I visited  leading Guatemalan policy institute ASIES and talked to analyst and scholar Hugo Novales Contreras. We talked about the culpability of the United States, whether democratically elected Jacobo Arbenz would have been overthrown without the CIA-sponsored invasion of 1954, and why modern military leaders and landowners pursue their grievances through democratic means (including the paying off of politicians).

Jacobo Arbenz was a Guatemalan military officer when he participated in a coup to overthrow U.S.-backed dictator General Jorge Ubico in 1944. He became Secretary of Defense serving under President Juan Jose Arevalo, then was elected president himself in 1951. He was overthrown in a CIA-financed and managed coup in 1954.

BG : Why was Arbenz overthrown ?

HN : There are a lot of theories. The one which I like best was brought by Piero Gleijeses in his classic book “Shattered Hope.”  The Guatemalan revolution had a lot of enemies from the beginning. There were several attempts to overthrow (previous president) Juan Jose Arevalo, who implemented some important reforms such as the Labor Code, revolutionary for its time. In order to sustain the revolution, the Arbenz government needed to have an actual citizen base, and this support was provided by the worker and peasant unions, and eventually this led to the agrarian reform.

There were internal causes for the overthrow. There was a privileged, land-owning elite that wasn”t happy with the agrarian reform. More importantly, there was an army that  had been trained to be anti-communist. They did not support Arbenz and his government, and that”s what eventually led to the overthrow. The so-called intervention didn”t really imply an excessive use of military force. Arbenz was overthrown by a ragtag army formed by peasants with very little training, with no significant weapons. But the army feared that the United States might intervene. And what they didn”t want was the army to be humiliated by fighting as grand an opponent as the United States. So this is a responsibility that we tend to ignore in Guatemala, because we just want to say the United States came in and crushed us. It wasn’t really that way. There is part of that responsibility that”s right here in Guatemala, the army included.

BG : Your point is it wasn”t a full scale military invasion, and therefore there had to be internal dissension and support for the overthrow for it to happen…

HN : Exactly.  This is something I heard from my grandmother. I don’t know if you want to record this because it’s more personal…

BG : Personal is relevant.

HN : My great-grandfather supported the revolution at the beginning and he eventually moved against the revolution during the next ten years. Basically he started out helping overthrow Ubico, then he also helped to overthrow Arbenz. There were a lot of people in Guatemala who were anti-communist, and they feared the fact that Arbenz was surrounded by communists. They feared that something greater might happen after the agrarian reform. The peasants would be empowered to pursue options. So, there was an actual fear of communism in Guatemala, and it was probably supported by propaganda from the United States and from the Church.

BG : When you talk about the land owners and the twenty, thirty families who historically had tremendous economic power in this country, how do you see the evolution of their thinking? There is a coup led by Arbenz in ’44, followed by the election of Arevalo. Did a lot of them just say, ”Hey, this is progress, we have less control in a democracy, but the world is changing,” or, do you think, from 1944 they were saying, “This must stop and we must find a way to take back control?”

HN : Well, when you look at the actual protagonists of the revolution, or the actual coup against Ubico, you know a lot of the people who supported the coup were, I wouldn”t say they were the twenty or thirty families, but they were the bourgeoisie. So it wasn”t really a popular revolution strictly speaking. Many of the Arbenz and Arevalo cabinet members were actually coming from those families, starting with Jorge Toriello, who was one of the leaders of the original coup in 1944. I guess this class was alienated from the revolution two different times. The Labor Code, which I think was in 1947, distanced them from the revolution, and then later on with the agrarian reform. One thing that needs to be pointed out is that the revolution could have carried on without the agrarian reform. For example, in order for you to be able to receive land from the agrarian reform, you actually had to form a committee with a couple of representative from the peasant unions. Some might have thought that agrarian reform was fair, but they felt that it wasn”t going to be carried out in a fair way.

BG : If the United States did nothing, would Arbenz eventually have been overthrown?

