The New York Review of Books

To the Editors:

I hope Mr. Leiken’s later articles on Nicaragua are more objective and less tendentious than his first [NYR, December 5, 1985]. To take just one example, his allegation that the voting figures at the 1984 elections there were rigged, his case seems in essence to be that they always were in pre-revolutionary Nicaragua, that they were in El Salvador, and that La Prensa says so. The first two points are irrelevant and to rest a case on La Prensa is the equivalent of basing a serious judgement on the word of one of the most disreputable of Rupert Murdoch’s papers—the Sun in this country and you have equivalents in the United States.

Mr. Leiken disagrees with my observations of the Nicaraguan election. With what facts given in my report does he disagree? My case is simply that, imperfect in some ways as the Nicaraguan election of 1984 was, it was better in every measurable way than the one in El Salvador during the same year which I also observed and on which I published a report. Therefore if President Duarte was validly elected, as the US government and I both think he was, then President Ortega was too.

Lord Chitnis

House of Lords

London, England

To the Editors:

As a member of the all-party mission from the Human Rights Group of the British Parliament¹ which observed the 1984 Nicaraguan elections, and as by now a fairly frequent traveller in Nicaragua and from end to end of Central America, may I comment on Robert Leiken’s article “The Nicaraguan Tangle”?

Like most other qualified observers, we found some things wrong with the election campaign—disorders, censorship—but not to any remarkable extent by world, as opposed to United States and North European, standards. (Compare India, generally regarded as a great democracy.) We found nothing wrong with the election law, or with the polling and count, which we observed closely and in many places. We travelled unaccompanied, and chose our own routes. The law was devised by Swedish experts and the count was carried out with the help of telecommunications equipment given by France.

Mr. Leiken gives a vague impression that there must have been election fraud, and that the results were pre-established, but also notes that the final results came only after nine days. Provisional results came at once, and the final ones were not significantly different. If there was fraud, many hundreds of officials must have conspired to procure it, and the Electoral Council (Chairman, a devoutly Christian former Rector of the University) must have been part of the conspiracy. From personal knowledge, I do not believe they were. Nor do I believe that in Nicaragua, hardly a tightlipped country, several hundred officials have been keeping secrecy for over a year.

Too much of the argument abroad is still buzzing round the question of Arturo Cruz. Democrats in all continents should bear in mind that he was one candidate out of eight who might have stood for the presidency. Sure, he was an important one; but some of the others were no slouches either. After weeks and months of hesitating the revolutionary government decided not, as Cruz had demanded, to postpone the elections beyond the fifth year after the revolution, which was what they had promised at the time. So Cruz chose not to stand. The other seven stood, three of them to the right of the Sandinistas, three to the left. The three parties on the right got a third of the votes cast, and a third of the seats on the Assembly. From that position the right-wing parties which decided to get their hands dirty have been conducting a spirited opposition and achieving (so far) a full input into the constitution-making machinery. It is a pity this is so little reported in the United States and Western Europe.

Mr. Leiken did not either report the campaign of the Nicaraguan Communist Party which, hammer, sickle, red star, picture of Lenin, nationalization-of-the-means-of-production-distribution-and-exchange and all, fought an excellent campaign against the Sandinistas, who promised a continuation of the mixed economy.

I do not write as a friend of Sandinism, since it is a nationalist, anti-United States revolutionary socialism, and so cannot mean very much to a West European. I write as a friend of the rights of small peoples to have home-made revolutions, do good things and mistaken ones, and hold elections as best they can and in their own way without having war carried into their country by either superpower.

The United States Administration judges Nicaragua by the standards of North America and Western Europe, not, as would be fair, by the standards of Honduras, Salvador, and Guatemala. People by and large do not disappear in Nicaragua, and are not tortured, and the only guerrillas there are those financed by the United States.

Lord Kennet

House of Lords

London, England

To the Editors:

In assessing the Nicaraguan election of 1984, Robert Leiken asserts that it falls within the tradition of staged or “demonstration” elections in Latin America, citing our book Demonstration Elections in support of this argument. We believe that Leiken misunderstands and misapplies the concept of a demonstration election. We described it as a relatively new technique of foreign intervention, in which elections are “organized and staged by a foreign power primarily to pacify a restive home population.” We contrasted these elections—such as those in the Dominican Republic in 1966, Vietnam in 1967, and El Salvador in 1982—to earlier staged elections, particularly in Latin America, where the United States manipulated the outcomes for a different reason: not to pacify a home population alarmed over a brutal US intervention and the prospects of an imperial war, but simply to choose an appropriate agent for US policies or to peacefully resolve conflicts among Latin American elites. The transition from merely staged to demonstration elections reflects a major change in the requisites of imperial management, a problem eventually encoded as the “Victnam Syndrome.”

