Who Was Naive About Bernie Sanders Meeting the Sandinistas? [View all]

[Uncle Joe]

On December 4, 1984, a dump truck carrying volunteer government coffee pickers was ambushed in northern Nicaragua. The attackers, rebel soldiers known as Contras, ripped through the truck with machine-gun fire and grenades, and they fired a rocket launcher into its tires. When the truck rattled to a stop, the Contras climbed aboard. They opened fire into the mangle of the living and dead, and stabbed those still moving with their bayonets—setting aside a 19-year-old woman to kidnap. Then they set the truck on fire. Roger Briones, a coffee picker who had fallen out and survived by playing dead, later testified: “I could hear the cries and laments of those who were burning alive.”

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In 1979, leftist revolutionaries overthrew the US-backed dictatorship of Anastasio Somoza Debayle, the West Point–educated scion of a repressive family dynasty that had been in power since 1936. Some of the new leaders called themselves “Sandinistas,” in honor of Augusto Sandino, an early-20th-century revolutionary who’d fought against the 1912-33 US military occupation of Nicaragua and was assassinated on Somoza’s grandfather’s orders.

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Initially, the Sandinistas had tried to establish a good relationship with the United States. But Ronald Reagan had won the presidency in 1980 in part on the basis of his promise to reject Jimmy Carter’s human rights–centered approach to foreign policy, and instead be more “assertive”—to use the Times’ word—especially when it came to communism.

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Abrams was pardoned by a lame-duck George H.W. Bush, who himself had been involved in supporting death squads as CIA director and was tangled up in Iran-Contra itself. Those pardons were underwritten by Bush’s attorney general, William Barr. Abrams is now Trump’s point man on the Venezuela crisis. Barr is now Trump’s attorney general—apparently hired to help to cover up the president’s many crimes, just as he did for Bush decades ago.

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https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2019/05/who-was-naive-about-bernie-sanders-meeting-the-sandinistas/

This is a good read.