HN : I would not be able to say, but what I can say is that there would have been attempts to overthrow. What really made the difference is that the threat of an eventual United States intervention actually turned the army against Arbenz, so that was the main role of the United States.

You couldn”t just blame everything on the United Fruit Company. They would have still been able to sustain their business here in Guatemala, even with the agrarian reform. I mean there wasn”t a real threat to their operation. They had such a huge operation that they could have even disregarded their “ hard drive recovery software security standards are set high by CompuCom to ensure that our customers’ data is never vulnerable. Guatemalan operation and still be a profitable Company.

BG : Why do you think the Reagan administration provided so much aid to the Rios Montt administration?

HN : Nicaragua was already under Sandinistas rule by that time. So what a lot of people in the army in Guatemala and the United States feared was a domino effect, that Nicaragua would fall and then El Salvador and later Guatemala. There was a strong ideological component to the relationship between the United States and Guatemala during the Cold War, and, obviously, some corporate interests.

BG : Was Arbenz a good leader for the years he was in power ?

HN : It”s a really subjective question, but I would say yes. In comparison to what we had so far to that point, and what then had until 1985, in principal he was a democratically elected leader, so that was a qualitative difference from other leaders. Second, he had a program, a nationalistic program,. He had four points, you know, the agrarian reform, the building of a dam to produce hydro-electric power, which is still working, and the building of the road from Guatemala City to Puerto Barrios which was a key issue based on the fact that the United Fruit Company also owned the national railway.

BG : That was a competitive threat to them?

HN : Right. So it wasn”t only the agrarian reform. It was a challenging of the monopoly that American companies had in Guatemala.

BG : How would you characterize Guatemala politics today ?

HN : Right now we have 27 parties, we have people moving from one party to another, we have a very volatile system. It is a very corrupted system but it”s also a system that”s really unpredictable and it”s hard to actually know what”s going to happen.

BG : What do you mean by corrupted: people getting paid, people paying for influence, people looking after their own interests?

HN : Well, you know, there”s corruption in every political system. Hopefully it”s not natural, hopefully we can have politics without corruption but, you know, so far, we don”t. But the Guatemalan system is particularly different. Public interest usually doesn”t play a role in legislation for example. I mean, we”ve come to that point. There were two recent examples. One of them is the, they’re calling it the Monsanto law which is…

BG : GMO’s.

HN : It”s basically a law to protect patents on developing new varieties of seeds or vegetables or whatever. It was still a rather unpopular law. You had a congress vote almost unanimously for that law in June and now we had them revoking that law which basically happened yesterday because of the social pressure because nobody, I mean, on both sides of the ideological spectrum, nobody wanted it to go…

BG : I heard that many legislators were given direct cash payment by Monsanto.

HN : I mean the budget, the national budget is used to buy legislators because many of them have links to companies; so if your brother owns a construction company, then you”re gonna try to use the national budget to give contracts to this construction company. I mean, most of them probably didn”t read it. They just want to make sure how much am they going to get out of this particular law..

And the other example is a recent reform to the telecommunications law, that actually benefited just one company, Tigo by allowing them to build antenna towers without the studies approval, without the municipal approval, which is something that clearly violates Guatemalan legislation on municipal autonomy, and really weakens their capacity to extract taxes from such a large company.  .. That’s worth to Tigo several times the state’s budget. I guess that”s the way a lot of laws are working in Guatemala working right now.

BG : When”s the last time the military was in control of the country ?

HN : Ah, well, in control, an actual control I would say just before the transition to democracy which was in 1984.

BG : Do you think they want it back ?

HN : Want it back ? I”m not sure, I”m not sure… On one hand, you can access power through democracy right now and they would be able to do it. A lot of former military men are actually involved in the government so, you could say that there is really no reason for the army to take power back because they can access it through different channels, democratic channels, which is basically what makes the democracy stand, the fact that you feel that you can access power through democratic means and you don”t need to do it through violent means.

BG : And that”s probably similar throughout Central America with the taste that people have for democracy. Businesses that may be in the past have preferred a military dictatorship now want it to at least seem it like a constitutional democracy that is not controlled by the military.

