Stephen Sefton, Tortilla con Sal, July 25th 2019
Among the most recent examples of Western media’s endless offensive against independent countries around the world resisting US and allied extortion and intimidation is a 2-part propaganda report on Nicaragua in the Irish Times entitled “A Revolution Gone Wrong”. Like so many similar reports since the failed coup attempt in Nicaragua last year, it appears just as Nicaragua’s foreign-owned political opposition continue losing yet more ground both internationally and domestically. Internationally, the US and its allies failed completely in a recent attempt to expel Nicaragua from the Organization of American States. Domestically, this year’s 40th anniversary of the Sandinista Revolution saw a massive outpouring of support for the country’s Sandinista government led by President Daniel Ortega, highlighting the opposition’s abysmal levels of support.
The Irish Times report by Michael McCaughan spins this categorical political failure of Nicaragua’s opposition as if it were the result of ruthless government repression. The propaganda techniques deployed are standard Western neocolonial issue : selective use of testimony, omission of key facts, smearing opponents, exclusion of vital context. McCaughan sets the scene for his visit to the city of Masaya with the bizarre claim that his contacts feared to give their names. He then openly interviewed an opposition supporter whose husband died during the fighting in Masaya. Likewise, opposition media like Channel 10, Radio Corporación or La Prensa and El Nuevo Diario routinely publish vehement criticism of the government both by individuals and organizations while at the same time denouncing government censorship.
McCaughan’s report slavishly follows opposition media propaganda, insisting that Nicaragua’s government is repressive and murdered hundreds of peaceful protesters last year. In fact, the very first deaths on April 19th were a police officer, a supermarket worker and a Sandinista municipal worker, all killed by violent opposition activists. That same weekend on Friday April 20th and Saturday April 21st, armed opposition activists burned down the famous Masaya craft market, they attacked the family of Masaya’s mayor, subsequently burning down the house of the mayor’s brother and attacking the homes of Sandinista officials and local Sandinista supporters as well as government offices.
From early May to mid June, the police were ordered to remain in their barracks as a precondition for peace talks. Masaya resident, writer John Perry, explains what happened: “For six weeks in May and June last year, Masaya and some other cities were held captive by armed opposition groups. The Masaya police station was under siege, with several police officers killed or injured in the nightly attacks. While the police were kept off the streets, violent mobs burned the town hall, tourist market, main secondary school and several houses belonging to government supporters. Businesses were looted. Public services were brought to a halt and schools closed. Many people couldn’t even get to the market to buy food because of armed groups controlling road blocks.”
McCaughan’s report is a very useful case study for a student of propaganda. For example, the original propaganda claim last April was of a student massacre. The authorities of the private Central American University circulated the claim that police had shot dead one of their students. The claim inflamed social media, massively manipulated in a well coordinated psychological warfare assault typical of recent US driven regime change offensives. The claim was a lie. The facts of the first days of the extremely violent initial opposition assault are well established. In particular widespread destruction by opposition attacks in Masaya and León, but also clearly coordinated violent attacks in the capital Managua, and also on the Caribbean Coast in Bluefields, as well as in Pacific urban centres like Chinandega, Estelí, Diriamba and Jinotepe.
McCaughan’s new falsehood is “Elderly citizens protesting against pension cuts were beaten off the streets”. There were no pension cuts. Nicaragua’s Senior Citizen’s Union supported the social security reforms because it gave them the same rights to health care as active workers in exchange for a 5% levy on their pensions. Among other false propaganda methods, opposition media used an image of an elderly woman attacked by police in Colombia to inflame opinion here in Nicaragua. Protesters on Wednesday April 18th faced similar policing to that used by police in Ireland or France against provocative anti-government protests, but the Irish Times reporting on Nicaragua applies the usual neocolonial double standard appropriate to its origins as the newspaper of Ireland’s Protestant Ascendancy. (For the same reason the Irish Times fails to report the many thousands of political prisoners held in France following the “gilets jaunes” protests there.)
McCaughan portrays a local priest in Masaya as a hero of democratic non-violent protest. In fact, the priest concerned, along with many fellow priests and many Catholic bishops, allowed their churches and cathedrals to serve as organizational bases for armed groups, as detention and torture centers holding kidnapped Sandinistas and as logistical centers provided storage and transport for violent opposition gangs. This pattern of abuse of churches in Masaya, Diriamba, León and elsewhere as well as Catholic schools like St. Joseph’s College in Jinotepe is irrefutably documented with witness testimony and video published by opposition activists themselves. McCaughan ignores overwhelming evidence of Catholic Church support for the coup , because it contradicts his central arguments.
Among numerous horrific crimes committed by the violent armed opposition activists McCaughan seeks to whitewash, the murder of police officer Gabriel de Jesus Vado was particularly sadistic. McCaughan and the Irish Times seem to share the opinion of their US psy-warfare colleague Tim Rogers who wrote on social media about these violent opposition activists : “I love these guys”. Among many other terrible crimes, “these guys” kidnapped Vado, beat and tortured him for a couple of days then threw him, bound, in front of a barricade, set him on fire and then hurled heavy paving stones at him as he burned. A Catholic priest was recorded encouraging them but urging them not to post the video. Inside Nicaragua all of this, among many other horrific opposition crimes, is very well known. But phony journalists like McCaughan and Western propaganda outlets like the Irish Times make sure this information is suppressed outside Nicaragua.
