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Episode 219 – Nicaragua with Dan Kovalik
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Author Dan Kovalik talks to Steve about his recent book, Nicaragua: A History of US Intervention and Resistance. His perspective includes his own experiences in Nicaragua and the personal connections he made there.
From the 1910 occupation and eventual ouster of US Marines, through the dictatorships of several members of the Samosa family, the conditions for revolution were ripe. Dan describes the 1979 revolution as a David and Goliath story. The Sandinistas inherited a country steeped in poverty, with no infrastructure. The US-backed counterrevolution began almost immediately. Ronald Reagan and the Contras are just a small piece of it.
Dan grew up believing the US was the beacon on the hill, committed to spreading democracy and freedom. His first trip to Nicaragua changed his politics and his life.
Dan Kovalik is a labor and human rights lawyer and peace activist. He teaches International Human Rights at the University of Pittsburgh School of Law. He is the author of several books, including The Plot to Scapegoat Russia and Nicaragua: A History of US Intervention and Resistance.
@danielmkovalik on Twitter
Macro N Cheese – Episode 219
Nicaragua with Dan Kovalik
April 8, 2023
[00:00:00] Dan Kovalik [intro/music]: The reason that the population turned against Somoza was not because of the earthquake itself, but because it turned out that the billions of dollars of aid that was being sent from around the world for recovery efforts for the earthquake were just stolen and looted by Somoza. He just pocketed everything, and so the city was not rebuilt.
Revolutions are a process. A lot of people think that with the Nicaraguan Revolution, they’ll say, well, the revolution happened on July 19th, 1979. No, the revolution continues.
[00:01:35] Geoff Ginter [intro/music]: Now, let’s see if we can avoid the apocalypse all together. Here’s another episode of Macro N Cheese with your host, Steve Grumbine.
[00:01:43] Steve Grumbine: All right. This is Steve with Macro N Cheese. We’re going down the trail of revolution once again, and we’re gonna talk about not only the counter-revolutionary forces, but we’re gonna talk in particular about my friend Dan Kovalik’s book Nicaragua. Dan Kovalik graduated from Columbia Law School in 1993 and currently teaches international human rights at the University of Pittsburgh School of Law.
He’s written extensively on the issue of international human rights and US foreign policy for the Huffington Post, Counterpunch, and RT News, and has lectured throughout the world on these subjects. He is the author of several books, including The Plot to Overthrow Venezuela: How The U.S. Is Orchestrating A Coup For Oil, and of course, the book that we’re about to talk about, which is Nicaragua: A History of US Intervention and Resistance. Dan, thank you so much for joining me, sir.
[00:02:41] Dan Kovalik: Well, thank you for having me. I appreciate it.
[00:02:43] Grumbine: This book is powerful. I bought it several weeks ago with the intention of talking to you today. This book was compelling. It was very hard to put down. I’m a 50 something dude. I was born in 69, the summer of love. So some of the things that you talk about in this book were very relevant in my early years as I was growing up and some of the references you made brought back some really rough nostalgia in the Reagan era. So I wanna thank you and scream at you all in the same breath though. It was a beautiful book.
[00:03:17] Kovalik: Well, thank you. I really appreciate that.
[00:03:19] Grumbine: Absolutely. For those of us who have not read the book and are maybe unfamiliar with your work, what was your purpose for writing this book? Where did it come from?
[00:03:30] Kovalik: Well, I’ve had a lifelong love of Nicaragua, really stemming from my visit there for the first time in 1987. I was 19 years old and it was very life transforming and I’ve been very dedicated to Nicaragua. And the Sandinista revolution since that time. And I really was finally inspired to write the book because of a lot of the misinformation and disinformation that’s being put out there, particularly since 2018, which we’ll talk about what happened then. But the propaganda against Nicaragua was very, very thick right now. And I felt, and some friends who encouraged me to write the book felt that it really was time to do a book on Nicaragua putting all the historical pieces together to show what they’re up against.
[00:04:19] Grumbine: The very beginning of this book caught me off guard the story of your schooling years and the kids that you went to school with in particular, and. There was two children that were at your school. There’s no way to have written this story better. Can you tell us about the opening story?
[00:04:39] Kovalik: Yeah, so I was in a little Catholic school called St. Andrews. There were probably 50 kids in total in the whole school. And in the fall of 1979, and I would’ve been 11 at that time. I was born in 1968, the summer of Revolution, June 21, first day of summer, 1968. So I was 11 at this time, fall of 1979, and these two boys started the school, Juan and Carlos Garcia. And it was interesting to have them, one, that they were immigrants from Nicaragua.
We all knew that. We all knew that they came because of, I think they portrayed at first the civil conflict over the summer. The other interesting thing, especially in retrospect, I didn’t understand the meaning of this so much at the time, but they were very big physically. Juan, in fact, became the center for our basketball team, which if you know anything about basketball, that’s the tallest position.
Kareem played that and Wilt the Stilt Chamberlain. They were very physically big. They spoke English. The point is, again, in retrospect, I would find these are not your typical Nicaraguans. And at some point I asked them, I said, well, what did bring you here to the United States? And they said that their father had been the president of Nicaragua. That he was overthrown in a revolution over the summer, meaning that their father was in fact, Anastasio Somoza.
[00:06:14] Grumbine: Wow. Wow, when you had that revelation. That’s wild.
[00:06:21] Kovalik: Yeah, well again, I was 11. Now I was a very political kid, mostly because my dad was very political, so, I had a little sense of what that meant, but not a lot. I couldn’t tell you at that moment who I thought the good guys were and the bad guys were. And I think at this point there wasn’t even a lot of news about it or propaganda because this is right after the revolution.
So, people were just learning. And, then, the revolution took people by surprise, by the way. No one knew what a Nicaragua was in this country at this point, but I was obviously curious. Oh, okay. So there was a revolution. I got that and overthrew your dad. So, I don’t know. Was your dad a good guy? Was he a bad guy? Anyway, I do think it was very important to me in the sense that at least made me curious about what was happening in Nicaragua and what was happening in Central America.
It put it on the map for me in a very significant way. And again, as I got older, it meant more to me. I was like, wow, did that really happen? Recently, there was a reunion of my class, which graduated in 82. We had our 40th anniversary last year.
[00:07:33] Grumbine: Oh, okay.
[00:07:35] Kovalik: And I talked to some old friends and I was like, remember those guys? They remembered the details of them that I did. So, yeah, that was a crazy coincidence in my life and probably did set me down a certain path.
[00:07:51] Grumbine: I have a feeling I’d write a book about Nicaragua too if I found out that that was the way it started. But your life really went beyond that though. You have been to Nicaragua a lot of times and for a long time, and you’ve been an instrumental part of things there. It’s not like you’re just a grifter. You were doing things, you were working with people, in particular, one of the guys you highlight in the book, I believe his name is Brian Wilson.
[00:08:17] Kovalik: Brian Wilson, not the Beach Boy, you have to say, right? The other Brian Wilson.
[00:08:23] Grumbine: The revolutionary, Brian Wilson.
[00:08:25] Kovalik: Right.
[00:08:26] Grumbine: The humanities Brian Wilson. I think that’s another neat story to highlight before we jump into the history of it all. They say, give your arms and legs. He literally gave his legs to the cause, so to speak.
[00:08:39] Kovalik: Yeah, so when I, literally, landed in Nicaragua for the first time at age 19, was September 1st, 1987, and this would’ve just happened to him. And I found out about it. When I landed, I was told, I didn’t know who he was, but I was quickly told who this guy was and what happened to him. So, he was, first of all, an interesting guy. He was a lawyer by trade. He fought in Vietnam. He volunteered for Vietnam.
He’s actually from around Jamestown, New York, which is in the northwest of the state of New York. It’s where Lucille Ball is from as well. He’s from kind of middle America, and he joined up to fight in Vietnam. Because of his education, he quickly moved up in the ranks and they gave him a job. He was an Air Force captain, actually. But the job they gave him in Vietnam was to survey the dead and casualties and damage done by US Air Force bombings and raids in Vietnam. And after five weeks of doing this in Vietnam, he saw a certain pattern and that was, he determined that pretty much everyone being killed was women and children.
[00:09:55] Grumbine: Hmm.
[00:09:56] Kovalik: We’re not killing any soldiers here. And he wondered as any rational human being would wonder, is this on purpose or is this just an accident? What’s going on here? So he actually on his own, flew to Saigon. And met with his commanding officer and he said, what’s going on here? This is what I’m finding. Is this what’s going on? And the guy confirmed, yeah, this is pretty much what’s going on.
These are our targets because we’re more or less in these areas, we’re targeting everything that moves. There’s even a book called Kill Everything That Moves by Nick Terse about this, that we were basically killing all life forms in these areas, man, women, child elderly. Which of course, Brian found to be reprehensible and he basically bided at his time at that point till his tour duty was over.
But he lost all interest and any faith in what he was doing. So he came back and he joined Veterans for Peace, which was an organization founded mostly by Vietnam veterans who turned against the war, and he became a peace activist. And then at some point, again, in 1987, he helped organize this demonstration. What it was is they were gonna sit on the railroad tracks in front of a train in California that they knew was bound for Central America with arm shipments.
And he went to this train track for weeks before he did the action, and he noticed that to his comfort the train only went about five miles an hour, and that it slowed down or stopped if someone or something tried to cross the track. So he felt like it was safe to do this action. He was willing and ready to go to jail for doing this, but he did not wanna be killed. That has to be pointed out. He did not have a death wish.
But as it turned out on the day in question, he and his comrades sat down on the tracks. The train came. By the way, they informed the government they were gonna do this, so the train conductor knew that they were there and would be there. But the train, instead of slowing down as it normally would, it actually sped up. Wow. And everyone jumped off the tracks, except Brian who got stuck. He was unable to get off in time.
He tried to get off and he got hit by the train and he woke up about a week later. And when he woke up, one of the first things he said to the nurse was, wow, my feet hurt so much. Can you do something about it? And they said to him, Mr. Wilson, you don’t have any feet. Because I believe both his legs were cut off above the knee. He lost part of his shoulder and he lost part of his brain.
So he, he became a legend, particularly in Nicaragua, but also in the rest of Central America for this action. And as I mentioned in the book, Rosario Murillo, who is the wife of Danny Ortega, she’s also the vice president. She wasn’t vice president at that time. She was the wife of Daniel at the time. She flew with all their kids to California to the hospital to sit with him during his convalescence, which was an amazing thing. And he’s now a hero of Nicaragua. So that’s Brian Wilson. And he and I are very good friends and he lives in Nicaragua now. He’s lived there for some time and he is very dedicated to the revolution, and they’re very dedicated to him. He’s a national hero there.
[00:13:39] Grumbine: These are the kind of heroes you want to have more of. You definitely want to have people that are committed, not milquetoast, not lukewarm, but really understand that they may be the only thing standing between people and their life. And that was just very powerful. Sending arms down there, especially to the counterrevolutionary forces, which is a little jumping ahead because I want to start discussion here. Going back to the Somoza takeover of Nicaragua. They were in charge for a very long time, and it was handed down from generation to generation. Tell us a little bit about the Somoza takeover of Nicaragua.
[00:14:21] Kovalik: Yeah, so the story really begins in around 1910, the US Marines invaded to depose a president named Jose Zelaya, who was a social reformer, a small d democrat. He was a good guy, but he was not that friendly to US businesses, including some folks actually from Pittsburgh where I’m located, who wanted to open up a gold mine there, and he denied a license to them.