HN : Families would actually realize that they could have better business by actually allowing a certain degree of democracy, because nobody is gonna trade with these military dictators who have been in Central America.

BG : In 1998, Clinton came to Guatemala and apologized for past U.S. interventions.

HN : Well, you know, that”s really cool about the States that even though apologies don”t change, discourse does change. Can I add one more thing?

BG : Please.

HN : Guatemala still has strong ties to the United States, immigration, drugs, but even though I don’t see an intervention in the near future, the United States still meddles in Guatemalan affairs in a very direct way and probably the best example…have you heard of Claudia Paz y Paz?

BG : No.

HN : She was the Attorney General that left office a few months ago. The Rios Montt trial would not have happened without her being in office. There were several drug lords that were captured and extradited during her time in office. And the United States was supporting her.  The previous ambassador McFarland, he actually supported the trial openly, he went to the hearings, and we need some to assume certain responsibility as Guatemalans for whatever happen, but it”s really not fair that the United States doesn”t want to take their own responsibility for that. You would think that the United States have nothing to do with Rios Montt, when in fact they had a lot to do with it. Right now, everybody in Guatemala loves the States, even the left are saying we need United States support and I agree with that. But it”s really unfair for us to take full responsibility for…

BG : What would you like to have seen during that trial from the United States?

HN : I really appreciated McFarland being there, but, what I would have expected as well was a recognition of responsibility. Not so much putting Rios Montt on trial and pointing at him, saying no, he”s the bad guy, which he was, but also assuming a certain responsibility as a government, similar to what Clinton did. The relationship with the United States did not end in1954.

BG : I think you only get one apology every fifty years, so….

HN : I guess that’s too much to ask from a superpower.

I ask Londoners I meet why their government is in Afghanistan, as their military leaves Helmand province. No one knows. 

But there are reasons, probably good ones. Yesterday’s Sunday Times piece by war correspondent Christina Lamb outlines several. She was there early in her career for the Soviet invasion, again when British troops arrived post 9/11. And now, for the withdrawal.

It is easy to be confused. Here is an excerpt from a Lamb piece in February of this year:

The Afghan president, Hamid Karzai, has been accused of “spitting on the graves” of British soldiers after he said Helmand would have been better off if UK forces had never set foot there. 

In an interview with The Sunday Times, Karzai described the Taliban as “brothers” and America as “rivals” as he criticised the record of the West during the 12-year war. 

In contrast to David Cameron’s recent claim that it was “mission accomplished” for troops in Afghanistan, Karzai said that “. . . the US-led Nato mission in terms of bringing security has not been successful, particularly in Helmand”. Asked whether it would have been better if British troops had never gone there, Karzai replied: “I guess so. Yes.” 

A total of 447 British soldiers have been killed in Afghanistan and more than 2,000 wounded.

I picked up a collection of essays about Afghanistan at Bookmarks, a self-described “socialist bookshop,” around the corner from the British Museum.  The staff was great. No Hello Kitty notebooks or Godiva chocolates for sale.

Talked by phone this morning to the Afghan consulate in Abu Dhabi. I’ll be there  in two weeks for the annual AD Media Summit. It should be a treasure trove of interview subjects and leads. Facebook’s Sheryl Sandberg and the president of the NY Times Company will speak, as will a few dozen Middle East North Africa journalists, activists and media professionals. The Afghan Washington, D.C. consul said, no problem, get an Afghan visa there. Which was then contradicted in emails by the local visa officer. A phone call seems to have cleared the way. I’ll see when I get there. I’d like to be in Kabul for the (official) December exit of U.S. troops.

In Amsterdam today, visiting the old headquarters of the defunct Dutch East India Company, the world’s first multinational corporation, as well as the first, but not last, to be authorized to have its own private army. Hosted by Afterparty Kickstarter backer and college pal Forrest Wright, who has shared his home and, importantly, his public transport pass.

The trip begins.