As John Perry goes on to note: “McCaughan mentions none of these incidents. He says that when the police were eventually able to liberate the city on July 17 last, they did so “shooting anyone who stood in their way”. This is completely false: massive force was needed because of the weaponry held by the protesters, but it was used sparingly and only six people died, including a police officer shot in the head. Their restraint was remarkable given that only three days earlier, Gabriel Vado Ruíz, an off-duty policeman, had been kidnapped at one of the road blocks, tortured, killed and his body burnt.”
None of this important context bothers McCaughan, who repeats almost every main opposition propaganda falsehood in his two part report. For example, no medical personnel were dismissed “for treating the wounded” as McCaughan claims. These interviews and videos give a truer idea of what happened in Nicaragua’s public health system during and after the failed opposition coup attempt. Another common opposition lie McCaughan repeats is that out of the hundreds of opposition activists imprisoned “most” were young students. In fact only a tiny minority of those detained were students because student support for the protests fell dramatically away after the first couple of weeks, frightened off by the coup promoters’ violent tactics.
One interesting contradìction the lazy Irish Times editors failed to catch is McCaughan’s reporting of events in Managua’s Polytechnic University during the failed coup attempt. The reason the armed opposition activists occupied the UPOLI is that they were safe there because Nicaragua’s law forbids police to enter university precincts. McCaughan implicitly acknowledges this, writing “Police and paramilitaries patrolled outside, detaining anyone caught leaving the campus.” Leaving aside the fact that during the period in question the police were confined to their barracks, no repressive dictatorship respects the integrity of university precincts. But the Irish Times wants its readers to believe that not just the police but also supposedly lawless, murderous paramilitaries did precisely that.
On the UPOLI too, McCaughan ignores damning witness testimony and video material published by opposition activists. Student union leaders Veronica Gutierrez and Leonel Morales supported the protesters during the first three days of the coup attempt in April. When Morales changed his mind once he realized what was really happening, opposition activists kidnapped him from his home. He was taken to the UPOLI by the armed gangs that controlled it. Beaten and tortured he was then shot and left for dead in the street. Despite being badly wounded, Morales managed to escape and fell into a drainage canal from which local people rescued him and sent him to hospital. None of this fits the Irish Times propaganda requirements, so its readers are denied this vital information.
McCaughan reports the findings of the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights Interdisciplinary Group of Independent Experts (GIEI) and notes the government rejected them. McCaughan fails to report that the IACHR had already presented to the Organization of American States Permanent Council in early June what they called their final report, also rejected by the Nicaraguan government, even before the GIEI had started work. Nor does McCaughan report that the IACHR mission that arrived in May hardly investigated anything. They depended entirely on information they received from opposition aligned media and human rights groups, all funded by the US and allied country network of non-profits. The same applies to the UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights whose report was meticulously critiqued by the Nicaraguan Foreign Ministry. The IACHR representative Paulo Abrau was so biased in favor of Nicaragua’s opposition, he was recorded addressing armed opposition protesters saying “We support you!”
Among other opposition disinformation McCaughan recyles the phony claim that 60,000 Nicaraguans fled to Costa Rica. But in August 2018 the Costa Rican authorities themselves stated that there was no crisis of people fleeing from Nicaragua. The number of Nicaraguans living and working in Costa Rica is well over 500,000. The economic slump during and after the failed coup attempt did indeed definitely provoke a spike in economic migration to Costa Rica. The Costa Rican authorities mentioned a figure of around 25,000 for June and July 2018, a figure which certainly did include many hundreds fleeing potential arrest for the crimes they committed during the failed coup attempt which collapsed in late June and early July. But most of the Nicaraguans who migrated at that time were looking for work, given the economic slump deliberately provoked by the opposition, from which Nicaragua has quickly recovered, another fact McCaughan gets wrong.
Much of the organized private business sector initially supported the coup and later attempted on several occasions to stage a one day national lock-out trying to bring the country to a standstill. McCaughan reports without foundation that they did so. In fact they never did. They always failed because the organized private business sector in Nicaragua only accounts for around 20% of the country’s employment. 70% of Nicaragua’s economy consists of small and medium sized businesses, agricultural smallholders, cooperatives and informal economy workers. Around another 10% work in the public sector. This popular economy was crucial in defeating the opposition’s efforts to destroy Nicaragua’s economic life and enabled the country to return to normal from the failed coup attempt much faster than most people thought possible.
The remainder of McCaughan’s psy-warfare report recycles false opposition claims that have long been categorically debunked. He reports the murder of Angel Gahona without noting that in the very same attack that killed Gahona, a senior police officer was also seriously wounded. His Irish Times report omits that crucial fact, allowing McCaughan to make the ridiculous claim that Gahona’s daily news program was “forced off the air” by government censors during a period when video shows Gahona out reporting the protests in Bluefields in the company of Nicaraguan police at the time he was murdered. Furthermore, among other assignments, Gahona not infrequently reported for the Channel 6 government television channel.
Like most anti-Sandinista writers, McCaughan focuses on human rights concerns repeating similar falsehoods and inaccuracies as those in the case of Angel Gahona. The Nicaraguan authorities, their media and independent researchers have shown both opposition claims and lazy, inaccurate, biased reporting by organizations like the IACHR, the UN Human Rights High Commissioner and Amnesty International, among others, to be categorically untrue. But a real understanding of what happened in Nicaragua requires a much broader perspective, including a good grasp of Nicaragua’s history and economy and the perennial role of the US government. No one serious about understanding what happened in Nicaragua last year should waste time on Michael McCaughan and the Irish Times. For a definitive account of what happened in Nicaragua in 2018, download free “Live from Nicaragua: Uprising or Coup?” here in English and here in Spanish.