Francisco Sierra Caballero * 16 de julio 2021
What has happened in Haiti, what is on the move in Cuba, why Nicaragua is once again the target of controversy in the international press - the answers lie in documents of the Pentagon. Julian Assange has told us everything in detail and today he is a victim of imperialist terrorism. While at Fort Benning, at the Western Hemisphere Institute, former school of the Americas, they continue to train military coup leaders in the Reagan doctrine of irregular warfare.
The same doctrine that puts Haiti as a case study and exemplary model of a successful soft coup by which the United States presented itself to world public opinion as a mediator with Raoul Cedras, when in fact it was the promoter of Aristide's overthrow. And that is a continuation of Nicaragua's unfortunate role as the laboratory of the doctrine of counterinsurgency since the eighties and today, the battlefield for the deployment of the so-called hybrid war. As in the case of Cuba, its geopolitical position is strategic and considered to be within empires high security perimeter by virtue of its natural connection, as with the Panama Canal, between the Atlantic and the Pacific, not counting, as in the case of Brazil, its water reserves.
If in the twentieth century the United States promoted imperialist wars over oil, in this millennium, U.S. State Department advisers define conflicts by virtue of the possession of the precious commodity of water. As always, one is dealing not only awith n ideological issue in the fight against Sandinismo, but a material one. Therefore, in this context, since 2018, and even before, as already happened in the dirty war of the Contras in the eighties, the government of Daniel Ortega has suffered innumerable difficulties, due to the persistent actions of internal forces collaborating with imperialism.
Despite all the remarkable successes that the Sandinista government has achieved in terms of social economy, in the management of Covid itself, notably higher in progressive countries such as Cuba, compared to the cases of neoliberal governments such as Ecuador or Colombia. The commitment to sovereignty, South-South collaboration and support for small and medium-sized producers with active policies of inclusion and citizen participation, explain the broad support of the population for Sandino’s project within the country, as well as the failure of the coup intervention violently promoted by the right-wing opposition in 2018 causing a toll of more than 200 deaths.
Despite this, the irregular war, the so-called hybrid war, does not cease, because, as it has its origins in low-intensity warfare, the objective is not so much military as cultural, to defeat, on the ideological front, the commitment toward independence and the transformation of the broad popular sectors that support sandinismo, as before.
The approach of this type of attack is to generate distrust in the democratic, political and administrative system of the country and to try to undermine its social cohesion, in order to legitimize a conservative restoration, as had already been done with the victory of Violeta Chamorro, following the siege and open and permanent war suffered by the American ultra-right and its allies, in what constituted an international condemnation of the Reagan administration for Irangate.
Today the modes of intervention are not openly military, but the objective and modus operandi are essentially the same. Brian Fleming defines hybrid warfare as the synthesis of several types of warfare: conventional warfare, asymmetric warfare, irregular warfare, non-linear warfare, cyberwarfare, composite warfare, among others. In short, a type of unrestricted war in which there are no limits because anything goes. From there to the outrageous description by El País of Nicaragua as the Central American gulag (a propaganda proclamation already used at the time of the Contras in the international media under the protection of the White House with the collaboration of Felipe González, and which has followed the same steps in Venezuela), there is only one step.
In this regard, the disinformation campaign about Nicaragua can be placed in the context, as Maurice Lemoine warns, of the roadmap of the "Nica" opposition that has begun to denounce an "electoral farce" in advance. The same script as in Bolivia, before that in Brazil or Ecuador, despite the fact that all the polls recognize the current head of state as the projected winner, including, the not at all suspicious polling agency Gallup. From this point of view, the objective of the soft coup to overthrow Ortega is none other than to liquidate Sandinismo, as in the past with Hugo Chávez or as we have known for decades in the sustained war against Castro.
It is a well-known law of propaganda, personalizing, demonizing the enemy, to abstract the unobjectionable moral reason that is the imperialist immorality of reversing the changes and advances that even The Economist recognizes and for which Ortega won, and will win, the elections by broadly revalidating popular support for the project of change that it represents, hence the media campaign questioning in advance its democratic endorsement.
It is therefore foreseeable that, in the management of the variable response time, a learning from the experience applied on the occasion of the Esquipulas treaty and the low-intensity war, the attacks and the campaign of isolation on the Government of Nicaragua sponsored by the White House, will intensify through the use of methods and covert operations that justify, before international public opinion, the removal of a government that is harmful to the interests of the empire. In this war, the role of the Civic Alliance for Justice and Democracy (ACJD), and the National Blue and White Union (UNAB), as well as the supposed left that didn’t blush in supporting the right electorally and even the intervention in the country, and are now nothing more than collaborationists and pawns of imperialism.