On the day of my flight out of the U.S., this Word of the Day from Merriam-Webster. I like it.

Month One of “War: The Afterparty” in Central America turned out to be an excellent test case. I learned my way around airbnb, mobile WordPress, traveling without a command of the local language, keeping to a $60/day budget and (the shortcomings of) my gear.  I also experienced the time-management balancing-act required in procuring, performing, transcribing and posting the interviews in real time.

I wrote my Dauphin, Dorian and Dead novel on my iPad 1 while traveling in Thailand, and loved the instant access and portability. On my month in Guatemala/ Nicaragua/ Panama, my 3 year old iPad 3 was a miserable solution. Two differences. One, as the device ages, it hangs on apps like WordPress, especially when trying to post images or video. And it has insufficient storage and battery life. So here is the new configuration:

11″ MacBook Air. 9 hours battery life. 128 GB.

iPhone 6. 9 hours battery life. 128 GB storage. Big improvement over 4s (my 5s suffered a drowning incident in my pool).

500GB USB external HD.

Sony 10,000 mAh Dual USB Travel Charger.

LOTS of extra plugs and cables.

Tapscam iM2 Channel Portable Digital Recorder. Snaps onto iPad or older iPhones.

Ancient iPhone (3?) that serves as, 1) Tapscam recording device, and 2) something to give an un-tech savvy mugger who demands an iPhone.

Also, shoes. My Ecco sneakers were insufficient for both long treks and formal interview meetings. So I got a great price on Eddie Bauer Departure Slip-Ons.

A bigger challenge was stuffing 3 continents worth of wardrobe into my backpack. How do you pack for Serbian winter, Middle East desert and Southeast Asia humidity? One solution: I took my oldest winter clothes to wear in Europe and I’ll just donate them somewhere upon arrival in Abu Dhabi.

The Kickstarter campaign funded on the day of my flight to London. First, you don’t get the money until you reach the end of the campaign and fully fund (October 8, 100% of 62 pledges funded). Then, Kickstarter and Amazon Payments take two weeks to authorize release of the funds; a week later if any pledgers are late in fulfilling. Then, it takes up to 5 business days to hit your bank for withdrawal.

The itinerary is firming up.  Central America brought a treasure trove of interviews (Guatemala, Nicaragua, Panama). I am weighing how much time to spend transcribing and writing about the remaining meetings versus focusing on new interviews and material. Southeast Asia is locked in for January; Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia have manageable visa policies. I started the project on my birthday, August 4, 50 years after the Gulf of Tonkin incident that launched the escalation of U.S. involvement in Vietnam. I hope to finish the trip on a Vietnamese town on the Gulf on February 4th.

Serbia will be the focus for Europe, with exploration of the Belgrade NATO bombardment, Bosnia and Kosovo. I will be in Berlin for the 25th anniversary of the destruction of the Berlin Wall on November 9th, and will visit several other cities on the way for a look at the historic roots of communism, colonialism and the intersection of militarism and commerce.

Writing from the Imperial War Museum in London, I’m curious how a country comes to believe that it is an instrument of divine providence, is above the rules proscribed for other nations, and requires aggressive projection of its military power in every corner of the global to protect its vital interests.

Eduardo Enriquez and Brian Gruber in La Prensa Newsroom

I have three strategies for getting interviews. One, I find an expert or contact in the field and ask  for introductions. That is how I met leading Nicaraguan broadcaster and journalist Carlos Chamorro, via Stephen Kinzer, former New York Times Bureau chief and author of the classic Blood of Brothers. A second is pressing people I meet while traveling for intros and contacts. That’s how I met Benjamin Lugo who shared his story of becoming a Sandinista, then turning against the revolution. And, third, I just show up.