And they happened to be friends with the Secretary of State Knox, also from Pittsburgh. And they went to him and said, hey this Zelaya guy, he is not playing ball with us. And so they sent in the Marines to depose him, which they did successfully. And this began a Marine occupation of Nicaragua, which lasted until 1933. Now, ultimately the Marines were kicked out by the guerillas led by Augusto Sandino, who organized this band of mostly peasant guerillas to attack the Marines and to drive them outta Nicaragua, which they did successfully, which was an incredible victory for these very poorly armed, again, mostly peasant people.
The Marines were driven out, but before leaving Nicaragua, they had organized and left in place the National Guard. These repressive security forces led at that time by the first Somoza, Anastasio Somoza. And when the Marines left, Augusta Sandino who had led the resistance to the Marines, was invited to Managua by the president to sign a peace agreement. Because, well, the view even Sandino had was, well, I did what I really wanted to do, and that is get rid of the Marines so now we can have a democracy, which I also wanted.
So he was willing to sign this peace agreement, which he did, but then on his way out, he was murdered and so was at least one of his other generals, and his body was disappeared. His remains have never been found. So the revolution in that sense was put down by chicanery. And Somoza, who was leading the National Guard soon, declared himself the president, really dictator of Nicaragua in 1934. And with the US backing, he and his two sons ruled Nicaragua with an iron hand until 1979 when they were overthrown by the Sandinistas.
[00:16:58] Grumbine: This country has been so propagandized. It has no concept of revolution, counterrevolution, even though we struggle in this nation, we see tent cities, poverty, and all kinds of horrific conditions throughout the US for the working class. But we just think that those are just the people at the bottom because they’re not good people and they deserve to be there, and so we just walk right past them.
But this revolution in particular, I remember the name Daniel Ortega as a child, I can hearken back to hearing that name. And it wasn’t said with the kind of reverence it probably should have been. It was said with almost derision and hate. Like this guy was a bad guy. It doesn’t make sense to me how little knowledge we have of the struggle of the peoples outside of the domestic US. As you saw the Sandinistas develop their populist movement and then begin a revolution, what was it that finally put the Sandinistas in a position to take action, and what was the catalyst for it?
[00:18:11] Kovalik: Well, so first of all, the Sandinistas were founded in 1961 to overthrow the dictatorship. And as the name suggest, Sandinista refers to Sandino, Augusto Sandino, the guerilla leader who got rid of the Marines and then was killed. So they were named in honor of him, Sandinistas, and they began to organize. They had the two front war, if you want to call it that, against Somoza. So one was a military one. Mostly in the mountains and rural areas.
And then they had a more political one, organizing people throughout the country, including in the urban sectors, organizing workers and unions and whatnot. Also to resist Somoza, but it was pretty slow going to about 1972. There was probably up to that point, a couple to a few hundred guerillas at that point. But what really pushed the population at large over to their side and against Somoza was the earthquake of 1972, which pretty much leveled Managua.
In fact, if you go to Managua today, you’ll only see a couple tall buildings, and they’re buildings that were left over from before the earthquake. They don’t build tall buildings anymore because they actually expect another earthquake. And the reason that the population turned against Somoza was not because of the earthquake itself, but because it turned out that the billions of dollars of aid that was being sent from around the world for recovery efforts for the earthquake were just stolen and looted by Somoza.
He just pocketed everything. And so the city was not rebuilt. He didn’t do any recovery. He just stole everything. And in fact, as I mentioned in the book, there’s this Pittsburgh connection because. Roberto Clemente, that we call him the great one here in Pittsburgh, it was a great baseball player, played for the Pirates for I think nine years, had 3000 hits, which is kind of a big number. And he was sending aid himself and organizing drives for Nicaragua.
And he read in the newspapers that Somoza was stealing all the aid. So he said, well, geez, I’m organizing all this aid, and I’m sending aid down, but it’s probably not getting to the people. So he ended up deciding to fly himself from Puerto Rico. He was Puerto Rican. To bring aid to Nicaragua, but his airplane blew up on the runway, so he became a martyr too for Nicaragua and the Sandinistas, and he still is a big figure there in Nicaragua.
But the point is that it became well known that Somoza was stealing all the aid, and this really showed how corrupt Somoza was. He did nothing to develop the country, he just used it as his private piggy bank. And anyone who said Boo was killed or put in jail by the National Guard, which continued to be the repressive apparatus of the state that again, the Marines had created and organized back in the 1930s.
So between 72 and 79, the organizing against the dictatorship begins to really pick up the Sandinistas begin several major actions against the dictatorship. But the major insurrection finally begins in 1978 where they decide that they have the forces and they have the support to try to overthrow Somoza by force. And during this time, between 78 and the Triumph of the Revolution on July 19th, 1979, Somoza with the help of the US, which is almost the sole supporter of him, militarily and otherwise, kills 50,000 Nicaraguans, trying to put down the insurrection.
And that’s a huge number because there are only about 2.5 million Nicaraguans at that time, mostly by aerial bombings. So because there was such massive support for the Sandinistas throughout the country, he just began to bomb his own cities indiscriminately. To try to put down the unrest. And again, he killed 50,000 people in that process. But also while that had some effect of setting back the revolution, in fact, of course it inspired more resistance.
People began to become even angrier when they see their own government bombing their cities. And so finally the tide became so great that the dictatorship collapsed. And on July 19th, 1979, the Sandinistas marched into Managua and they took over the government, which was an incredible feat. And if you go to YouTube, you look up “Sandinista Triumph”, you’ll see incredible videos of just regular people in the plaza, the big government plaza there, which is now the plaza of the revolution.
And they’re literally hanging from the balcony of the church. Which by the way, is still rubble, which they’ve left is kind of a memorial to that period. But the church had been destroyed largely by the earthquake and the Sandinista government has done some things to make it cosmetically nicer, but it’s never been fully rebuilt. And you can see people literally just hanging outside the windows of it and in the plaza just cheering, hugging each other, crying.
That they had managed to do the impossible, and no one expected this to happen, in the world that they were very poorly armed. They fought with bricks, with rocks, with handmade weapons. They got little help from Fidel Castro, but not much, and not from anyone else. The communist movement didn’t think that they were gonna win, so they didn’t get much support from them. So they overthrew this heavily armed dictatorship that was backed by the United States, and this was really a David and Goliath story.
[00:24:16] Grumbine: Indeed.
[00:24:18] Kovalik: And in the 80s they had a lot of popular support, and I mentioned this in the book, The Clash, their last album was called “Sandinista”. There was a movie with Nick Nolte, which was pretty pro Sandinista. They became kind of this mythical force. And a lot of people visited Nicaragua in the 80s and there was just a lot of excitement around the revolution. People get excited about revolutions and they should, especially when it’s poor people overthrowing this corrupt dictatorship, which it was. That was the revolution.
[00:24:53] Grumbine: You bring up some really important points in the book and one of the things, you kind of touched on it earlier by saying they were peasants, but the pure poverty of the region, it was ridiculous. Kids without shoes and the clothing was worn down to where it was basically see-through, and food was non-existent. You, you even told a tale of why you were sitting there having lunch and kids are standing there at the window begging, and how tremendous getting through a revolution is while dealing with the counterrevolution.
That creates the poverty 10 times fold because now you’re not only dealing with the wreckage from the revolution, now you’re dealing with even more bloodshed and more poverty as the counter revolution decides to try and take back whatever gains the revolution was able to produce. Talk a little bit about the poverty of that time.
[00:25:48] Kovalik: It was amazing because again, Somoza did nothing for the country. He didn’t bother to pave roads. He didn’t bother to bring electricity to people or water or sewage. Again, it was his fiefdom. He used the country as his piggy bank. When he was overthrown, he fled Nicaragua and he took the entire treasury with him. And so the country was very poor and the people were very poor and neglected and had no infrastructure to speak of.
And this is what the Sandinistas inherited. When they took over and again with no treasury because it had been robbed, but they immediately tried to engage in poverty alleviation, land reform, giving land to poor peasants, had a major literacy campaign. By the way, this week is the anniversary of the literacy campaign in which a hundred thousand Nicaraguans volunteered to go to the countryside and teach people to read and write.
They instituted free education, free healthcare, and they really began to try to improve this country really from the ground up and from scratch. A country that had been neglected for so long, but the revolution was never given any oxygen. Jimmy Carter, as he’s leaving office, actually flies these National Guard leaders out of Nicaragua to Honduras. By the way, in planes marked with Red Cross Insignia, which is a war crime because they weren’t Red Cross planes.
And very quickly the CIA and the Argentine junta, which at that time was fascists, if you know about that period in Argentina, began to train these National Guardsmen into what became the Contras, which was this terrorist organization which would terrorize Nicaragua for the next 10 years. Which would destroy the economy, which would undermine a lot of the gains of the revolution. And in addition, kill another 30,000 Nicaraguans on top of the 50,000 that Somoza killed in the last year of the insurrection.
And that Contra War began in earnest in the spring of 1981, so less than two years after the triumph. Less than two years, now the Sandinistas have to fight a major conflict against US backed terrorist forces. And so the revolution really had very little chance to get off the ground. And again, when I went there in 1987, which was a rough year. So the first several years of the revolution were pretty exuberant, even with the Contras, because the gains continued to be made slowly, notwithstanding the Contras and people were excited about the revolution and there was a certain, as I understand it from people were there at the time, espirit decor and elation amongst the people.
But by 1987 people started to get worn down by the Contra war and the economy had been battered by not just the war, by US sanctions, a US embargo. The CIA was attacking, you know, blowing up oil installations and mining the Nicaraguan Harbor. So by 1987, the people were really feeling desperate. And again, economically the country was really suffering.
And I saw that, and that’s the stories I tell about the kids without shoes and literally in rags that I saw. And again, there was a fighting spirit, but they were starting to get worn down. And then the people were really suffering by that time. And so I came to Nicaragua, not at the best time for the revolution. It was a difficult time, but it was still very inspiring just to see these people, very poor people struggling against, again, the Colossus of the North, the United States that was supporting these Contra forces against them.
And this was what changed my life. I went there. I was becoming a leftist for sure. My parents, my dad in particular were real hawkish people, cold warriors, anti-communists. I grew up really believing that the US was the beacon on the hill and spread democracy and freedom. But after I went on that trip, I was there for a month in a war zone in Ocotal, in Northern Nicaragua, and after I saw these very poor people being battered by the United States, I was like, wow, this isn’t what I thought the US was about.
I thought we would defend these types of people, and by the way, vast majority of them were Roman Catholic. I was raised Roman Catholic. They’re killing these Catholic people. Why are they doing this? They present no threat to us. And so that changed my life. When I got back, I became an anti-imperialist and I never looked back. I never changed that worldview. I maintain that to this day.
And the next summer I drove to Nicaragua from the US with the Veterans Peace Convoy with a lot of these veterans of Brian Wilson’s type. Brian wasn’t actually on the convoy because he was still recuperating from his injuries, but he did meet us down in Texas. I got to meet him then, and that was an incredible experience as well. And again, I just never looked back at that point. And I’ve been a real staunch supporter of Nicaragua and Sandinistas since that time.
[00:31:48] Intermission: You are listening to Macro N Cheese, a podcast brought to you by Real Progressives, a nonprofit organization dedicated to teaching the masses about MMT or Modern Monetary Theory. Please help our efforts and become a monthly donor at PayPal or Patreon. Like and follow our pages on Facebook and YouTube and follow us on Periscope, Twitch, Rokfin, and Instagram.
[00:32:40] Grumbine: One of the things that I think people will remember when they hear Contra is Ronald Reagan and Ollie North in the Iran Contra affair, and this had huge implications throughout our history. I think a lot of people became disillusioned at that point alone. But you also mentioned something that I thought was worthy of describing, because what I often hear when people hear about revolution is they always complain about the bloodshed that the revolution brought on.