Clearly the Nicaraguan election was not a demonstration election in the above sense. But it does fit into a demonstration elections framework in a manner that Leiken fails to recognize. That is, with the United States attempting to destabilize and overthrow the Nicaraguan government, it has tried diligently to create a negative image of the election in order to discredit it and to prevent the election symbolism from interfering with US plans. Just as the US campaign and use of symbols made El Salvador’s elections in 1982 and 1984 genuine “steps toward democracy,” so the intense US effort to denigrate Nicaragua’s election succeeded in making the latter a “disappointment” if not an electoral farce. For the sponsored election, imperial power legitimized; for the disapproved state, it demonstrated democratic failure and illegitimacy.

A demonstration elections framework is also useful for analyzing the role of Arturo Cruz. It is difficult to believe that Cruz ever intended to run, given his certain defeat and the plans of his major supporters. His defeat was assured by both a lack of mass base and, even more definitively, by his ties to the contras and the Reagan administration. Whatever Cruz’s personal wishes, interviews with his backers and managers that appeared in the US press before the election indicate that neither the US administration nor the Coordinadora had any intention that he would actually run. For example, Philip Taubman wrote in The New York Times that “the Reagan administration, while publicly criticizing the Nov. 4 elections in Nicaragua as ‘a sham,’ has privately argued against the participation of the leading opposition candidate [Cruz] for fear his involvement would legitimate the electoral process, according to some senior Administration officials” (October 21, 1984). Taubman was told by several officials of the Reagan administration that, unbeknownst to Cruz, the CIA “had worked with some of Mr. Cruz’s supporters to insure that they would object to any potential agreement for his participation in the election.” Chief among these was the business organization COSEP, one of the major constituents of the Coordinadora. Taubman was also told by Reagan administration officials that the leaders of COSEP had met with CIA officials throughout the spring and summer of 1984. Furthermore, Taubman was told by members of the Coordinadora that objections by the leaders of COSEP “played a major role in preventing Mr. Cruz from reaching an agreement with the Sandinistas” over election arrangements.

Cruz’s function in the election was to help create the appropriate negative image. By holding forth the possibility of running, he was able to obtain steady publicity that allowed him and his backers to feature the imperfections of the Nicaraguan electoral process. Given their limited media access and power, the Sandinistas could not disregard Cruz even though they knew that he was acting a role in a political theater intended to discredit them. Thus the negotiations and their inevitable failure provided an effective vehicle for demonstrating Sandinista intransigence and electoral failure. By contrast, the planned and total exclusion of the mass-based FDR from the Salvadoran elections never interfered with the positive view of those elections as reasonable expressions of the popular will.

Frank Brodhead
Edward S. Herman

Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

To the Editors:

I’m writing to you in reference to a letter published in The New York Review of Books, May 8, 1986, signed by Marvin José Corrales, which contains numerous distortions concerning political activity inside Nicaragua. As a Nicaraguan writer, the editor, between 1979 and 1984, of Nicaráuac, the cultural magazine of the Sandinista government, who was in Managua during the election campaign, I feel the statements in his letter should be corrected.

By agreement of the Sandinista leaders, the purpose of the 1984 elections in Nicaragua was to institutionalize the revolution and at no time to allow their own power to be jeopardized. This intention was repeated time and again by all the leaders of the revolution, from the most arrogant, like Bayardo Arce, to the supposedly most pragmatic, like Daniel Ortega.

In this context, in which the Sandinista Front could count on all the resources of the state, the FSLN granted to six political groups a certain amount of money in order to carry out their election campaigns, including limited use of the media (which were constantly clogged with government propaganda). Among these groups, the only one with the true identity of an opposition party with a political strategy was the Independent Liberal party, whose leader was Virgilio Godoy.

Realizing that the Independent Liberal party might be able to capitalize on the enormous popular discontent and, above all, boycott the elections, the FSLN seduced and promoted a PLI vice-presidential candidate in order to protect themselves in the event that Godoy withdrew. When Godoy did withdraw, after it became obvious that the Sandinistas did not intend to grant even the most minimal political concessions, this reserve candidate was now ready to participate fully in the election game.