U.S. INTERVENTION IN NICARAGUA

Anyone old enough to remember -- or savvy enough to have learned about -- the fierce battles over U.S. aid to the Contras will have to feel a queasy sense of déjà vu: the diplomatic personnel are being assembled, and the funds allocated, for new U.S. intervention in Nicaragua.

Personnel:

--Former Assistant Secretary of State for Western Hemispheric Affairs, Elliott Abrams, has been appointed to the staff of the National Security Council, a position for which he does not need Senate confirmation. Abrams has the blood of more innocent children, women, and men on his hands than any Balkan war criminal. He has also grown rich in Central American business schemes since his departure from government.

--Otto Reich, who Bush is planning to nominate for Abrams' old job, was in charge of psychological operations under Reagan and Bush, a position from which he spread disinformation to the press...

--John Negroponte, who as Ambassador to Honduras during the 80's helped run the contra war and covered up Honduran army atrocities, is Bush's shameful choice for Ambassador to the UN.... In 1988, after Nicaragua was devastated by Hurricane Joan, Negroponte was overheard to say, "We need to treat this as if it were a successful contra attack." This is a chillingly evil man.

[Excerpts from a letter (full text here) sent out by the Nicaragua Network, a long-established advocacy group opposing U.S. intervention in Nicaragua and elsewhere in Central America.]

Funds:

Greg Thome, Desk Officer for Nicaragua at the U.S. State Department, told me today that $5.6 million has been allocated for U.S. "monitoring" and other "help" in the upcoming Nicaraguan presidential elections. (There are likely similar allocations in other U.S. government departments and agencies about which we're still unaware.  And of course, as we know from experience, whatever amount of money they admit to is always multiplied several times over in covert funding.)

Even that $5.6 million is huge.  Nicaragua has a population of 4.4 million, the U.S. about 280 million.  So the $5.6 million is the equivalent of a foreign country spending over $356 million to "assist" in a U.S. presidential election.  I somehow think the powers that be in this country might object to that.  [When I pointed how to Desk Officer Thome how relatively massive this amount of money was for a country of Nicaragua's population, he said "You're right.  Fair enough."]

From the same letter as above:

All of this makes me so angry that it is difficult to even find the words to express my outrage. For more than a century, my country has killed Nicaragua's children, destroyed its economy, wiped out every social advance of the Sandinista Revolution, and raped the environment.