The revolutionaries are the bad guys as opposed to they’re the good guys, the ones that are fighting back against the oppressors. And I’m never quite sure why that is, because we celebrate our own bourgeois revolution here in the United States and we don’t seem to have a problem with that. And I don’t quite understand the national consciousness that allows that to be the case.
But you talk in the book about how every piece of food was crunchy because the roads were all dust. And one of the things that the Revolutionary Forces, it was they improved the country. They did build roads, hospitals, and schools. No, it was not everything everybody would want it to be, but I don’t think most understand, and I know I didn’t prior to reading your book, that the Revolutionary Forces were up against nonstop counter Revolutionary forces. Incursions into the people’s will, and basically their spirits were down. Talk a little bit about the impact of counter Revolutionary forces on revolutions, in particular, the impact of that in Nicaragua.
[00:34:25] Kovalik: Well, first of all, depending on the strength of the Counterrevolutionary forces, they can undermine and destroy the revolution. Some revolutions are overwhelmed by the counter Revolution and are defeated. That did not happen in Nicaragua, although there was essentially an electoral defeat in 1990 due to the Contra war. And the fact that the US said that the cultural war would continue and the economic war would continue if they didn’t vote against the Sandinistas is in 1990.
The people with a gun to their head did vote the Sandinistas out of power. But the Sandinistas weren’t militarily defeated, and they would come back in 2007, after the 2006 elections, they would be reelected back into power and reignite the revolution. And this is when they’re really able to build roads and build hospitals and whatnot. Because at this point, the Contra war had been in the past.
But counter revolutions in addition to undermining or destroying the revolution, certainly it can also have the impact of distorting the revolution. That is because many times the revolutionaries have to do things they didn’t wanna do to survive. And sometimes that means engaging in certain acts of repression to destroy the counterrevolution. And we see this particularly with the French Revolution, with the guillotines. They had the terror, Russia had the red terror, China had the cultural revolution.
So many times revolutions can take on characteristics that are bad and negative. But the point about Nicaragua is they never did that. That’s the incredible thing about Nicaragua, is they didn’t allow themselves to be changed in that way, though they’ve been accused of that. Immediately, the Sandinistas suspended the death penalty, they released a bunch of Somozista National Guardsmen.
That’s how they were, National Guardsmen, who were able to be taken to Honduras and organized into Contras. They were actually very benevolent towards their enemies. And even in 2006 when Danny Ortega runs for office and is reelected, his Vice presidential running mate is a former Contra leader. So the Sandinistas have gone out of their way to work with these people to try to have peace and reconciliation.
In fact, their government, their self-described name of the Sandinista government right now is called the Government of Peace and Reconciliation. And so while a counter revolution can really change the nature of the revolution, and it reminds me of this quote, be careful who you choose as an enemy because you may become like them. The Sandinistas never did become like them, and that is a tribute to them. And that’s what I try to talk about in my book.
And I think those who claim that they are like Somoza or whatever, they’re just crazy. It’s not true. And that’s, I guess why I wrote the book is to say it’s not true and show it’s not true, and to show what they’ve been up against and that yes, they could have gone down a dark path in order to succeed. But again, in 1990, They held an election they lost, even though it was a completely unfair election, because the US again was holding a gun to the Nicaraguan people’s heads in the form of the Contras, but still the Sandinistas in response to losing the election, they stepped down and they were not reelected for another 17 years.
As I mentioned in the book, there is no revolution in the world that fits this pattern. Where a revolution came to power through armed struggle, lost an election. By the way, it should be pointed out, the Sandinistas did win the 1984 elections. That’s important to say. Those were the first free and fair elections held in Nicaragua, but they lost in 1990. No other revolution has come to power through arms, lost an election, stepped down voluntarily after that election, and then regained power through the ballot box. Which is what the Sandinistas did.
You cannot point to any other historical event like this. This is an amazing feat that they pulled off because they wanted to be democratic, small d democratic. They came to power through arms, but the goal was to make Nicaragua democracy, and they have never backed off.
[00:39:15] Grumbine: You brought up a really powerful point about Ortega, and I wanna make sure that this is brought out. He was, I guess, imprisoned.
[00:39:24] Kovalik: He was for seven years.
[00:39:28] Grumbine: By being imprisoned, he was around those kind of revolutionary contras and others, and in that time he realized that there was a very weird gray line that was impossible to pinpoint. Good guy, bad guy. And that kind of informed his decision to be the reconciliation. I feel like that’s a really important point that his personal experience led him to be the great uniter later. I think that was powerful.
[00:39:58] Kovalik: Yeah. And by the way, he was tortured for seven years, made to eat his own feces and glass, and he was kept in a coffin. And the extraordinary things that happened to him were incredible. Seven years of this he endured under Somoza, and as you said, he did encounter people there, including his own jailers. He realized that they weren’t well educated, that they had their own prejudices, though these prejudices could be overcome through discussion, and he learned not to try to have this manichean view of the world, which is that there’s a good side and there’s a bad side, that it was more complicated than that, that your peasant revolutionary could just as well have become a National Guardsman depending on circumstances.
So, and I’ll give you an example of this. I actually dedicate my book to my good friend Abby, to her brother who was killed. He was a Sandinista revolutionary. He was killed very shortly before the revolution succeeded. His name was Socrates Espinoza-Nunos. He was killed June 28th, 1979, right before the triumph. Well, her family’s very interesting because all of her family were Sandinista, including her mom, except for her dad. Her dad was a National Guardsman and he didn’t even know that the rest of the family was Sandinista till the triumph happened.
[00:41:28] Grumbine: Wow.
[00:41:30] Kovalik: And in fact, he was in jail. They discovered he was in jail under the Sandinistas after the Triumph, and they actually got him out. And he realized, oh my God, you guys were on the other side the whole time. So again, how he became a Somozista, but the rest of the family, including his own wife, became Sandanista and she was even hiding Sandanista soldiers in the house while he was out in other towns repressing people as a National Guardsman, and he didn’t even know it. That’s an incredible story.
And near the end of his life, he told his daughter, my friend Abby, said something like, he urged her to continue to stick to her values, her Sandanista values. And he said that he was always a Somozista. He said, he’ll die as Somozista. He said, that’s the life he chose, but he urged her to continue believing in the Sandinistas and he thought that was a legitimate choice for her.
And that was a very interesting thing. And again, life is complicated and you found this with the US Civil War. It’s very famous brother fighting brother and that sort of thing. And that’s why in a civil war, in a civil conflict, the good guys who the Sandanistas were, they didn’t want total victory. They didn’t wanna just eradicate their enemies because that would mean eradicating other Nicaraguans.
They did wanna win them over to their side. And they have tried very hard to do that and they continue to try to do that. And that is very inspirational, but also makes me very sad when people claim that they’re, oh, these repressive people or whatever. Cause the facts really don’t bear that out.
[00:43:20] Grumbine: Right. So the nineties were dark days, as you call it, and the Sandinistas did not come back until 2007. Define the dark days. That was a long stretch of time. What happened during that period?
[00:43:37] Kovalik: Well, it was a very difficult period because the neoliberal governments that were empowered during that time tried to roll back all the gains of the revolution. They got rid of free education, free, healthcare. They started giving land back that was given to the peasants. They began to give it back to the wealthy landowners. In fact, the US government pressured them to do that, and inequality grew during this time poverty grew during this time, illiteracy, which had been largely wiped out, now began to grow.
So they went back to really the Somoza years economically. Now, the good news was they didn’t go back to the Somoza years in terms of repression. Because the police and the army were still loyal to the Sandanistas because the Sandanistas won militarily against Somoza. This allowed them to create a new police force, a new army of the people. So the one good news is while economically and socially, the country went backwards. There wasn’t the mass repression that happened under Somoza because the security apparatus was very much in the hands of the Sandinistas and therefore in the hands of the people.
[00:44:54] Grumbine: Let’s jump ahead. Ortega was able to get elected. I find that fascinating to be, dare I say, like Lula here even. What was it that brought him into power? How was he able to generate the kind of popular support? What was it about his message that allowed him to take power back in 2007?
[00:45:15] Kovalik: Well, first of all, Daniel, between 1990 and 2006, began a very quiet campaign, where he was going around the country, meeting with people privately. He’d meet with poor peasants in their home, eat the food they ate these modest meals, stay up late with them talking and drinking. And first of all, he continued to be connected with the people and that was important.
But his message was that they wanted to continue the revolutionary process. They wanted to bring the education and healthcare back to the people, bring literacy. Give land back that had been taken by the neoliberal governments, give it back to the peasants, expand the land reform, and that they did wanna have a reconciliation. They wanted to do all those things without provoking another Contra war, because people did fear that.
And that was a rational fear. And yeah, after 16 years of neoliberal rule, the people finally said, yeah, we don’t want this anymore. We do think the culture war is enough in the past that it’s not gonna come back, that we’re gonna risk it. And they voted the Sandinisitas back in power. So that was an incredible feat as well. And again, he ran with a Contra as his vice president. Again, there’s no precedent for this in history. It’s a really an amazing thing that they accomplished.
[00:46:36] Grumbine: Truly, I want to ask you a more general US imperialism question. Seems like the playbook of the US is standard. Insert puppet government or a person destabilize region with CIA, propagandize the American people to believe these are evil terrorists, and then ultimately overthrow it and bring the IMF to impose structural adjustments and debt peonage how did they avoid some of the IMF implications? How did they avoid being part of that world? That seems to eat up everybody else.
[00:47:16] Kovalik: Well, I think because they were very intentional about what they did. It’s a very well organized society. Again, there is much popular support for the Sandinistas. They use that as a mandate to reject the neoliberal policies that many other governments were forced to accept. Now that doesn’t mean they didn’t accept some, they’ve had to accept some, just because you’re not an island, you live in this capitalist world.
Unless you’re like the Soviet Union, which was so big and had all of these resources, it’s very hard to fully resist being in the system, but they’ve been very intentional about living in that system, but also, again, using their resources for healthcare, for education, for building houses, for infrastructure. They’ve been very intentional about that, and it has not been easy. And again, the US continues to try to overthrow that government. They continue to impose sanctions on that country. The Sandinistas have not allowed that to derail the social programs that they’re trying to maintain. So that’s just an amazing thing.
[00:48:24] Grumbine: The final piece that we want to touch on here is the April, 2018 crisis. This is much more current pre pandemic. Can you talk to us about that?
[00:48:34] Kovalik: So in 2018, the US supported another Contra type violent insurrection against the Sandinista government. Beginning in April of 2018. Clearly the groundwork for this had been laid for some time. In fact, there’s a magazine article by a magazine funded by the US National Endowment for Democracy, which talks about this, that the US had laid the groundwork for this insurrection by giving millions of dollars to various opposition groups who planned this coup attempt in April of 2018.
And part and parcel of that coup attempt was these gangs basically that set up these roadblocks known as tranques throughout major cities, there are thousands of these set up, which undermine commerce, undermine the economy, and also the folks who manned those tranques carried out assassination of Sandinista cadre, a police officer. Carried out billions of dollars of destruction of property, all an attempt not to just overturn the government, but to eradicate Sandinistas at its root, they destroyed Sandinista monuments and memorials.
It was an attempt really to eradicate the revolution again, as the cultures had tried to do, but this really took the government by surprise. They didn’t see this coming and. Again, by the end, a couple hundred people were killed. Billions of dollars of destruction took place. But the very interesting thing that happened in it, which most people don’t know about, because again, they try to blame the Sandinistas and the police for the violence.
What happened early on in May of 2018? The Catholic Church in Nicaragua demanded that Ortega take the police off the streets, which he did. He confined them to their barracks for 50 days, five oh days. And during this time, the violence didn’t decrease. It only increased, which showed who was doing the violence, not the police who many of whom, by the way, were attacked in their barracks. But it was these violent insurrectionists.
