US warns Nicaraguans not to back Ortega

[Judi Lynn]

US warns Nicaraguans not to back Ortega
By Adam Thomson in Managua

Updated: 5 minutes ago
The US ambassador to Nicaragua has issued a vigorous warning to this small Central American country's electors against supporting Daniel Ortega, the veteran leftwing Sandinista leader and the frontrunner in November's presidential election.

In a frank interview with the FT, Paul Trivelli said Mr Ortega was "undemocratic" and would roll back much of the advances made in recent years. And, underlining the concern felt in Washington about the regional influence of President Hugo Chávez of Venezuela, the ambassador said he had no doubt that Venezuela was playing an important role in the election.

"It's one thing to be truly democratic. It's another thing to do what the Sandinistas really have done, which is to distort and manipulate democracy for partisan and personal benefit," Mr Trivelli said. "The fact that has been in charge of the Sandinista movement for 25 years or more gives you a clue about his democratic tendencies."
(snip)

The US has had a long and – in many cases – unfortunate history in Nicaragua. During the 1980s it earned international criticism for its illegal funding of the so-called Contra war against Mr Ortega's democratically elected administration.
(snip/...)

http://msnbc.msn.com/id/14840215/

[ShortnFiery]

1. May I be the first to quip ...

Si, Ortega! :applause:

Why do The USA's Ruler have any right to ORDER any other Sovereign Country who to elect as their LEADER? :shrug:

[mom cat]

15. Look what they did to Palastine!

[olddad56]

16. Well, just maybe God talked to Bush...

told him to tell the US Ambassador to Nicaragua to say this.

[drm604]

2. distort and manipulate democracy

"...distort and manipulate democracy for partisan and personal benefit..."

Sounds familiar somehow, who else do we know that has done that? Hmm...

[Robbien]

3. "Unfortunate history"?

The history the US has had with Nicaragua has been very fortunate for US politicians/corporate elite.

The only unfortunate thing about it is that the people of Nicaragua have only received death and poverty from the arrangement. Normal US foreign policy in Latin America.

[Vidar]

4. Viva Ortega!

[laylah]

5. Who the

HELL do we think we are? :mad: Damn, meddling bastards.

[SoCalDem]

6. The whole WORLD warned us to not support GWB, but they stole

the election anyway.:shrug:

[WCGreen]

7. You know what....

They can vote whom ever they wish into office...

But curiously, the rise of so called communist dictators in Central and South America didn't happen until the US was seen as weakened by Vietnam...

I wonder if the new boldness coming from our neighbors to the south is related to the impotence of US foreign policy since Bush took over....

I know I am over simplifying this, but things were going rather smoothly in South and Central America until Bush decided he was going to shout loudly and carry a small stick...

[Lydia Leftcoast]

10. Things were going "smoothly" in Latin America

mostly for the corporatists. The majority of the populations of countries such as Nicaragua and Honduras have remained as poor as ever, or even worse off than before.

[WCGreen]

12. Compared to what was happening in the decades before

Clinton, you have to admit the region took on a more democratic sheen....

[Lydia Leftcoast]

21. And it was mostly a sheen in many places

:-(

[WCGreen]

30. HEy, I'm not condoning it....

I'm just making an observation....

[IChing]

34. Never saw the movie Bananas from 1971 eh?

Or the term banana republics?
It was in Honduras that the United Fruit and Standard Fruit companies dominated the country's key banana export sector and support sectors such as railways. The United Fruit Company was nicknamed 'The Octopus', for its willingness to involve itself in politics, sometimes violently. In 1910 Sam Zemurray, who 22 years later would take over United Fruit in a hostile bid, hired a gang of armed toughs from New Orleans to help stage a coup in Honduras in order to obtain beneficial treatment from the new government for his own banana-trading company, Cuyamel Fruit. Four decades later, the directors of United Fruit played a role in convincing the Truman and Eisenhower administrations that the government of Colonel Arbenz in Guatemala was secretly pro-Soviet, thus contributing to the CIA's decision to assist in overthrowing Arbenz's government in 1954 (see Operation PBSUCCESS). Pablo Neruda would later denounce the dominance of foreign-owned banana producers in the politics of several Latin American countries in a poem titled La United Fruit Co.

[Judi Lynn]

18. The U.S. shouldn't have been butting into Latin American business

before Viet Nam.

Any power wielded there was inappropriate, and the U.S. was truly hated and feared all the way back as far as the Eisenhower administration when Nixon got the reception his right-wing administration had coming, during his not-so-triumphal Latin American tour in Caracas:







They had had enough of this long, long ago, in the early 1950's, when Eisenhower had Guatemala's Arbenz eliminated.

