K & R for exposure. nt

[fleabiscuit]

4. K&R

[CajunBlazer]

5. "It's no big secret that (the Sandinistas) were aligned with the Soviet Union'

([n my reply to the response (above) I posted to an OP in GD-P someone replied with the statement ""It's no big secret that (the Sandinistas) were aligned with the Soviet Union" and then went on to try defend Bernie Sanders statements back in 1985 and during the debate. I wrote the following in reply]

And certainly Castro's Cuba was also aligned with the Soviet Union at the time. It was also known at the time that some of the leaders of the Sandinista were Communist agents and our intelligence agencies certainly knew they were plotting terrorist acts in the United States. This at the time when our country was under threat of nuclear attack by that same Soviet Union.

So here we have this Burlington mayor traveling to Nicaragua to meet with the Sandinista leaders and to Cuba were he tried very hard to meet with Fidel Castro. Then Sanders came back to this country and praised both of those government extensively while dismissing their alignment with our sworn enemy, their killing and torturing their political opponents, and suppression of civil rights by saying "they have their problems". Why did he make those trips and later praise those governments? The obvious answer is that he was aligned with their socialist ideals and that trumped everything else. Notice Sanders didn't travel to countries where our government was working against right wing dictators.

Now perhaps he was just naive at the time and he really didn't understand what was really going behind the scenes. That's certainly a possibility; he was a young idealist. If that was the case he is no longer naive, he knows the score. Yet when he was given an opportunity to repudiate those statements he made back in 1985 during last night's debate, he did not. He instead stood by them.

This is not the image most Americans have of the man or woman who will occupy the most powerful office in the country.

The other poster countered with, "Now you are starting to sound like Oliver North"

To which I replied, "I detest Oliver North, but I can detest Oliver North while at the same time saying that what Bernie Sanders did and said in 1985 were huge mistakes, but standing by actions and statements made as young man more than 30 years ago during the debate was an even bigger mistake. I just hope that the Democratic party doesn't have to pay for all of those mistakes."

[UtahLib]

6. K&R