Nicaragua continued.
I have had some feedback about my last post. Ruari Patterson writes:

"I'd like to take issue with your piece on Nicaragua on your blog. You make some good points but the lack of context and ommissions are shocking. You completely neglect to mention that the Sandanistas overthrew an extremly brutal decades-old dictatorship and that their opponents, the Contras, were drawn largely from that dictatorship's murderous National Guard. You make some good points about the Sandanista's own human rights abuses but you present them as if they were on a par with those of the Contras, which no serious human rights group would accept."

I was not planning to write a full history of Nicaragua. I started the story in 1987 because that was the year that I became aware of the left's strong passion for the Sandanistas during an open day at Hull University. I wasn't trying to omit anything. What Ruari says is quite true however. He continues:

"You also write as if the only election thr Sandanistas presided over was one they were forced to hold as "part of a peace deal" with the contras; in fact the Sandanistas won a 67% majority in an election in the early eighties which though accused of being flawed (the opposition alleged that government domination of the media worked against them) was widely regarded as straight.

I must confess that I was either unaware of the election that they won or had read somewhere that it wasn't free and fair. My own fascination with the subject comes from one of my favourite websites. It's a blog called www.deanesmay.com. Dean Esmay shares many of my views now but was a registered Democrat and quite left-wing in the past. In one of his entries, he explains that it was the election of UNO that triggered his move to the Right. You can read the entry here:

http://www.deanesmay.com/archives/001264.html

It is by no means an exhaustive analysis of the subject; just his personal reflections.

Ruari continues:

"The fact that they then peacefully conceded power in the second election in the late 80s, which there is no reason to believe they would not have held regardless of the peace negotiations, is glossed over. Do you think Somoza or the contras would have done the same?"

I'm too young to know whether Somoza would have done the same. From what I've read about the subject, the answer is no. I totally agree that it was to the Sandanistas credit that they did hand over power to UNO.

Ruari concludes:

"The left-wingers you disdain may have been misguided in their total support for the Sandanistas but they were defending a movement that overthrew a corrupt and violent dictarship, held two elections in its tenure of less than a decade and abided by the will of the people when it lost the second, bringing democracy to the country, not to mention saw literacy and life expectancy rates soar during its period in power, against the remnants of a military dictarship that had never shown any appetite for political freedoms or introducing democracy. That the movement has long outlived its usefulness is not particularly contraversial, but from your piece anyone would think it was a left-wing mirror image of Somoza or the contras that achieved nothing, which is absurd."

I won't add much to that. I'm glad that the people of Nicaragua are free of both the Somoza regime and the Sandanistas. There is one thing on which Ruari and I agree - that it is genuinely fascinating that Nicaragua was such a hot topic for several years and is now virtually never mentioned at all. In my last week at University in summer 1990, I rented a Camcorder and interviewed many of my fellow students. One of them, a mature student named Jake, who had been studying South-East Asian studies, was very left-wing (despite being a close friend of mine). One of the questions I asked him in the interview was 'How will history judge Ronald Reagan'? His reply was that he would be regarded as a war criminal for what the Contras did. Last month Reagan died and I read many pages of analysis about his life. Nicaragua barely featured in any of them.