And by the end of the 50 days, the people were like, okay, we’re tired of this. Get rid of these tranques. And by that time, the tranques were removed. And the people were very elated that that period had ended because they were really laid siege to by these insurrectionists from April till mid-January of that year and I was there for the celebration on July 19th of the revolution, the 1979 revolution. But also this was a celebration that they had now overturned another counter revolutionary attempt. And that is the true story of what happened in 2018. And that is not a story that is told very often.
[00:51:41] Grumbine: Indeed. I think what is really important is that people not judge the struggle of others who are under oppression based on US news media. We are dealing with some really horrific and very powerful people in the United States today. And we are watching as empire crawls back, as it loses its grip on aspects around the world and other multipolar groups joining forces with one another in trying to lead lives that are not oppressed by US sanctions, which is a form of austerity, which is absolute murder.
And I guess my final question to you is how would you advise people to think of revolutionaries in general? People that have been propagandized by the Red Scare and don’t have an understanding of all the different actors throughout history, each of these characters has had violence against them, and I feel like people just don’t have a real good framework or analyzing global affairs. What would your final thoughts on that?
[00:52:55] Kovalik: First of all, the revolutions are a process. A lot of people think that with the Nicaragua Revolution, they’ll say, well, the revolution happened on July 19th, 1979. No, the revolution continues. The triumph against Somoza happened then. But then there’s many different phases of the revolution, and the revolution has gains and it has losses and it moves forward and sometimes has to move back.
Again, because of counterrevolutionary activity, and you have to look at it as a process and you have to judge it not by any snapshot in time, but by the trajectory of the revolution. Is it moving generally in a positive direction. Again, even if it has some backward movement. Lennon talked about one step forward, two steps back, but is it generally moving in a positive direction?
And I would say in the case of Nicaragua, it. That over time, when you look at where Nicaragua is now compared to where it was in 1979, it’s night and day. You wouldn’t recognize it. It has paved roads since 2017. The government’s built 26 state-of-the-art hospitals that are free to the people. Illiteracy is nearly wiped out. They have almost a hundred percent food sovereignty, which means almost all the food they eat, they grow themselves.
The trajectory of the revolution has always been positive, and that’s how you need to judge it, and they have not betrayed their basic values. That’s really how you judge it, and I think by those markers, the Nicaraguan revolution has to be judged very kindly and positively.
[00:54:43] Grumbine: I a hundred percent agree with that. Please pick up Dan’s book. It’s Nicaragua, A History of US Intervention and Resistance. From Clarity Press Incorporated, you can get. Pretty much any bookstore you like. Dan, how do we find more of your work.
[00:54:59] Kovalik: Well, I’m on Twitter at Daniel M Kovalik. You can find my books at Amazon and at your local bookstore. If they don’t have ’em, you can ask them to order it for you or you can go to my publisher, Skyhorse Publishing or Clarity Press. I think those are pretty good places to find me. Also, on Spotify, if you put my name in, you’ll see a lot of podcasts I’ve been on and yeah, those are good places to find me. I think.
[00:55:25] Grumbine: Absolutly. Dan, it was a pleasure. I hope I can have you back on. You’re one of my favorite people. I really appreciate your work.
[00:55:34] Kovalik: Well, you made my day for an author to hear someone say that. Really? That’s a pleasure. I’m thrilled to come back.
[00:55:40] Grumbine: Absolutely. This is Steve Grumbine. I’m the host of Macro N Cheese. We are a nonprofit. We survive by your donations and only your donations, so please consider donating to Real Progressives for a 501 c3. Please. We need your help. And with that, Dan, thank you so much, sir, and we are out of here.
[00:56:07] End Credits: Macro N Cheese is produced by Andy Kennedy. Descriptive writing by Virginia Cotts and promotional artwork by Andy Kennedy. Macro N Cheese is publicly funded by our Real Progressives Patreon account. If you would like to donate to Macro N Cheese, please visit patreon.com/realprogressives.
GUEST BIO
Daniel Kovalik is an American lawyer and Human Rights advocate who currently teaches International Human Rights at the University of Pittsburgh School of Law. He graduated from Columbia University School of Law in 1993 and then served as in-house counsel for the United Steelworkers, AFL-CIO (USW) until 2019. While with the USW, Dan worked on Alien Tort Claims Act cases against the Coca-Cola Company, Drummond and Occidental Petroleum cases all of which arose out of egregious human rights abuses in Colombia. The Christian Science Monitor, referring to his work defending Colombian unionists under threat of assassination, described Mr. Kovalik as “one of the most prominent defenders of Colombian workers in the United States.” Mr. Kovalik received the David W. Mills Mentoring Fellowship from Stanford University School of Law and was the recipient of the Project Censored Award for his article exposing the unprecedented killing of trade unionists in Colombia and has written extensively on the issue of international human rights and U.S. foreign policy for the Huffington Post and Counterpunch, lecturing throughout the world on these subjects and has also authored several books.
https://danielmkovalik.weebly.com
PEOPLE
Anastasio Somoza
Anastasio Somoza, in full Anastasio Somoza García, was soldier-politician and was dictator of Nicaragua for 20 years. Preferring the use of patronage and bribery to violence, he established a family political dynasty in Nicaragua.
https://www.britannica.com/biography/Anastasio-Somoza
Augusto Sandino
Cesar Augusto Sandino first gained national recognition in 1926, when he took up arms in support of Vice President Juan Bautista Sacasa’s claim to the presidency. Upon the intervention of U.S. Marines in 1927, Sandino withdrew with several hundred men to the mountains of northern Nicaragua, and his success in eluding capture by the U.S. forces and the Nicaraguan National Guard attracted widespread sympathy for him throughout the hemisphere. Following the withdrawal of the Marines in January 1933 and the inauguration of Sacasa as president, Sandino was invited to meet with Anastasio Somoza, the head of the National Guard, for an apparent peace conference but was abducted and murdered instead by National Guardsmen.
https://www.britannica.com/biography/Cesar-Augusto-Sandino
Brian Wilson
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brian_Willson
https://afgj.org/nicanotes-33rd-anniversary-of-my-survival-of-a-us-train-assault-in-california
Rosario Murillo
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosario_Murillo
Daniel Ortega
José Daniel Ortega Saavedra is the son of a veteran of the peasant army of Augusto Sandino, having moved with his family to Managua in the mid-1950s. He briefly attended the Central American University in Managua, then in 1963 he went underground and became a member of the Sandinista National Liberation Front (FSLN). By 1967 he was in charge of the FSLN’s urban resistance campaign against the ruling Somoza family.
In the fall of 1967 Ortega was arrested for his part in a bank robbery and spent the next seven years in jail. He and a number of other Sandinista prisoners were released at the end of 1974 in exchange for high level Somocista hostages. Ortega, with the other released prisoners, was exiled to Cuba, where he received several months of guerrilla training. After secretly returning to Nicaragua, Ortega played a major role in the conciliation of various FSLN factions and in the formation of alliances with business and political groups. This policy gradually turned the guerrilla campaign into a full-fledged civil war and led to the Sandinista victory in 1979.
https://www.britannica.com/biography/Daniel-Ortega
Jose Zelaya
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/José_Santos_Zelaya
Philander Knox
https://history.state.gov/departmenthistory/people/knox-philander-chase
Roberto Clemente
https://www.robertoclementefoundation.com/roberto-clemente-bio/
Ronald Reagan
https://www.reaganlibrary.gov/reagans/ronald-reagan
Oliver North
https://www.britannica.com/biography/Oliver-North
INSTITUTIONS
Veterans For Peace
https://www.veteransforpeace.org/who-we-are
National Reorganization Process (Argentine Junta)
The National Reorganization Process (Spanish: Proceso de Reorganización Nacional, often simply el Proceso, “the Process”) was the military dictatorship that ruled Argentina from 1976 to 1983, which received support from the United States until 1982. In Argentina it is often known simply as última junta militar (“last military junta”), última dictadura militar (“last military dictatorship”) or última dictadura cívico-militar (“last civil–military dictatorship”), because there have been several in the country’s history[2] and no others since it ended.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Reorganization_Process
Veterans Peace Convoy
Nicaraguan Counterrevolutionary Force (Contra)
“Contra” denotes membership in a counterrevolutionary force that sought to overthrow Nicaragua’s left-wing Sandinista government. The original contras had been National Guardsmen during the regime of Anastasio Somoza. The U.S. Central Intelligence Agency played a key role in training and funding the group, whose tactics were decried by the international human-rights community. In 1984 the U.S. Congress banned military aid to the contras; the efforts of the administration of U.S. president Ronald Reagan to circumvent the ban led to the Iran-Contra Affair. A general peace in the region was negotiated by Costa Rican president Oscar Arias Sánchez, and in 1990 Nicaraguan president Violeta Chamorro negotiated the contras’ demobilization.
https://www.britannica.com/topic/contra-Nicaraguan-counterrevolutionary
https://www.brown.edu/Research/Understanding_the_Iran_Contra_Affair/n-contras.php
National Endowment for Democracy
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Endowment_for_Democracy
EVENTS
Sandinista Revolution
In 1979, a revolution led by Sandinista guerrillas overthrew an entrenched dynastic regime in Nicaragua.
The Sandinistas promised land reform, universal literacy and health care, expanded rights for women and minority groups, and a government that would respond to basic needs in their impoverished country. They had been in power only a short time when the “contra” rebellion, encouraged and financed by the United States, emerged to challenge their power. During the 1980s Nicaragua became a Cold War battleground, with Washington, Havana, and Moscow jousting for power and influence. Tens of thousands of Nicaraguans died in this conflict.
https://vianica.com/go/specials/15-sandinista-revolution-in-nicaragua.html
https://watson.brown.edu/nicaragua
1972 Nicaragua Earthquake
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1972_Nicaragua_earthquake
Summer of Love
https://www.theguardian.com/travel/2007/may/27/escape
Iran-Contra Affair
The Iran-Contra Affair, 1980s U.S. political scandal in which the National Security Council (NSC) became involved in secret weapons transactions and other activities that either were prohibited by the U.S. Congress or violated the stated public policy of the government.
https://www.britannica.com/event/Iran-Contra-Affair
https://www.brown.edu/Research/Understanding_the_Iran_Contra_Affair/n-contras.php
Red Terror (Russia)
https://time.com/5386789/red-terror-soviet-history/
Cultural Revolution (China)
https://www.britannica.com/event/Cultural-Revolution
Red Scare
https://www.history.com/topics/cold-war/red-scare
Tranque
April 2018 Crisis
President Daniel Ortega announced changes in the country’s pension system on April 18, 2018, igniting demonstrations across the country that have evolved into a larger outpouring of anger against his, then, 11-year administration. The Nicaraguan government appeared to have engaged in serious abuses against protesters and arbitrarily shut down media outlets covering the protests.
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-latin-america-44398673
https://www.hrw.org/news/2018/04/27/nicaragua-protests-leave-deadly-toll
https://www.oas.org/en/iachr/jsForm/?File=/en/iachr/media_center/preleases/2022/081.asp
CONCEPTS
Bourgeois Revolution
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bourgeois_revolution
Manachean
https://www.vocabulary.com/dictionary/Manichean
Neoliberalism
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/neoliberalism/
https://www.investopedia.com/terms/n/neoliberalism.asp
PUBLICATIONS
Nicaragua: A History of US Intervention and Resistance by Daniel Kovalik
The Plot to Overthrow Venezuela:How the US is Orchestrating a Coup for Oil by Dan Kovalik
More of Dan’s writing can be found here:
https://bookshop.org/search?keywords=Dan+kovalik
Many of Dan’s podcast appearances can be found here:
https://open.spotify.com/search/dan%20kovalik/podcastAndEpisodes
Kill Anything That Moves: The Real American War in Vietnam by Nick Turse
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Show Notes
Transcript
Extras
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Author Dan Kovalik talks to Steve about his recent book, Nicaragua: A History of US Intervention and Resistance. His perspective includes his own experiences in Nicaragua and the personal connections he made there.