President Dwight Eisenhower and Guatemala
excerpted from the book
Lying for Empire
How to Commit War Crimes With A Straight Face
by David Model
Common Courage Press, 2005, paper

1954, the American government successfully orchestrated the overthrow of the freely elected government of Jacobo Arbenz in Guatemala and replaced him with their hand-picked alternative.
p81
... nationalist ambitions in developing country where the government sought to become independent of Washington's influence were usually interpreted on the surface as communist subversion whereas the greater threat was a weakening of the American sphere of influence. As well, redistributing wealth or land was usually a sign that the government was apparently poisoned by communist subversion. Gabriel Kolko, in Confronting the Third World: United States Foreign Policy 1945-1980, points out that:
Both privately and publicly, each attributed to the Russians a transcendent ability to shape events in the most remote countries, and even when they did not initiate them they almost invariably knew how to exploit them... Russia "seeks world rule through the domination of all governments by the International Communist Party" as John Foster Dulles typically put it in 1957. Such conspiracies included "extreme nationalism" as one of its tools. And he found their alleged ability "to get control of mass movements" uncanny.
According to a number of scholars, the hypothesis that international Communism infiltrated developing world political and economic structures for the purpose of establishing a communist government was inaccurate and missed the real motivations for American foreign policy which was to expand the American Empire.
(snip/...)

http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/American_Empire/Eisenhower_Guatemala_LFE.html

[arewenotdemo]

25. very interesting reading

as always, Judi.

[Judi Lynn]

49. Somehow this was overlooked in our public school upbringings!

Undoubtedly just an accident, it could never have been intentional!

No doubt it's all in Lynne Cheney's history book for American school children, "America!"

[independentpiney]

43. What a treasure trove that link is

Thanks for that, bookmarked for alot of reading

[Judi Lynn]

51. We all have a ton of reading to catch up on, don't we?

Better late than never, anyway.

It DOES put us ahead of Republicans.

Makes you wonder if the right-wing is going to find a way to erase all recorded history and replace it with their version some day. You know they would if they could!

[CatholicEdHead]

8. Will the renamed School for the Americas ramp up for this?

[pretzel4gore]

9. 'even having compassion for the poor is communism'

in an interview with tom brokaw (before he sold his arse to the the busheviks, i guess) brokaw mentioned being on a miami bound plane with some el salvadorans/nicaruaguans, whatever, and one of the righties told him 'anyone who even has compassion for poor people is a commie' etc (during same interviw, i believe, an america embassy employee said that the 'war' in central america was really just a 'war of murder'....
maybe that's what the pig guy tivelli is referring to(?)

[CatholicEdHead]

24. That seems to be conventional wisdom nowadays :(

I was called "dumbass socialist swine" for trying to have some compassion and pointing out class differences in Larry Kudlow's blog. Read the 10:42pm comment attacking me. I am of course DUer there.

http://kudlowsmoneypolitics.blogspot.com/2006/09/turning-tide.html

It is a "all for me, none for you" mentality over there (those who agree with Kudlow).

[pretzel4gore]

37. a tapeworm mentality

squirming in the guts of a grasping hyena....how you can stand the bushboors is amazing....

[pinerow]

11. The more things change....the more i get the feeling that

reagan is NOT dead....he's in the host aka GWB...:

[Anakin Skywalker]

13. The Bush Administration - Making Friends the World Over.

Via threats and intimidations, of course. :)

[anotherdrew]

14. if the bastards start another dirty war against the people of Nicaragua

I will be hoping to see some solidarity brigades formed and travel from America to help defend Nicaragua's TRUE freedom. Marching around your hometown in circles isn't going to cut it this time.

[ConcernedCanuk]

17. "US orders" , threatens, sanctions, warns - and even INVADES countries

,
,
,

Don't y'all down there grasp the concept that maybe the World will get tired of all your bullying bullshit?

Well

It's happening,

but y'all won't realize it until it is too late

Sad thing that

Because you DO have a nice country down there

But you are earning the hatred and disrespect of the World by letting your government behave the way they do . . .

(sigh)

[MisterP]

19. foot-stamping petulant little martinet giving orders to other nations

and their people

[jaybeat]

20. Let me get this straight...

We done funded (with drug money, and illegal arms sales money--from "state sponsors of terrorism," no less!!!), trained, armed, propaganda'd an illegal mercenary army to overthrow your democracy, way back in the '80s, and after 20+ years of the Contras screwing up your country even more than *we* thought possible, YOU have the temerity to try and bring them darn commie Sandinistas back?

Sheesh! What a bunch of ungrateful, uppity brown people!

