US Continues to Wave Its Big Stick in Nicaragua

Jim Luken is a retired teacher and freelance journalist. He lives in Peace Dale, Connecticut.

As high schoolers, most of us learned about the Monroe Doctrine.

For almost two centuries, this sometimes problematic “doctrine” has been hanging over U.S. foreign policy, something like the Jolly Roger flag on a pirate ship. Basically it has symbolized the United States’ self-proclaimed right to run roughshod — whenever we please — over sovereign nations to our south. President Teddy Roosevelt phrased it somewhat quaintly: “Speak softly, but carry a big stick.”

Which we did, while invading and often occupying numerous countries, some of them, like Nicaragua, many times over. All in all, since President Monroe penned his doctrine, there have been more than 50 such interventions, including our support of the 2009 coup d’etat in Honduras (resulting in chaos: gangs, high-level drug dealing, and a flood of the country’s poor clamoring at our border). We have murdered duly elected left-leaning leaders: Sandino in Nicaragua (1932), Arbenz in Guatemala (1954), Allende in Chile (1973).

After the Nicaraguan Sandinistas’ successful war of liberation against the Somoza dictatorship (1979), the U.S. began its own proxy war against the new populist government (1979-90). This was known as the Contra war. To fight that war, we carried out a withering boycott. We illegally mined the Corinto harbor. We armed, directed and supplied the Contra mercenaries, then sold weapons to Iran’s despised Ayatollah Khomeini, this in exchange for money that would enable the continuation of our patently illegal war.Story from Harbor Freight11 tools under $40 every homeowner should haveSee More →

In the late ‘80s, I spent part of three summers in the midst of that war. In nine years, the Contras failed to hold any part of the country for more than a few hours. Their ongoing goal was to terrorize the war-weary campesinos by burning their cooperative farms, and randomly killing teachers, nurses, priests and farmers. As a journalist for the Franciscan Order, I interviewed a husband (and several of his seven children) shortly after his wife and two other women (one pregnant) had been killed in the ambush of a municipal truck they were riding in. Over and over again I met people who had lost loved ones. Again and again I had to deal with the reality: My country had paid the killers.Your stories live here.Fuel your hometown passion and plug into the stories that define it.Create Account

So guess what? We’re at it again. And once again the reason is simply that the Nicaraguan government (reelected in 2007) is leftist. Its economy is mixed, capitalist and socialist. It provides free health care to its citizens and universal free education, preschool through college, if desired. Half of all candidates for office, by law, must be women. The highways are good. The lights are on. Most revealing is the fact that the Nicaraguan poor do not flee in droves to the U.S. border. Why should they? Their standard of living is higher than in any other of the so-called “banana republics.”

In 2018, the Trump administration supported a violent coup attempt to overthrow the Sandinista government. That coup failed. Sadly (but no surprise), the Biden folks are following the same agenda.

A recently-leaked document (RAIN) from USAID, a government-sponsored agency dedicated — so they say — to helping third-world countries, indicated that the program Responsive Assistance in Nicaragua is intended to re-install a right-wing government that would totally privatize, impose draconian reforms, and purge the new government of socialists.

Meanwhile the “lamestream” media continue to support the party line whenever our corporate economic interests are threatened.

With that in mind, on July 12, soft-spoken Joe Biden slapped visa restrictions on 100 Nicaraguan statesmen. Uncle Sam continues to wave his big stick.