From the 1910 occupation and eventual ouster of US Marines, through the dictatorships of several members of the Samosa family, the conditions for revolution were ripe. Dan describes the 1979 revolution as a David and Goliath story. The Sandinistas inherited a country steeped in poverty, with no infrastructure. The US-backed counterrevolution began almost immediately. Ronald Reagan and the Contras are just a small piece of it.
Dan grew up believing the US was the beacon on the hill, committed to spreading democracy and freedom. His first trip to Nicaragua changed his politics and his life.
Dan Kovalik is a labor and human rights lawyer and peace activist. He teaches International Human Rights at the University of Pittsburgh School of Law. He is the author of several books, including The Plot to Scapegoat Russia and Nicaragua: A History of US Intervention and Resistance.
@danielmkovalik on Twitter
Macro N Cheese – Episode 219
Nicaragua with Dan Kovalik
April 8, 2023
[00:00:00] Dan Kovalik [intro/music]: The reason that the population turned against Somoza was not because of the earthquake itself, but because it turned out that the billions of dollars of aid that was being sent from around the world for recovery efforts for the earthquake were just stolen and looted by Somoza. He just pocketed everything, and so the city was not rebuilt.
Revolutions are a process. A lot of people think that with the Nicaraguan Revolution, they’ll say, well, the revolution happened on July 19th, 1979. No, the revolution continues.
[00:01:35] Geoff Ginter [intro/music]: Now, let’s see if we can avoid the apocalypse all together. Here’s another episode of Macro N Cheese with your host, Steve Grumbine.
[00:01:43] Steve Grumbine: All right. This is Steve with Macro N Cheese. We’re going down the trail of revolution once again, and we’re gonna talk about not only the counter-revolutionary forces, but we’re gonna talk in particular about my friend Dan Kovalik’s book Nicaragua. Dan Kovalik graduated from Columbia Law School in 1993 and currently teaches international human rights at the University of Pittsburgh School of Law.
He’s written extensively on the issue of international human rights and US foreign policy for the Huffington Post, Counterpunch, and RT News, and has lectured throughout the world on these subjects. He is the author of several books, including The Plot to Overthrow Venezuela: How The U.S. Is Orchestrating A Coup For Oil, and of course, the book that we’re about to talk about, which is Nicaragua: A History of US Intervention and Resistance. Dan, thank you so much for joining me, sir.
[00:02:41] Dan Kovalik: Well, thank you for having me. I appreciate it.
[00:02:43] Grumbine: This book is powerful. I bought it several weeks ago with the intention of talking to you today. This book was compelling. It was very hard to put down. I’m a 50 something dude. I was born in 69, the summer of love. So some of the things that you talk about in this book were very relevant in my early years as I was growing up and some of the references you made brought back some really rough nostalgia in the Reagan era. So I wanna thank you and scream at you all in the same breath though. It was a beautiful book.
[00:03:17] Kovalik: Well, thank you. I really appreciate that.
[00:03:19] Grumbine: Absolutely. For those of us who have not read the book and are maybe unfamiliar with your work, what was your purpose for writing this book? Where did it come from?
[00:03:30] Kovalik: Well, I’ve had a lifelong love of Nicaragua, really stemming from my visit there for the first time in 1987. I was 19 years old and it was very life transforming and I’ve been very dedicated to Nicaragua. And the Sandinista revolution since that time. And I really was finally inspired to write the book because of a lot of the misinformation and disinformation that’s being put out there, particularly since 2018, which we’ll talk about what happened then. But the propaganda against Nicaragua was very, very thick right now. And I felt, and some friends who encouraged me to write the book felt that it really was time to do a book on Nicaragua putting all the historical pieces together to show what they’re up against.
[00:04:19] Grumbine: The very beginning of this book caught me off guard the story of your schooling years and the kids that you went to school with in particular, and. There was two children that were at your school. There’s no way to have written this story better. Can you tell us about the opening story?
[00:04:39] Kovalik: Yeah, so I was in a little Catholic school called St. Andrews. There were probably 50 kids in total in the whole school. And in the fall of 1979, and I would’ve been 11 at that time. I was born in 1968, the summer of Revolution, June 21, first day of summer, 1968. So I was 11 at this time, fall of 1979, and these two boys started the school, Juan and Carlos Garcia. And it was interesting to have them, one, that they were immigrants from Nicaragua.
We all knew that. We all knew that they came because of, I think they portrayed at first the civil conflict over the summer. The other interesting thing, especially in retrospect, I didn’t understand the meaning of this so much at the time, but they were very big physically. Juan, in fact, became the center for our basketball team, which if you know anything about basketball, that’s the tallest position.
Kareem played that and Wilt the Stilt Chamberlain. They were very physically big. They spoke English. The point is, again, in retrospect, I would find these are not your typical Nicaraguans. And at some point I asked them, I said, well, what did bring you here to the United States? And they said that their father had been the president of Nicaragua. That he was overthrown in a revolution over the summer, meaning that their father was in fact, Anastasio Somoza.
[00:06:14] Grumbine: Wow. Wow, when you had that revelation. That’s wild.
[00:06:21] Kovalik: Yeah, well again, I was 11. Now I was a very political kid, mostly because my dad was very political, so, I had a little sense of what that meant, but not a lot. I couldn’t tell you at that moment who I thought the good guys were and the bad guys were. And I think at this point there wasn’t even a lot of news about it or propaganda because this is right after the revolution.
So, people were just learning. And, then, the revolution took people by surprise, by the way. No one knew what a Nicaragua was in this country at this point, but I was obviously curious. Oh, okay. So there was a revolution. I got that and overthrew your dad. So, I don’t know. Was your dad a good guy? Was he a bad guy? Anyway, I do think it was very important to me in the sense that at least made me curious about what was happening in Nicaragua and what was happening in Central America.
It put it on the map for me in a very significant way. And again, as I got older, it meant more to me. I was like, wow, did that really happen? Recently, there was a reunion of my class, which graduated in 82. We had our 40th anniversary last year.
[00:07:33] Grumbine: Oh, okay.
[00:07:35] Kovalik: And I talked to some old friends and I was like, remember those guys? They remembered the details of them that I did. So, yeah, that was a crazy coincidence in my life and probably did set me down a certain path.
[00:07:51] Grumbine: I have a feeling I’d write a book about Nicaragua too if I found out that that was the way it started. But your life really went beyond that though. You have been to Nicaragua a lot of times and for a long time, and you’ve been an instrumental part of things there. It’s not like you’re just a grifter. You were doing things, you were working with people, in particular, one of the guys you highlight in the book, I believe his name is Brian Wilson.
[00:08:17] Kovalik: Brian Wilson, not the Beach Boy, you have to say, right? The other Brian Wilson.
[00:08:23] Grumbine: The revolutionary, Brian Wilson.
[00:08:25] Kovalik: Right.
[00:08:26] Grumbine: The humanities Brian Wilson. I think that’s another neat story to highlight before we jump into the history of it all. They say, give your arms and legs. He literally gave his legs to the cause, so to speak.
[00:08:39] Kovalik: Yeah, so when I, literally, landed in Nicaragua for the first time at age 19, was September 1st, 1987, and this would’ve just happened to him. And I found out about it. When I landed, I was told, I didn’t know who he was, but I was quickly told who this guy was and what happened to him. So, he was, first of all, an interesting guy. He was a lawyer by trade. He fought in Vietnam. He volunteered for Vietnam.
He’s actually from around Jamestown, New York, which is in the northwest of the state of New York. It’s where Lucille Ball is from as well. He’s from kind of middle America, and he joined up to fight in Vietnam. Because of his education, he quickly moved up in the ranks and they gave him a job. He was an Air Force captain, actually. But the job they gave him in Vietnam was to survey the dead and casualties and damage done by US Air Force bombings and raids in Vietnam. And after five weeks of doing this in Vietnam, he saw a certain pattern and that was, he determined that pretty much everyone being killed was women and children.
[00:09:55] Grumbine: Hmm.
[00:09:56] Kovalik: We’re not killing any soldiers here. And he wondered as any rational human being would wonder, is this on purpose or is this just an accident? What’s going on here? So he actually on his own, flew to Saigon. And met with his commanding officer and he said, what’s going on here? This is what I’m finding. Is this what’s going on? And the guy confirmed, yeah, this is pretty much what’s going on.
These are our targets because we’re more or less in these areas, we’re targeting everything that moves. There’s even a book called Kill Everything That Moves by Nick Terse about this, that we were basically killing all life forms in these areas, man, women, child elderly. Which of course, Brian found to be reprehensible and he basically bided at his time at that point till his tour duty was over.
But he lost all interest and any faith in what he was doing. So he came back and he joined Veterans for Peace, which was an organization founded mostly by Vietnam veterans who turned against the war, and he became a peace activist. And then at some point, again, in 1987, he helped organize this demonstration. What it was is they were gonna sit on the railroad tracks in front of a train in California that they knew was bound for Central America with arm shipments.
And he went to this train track for weeks before he did the action, and he noticed that to his comfort the train only went about five miles an hour, and that it slowed down or stopped if someone or something tried to cross the track. So he felt like it was safe to do this action. He was willing and ready to go to jail for doing this, but he did not wanna be killed. That has to be pointed out. He did not have a death wish.
But as it turned out on the day in question, he and his comrades sat down on the tracks. The train came. By the way, they informed the government they were gonna do this, so the train conductor knew that they were there and would be there. But the train, instead of slowing down as it normally would, it actually sped up. Wow. And everyone jumped off the tracks, except Brian who got stuck. He was unable to get off in time.
He tried to get off and he got hit by the train and he woke up about a week later. And when he woke up, one of the first things he said to the nurse was, wow, my feet hurt so much. Can you do something about it? And they said to him, Mr. Wilson, you don’t have any feet. Because I believe both his legs were cut off above the knee. He lost part of his shoulder and he lost part of his brain.
So he, he became a legend, particularly in Nicaragua, but also in the rest of Central America for this action. And as I mentioned in the book, Rosario Murillo, who is the wife of Danny Ortega, she’s also the vice president. She wasn’t vice president at that time. She was the wife of Daniel at the time. She flew with all their kids to California to the hospital to sit with him during his convalescence, which was an amazing thing. And he’s now a hero of Nicaragua. So that’s Brian Wilson. And he and I are very good friends and he lives in Nicaragua now. He’s lived there for some time and he is very dedicated to the revolution, and they’re very dedicated to him. He’s a national hero there.
[00:13:39] Grumbine: These are the kind of heroes you want to have more of. You definitely want to have people that are committed, not milquetoast, not lukewarm, but really understand that they may be the only thing standing between people and their life. And that was just very powerful. Sending arms down there, especially to the counterrevolutionary forces, which is a little jumping ahead because I want to start discussion here. Going back to the Somoza takeover of Nicaragua. They were in charge for a very long time, and it was handed down from generation to generation. Tell us a little bit about the Somoza takeover of Nicaragua.
[00:14:21] Kovalik: Yeah, so the story really begins in around 1910, the US Marines invaded to depose a president named Jose Zelaya, who was a social reformer, a small d democrat. He was a good guy, but he was not that friendly to US businesses, including some folks actually from Pittsburgh where I’m located, who wanted to open up a gold mine there, and he denied a license to them.
And they happened to be friends with the Secretary of State Knox, also from Pittsburgh. And they went to him and said, hey this Zelaya guy, he is not playing ball with us. And so they sent in the Marines to depose him, which they did successfully. And this began a Marine occupation of Nicaragua, which lasted until 1933. Now, ultimately the Marines were kicked out by the guerillas led by Augusto Sandino, who organized this band of mostly peasant guerillas to attack the Marines and to drive them outta Nicaragua, which they did successfully, which was an incredible victory for these very poorly armed, again, mostly peasant people.