Then again, if you insist on electing commies, I guess that just gives us an excuse to come down and whup yer asses.

Again.

:banghead:

[Jazzgirl]

31. You got it jaybeat and....

Welcome! :hi:

[breakaleg]

22. US arrogance never ceases to amaze me.

[arewenotdemo]

26. incredible, isn't it?

I like this quote from "Killing Hope":

... the educated, urbane men of the State Department, the CIA, and the United Fruit Company, the pipe-smoking men of Princeton, Harvard, and Wall Street, decided that the illiterate peasants of Guatemala did not deserve the land which had been given to them, that the workers did not need their unions, that hunger and torture were a small price to pay for being rid of the scourge of Communism.

It makes me question whether there is something genetic to the Nazi persuasion.

[PeaceProgProsp]

23. They did this to Evo Morales when he was lower than 4th place

in the 2002 elections. He ended coming in a strong second and then winning the next election after the '02 winner had to resign because he (a University of Chicago graduate) was giving the country away to the US and the IMF and people revolted.

[Jack Rabbit]

27. What is this?

Trivelli said Mr Ortega was "undemocratic" and would roll back much of the advances made in recent years.

I don't want to hear a Bush regime hoodlum talk about what is democratic or undemocratic or what advances have been made in that area in recent years.

It would be like listening to Britt Hume lecture on good journalism.

[Solly Mack]

28. Another sequel !!!!!! and with almost all of the original players!

YAY! America!!!

Gee, if only the too ready for crime time players of yester-year had been held responsible the first time around....(but I digress)


Bush the sequel
Iraq the sequel
Contra the sequel

[0007]

29. Democracy brought to you by authentic altruist means...



[w4rma]

32. Projection

In psychology, psychological projection (or projection bias) is a defence mechanism in which one attributes ("projects") to others, one’s own unacceptable or unwanted thoughts or/and emotions. Projection reduces anxiety by allowing the expression of the unwanted subconscious impulses/desires without letting the ego recognize them. The theory was developed by Sigmund Freud and further refined by his daughter Anna Freud.
…
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychological_projection

[bobbieinok]

33. US invasions of NIcaragua

http://www.nicaliving.com/node/2883

(also see info in comments)

US Military Incursions Into Nicaragua
Submitted by caffeineHi on 27 December, 2005 - 03:43.
Nice collection of all US military incursions. Below are the Nicaraguan ones. Source is pretty anti-US govt but the dates look correct.

* Note: Added 1961 mission from http://cuban-exile.com/doc_026-050/doc0045.html

* Note: Added 1984 mission from http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB54/st38.pdf

Original list from http://rwor.org/a/v22/1052-059/1059/invasion.htm

1853 Nicaragua. March 11 through 13. Troops land "to protect American interests during a revolution."

1854 Nicaragua. July 9 through 15. San Juan del Norte (Greytown) is destroyed to avenge an insult to the U.S. Minister to Nicaragua.

1857 Nicaragua. U.S. forces land twice.

1894 Nicaragua. July 6 to August 7. To protect U.S. interests in Bluefield following a change of power.

1896 Nicaragua. May 2-4. To protect U.S. interests in Corinto during political unrest.

1898 Nicaragua. February 7-8. To protect San Juan del Sur.

1899 Nicaragua. To protect U.S. interests at San Juan del Norte, February 22 to March 5, and at Bluefields a few weeks later in connection with internal political disturbances—in this case, a military coup.

1910 Nicaragua. February 22. Troops land at Corinto to get information on the political conditions prevailing in the country following a civil war. And from May 19 to September 4 to protect U.S. interests at Bluefields.

1912-25 Nicaragua. Landing of 2,700 Marines to protect U.S. interests during "an attempted revolution." U.S. troops stay for 13 years as a tripwire—or in the words of the U.S. government, "as a promoter of peace and government stability." Less than two years after the troops left, they returned.

1926-1933 Nicaragua. An upheaval of revolutionary activity leads to the landing of 5,000 Marines "to protect the interests of the United States." The National Guard of the Somoza family is established to rule into the future. U.S. forces engage in major operations against the revolutionary Sandino in 1928. After their withdrawal, Sandino is deceived and finally assassinated by the U.S.-trained Somoza forces in 1934. The consolidated military dictatorship rules for 45 years.

1961 Nicaragua. In March/April the CIA moves a training camp from Trax, Guatemala to Puerto Cabezas, Nicaragua. The mission to invade Bahia de Cochinos in Cuba was later aborted.

1979 Nicaragua. Following the overthrow of Somoza, regroupment starts of what is to become a U.S.-led and trained army of counterrevolutionaries (Contras) based in neighboring Honduras and Costa Rica.