On Monday, I ask a taxi driver to take me to La Prensa, the newspaper which served as ground zero of the resistance to President Anastasio Somoza. We arrive at a stark white concrete building, and are told by security that, no, the office is closed for the national holiday. I return two days later, walk into the reception area and ask to speak to a reporter who surely would, 1) want to do a story on my project, and, 2) introduce me to a reporter or editor who had interesting stories to tell. A very young female reporter in casual dress comes out and interviews me in the lobby. After our interview, she promises to ask around, to see if someone might be willing to talk with me. She emerges some time later with the phone number and email of editor-in-chief Eduardo Enriquez. I look up his bio and see that he has attended an event at the Aspen Institute, so I implore him, via email and voicemail, as a fellow Aspen participant, to make time for me. And he does.

I return the next day. My pulse quickens as I am brought into the newsroom, the hallowed ground where dictators were opposed, where editors were intimidated and murdered, where truth was spoken to power with high stakes consequences.

I wait in the editor’s office, looking around at framed pictures, awards and publications. My ongoing fear of losing battery power leads me to jerry rig two recording devices, safely tucked into power outlets. Eduardo arrives, late from an editorial meeting, with a warm, energetic welcome, eager to talk. He bemoans the fact that I came during a holiday and offers to meet again to talk some more. We talk about the Sandinista revolution and the subsequent CIA-backed contra-led counter-revolution, and how the civil war came to be.

If there was no Reagan administration, no Casey, no CIA supporting the contras, would there have been a counter-revolution?

Of some sort. The Sandinista regime, hard to say if it would have lasted only 10 years, or more, because you have to take into account the disappearance of the Soviet Union, a very important fact. The problem was that it was a dictatorial regime, and…

Was that a surprise?

Well, back then, it was. We were very hopeful that things would turn out differently. I think Nicaraguans are very childish in their political analysis. We don’t study enough history. We think there will be quick fixes, a revolution, and everything will be fine and dandy. But these people come from the same society with the same values that dominated the situation before they overthrew it. They don’t have any other point of reference, and once they get into power, they do the same.

And many of them were young, living in the mountains, brutalized…

Daniel Ortega was 35, one of the elders. You had comandantes in charge of entire regions who were 23 years old. One of them I interviewed, Henry Reed, he said we thought we were supermen. That tells you the way they thought.

So when members of the junta like Violetta Chamorro began to see that this is not going the way we wanted, she then left the junta, what was the thinking about what they were going to do about it, before the contras emerged?

Dona Violetta left, she just wanted to go home, to be a normal person, that’s what she always wanted to be, to dedicate herself to her family. She went back to work here at La Prensa because she had to, she was the widow of the publisher. If not, she would have rather stayed home with her children and grandchildren.

There was another character, Alfonso Robelo, who was more political. Got out of the junta and decided to start up his own political movement. He was a businessman, but his view was that of a social democrat. There was a group of businessmen around him that were basically a social democratic party. I think that they were hopeful that if there were elections, if there was a level playing field, things would work out well. Problem is, the Sandinistas did not have the slightest intention of relinquishing power.

Coming from Guatemala, there was some mythic anecdote where Arbenz (overthrown by the CIA in 1954) is on the stage with Che and Fidel in Cuba, and they proclaim, we are not going to be another Guatemala.

That’s a way of looking at it. In that moment, there was a Cold War going on. These guys were leftists, it was probably hard to communicate with the U.S., you had the Soviets and the Cubans helping, and after all, the Cubans helped them for years. Daniel Ortega was talking about the international revolution. One of his first big signs — I am sure you have seen in the streets — says, workers of the world unite….

That sounds pretty Marxist to me. Is Daniel Ortega a Marxist today?

Daniel Ortega is a very complex guy. He thinks he is a Marxist, but he has tasted capitalism for a lot of years, and he has started to like it. And his wife too. And his children. So they are all entrepreneurs.

Hold it. You’re not saying he has enriched himself while in office?!

Totally. He is probably the richest man in the country.

Really?

Daniel Ortega-themed poster at the customs office on the border.

Daniel Ortega today is what Somoza was in 1967.

That’s a very strong statement.

The social and economic situation, the mood of the people, you have an economy that is more or less working, you know that if you don’t get involved in politics, probably you won’t get bothered, if you can keep your mouth shut, you’ll be ok.