The Marines were driven out, but before leaving Nicaragua, they had organized and left in place the National Guard. These repressive security forces led at that time by the first Somoza, Anastasio Somoza. And when the Marines left, Augusta Sandino who had led the resistance to the Marines, was invited to Managua by the president to sign a peace agreement. Because, well, the view even Sandino had was, well, I did what I really wanted to do, and that is get rid of the Marines so now we can have a democracy, which I also wanted.
So he was willing to sign this peace agreement, which he did, but then on his way out, he was murdered and so was at least one of his other generals, and his body was disappeared. His remains have never been found. So the revolution in that sense was put down by chicanery. And Somoza, who was leading the National Guard soon, declared himself the president, really dictator of Nicaragua in 1934. And with the US backing, he and his two sons ruled Nicaragua with an iron hand until 1979 when they were overthrown by the Sandinistas.
[00:16:58] Grumbine: This country has been so propagandized. It has no concept of revolution, counterrevolution, even though we struggle in this nation, we see tent cities, poverty, and all kinds of horrific conditions throughout the US for the working class. But we just think that those are just the people at the bottom because they’re not good people and they deserve to be there, and so we just walk right past them.
But this revolution in particular, I remember the name Daniel Ortega as a child, I can hearken back to hearing that name. And it wasn’t said with the kind of reverence it probably should have been. It was said with almost derision and hate. Like this guy was a bad guy. It doesn’t make sense to me how little knowledge we have of the struggle of the peoples outside of the domestic US. As you saw the Sandinistas develop their populist movement and then begin a revolution, what was it that finally put the Sandinistas in a position to take action, and what was the catalyst for it?
[00:18:11] Kovalik: Well, so first of all, the Sandinistas were founded in 1961 to overthrow the dictatorship. And as the name suggest, Sandinista refers to Sandino, Augusto Sandino, the guerilla leader who got rid of the Marines and then was killed. So they were named in honor of him, Sandinistas, and they began to organize. They had the two front war, if you want to call it that, against Somoza. So one was a military one. Mostly in the mountains and rural areas.
And then they had a more political one, organizing people throughout the country, including in the urban sectors, organizing workers and unions and whatnot. Also to resist Somoza, but it was pretty slow going to about 1972. There was probably up to that point, a couple to a few hundred guerillas at that point. But what really pushed the population at large over to their side and against Somoza was the earthquake of 1972, which pretty much leveled Managua.
In fact, if you go to Managua today, you’ll only see a couple tall buildings, and they’re buildings that were left over from before the earthquake. They don’t build tall buildings anymore because they actually expect another earthquake. And the reason that the population turned against Somoza was not because of the earthquake itself, but because it turned out that the billions of dollars of aid that was being sent from around the world for recovery efforts for the earthquake were just stolen and looted by Somoza.
He just pocketed everything. And so the city was not rebuilt. He didn’t do any recovery. He just stole everything. And in fact, as I mentioned in the book, there’s this Pittsburgh connection because. Roberto Clemente, that we call him the great one here in Pittsburgh, it was a great baseball player, played for the Pirates for I think nine years, had 3000 hits, which is kind of a big number. And he was sending aid himself and organizing drives for Nicaragua.
And he read in the newspapers that Somoza was stealing all the aid. So he said, well, geez, I’m organizing all this aid, and I’m sending aid down, but it’s probably not getting to the people. So he ended up deciding to fly himself from Puerto Rico. He was Puerto Rican. To bring aid to Nicaragua, but his airplane blew up on the runway, so he became a martyr too for Nicaragua and the Sandinistas, and he still is a big figure there in Nicaragua.
But the point is that it became well known that Somoza was stealing all the aid, and this really showed how corrupt Somoza was. He did nothing to develop the country, he just used it as his private piggy bank. And anyone who said Boo was killed or put in jail by the National Guard, which continued to be the repressive apparatus of the state that again, the Marines had created and organized back in the 1930s.
So between 72 and 79, the organizing against the dictatorship begins to really pick up the Sandinistas begin several major actions against the dictatorship. But the major insurrection finally begins in 1978 where they decide that they have the forces and they have the support to try to overthrow Somoza by force. And during this time, between 78 and the Triumph of the Revolution on July 19th, 1979, Somoza with the help of the US, which is almost the sole supporter of him, militarily and otherwise, kills 50,000 Nicaraguans, trying to put down the insurrection.
And that’s a huge number because there are only about 2.5 million Nicaraguans at that time, mostly by aerial bombings. So because there was such massive support for the Sandinistas throughout the country, he just began to bomb his own cities indiscriminately. To try to put down the unrest. And again, he killed 50,000 people in that process. But also while that had some effect of setting back the revolution, in fact, of course it inspired more resistance.
People began to become even angrier when they see their own government bombing their cities. And so finally the tide became so great that the dictatorship collapsed. And on July 19th, 1979, the Sandinistas marched into Managua and they took over the government, which was an incredible feat. And if you go to YouTube, you look up “Sandinista Triumph”, you’ll see incredible videos of just regular people in the plaza, the big government plaza there, which is now the plaza of the revolution.
And they’re literally hanging from the balcony of the church. Which by the way, is still rubble, which they’ve left is kind of a memorial to that period. But the church had been destroyed largely by the earthquake and the Sandinista government has done some things to make it cosmetically nicer, but it’s never been fully rebuilt. And you can see people literally just hanging outside the windows of it and in the plaza just cheering, hugging each other, crying.
That they had managed to do the impossible, and no one expected this to happen, in the world that they were very poorly armed. They fought with bricks, with rocks, with handmade weapons. They got little help from Fidel Castro, but not much, and not from anyone else. The communist movement didn’t think that they were gonna win, so they didn’t get much support from them. So they overthrew this heavily armed dictatorship that was backed by the United States, and this was really a David and Goliath story.
[00:24:16] Grumbine: Indeed.
[00:24:18] Kovalik: And in the 80s they had a lot of popular support, and I mentioned this in the book, The Clash, their last album was called “Sandinista”. There was a movie with Nick Nolte, which was pretty pro Sandinista. They became kind of this mythical force. And a lot of people visited Nicaragua in the 80s and there was just a lot of excitement around the revolution. People get excited about revolutions and they should, especially when it’s poor people overthrowing this corrupt dictatorship, which it was. That was the revolution.
[00:24:53] Grumbine: You bring up some really important points in the book and one of the things, you kind of touched on it earlier by saying they were peasants, but the pure poverty of the region, it was ridiculous. Kids without shoes and the clothing was worn down to where it was basically see-through, and food was non-existent. You, you even told a tale of why you were sitting there having lunch and kids are standing there at the window begging, and how tremendous getting through a revolution is while dealing with the counterrevolution.
That creates the poverty 10 times fold because now you’re not only dealing with the wreckage from the revolution, now you’re dealing with even more bloodshed and more poverty as the counter revolution decides to try and take back whatever gains the revolution was able to produce. Talk a little bit about the poverty of that time.
[00:25:48] Kovalik: It was amazing because again, Somoza did nothing for the country. He didn’t bother to pave roads. He didn’t bother to bring electricity to people or water or sewage. Again, it was his fiefdom. He used the country as his piggy bank. When he was overthrown, he fled Nicaragua and he took the entire treasury with him. And so the country was very poor and the people were very poor and neglected and had no infrastructure to speak of.
And this is what the Sandinistas inherited. When they took over and again with no treasury because it had been robbed, but they immediately tried to engage in poverty alleviation, land reform, giving land to poor peasants, had a major literacy campaign. By the way, this week is the anniversary of the literacy campaign in which a hundred thousand Nicaraguans volunteered to go to the countryside and teach people to read and write.
They instituted free education, free healthcare, and they really began to try to improve this country really from the ground up and from scratch. A country that had been neglected for so long, but the revolution was never given any oxygen. Jimmy Carter, as he’s leaving office, actually flies these National Guard leaders out of Nicaragua to Honduras. By the way, in planes marked with Red Cross Insignia, which is a war crime because they weren’t Red Cross planes.
And very quickly the CIA and the Argentine junta, which at that time was fascists, if you know about that period in Argentina, began to train these National Guardsmen into what became the Contras, which was this terrorist organization which would terrorize Nicaragua for the next 10 years. Which would destroy the economy, which would undermine a lot of the gains of the revolution. And in addition, kill another 30,000 Nicaraguans on top of the 50,000 that Somoza killed in the last year of the insurrection.
And that Contra War began in earnest in the spring of 1981, so less than two years after the triumph. Less than two years, now the Sandinistas have to fight a major conflict against US backed terrorist forces. And so the revolution really had very little chance to get off the ground. And again, when I went there in 1987, which was a rough year. So the first several years of the revolution were pretty exuberant, even with the Contras, because the gains continued to be made slowly, notwithstanding the Contras and people were excited about the revolution and there was a certain, as I understand it from people were there at the time, espirit decor and elation amongst the people.
But by 1987 people started to get worn down by the Contra war and the economy had been battered by not just the war, by US sanctions, a US embargo. The CIA was attacking, you know, blowing up oil installations and mining the Nicaraguan Harbor. So by 1987, the people were really feeling desperate. And again, economically the country was really suffering.
And I saw that, and that’s the stories I tell about the kids without shoes and literally in rags that I saw. And again, there was a fighting spirit, but they were starting to get worn down. And then the people were really suffering by that time. And so I came to Nicaragua, not at the best time for the revolution. It was a difficult time, but it was still very inspiring just to see these people, very poor people struggling against, again, the Colossus of the North, the United States that was supporting these Contra forces against them.
And this was what changed my life. I went there. I was becoming a leftist for sure. My parents, my dad in particular were real hawkish people, cold warriors, anti-communists. I grew up really believing that the US was the beacon on the hill and spread democracy and freedom. But after I went on that trip, I was there for a month in a war zone in Ocotal, in Northern Nicaragua, and after I saw these very poor people being battered by the United States, I was like, wow, this isn’t what I thought the US was about.
I thought we would defend these types of people, and by the way, vast majority of them were Roman Catholic. I was raised Roman Catholic. They’re killing these Catholic people. Why are they doing this? They present no threat to us. And so that changed my life. When I got back, I became an anti-imperialist and I never looked back. I never changed that worldview. I maintain that to this day.
And the next summer I drove to Nicaragua from the US with the Veterans Peace Convoy with a lot of these veterans of Brian Wilson’s type. Brian wasn’t actually on the convoy because he was still recuperating from his injuries, but he did meet us down in Texas. I got to meet him then, and that was an incredible experience as well. And again, I just never looked back at that point. And I’ve been a real staunch supporter of Nicaragua and Sandinistas since that time.
[00:31:48] Intermission: You are listening to Macro N Cheese, a podcast brought to you by Real Progressives, a nonprofit organization dedicated to teaching the masses about MMT or Modern Monetary Theory. Please help our efforts and become a monthly donor at PayPal or Patreon. Like and follow our pages on Facebook and YouTube and follow us on Periscope, Twitch, Rokfin, and Instagram.
[00:32:40] Grumbine: One of the things that I think people will remember when they hear Contra is Ronald Reagan and Ollie North in the Iran Contra affair, and this had huge implications throughout our history. I think a lot of people became disillusioned at that point alone. But you also mentioned something that I thought was worthy of describing, because what I often hear when people hear about revolution is they always complain about the bloodshed that the revolution brought on.
The revolutionaries are the bad guys as opposed to they’re the good guys, the ones that are fighting back against the oppressors. And I’m never quite sure why that is, because we celebrate our own bourgeois revolution here in the United States and we don’t seem to have a problem with that. And I don’t quite understand the national consciousness that allows that to be the case.
