Sara Rosenberg, July 12th 2021
It has been a long time since the Elephantine papyri. The techniques of warfare have been refined and cover many more fields, such as ideological-cultural warfare, which directly attacks the human consciousness, using the word as a virus. What remains intact is the sense of the word "merce-narius," the one who works or fights for pay.
The American ruling class has also not changed in its desire to dominate and plunder other peoples; it has never skimped on trickery, stratagems and the use of violence. The objective has been to impose its political-economic and symbolic model on the world and especially in Latin America, which by the Monroe doctrine, it considers as its "backyard."
At this moment the ideological and cultural war against Nicaragua is at its peak and as always, the American elites have co-opted/bought groups of the creole elites ("merce-naries") to carry out this now, classic task, called counter-information and propaganda warfare. They have powerful means for this, especially if we take into account that the media power is in the hands of four or five large corporations that are a kind of fattening farm for lies and their dissemination. Mercenary feathers of all colors beat their wings and receive the alpiste seeds.
Despite their immense media power, these mercenary birds have been countered by the Nicaraguan government. Beating their scavenger wings in well-lit scenarios, these "merce-politicians and intellectuals" are no longer only trying to destabilize and attack democracy and the popular will, but also ask and plead with the empire for an intervention against their own motherland, another military intervention in a land that has suffered so many criminal interventions. As I said, the concept of mercenary has been refined and has adopted a patricidal character.
In Nicaragua, these internal subjects, these "merce-politicians" have developed two opprobrious ways of encouraging U.S. interference in internal affairs. And precisely in this, the Chamorro family has an extensive history.
The first way, perhaps the most common, is to act directly by asking in the halls of the White House, congress or though intermediates, for aggressions against the country in order to overthrow the Sandinista Government, because they know that the people will not give them the opportunity to win the government by democratic means. It has been proven: in the most recent regional elections of 2019, the Sandinismo, even after having defeated the failed attempted coup, obtained an indisputable and resounding victory, which revealed, yet again, the confidence of the Nicaraguan people in its project of transformation.
The other way in which these merce-figures operate is simultaneous and uses a certain "establishment" that gravitates and enhances, with a strong media echo, the defamation of the government and thus expands the invocation of foreign interference. A very well-articulated merce-theater.
This is how the hybrid-cultural war and the imperialist onslaught against today's Sandinista Nicaragua works. First they have exalted "in the world of culture" a series of merce-figures that propagate lies in the platforms, the networks and the corporate press that act like "media war machine", far from what could be journalism or communication.
These mercenary figures are chameleons (my apologies to the beautiful chameleon), they know how to mutate and blend in and how to reappear in the imperial swamps to denigrate the advances made by Sandinismo in Nicaragua. Previous mutations guarantee the powerful media echo that by force of repetition and misrepresentation tries to inoculate the public (and within the public spaces) the false image about the Nicaraguan reality. Writings, opinion pieces, interviews, decontextualized sentences, large doses of euphemisms, but all loaded with hatred and toxicity against the Sandinista model that benefits the great majority in Nicaragua.
These merce-figures obtained their recognition under the protection of the Revolution, which today they cynically and ruthlessly attack. Since the nineties they joined the "readjustment" of the so-called new world order, which meant renouncing their flimsy principles (if in fact they ever had them) and to fold first in a clandestine manner and then, without any cover or shame, to the thoughts and practices demanded by Washington.
It is the same model of the Peruvian novelist Mario Vargas Llosa, who fulfills the unfortunate function of the cynical "merce-figure", who in the name of his supposed and much-vaunted "democracy" now supports Fujimorism, which he once detested. Capacity for rapid mutation always within the same parameters: supporting the imperialist master.
This is what happens with people like the Ramírez or Belli, who after failing in their own land have become a kind of "cultural intermediaries", "merce-intellectuals" at the service of the hegemonic discourse of the USA and the EU, against Sandinismo.
These merce-intellectuals distort with a clear objective. They carry out a tendentious handling of concepts, post-truths and sophisms, which do not hide their main motivation: the hatred of Sandinismo and the exaltation of the capitalist-neoliberal, imperial-Western model. Two inseparable reasons that explain why they have had no qualms about being in electoral formulas with corrupt bankers, with extreme neo-liberals, in elections such as those of 1996, 2001 or 2006.
That is why we are not surprised that these merce-intellectuals are sad and mere disseminators of the "American way of life", who are protagonists of the old and terrible operetta of a Latin America "in need" of the intervention of the United States.
Perhaps if they were not part of this nefarious operation, designed to try to anchor the continent to Washington's designs, they would be something or someone? Do they have any intellectual capacity, truly human and creative as proposed and delivered by socialist humanism? A sad fate, Faust would say.
As they watch the Sandinista Nicaragua move forward, without bending; they roar, they get irritated and pervert the necessary daily word: the word truth.
A sad fate to run against the wind of history, full of difficulties, but also of hope and victories.
* Novelist, Playwright, Political Analyst, Essayist. Member of the Network of Artists, Intellectuals and Communicators in Solidarity with Nicaragua and the FSLN.