Nan McCurdy * , September 10th 2018
Message to Laura Blume writer for NACLA
Dear Laura
I have just read your NACLA piece ‘A Tale of Two Dictatorships,’ on the hypocrisy of US attitudes towards Honduras and Nicaragua. You make a very good point about the energy the US government is putting into attacking Nicaragua, while it has turned a blind eye to electoral fraud and repression of protesters in Honduras. Unfortunately, in most other respects your commentary about Nicaragua gives a very distorted picture of events there (I lived in Nicaragua for thirty-one years, am visiting now, and have three grown children and other family members living here). I won’t pick up all of the contentious points you make, but here are four that are particularly important.
First, there is no repression of the right to protest. The opposition has held frequent marches, as often as not patrolled in normal ways by the police and mainly without incident. Yes, it is true that the aftermath of the big march on May 30 was marked by deaths in a chaotic shooting incident, but it is still far from clear who did this given that a large number of police were shot in the same attack. What is true is that opposition members have been arrested, but this is because of the enormous number of real crimes carried out at the barricades in the period April-July.
Second, you say there are parallels between the situation in Nicaragua and that in Honduras. There are many activists working in solidarity with those countries who would disagree strongly with this assessment. Protesters in Honduras are not allowed to erect road blocks – in Nicaragua there were literally thousands built in those three months which strangled major cities such as Masaya and Jinotepe. If there is such similarity between the two countries, why do most major Honduran popular organizations support Daniel Ortega and the FSLN, such as Ofraneh, Copinh, L@s Neci@s, Libre and the FNRP? The secondary teachers union COPEMH just issued a message of support too, as have various other Honduran labor organizations.
Third, you say that Ortega and JOH are similar in the way that they are holding onto power. While it is true that both have used the judiciary to avoid constitutional limits on terms of office, there is a very big difference in that Ortega clearly won a large majority in the 2016 election, whereas JOH only won last year’s election by extreme manipulation of the results. The difference was obvious from the OAS’s judgments in each case. They accepted the Nicaraguan result, calling for some changes in the electoral process which are now taking place. However, although the OAS have now succumbed to US pressure over Honduras, the expert report they commissioned shortly after the November 2017 election clearly showed how the results had been altered on a massive scale.
Finally, you say that ‘The people taking to the streets in the region… are making comparable demands for justice, transparency, and accountability’. There is a vital difference however: the protests in Honduras have, to the best of my knowledge, been entirely peaceful, while those in Nicaragua have been marked by extreme violence that escalated as the protesters gained control of more and more cities during May and June. Not only were they (unlike Hondurans) armed with weapons like mortars, but in most places like Masaya they had AK47s and other weaponry, and were not only killing people but using widespread intimidation, torture and kidnapping to achieve their ends. There are now countless examples of this, from the killing of four police and one teacher in Morrito in July and kidnapping of nine others, to the disappearance of Bismark Martinez on June 29 in Diriamba – torture videos were found a few days ago on the cell phone of a captured criminal. If you want to see evidence of the effects of torture on its victims and their families, please look at the interviews which Max Blumenthal of the Grayzone Project made in Nicaragua in July.
While you are right to call out US government hypocrisy, drawing these false parallels between Honduras and Nicaragua does not serve the interests of progressive forces on either side. I’m sure that compañeros/as in Honduras would be horrified that their actions are being compared with those of the violent protesters in Nicaragua, who simply want to get rid of Daniel Ortega and have actively sought US help to do so. Nicaragua’s Alianza Civica has no alternative plan for government, except of course that they betray their real intentions by choosing as allies the most right-wing US Republicans. This would be anathema to Libre and progressive forces in Honduras, who offer a real alternative that was chosen by the Honduran people in the last election, and from which they have been defrauded by JOH and his US allies.
The situations of Nicaragua and Honduras may have some similarities – but they have many more important differences and it is a pity that your article ignored them. I hope that if you write on this topic again, you will do so in a much more balanced and fair-minded way.
Nan McCurdy,
Misionera
Ministerios Globales, Iglesia Metodista Unida
* Vivió 31 años en Nicaragua, regresa cuatro veces al año; tres niños viven allí, siete suegros, sesenta y siete sobrinas y sobrinos también, algunos en Masaya.