But you talk in the book about how every piece of food was crunchy because the roads were all dust. And one of the things that the Revolutionary Forces, it was they improved the country. They did build roads, hospitals, and schools. No, it was not everything everybody would want it to be, but I don’t think most understand, and I know I didn’t prior to reading your book, that the Revolutionary Forces were up against nonstop counter Revolutionary forces. Incursions into the people’s will, and basically their spirits were down. Talk a little bit about the impact of counter Revolutionary forces on revolutions, in particular, the impact of that in Nicaragua.
[00:34:25] Kovalik: Well, first of all, depending on the strength of the Counterrevolutionary forces, they can undermine and destroy the revolution. Some revolutions are overwhelmed by the counter Revolution and are defeated. That did not happen in Nicaragua, although there was essentially an electoral defeat in 1990 due to the Contra war. And the fact that the US said that the cultural war would continue and the economic war would continue if they didn’t vote against the Sandinistas is in 1990.
The people with a gun to their head did vote the Sandinistas out of power. But the Sandinistas weren’t militarily defeated, and they would come back in 2007, after the 2006 elections, they would be reelected back into power and reignite the revolution. And this is when they’re really able to build roads and build hospitals and whatnot. Because at this point, the Contra war had been in the past.
But counter revolutions in addition to undermining or destroying the revolution, certainly it can also have the impact of distorting the revolution. That is because many times the revolutionaries have to do things they didn’t wanna do to survive. And sometimes that means engaging in certain acts of repression to destroy the counterrevolution. And we see this particularly with the French Revolution, with the guillotines. They had the terror, Russia had the red terror, China had the cultural revolution.
So many times revolutions can take on characteristics that are bad and negative. But the point about Nicaragua is they never did that. That’s the incredible thing about Nicaragua, is they didn’t allow themselves to be changed in that way, though they’ve been accused of that. Immediately, the Sandinistas suspended the death penalty, they released a bunch of Somozista National Guardsmen.
That’s how they were, National Guardsmen, who were able to be taken to Honduras and organized into Contras. They were actually very benevolent towards their enemies. And even in 2006 when Danny Ortega runs for office and is reelected, his Vice presidential running mate is a former Contra leader. So the Sandinistas have gone out of their way to work with these people to try to have peace and reconciliation.
In fact, their government, their self-described name of the Sandinista government right now is called the Government of Peace and Reconciliation. And so while a counter revolution can really change the nature of the revolution, and it reminds me of this quote, be careful who you choose as an enemy because you may become like them. The Sandinistas never did become like them, and that is a tribute to them. And that’s what I try to talk about in my book.
And I think those who claim that they are like Somoza or whatever, they’re just crazy. It’s not true. And that’s, I guess why I wrote the book is to say it’s not true and show it’s not true, and to show what they’ve been up against and that yes, they could have gone down a dark path in order to succeed. But again, in 1990, They held an election they lost, even though it was a completely unfair election, because the US again was holding a gun to the Nicaraguan people’s heads in the form of the Contras, but still the Sandinistas in response to losing the election, they stepped down and they were not reelected for another 17 years.
As I mentioned in the book, there is no revolution in the world that fits this pattern. Where a revolution came to power through armed struggle, lost an election. By the way, it should be pointed out, the Sandinistas did win the 1984 elections. That’s important to say. Those were the first free and fair elections held in Nicaragua, but they lost in 1990. No other revolution has come to power through arms, lost an election, stepped down voluntarily after that election, and then regained power through the ballot box. Which is what the Sandinistas did.
You cannot point to any other historical event like this. This is an amazing feat that they pulled off because they wanted to be democratic, small d democratic. They came to power through arms, but the goal was to make Nicaragua democracy, and they have never backed off.
[00:39:15] Grumbine: You brought up a really powerful point about Ortega, and I wanna make sure that this is brought out. He was, I guess, imprisoned.
[00:39:24] Kovalik: He was for seven years.
[00:39:28] Grumbine: By being imprisoned, he was around those kind of revolutionary contras and others, and in that time he realized that there was a very weird gray line that was impossible to pinpoint. Good guy, bad guy. And that kind of informed his decision to be the reconciliation. I feel like that’s a really important point that his personal experience led him to be the great uniter later. I think that was powerful.
[00:39:58] Kovalik: Yeah. And by the way, he was tortured for seven years, made to eat his own feces and glass, and he was kept in a coffin. And the extraordinary things that happened to him were incredible. Seven years of this he endured under Somoza, and as you said, he did encounter people there, including his own jailers. He realized that they weren’t well educated, that they had their own prejudices, though these prejudices could be overcome through discussion, and he learned not to try to have this manichean view of the world, which is that there’s a good side and there’s a bad side, that it was more complicated than that, that your peasant revolutionary could just as well have become a National Guardsman depending on circumstances.
So, and I’ll give you an example of this. I actually dedicate my book to my good friend Abby, to her brother who was killed. He was a Sandinista revolutionary. He was killed very shortly before the revolution succeeded. His name was Socrates Espinoza-Nunos. He was killed June 28th, 1979, right before the triumph. Well, her family’s very interesting because all of her family were Sandinista, including her mom, except for her dad. Her dad was a National Guardsman and he didn’t even know that the rest of the family was Sandinista till the triumph happened.
[00:41:28] Grumbine: Wow.
[00:41:30] Kovalik: And in fact, he was in jail. They discovered he was in jail under the Sandinistas after the Triumph, and they actually got him out. And he realized, oh my God, you guys were on the other side the whole time. So again, how he became a Somozista, but the rest of the family, including his own wife, became Sandanista and she was even hiding Sandanista soldiers in the house while he was out in other towns repressing people as a National Guardsman, and he didn’t even know it. That’s an incredible story.
And near the end of his life, he told his daughter, my friend Abby, said something like, he urged her to continue to stick to her values, her Sandanista values. And he said that he was always a Somozista. He said, he’ll die as Somozista. He said, that’s the life he chose, but he urged her to continue believing in the Sandinistas and he thought that was a legitimate choice for her.
And that was a very interesting thing. And again, life is complicated and you found this with the US Civil War. It’s very famous brother fighting brother and that sort of thing. And that’s why in a civil war, in a civil conflict, the good guys who the Sandanistas were, they didn’t want total victory. They didn’t wanna just eradicate their enemies because that would mean eradicating other Nicaraguans.
They did wanna win them over to their side. And they have tried very hard to do that and they continue to try to do that. And that is very inspirational, but also makes me very sad when people claim that they’re, oh, these repressive people or whatever. Cause the facts really don’t bear that out.
[00:43:20] Grumbine: Right. So the nineties were dark days, as you call it, and the Sandinistas did not come back until 2007. Define the dark days. That was a long stretch of time. What happened during that period?
[00:43:37] Kovalik: Well, it was a very difficult period because the neoliberal governments that were empowered during that time tried to roll back all the gains of the revolution. They got rid of free education, free, healthcare. They started giving land back that was given to the peasants. They began to give it back to the wealthy landowners. In fact, the US government pressured them to do that, and inequality grew during this time poverty grew during this time, illiteracy, which had been largely wiped out, now began to grow.
So they went back to really the Somoza years economically. Now, the good news was they didn’t go back to the Somoza years in terms of repression. Because the police and the army were still loyal to the Sandanistas because the Sandanistas won militarily against Somoza. This allowed them to create a new police force, a new army of the people. So the one good news is while economically and socially, the country went backwards. There wasn’t the mass repression that happened under Somoza because the security apparatus was very much in the hands of the Sandinistas and therefore in the hands of the people.
[00:44:54] Grumbine: Let’s jump ahead. Ortega was able to get elected. I find that fascinating to be, dare I say, like Lula here even. What was it that brought him into power? How was he able to generate the kind of popular support? What was it about his message that allowed him to take power back in 2007?
[00:45:15] Kovalik: Well, first of all, Daniel, between 1990 and 2006, began a very quiet campaign, where he was going around the country, meeting with people privately. He’d meet with poor peasants in their home, eat the food they ate these modest meals, stay up late with them talking and drinking. And first of all, he continued to be connected with the people and that was important.
But his message was that they wanted to continue the revolutionary process. They wanted to bring the education and healthcare back to the people, bring literacy. Give land back that had been taken by the neoliberal governments, give it back to the peasants, expand the land reform, and that they did wanna have a reconciliation. They wanted to do all those things without provoking another Contra war, because people did fear that.
And that was a rational fear. And yeah, after 16 years of neoliberal rule, the people finally said, yeah, we don’t want this anymore. We do think the culture war is enough in the past that it’s not gonna come back, that we’re gonna risk it. And they voted the Sandinisitas back in power. So that was an incredible feat as well. And again, he ran with a Contra as his vice president. Again, there’s no precedent for this in history. It’s a really an amazing thing that they accomplished.
[00:46:36] Grumbine: Truly, I want to ask you a more general US imperialism question. Seems like the playbook of the US is standard. Insert puppet government or a person destabilize region with CIA, propagandize the American people to believe these are evil terrorists, and then ultimately overthrow it and bring the IMF to impose structural adjustments and debt peonage how did they avoid some of the IMF implications? How did they avoid being part of that world? That seems to eat up everybody else.
[00:47:16] Kovalik: Well, I think because they were very intentional about what they did. It’s a very well organized society. Again, there is much popular support for the Sandinistas. They use that as a mandate to reject the neoliberal policies that many other governments were forced to accept. Now that doesn’t mean they didn’t accept some, they’ve had to accept some, just because you’re not an island, you live in this capitalist world.
Unless you’re like the Soviet Union, which was so big and had all of these resources, it’s very hard to fully resist being in the system, but they’ve been very intentional about living in that system, but also, again, using their resources for healthcare, for education, for building houses, for infrastructure. They’ve been very intentional about that, and it has not been easy. And again, the US continues to try to overthrow that government. They continue to impose sanctions on that country. The Sandinistas have not allowed that to derail the social programs that they’re trying to maintain. So that’s just an amazing thing.
[00:48:24] Grumbine: The final piece that we want to touch on here is the April, 2018 crisis. This is much more current pre pandemic. Can you talk to us about that?
[00:48:34] Kovalik: So in 2018, the US supported another Contra type violent insurrection against the Sandinista government. Beginning in April of 2018. Clearly the groundwork for this had been laid for some time. In fact, there’s a magazine article by a magazine funded by the US National Endowment for Democracy, which talks about this, that the US had laid the groundwork for this insurrection by giving millions of dollars to various opposition groups who planned this coup attempt in April of 2018.
And part and parcel of that coup attempt was these gangs basically that set up these roadblocks known as tranques throughout major cities, there are thousands of these set up, which undermine commerce, undermine the economy, and also the folks who manned those tranques carried out assassination of Sandinista cadre, a police officer. Carried out billions of dollars of destruction of property, all an attempt not to just overturn the government, but to eradicate Sandinistas at its root, they destroyed Sandinista monuments and memorials.
It was an attempt really to eradicate the revolution again, as the cultures had tried to do, but this really took the government by surprise. They didn’t see this coming and. Again, by the end, a couple hundred people were killed. Billions of dollars of destruction took place. But the very interesting thing that happened in it, which most people don’t know about, because again, they try to blame the Sandinistas and the police for the violence.
What happened early on in May of 2018? The Catholic Church in Nicaragua demanded that Ortega take the police off the streets, which he did. He confined them to their barracks for 50 days, five oh days. And during this time, the violence didn’t decrease. It only increased, which showed who was doing the violence, not the police who many of whom, by the way, were attacked in their barracks. But it was these violent insurrectionists.