These "guardians of freedom," "champions of democracy," will nevertheless end up fragmenting, as in Venezuela, because the Chamorros and their OAS battering rams like Almagro do not have a national project, but rather several business ideas that sooner rather than later, end up entering into crisis and into the divisionism of those who project them onto the isthmus, in a way already been experienced in other territories such as Libya or Honduras. The script is already very well known and documented and includes sanctions, threats, unfounded accusations, internal and external damage, cyberattacks, psychological warfare based on manipulation and media misrepresentation and social networks, the use of common criminality or operations launched from with certain countries, led by the United States and a wide battery of resources of imperial rhetoric, well detailed by Carlos Midence in his latest essay on the relations of the “United States with Our America.” Since the nineteenth century, the United States uses both bilateral pressure on countries or institutions that have historically lent themselves to its designs, as forms of military intervention and aggression in the continued occupation of what it considers to be its backyard, and with this purpose it begins to restrict international funds for development cooperation and continues to sabotage and finance opposition NGOs.
Political scientist James Petras has already warned about them insofar as they constitute the cultural front of ideological warfare, as we have been observing since the Clinton administration's peace operations. Intervention on humanitarian grounds, whether in Kosovo or as is now being proposed in Cuba, is a classic form of the discourse of imperialist interference. Thus, today again, as in Venezuela, the United States Agency for International Development (USAID); the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), created in 1983 by Reagan to replace the CIA in the organization of "non military" actions in the times of the Contras; Freedom House or George Soros' Open Society, finance, train, coordinate and sustain the so-called "civil society" that they want to democratize, we imagine just as in Colombia, the country.
In the last decade, more than 80 million dollars have been allocated to this work benefiting political actors such as the Chamorro Foundation with which the internal media bases of imperialism have branched: the Foundation has been feeding television channels 10, 11 and 12, Vos TV, Radio Corporación, Radio Show Café con Voz, as well as the digital platforms 100% Noticias, Artículo 66, Nicaragua Investiga, Nicaragua Actual, BacanalNica and Despacho 505, among others. While false accusations proliferate in the international press, using the concentrated structure of information power in a kind of media coup that we have documented extensively in our study "Media coups. Theory and analysis of cases in Latin America" (CIESPAL, Quito, 2016).
The most recent is the campaign on the arrests ordered by the Nicaraguan Public Prosecutor's Office of individuals who have tried to destabilize, promote sanctions and call on the United States itself, perpetrate a military invasion of the country, ignoring the fact that, as in the invasion of the Capitol, there is a National Security Law to be applied and that in some cases, despite what the press and they have wanted to sell, they were not even election candidates.
The media, however, says nothing about the funding that the United States has given to local actors in order to destabilize the country. I don't know if information professionals and guardians of freedom have assumed that whoever reveals such hidden realities to the public will suffer the same fate as Assange. The fact is that it is obvious and verifiable for any attentive analyst who does not work subsidized by the generous private foundations at the service of the empire, that the tone of the hybrid war being used, seeks to divert the channel of investigations and the application of the legal framework by reproducing limitless falsehoods via fake news, post-truths, illusory stories, appropriate framing and non-news, the true media bases of the special forces of destabilization aiming at Sandinismo.
In this upside-down world, the arrest of coup conspirators is an attack on democracy, and the overthrow of elected presidents like Evo Morales, the desirable norm for the unquestionable restoration of the system. A simple analysis of the comparative discourse on the international press coverage of the Holy Alliance, around the massacres and those responsible for the coup in Bolivia and the recent arrests in Nicaragua, would highlight the contradictions of the mercantilist media in the effort to install a reality with which to legitimize what imperialism has always really sought.
The Achilles heel revealed in this project of aggression is, as always, the red thread of history and the circulation of money, in this case the financing of foundations, NGOs and agencies that have been trojan horses, traitors acting in the shadow of the empire's plans to reverse the historical conquests of sovereignty and dignity of the people, which, we know, is more intelligent than Pentagon strategists think.
Nicaragua, even as it is besieged siege by the centers of colonial/imperial power which for various reasons, cannot accpet that countries like her defend their sovereignty, resists and moves forward and resumes the historical thread that, in her case, was marked by Sandino. The entire propaganda machine is insufficient to reverse the unbendable will of a free people, no wonder the smear and manipulation campaign in the international media intensifies. As Luis Buñuel describes in The Golden Age, the media are like a scorpion that hides in its tail the poison of attack information, and this is what we find in the case of Nicaragua. It is now time, from freedom and independence, to tell the truth of the chronicles spread by the imperial hybrid war. It is a question of dignity and human rights.
* Professor of Communication at the University of Seville, President of the Latin Union of Political Economy of Communication (ULEPICC) and member of the Network of Artists, Intellectuals and Communicators in Solidarity with Nicaragua and the FSLN. More information: www.franciscosierracaballero.net