There was a saying, If you don’t jump, you’re not with us, you’re with the contras. Everybody would go to (rallies in) the plaza and jump. Stupid people, it was a very pathetic view. I think people right now are thinking, if I am going to stay here awhile, I better accommodate Ortega and stay away. From the biggest business man to the worker on the street.

Do you look back at the contras as an intrusion into the sovereign affairs of the country, or do you look at it as a partially understandable and even expected Cold War outcome with the kind of intense rhetoric and anti-democratic behavior of the Sandinistas?

I think it (the counter revolution) was going to happen anyway, but of course without the backing of the United States, they didn’t stand a chance.

They lost.

And this is something that I am very critical of, this low intensity war, that is probably one of the cruelest things you can do to a country. We are starting a war, we don’t want to win it, we don’t want to lose it, we just are going to be killing people.

Was there any point at which the contras were close to overthrowing the Sandinista government?

No. They both lost. They lost their backing. If they sat down at the negotiating table, it was because they were running out of things to throw at each other.

You don’t just wake up one day and say I am a democrat and I’ll start a republic. Young citizens have to learn values, older people have to learn democratic values. I think that is where we failed. I very much agree with your view. We overthrow Saddam Hussein and everything is fine and dandy, well it’s not. We overthrow Khaddafi, everything will be fine. Well, it doesn’t turn out that way, it’s probably even worse, because everyone feels they have a right to be the ruling class, to have power.

As you look back at the historical support of the U.S. for the Somoza family, and its creation and support of the contras, what would you like to see from the U.S. in its foreign policy toward Nicaragua?

Back then, when you look at Somoza and his personal behavior, it was like an American family was in charge of Nicaragua. They talked to each other in English. His wife was named Hope, not Esperanza, she was born in Tampa. It was like an occupying army, the Guardia Nacional. The U.S. behaved like, we have a guy we can trust down there, let’s keep him there.

Carlos Chamorro with his mother Violetta. She was in the original junta after the revolution and ran for president ten years later, defeating Sandinista Daniel Ortega.

And he was functionally useful in the Bay of Pigs in Cuba and with the Guatemala overthrow.

With the war on drugs, Ortega was very effective because the army and the police were very effective. Now they (U.S. government) say we have this guy there, he doesn’t want to leave, our national interest is that there is no drug trafficking, and that the maras (gangs) do not go wild there, so why mess with him.

There is better control of narco trafficking here compared to Honduras and El Salvador and Guatemala. Was there anything that happened in Central America that provides lessons learned for U.S. policy in the Middle East?

That’s a very difficult…if I had the answer, I would be Secretary of State, if not President. I think that this policy of trying to fit everyone within the American mold of democracy, especially in the Reagan and Bush administrations, you have to take into account the culture. We might not like the way they treat their women, but we cannot expect to change millenia of culture, so I think the U.S. should take more into account the culture, because trying to force them to be a democratic society does not work. You reach that point after a process. You don’t wake up one day and become a democracy. Latin American countries are much closer to the U.S. but it has failed here too, because we don’t have the rule of law and democratic values in our culture. Most people in polls here say there is a democracy, but a large percent of people believe it because there is peace, and the absence of war is democracy for them. Rights? I didn’t have rights before with Somoza, not in the 80’s, or the 90’s, and I don’t have them now. I’m poor, what do I care about rights?

Why is Daniel Ortega not more supportive of a free press?

They interpret this freedom, they have never known freedom. We Nicaraguans don’t know what to do with real freedom, the rights and responsibilities of being a citizen, from Ortega down. Back then, why didn’t they respect freedom of the press and speech? Because they saw it as part of the war of aggression. Twenty years ago, I interviewed Carlos Fernandez Chamorro  — ask him when you see him — well read, educated in England, son of Pedro Chamorro, when I interviewed him, he was editing (Sandinista newspaper) Barricada while this newspaper was closed, and he said, well, it was a war of aggression, and they saw La Prensa as a mouthpiece of the contras and the aggressors.