And by the end of the 50 days, the people were like, okay, we’re tired of this. Get rid of these tranques. And by that time, the tranques were removed. And the people were very elated that that period had ended because they were really laid siege to by these insurrectionists from April till mid-January of that year and I was there for the celebration on July 19th of the revolution, the 1979 revolution. But also this was a celebration that they had now overturned another counter revolutionary attempt. And that is the true story of what happened in 2018. And that is not a story that is told very often.
[00:51:41] Grumbine: Indeed. I think what is really important is that people not judge the struggle of others who are under oppression based on US news media. We are dealing with some really horrific and very powerful people in the United States today. And we are watching as empire crawls back, as it loses its grip on aspects around the world and other multipolar groups joining forces with one another in trying to lead lives that are not oppressed by US sanctions, which is a form of austerity, which is absolute murder.
And I guess my final question to you is how would you advise people to think of revolutionaries in general? People that have been propagandized by the Red Scare and don’t have an understanding of all the different actors throughout history, each of these characters has had violence against them, and I feel like people just don’t have a real good framework or analyzing global affairs. What would your final thoughts on that?
[00:52:55] Kovalik: First of all, the revolutions are a process. A lot of people think that with the Nicaragua Revolution, they’ll say, well, the revolution happened on July 19th, 1979. No, the revolution continues. The triumph against Somoza happened then. But then there’s many different phases of the revolution, and the revolution has gains and it has losses and it moves forward and sometimes has to move back.
Again, because of counterrevolutionary activity, and you have to look at it as a process and you have to judge it not by any snapshot in time, but by the trajectory of the revolution. Is it moving generally in a positive direction. Again, even if it has some backward movement. Lennon talked about one step forward, two steps back, but is it generally moving in a positive direction?
And I would say in the case of Nicaragua, it. That over time, when you look at where Nicaragua is now compared to where it was in 1979, it’s night and day. You wouldn’t recognize it. It has paved roads since 2017. The government’s built 26 state-of-the-art hospitals that are free to the people. Illiteracy is nearly wiped out. They have almost a hundred percent food sovereignty, which means almost all the food they eat, they grow themselves.
The trajectory of the revolution has always been positive, and that’s how you need to judge it, and they have not betrayed their basic values. That’s really how you judge it, and I think by those markers, the Nicaraguan revolution has to be judged very kindly and positively.
[00:54:43] Grumbine: I a hundred percent agree with that. Please pick up Dan’s book. It’s Nicaragua, A History of US Intervention and Resistance. From Clarity Press Incorporated, you can get. Pretty much any bookstore you like. Dan, how do we find more of your work.
[00:54:59] Kovalik: Well, I’m on Twitter at Daniel M Kovalik. You can find my books at Amazon and at your local bookstore. If they don’t have ’em, you can ask them to order it for you or you can go to my publisher, Skyhorse Publishing or Clarity Press. I think those are pretty good places to find me. Also, on Spotify, if you put my name in, you’ll see a lot of podcasts I’ve been on and yeah, those are good places to find me. I think.
[00:55:25] Grumbine: Absolutly. Dan, it was a pleasure. I hope I can have you back on. You’re one of my favorite people. I really appreciate your work.
[00:55:34] Kovalik: Well, you made my day for an author to hear someone say that. Really? That’s a pleasure. I’m thrilled to come back.
[00:55:40] Grumbine: Absolutely. This is Steve Grumbine. I’m the host of Macro N Cheese. We are a nonprofit. We survive by your donations and only your donations, so please consider donating to Real Progressives for a 501 c3. Please. We need your help. And with that, Dan, thank you so much, sir, and we are out of here.
[00:56:07] End Credits: Macro N Cheese is produced by Andy Kennedy. Descriptive writing by Virginia Cotts and promotional artwork by Andy Kennedy. Macro N Cheese is publicly funded by our Real Progressives Patreon account. If you would like to donate to Macro N Cheese, please visit patreon.com/realprogressives.
GUEST BIO
Daniel Kovalik is an American lawyer and Human Rights advocate who currently teaches International Human Rights at the University of Pittsburgh School of Law. He graduated from Columbia University School of Law in 1993 and then served as in-house counsel for the United Steelworkers, AFL-CIO (USW) until 2019. While with the USW, Dan worked on Alien Tort Claims Act cases against the Coca-Cola Company, Drummond and Occidental Petroleum cases all of which arose out of egregious human rights abuses in Colombia. The Christian Science Monitor, referring to his work defending Colombian unionists under threat of assassination, described Mr. Kovalik as “one of the most prominent defenders of Colombian workers in the United States.” Mr. Kovalik received the David W. Mills Mentoring Fellowship from Stanford University School of Law and was the recipient of the Project Censored Award for his article exposing the unprecedented killing of trade unionists in Colombia and has written extensively on the issue of international human rights and U.S. foreign policy for the Huffington Post and Counterpunch, lecturing throughout the world on these subjects and has also authored several books.
https://danielmkovalik.weebly.com
PEOPLE
Anastasio Somoza
Anastasio Somoza, in full Anastasio Somoza García, was soldier-politician and was dictator of Nicaragua for 20 years. Preferring the use of patronage and bribery to violence, he established a family political dynasty in Nicaragua.
https://www.britannica.com/biography/Anastasio-Somoza
Augusto Sandino
Cesar Augusto Sandino first gained national recognition in 1926, when he took up arms in support of Vice President Juan Bautista Sacasa’s claim to the presidency. Upon the intervention of U.S. Marines in 1927, Sandino withdrew with several hundred men to the mountains of northern Nicaragua, and his success in eluding capture by the U.S. forces and the Nicaraguan National Guard attracted widespread sympathy for him throughout the hemisphere. Following the withdrawal of the Marines in January 1933 and the inauguration of Sacasa as president, Sandino was invited to meet with Anastasio Somoza, the head of the National Guard, for an apparent peace conference but was abducted and murdered instead by National Guardsmen.
https://www.britannica.com/biography/Cesar-Augusto-Sandino
Brian Wilson
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brian_Willson
https://afgj.org/nicanotes-33rd-anniversary-of-my-survival-of-a-us-train-assault-in-california
Rosario Murillo
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosario_Murillo
Daniel Ortega
José Daniel Ortega Saavedra is the son of a veteran of the peasant army of Augusto Sandino, having moved with his family to Managua in the mid-1950s. He briefly attended the Central American University in Managua, then in 1963 he went underground and became a member of the Sandinista National Liberation Front (FSLN). By 1967 he was in charge of the FSLN’s urban resistance campaign against the ruling Somoza family.
In the fall of 1967 Ortega was arrested for his part in a bank robbery and spent the next seven years in jail. He and a number of other Sandinista prisoners were released at the end of 1974 in exchange for high level Somocista hostages. Ortega, with the other released prisoners, was exiled to Cuba, where he received several months of guerrilla training. After secretly returning to Nicaragua, Ortega played a major role in the conciliation of various FSLN factions and in the formation of alliances with business and political groups. This policy gradually turned the guerrilla campaign into a full-fledged civil war and led to the Sandinista victory in 1979.
https://www.britannica.com/biography/Daniel-Ortega
Jose Zelaya
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/José_Santos_Zelaya
Philander Knox
https://history.state.gov/departmenthistory/people/knox-philander-chase
Roberto Clemente
https://www.robertoclementefoundation.com/roberto-clemente-bio/
Ronald Reagan
https://www.reaganlibrary.gov/reagans/ronald-reagan
Oliver North
https://www.britannica.com/biography/Oliver-North
INSTITUTIONS
Veterans For Peace
https://www.veteransforpeace.org/who-we-are
National Reorganization Process (Argentine Junta)
The National Reorganization Process (Spanish: Proceso de Reorganización Nacional, often simply el Proceso, “the Process”) was the military dictatorship that ruled Argentina from 1976 to 1983, which received support from the United States until 1982. In Argentina it is often known simply as última junta militar (“last military junta”), última dictadura militar (“last military dictatorship”) or última dictadura cívico-militar (“last civil–military dictatorship”), because there have been several in the country’s history[2] and no others since it ended.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Reorganization_Process
Veterans Peace Convoy
Nicaraguan Counterrevolutionary Force (Contra)
“Contra” denotes membership in a counterrevolutionary force that sought to overthrow Nicaragua’s left-wing Sandinista government. The original contras had been National Guardsmen during the regime of Anastasio Somoza. The U.S. Central Intelligence Agency played a key role in training and funding the group, whose tactics were decried by the international human-rights community. In 1984 the U.S. Congress banned military aid to the contras; the efforts of the administration of U.S. president Ronald Reagan to circumvent the ban led to the Iran-Contra Affair. A general peace in the region was negotiated by Costa Rican president Oscar Arias Sánchez, and in 1990 Nicaraguan president Violeta Chamorro negotiated the contras’ demobilization.
https://www.britannica.com/topic/contra-Nicaraguan-counterrevolutionary
https://www.brown.edu/Research/Understanding_the_Iran_Contra_Affair/n-contras.php
National Endowment for Democracy
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Endowment_for_Democracy
EVENTS
Sandinista Revolution
In 1979, a revolution led by Sandinista guerrillas overthrew an entrenched dynastic regime in Nicaragua.
The Sandinistas promised land reform, universal literacy and health care, expanded rights for women and minority groups, and a government that would respond to basic needs in their impoverished country. They had been in power only a short time when the “contra” rebellion, encouraged and financed by the United States, emerged to challenge their power. During the 1980s Nicaragua became a Cold War battleground, with Washington, Havana, and Moscow jousting for power and influence. Tens of thousands of Nicaraguans died in this conflict.
https://vianica.com/go/specials/15-sandinista-revolution-in-nicaragua.html
https://watson.brown.edu/nicaragua
1972 Nicaragua Earthquake
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1972_Nicaragua_earthquake
Summer of Love
https://www.theguardian.com/travel/2007/may/27/escape
Iran-Contra Affair
The Iran-Contra Affair, 1980s U.S. political scandal in which the National Security Council (NSC) became involved in secret weapons transactions and other activities that either were prohibited by the U.S. Congress or violated the stated public policy of the government.
https://www.britannica.com/event/Iran-Contra-Affair
https://www.brown.edu/Research/Understanding_the_Iran_Contra_Affair/n-contras.php
Red Terror (Russia)
https://time.com/5386789/red-terror-soviet-history/
Cultural Revolution (China)
https://www.britannica.com/event/Cultural-Revolution
Red Scare
https://www.history.com/topics/cold-war/red-scare
Tranque
April 2018 Crisis
President Daniel Ortega announced changes in the country’s pension system on April 18, 2018, igniting demonstrations across the country that have evolved into a larger outpouring of anger against his, then, 11-year administration. The Nicaraguan government appeared to have engaged in serious abuses against protesters and arbitrarily shut down media outlets covering the protests.
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-latin-america-44398673
https://www.hrw.org/news/2018/04/27/nicaragua-protests-leave-deadly-toll
https://www.oas.org/en/iachr/jsForm/?File=/en/iachr/media_center/preleases/2022/081.asp
CONCEPTS
Bourgeois Revolution
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bourgeois_revolution
Manachean
https://www.vocabulary.com/dictionary/Manichean
Neoliberalism
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/neoliberalism/
https://www.investopedia.com/terms/n/neoliberalism.asp
PUBLICATIONS
Nicaragua: A History of US Intervention and Resistance by Daniel Kovalik
The Plot to Overthrow Venezuela:How the US is Orchestrating a Coup for Oil by Dan Kovalik
More of Dan’s writing can be found here:
https://bookshop.org/search?keywords=Dan+kovalik
Many of Dan’s podcast appearances can be found here:
https://open.spotify.com/search/dan%20kovalik/podcastAndEpisodes
Kill Anything That Moves: The Real American War in Vietnam by Nick Turse