1984 Nicaragua. On the night of February 29, emplaced four magnetic mines in the harbor at Corinto, Nicaragua. This anti-Sandanista measure was aimed at "applying stringent economic pressure.".

1987 Nicaragua. May. The U.S. military conducts a massive "training exercise" near Nicaragua. Code-named Solid Shield, the exercise involves 50,000 troops.

[Judi Lynn]

41. Great timeline, bobbieinok. It would lead some to imagine we've worn

out our "welcome" to meddle and bully there by now!

What a shame people in Latin American have been run over, murdered in great numbers, and bullied, again, again, and again while most of us have no idea whatsoever what the hell has happened (using our own tax dollars).

[winston61]

35. Viva Sandino! Viva La Revolucion!

Tell Monkey Boy to shove it. It's not enough to destroy the country under Reagan. Now they got the balls to try and tell them who they can elsect.

[IndianaGreen]

36. Fuck the American ambassador to Nicaragua!

The United States never bitched about the Somoza dictatorship. Americans never gave a rat's ass about how many Nicaraguans were murdered, tortured, and jailed by the Somoza family. It wasn't until the people of Nicaragua threw the yoke of the Somoza family that the American government started to worry about "freedom and democracy."

American "freedom and democracy" is a Satanic lie! When America speaks of freedom, it only means the freedom of capital to move across borders unencumbered, and damned the people that get in the way. When America speaks of democracy, it only means the power that those with capital have over the working class.

I curse and spit on American "freedom and democracy," the mother of all lies!

Viva Ortega! Viva la revolucion Sandinista!

[karlrschneider]

38. I know it's a different country but the theme is familiar. Recall Noriega?

http://www-personal.umich.edu/~lormand/poli/soa/panama.htm


edit: By the way, welcome to DU! :toast:

[sendero]

39. "distort and manipulate democracy?"..

... sounds like a perfect description of the Republican party under Karl Rove.

America talks freedom and democracy, but they only like it when the results are consistent with their personal preferences.

I hate a fucking hypocrite, our government is full of them.

[hatrack]

40. "It's one thing to be democratic . . . .

"It's another thing ENTIRELY to vote for someone we don't like!"

Fucking STEAMING MOUNDS of hypocrisy.

[truth2power]

42. This is beyond obscene!!!...

How in HELL we think that we have any right to make demands on everybody on this planet is beyond me. I am sick and tired of watching Bush and the rest of those pukes in his administration bully the whole world.

I fervently hope that Ortega wins. 'Course, we'll be sure to send our "fixers" down there to make sure it doesn't happen. May George Bush rot in hell! :mad:

[LynnTheDem]

44. When is the USA unfreezing the reparation payments US owes to Nicaragua

for being found guilty in the terrorist deaths of 30,000 Nicaraguans?

Just wondering.

[OutNow]

45. Daniel Ortega is undemocratic????

I have to admit that I have supported the FSLN as the representatives of the poor and oppressed in Nicaragua for many years. I have had the opportunity to spend some time there in the 80s. Daniel Ortega has always claimed to be a moderate socialist, and that is what he is today.

In the election of 1990 he lost and, to the surprise of many Americans (but not to me) he left office. And the Bush regime, illegal occupiers of the White House for the past 6 years, say Daniel Ortega is undemocratic?

Un-fucking-believable.

[Judi Lynn]

48. It's great to have someone with your actual experience here!

The upcoming election is going to be very tricky, no doubt.

It would be so decent of _Bush to butt out of their lives.


Welcome to D.U. OutNow! :hi: :hi: :hi:

[bhikkhu]

46. Wouldn't this be meddling in a foreign election?

I thought that we didn't do this, at least as policy.

[pinniped]

47. The weekly warnings have been issued.

.

[killbotfactory]

50. how diplomatic of us.

[Jed Dilligan]

Thank you, Mr. Trivelli,

for endorsing Sr. Ortega as no other person could.

Because the way the Nicaraguans have taken it in the culo from this country for 80+ years now, there is no better endorsement for a candidate than the US endorsing his opponent.

Almost makes me think Ortega is in cahoots with Bushco.

[Jed Dilligan]

52. delete

I wonder how much of my post count is based on this crap mouse

[HuffleClaw]

53. bwahahahaahaaaa

they are hte last people who should be saying stuff like 'distort and manipulate democracy for partisan and personal benefit'

[armodem08]

54. I love the hypocrisy!

"The ambassador said he had no doubt that Venezuela was playing an important role in the elections."
Yeah, and the U.S. isn't? Not that Venezuela has the kind of interest in this that we do.