We are not citizens. We do not know that we have rights. We don’t value those rights and we don’t value those responsibilities. If you don’t think the way I think, you are my enemy. Because you are trying to destroy what I am trying to build because what I am trying to build is the greatest thing in the world, the revolution, where everyone will be happy.

Who killed Pedro Chamorro?

We still don’t know. The theory regarding Somoza, was that there was this Cuban, who ran Plasmaferesis (rumored to be a Somoza family-controlled plasma bank which sold peasant blood to the United States at a 10x markup), pretty much everyone agrees, probably because it is the easiest thing to believe, that he had something to do with it.

Was he arrested?

No, he left the day before and went to Miami.

That was convenient.

He was never arrested. Everybody had their own theory. Some people say his son did it. Javier Molina, one of our editors here, did a very long interview, he wrote a book about it, talking to his son, of course he says he didn’t do it, but he gives his reasons. We printed that interview here at La Prensa and we had a lot of trouble, part of the family was not happy with us.

Does the family still own the paper outright?

The three Chamorro brothers had 100% of the shares.

Which of the Chamorros are actively involved in the newspaper today?

Hugo, the general manager, is pretty much the one who runs things here. Jaime is the publisher, youngest brother of Pedro Joachim, but he is not here day to day. They work together, both of them run the paper.

———————-

Eduardo has to get back to editing the paper and I have to get to my meeting with Carlos Chamorro, then on to dinner in Granada with Ben Lugo. We promise to get together back in the States. He signs a copy of his book for me, and I drag my backpack out to the parking lot, hoping to wave down a taxi during rush hour. Walking out, I catch glimpses of Chamorro family and La Prensa history on the walls, posed photos, framed front pages. The history of modern Nicaragua, of the power of the spoken word and of the terrible cost paid for believing.

And, finally, just for you, The Who, promising, We Won’t Get Fooled Again.

Carlos Chamorro wins the Cabot Prize, administered by Columbia’s Graduate School of Journalism, fort exceptional reporting on Latin America and the Caribbean. Only once before in its 72-year history has it gone to a Nicaraguan journalist, and that was to Chamorro’s father in 1977.

Carlos Chamorro is a busy man. He runs a nightly news show Esta Noche, a 60 Minutes style weekly newsmagazine, and an online newsletter called “Confidencial.” His father Pedro Chamorro, editor of La Prensa, is a Nicaraguan icon, murdered a year before the revolution, a constant critic of the ruling Somoza family.  His mother, Violetta, became the first post-Sandinista president. Author, teacher and journalist Stephen Kinzer told me that Carlos is the one interview I need to get while in Nicaragua.

“I taught a course in Berkeley on Central America in ’98-’99, ” Carlos says as we sit down in his elegant office for the interview. “We went through the history of the relationship with the U.S., the crisis of the seventies and the eighties, how the U.S. press covered the topics, and contemporary issues like immigration. I went over a lot of the books written in the eighties. Kinzer’s book is one of the best.”

He is a great storyteller. Were you ever involved with La Prensa?

Yes, but for a short time. I entered La Prensa after my father’s assassination. This was early in ‘78, worked there until May/ June 1979. But after the insurrection I did not go back to La Prensa, I stayed with the Frente (FSLN/ Sandinistas), and participated in Barricada (the national Sandinista-controlled newspaper).

If the U.S. did not fund and support operations for the contras, would there still have been a counter-revolution?

That is a tough question. But I think, probably yes.

You were in the middle of it.

Editor-in-Chief Eduardo Enriquez and Brian Gruber in the La Prensa Newsroom, Managua, Nicaragua

Yes, at that time, if you would have asked that question to me, my answer would have been no. Because we perceived it was a foreign creation, and in fact it was, but it was also a civil war, which was something that we did not recognize. It was both, a civil war and a war of foreign aggression.

