"The New Yorker" Romanticizes Contra Terrorists

In 1979, after Nicaraguan dictator Anastasio Somoza was overthrown by the Sandinista national liberation movement, U.S. President Jimmy Carter initiated a campaign to reestablish U.S. control. The Somoza dictatorial dynasty started with Somoza's father; both Somozas were backed by the U.S. throughout their brutal reign.

Remnants of Somoza's vicious National Guard were reconstituted in neighboring Honduras as a terrorist army to attack civilian targets and committ atrocities in Nicaragua to destabilize the country. This is well documented in various reports by reputable human rights organizations and journalists. The World Court ultimately entered a multi-billion dollar judgment against the United States for its crimesand mayhem against Nicaragua (which included SEAL and other U.S. military units conducting sabotage operations), a verdict the U.S. refused to honor, of course.

But now The New Yorker magazine has decided to lie about history. According to their reactionary writer Jon Lee Anderson, "In the countryside [of Nicaragua], conservative peasants and Somoza loyalists began a resistance movement, which coalesced into an army known as the Contras. Nicaragua slid toward civil war." [1]

All lies. The U.S. created, supplied, and directed former Somoza state terrorists based OUTSIDE Nicaragua. The idea that peasants would commit atrocities against peasant villages, rape and slaughter civilians, blow up health clinics and schools, and use terror and mutilation as weapons of war, is absurd on its face. And it is flatly false to claim that a "civil war" was going on in Nicaragua. A foreign-supplied terrorist force based outside the country conducted terror raids into Nicaragua.

So much for that over-vaunted "fact checking department" at The New Yorker, stuff of bourgeois media legend.


 See also "Hugo Chavez: Champion of the Poor or Unhinged Megalomaniac?" for more on the
operations of right-wing political operative disguised as a journalist Jon Lee Anderson.



1]  "The Comandante's Canal," The New Yorker, March 10, 2014.