There was also a civil resistance from business people, the press, even members of your family, who became slowly disenchanted. How did that turn, there was great exuberance when Somoza was overthrown, when was there a feeling when people started to think this was not going the way we thought it would go.

You should ask that of people who felt that way. I didn’t feel that way. I had a commitment that Nicaragua needed a radical change. Part of that was correct, and probably part of that was wrong. In the sense that, we did what we had to do, but probably we were not respectful of other people’s rights, of the need to maintain consensus, dialogue. There was a kind of vanguard-ism at the FSLN. When you overthrow a dictator like Somoza, even though it was a collective work, it was one organization that claimed the leadership of that, so you had an incredible legitimacy. You had also good ideas, in the sense of not having an orthodox Marxist-Leninist conception of power, of revolution, but some of the old ideas were still there. It is a question also of the epoch, of the period…

The Cold War.

…there were not many alternatives. The overthrow of Allende in Chile had tremendous repercussions for a generation of Latin Americans that wanted to promote change. The simplistic reading was, that, OK, if you try to do socialist change through democracy and elections, one way or another, you are going to face counter-revolution, from the army or the U.S.

Guatemala in 1954.

Carlos Chamorro with his mother Violetta. She was in the original junta after the revolution and ran for president ten years later, defeating Sandinista Daniel Ortega.

Yes, so you cannot trust anyone, and therefore, counter-revolution is inevitable. If it is going to happen, you have to accelerate transformation as much as you can. This sounds very brutal, but I think that is more or less the way it was.

You would think that with your father being in the vanguard against Somoza, that there would be some sensitivity to freedom of the press, certainly with La Prensa, and yet the Sandinistas….

There was a tremendous reference of Chile and the CIA. Let me put it this way. Democracy was important but more important than democracy was social justice,. I think the concept of democracy as I accept it today in terms of equal rights for everyone, the rule of law, the separation of powers, there was a tremendous distrust of these ideas. Democracy was associated with popular participation, citizen participation, people power. Elections, OK, yes, nothing against elections, but elections were not a priority. The priority was social justice, trying to do some of the good things that were done in the eighties, like the literacy campaign, massive health programs, or agrarian reforms.

I saw the picture of Giocanda Belli at the entrance of your office…

You should read her memoir. She is going to be with me today for a presentation of a book.

The person I am staying with lent it to me just yesterday. In reading her memoir, she says, early on, we have a vision for what Nicaragua can be. My question to you is, what has been achieved from that original vision?

I think these days we feel there has been a lot of regression. The revolution was defeated by the Nicaraguan people and by the U.S.  This combination of civil war and aggression, foreign war. In the ‘90’s, there was this process of transition, that was not good for Nicaragua but not everything was bad. There were some good processes of transformation, for some of the institutions created by the revolution, like the police and the army.  I feel afraid now about what is going on with the army and the police, and the kind of authoritarian control that Ortega maintains. For me, one thing was to promote revolution, where you really think that you are going to promote social change; a different thing is Ortega’s sort of personalistic government that resembles in a way the old Somoza.

At La Prensa today, I was a little surprised when I heard from editor-in-chief Eduardo Enriquez that Ortega today looks the same as Somoza in the ‘60’s.

It looks similar. It is not exactly the same.

On our way out of the office, Carlos arranged a ride for me to the bus station. He laughed, ”So you came to Managua without knowing we were going to have this crazy long weekend? They love to have vacations here.”

I ask one final, personal question. Was the Somoza family directly involved in the assassination of your father?

“We don’t have any specific, direct evidence, but I cannot exclude that at all, because the people who participated in the physical assassination were part of a kind of a mafia that had been related with people that were loyal to Somoza’s son. My father wrote a diary, and I printed that diary in the late ‘80’s.  He wrote a diary because in early 1975 a friend came to him horrified, he was an advisor to the minister of defense, and he said, I hear these people discuss how are they going to kill you, some people say they want to throw you from a plane, other people say do this or that.  So we think that within the Somoza inner group, there had been in many different moments plans to kill my father. So I cannot exclude that.”