Nicaragua: Varieties of bad faith | Nicaragua |Axisoflogic.com

Judgment first, fix the evidence later

Western elites and their regional allies have honed and applied that time honored methodology in Latin America with unparalleled cynicism.

Political leaders judged on the basis of virtually fact-free evidence include Lula da Silva and Dilma Rousseff in Brasil, Jorge Glas and Rafael Correa in Ecuador, Milagro Silva and now Amado Boudou in Argentina.

Governments targeted on the same basis include, most obviously, Cuba, Bolivia, Nicaragua and Venezuela. In that context, Nicaragua’s recent crisis has exposed multiple varieties of bad faith. For example, the Inter-American Commission for Human Rights “Independent Investigators” had not even started work when the IACHR presented what they called a final report to the Permanent Council of the Organization of American States. Judgment first, trial later.

IACHR Director Paulo Abrao also put that doctrine into practice on May 19th when he demonstrated complete abandonment of investigative rigor following an incident in Managua. On the basis of opposition claims, with zero corroboration, he turned an armed opposition attack on Sandinistas returning home from a peace march into a police attack on unarmed peaceful students. Plagued with errors and false assumptions, IACHR reporting relies on accounts by opposition human rights NGOs which themselves depend on opposition news media. By contrast, the IACHR has rejected information supplied by the Nicaraguan authorities and the National Assembly’s independent Truth Commission.

Nicaragua’s opposition initially claimed a massacre of peaceful students took place in mid-April. But there is no evidence at all for that claim. The facts are well established. Protests started on April 18th. Nobody was killed that day. Reports of deaths between April 19th and April 22nd vary between 17 and 23. At least half were of Sandinista supporters or bystanders caught up in opposition attacks when hundreds of well organized, extremely violent opposition protesters attacked and seriously damaged public buildings, FSLN office(s) and commercial businesses in Managua, Masaya, León, Estelí, Granada, Diriamba, Jinotepe and Chinandega.

Contradicting claims by the IACHR and its Nicaraguan opposition protégés of over 400 dead in the protests, the National Assembly’s Truth Commission has cited 270 deaths possibly related to the protests while the police and public prosecutor’s office cite 197. Around half the dead are Sandinista supporters but include 22 police officers. 400 more police officers were wounded by firearms. Local municipal authorities suffered US$112 million worth of damage. 60 schools were attacked and damaged and over 50 ambulances were attacked, many destroyed. Abundant video evidence exists of opposition extortion, torture, murders and desecration of their dead victims. These were not peaceful protests, nor did the police use disproportionate force.

The big lie of Nicaragua’s opposition is that they have been peaceful victims of government repression to which they falsely attribute all the deaths during the crisis. Western media and NGOs continue to spread that lie, omitting incontrovertible facts to the contrary. Amnesty International falsely claims the government has applied a shoot-to-kill policy, citing, for example, the deaths of 7 people on May 30th which their staff claim to have witnessed. They omit that 20 police officers suffered gunshot wounds in that same series of events. Neither they nor anyone else has reliably established who the gunmen were.

In the great majority of cases denounced by the international human rights industry, no serious investigation has been done and the facts indicate either no link to the protests or that the deaths were killings by the opposition. Echoing the falsehoods, leading intellectuals have displayed their own brand of bad faith. Noam Chomsky has repeated the repressive dictatorship lie. Leonardo Boff supports the false reporting of the opposition human rights organizations. Eric Toussaint misrepresents Nicaragua’s economic reality. For his part, Atilio Boron falsely asserts, “when the first protests occurred, the government acted in a completely disproportionate way”. The reverse is true. Like most well-known international intellectuals, neither Chomsky or Boff nor Toussaint or Boron have a clue about the social, political or economic reality in Nicaragua.

Eric Toussaint repeats the absurd argument that President Ortega’s economic policy is neoliberal when in fact Daniel Ortega’s economic policies have fundamentally democratized Nicaragua’s economy. Nicaragua has free public health care and education. Low income families receive transport and electricity subsidies. The government has greatly expanded social security coverage and dramatically increased public sector investment and employment. Continuing land title security programs have benefited well over a hundred thousand families. The government has purposefully supported expansion of cooperatives, maintained water supply as a public utility and decentralized resources to local municipal authorities. The government supports labor unions and ensures an annual increase in the minimum wage above inflation. Provided with unprecedented access to credit and technical support, Nicaragua’s popular economy enabled the country to resist three months of sabotage financed and supported by the country’s private business sector and foreign funded NGOs.

The exponential intensification in recent years of psychological warfare activity via social media has consolidated the chronic failure of international opinion to understand the reality in Nicaragua. In one sense, that trend has intensified already existing moral and intellectual bad faith among politicians, journalists and intellectuals who, like the IACHR’s Paulo Abrao, neglect the basic obligation of due diligence, ignoring facts they dislike: judgment first, fix the evidence later. It is also true that people everywhere face unprecedented pressure from the sheer inertia of the consensus around false beliefs generated both by conventional media and by the social media on which they increasingly depend for information.

The preferred Western corporate elite approach to maintaining and extending their global dominance prioritizes the deployment of “soft power” influence and persuasion rather than brute force coercion and extortion. Cory Morningstar and Forrest Palmer state “while this has been achieved for some decades now by the NGOs that comprise the non-profit industrial complex, more and more corporations, institutions and states, are now applying it to their business models. The key differences are that 1) the organizers remain invisible and 2), the populace is manipulated into believing that they control said movements.”

One of the key errors of the opposition in Nicaragua was their fatal narcissism, vying with each other in public to attack the government. Nicaragua is a small country of a little over 6 million people. Awareness is high of the false histrionics of opposition human rights organizations, the banal greed of private business leaders, the faithless demagoguery of right wing politicians and the uncompromising anti-government bias of opposition news media. By publicly claiming responsibility for the coup attempt, the opposition leaders broke the psychological warfare spell, shattering their ability to manipulate the population. The disenchantment was compounded by people’s exasperation at the severe real life difficulties and intimidation imposed by the opposition’s two-month blockade of normal economic activity and everyday life.

Defeated internally, the promoters of the coup - like their counterparts in Venezuela - have switched their offensive to international institutions, principally the Organization of American States and the US and European media. On August 9, the OAS Permanent Council tried to advance the proposal - illegal under OAS rules - for a working group on Nicaragua. Nicaragua categorically rejected the move, with Foreign Minister Denis Moncada noting, “We repeat that the attempted coup d’état against President Daniel Ortega has been defeated and Nicaragua’s people have resumed their normal daily routine and the country’s economic, social, productive and cultural activities in a context of restitution and growing security.”

Now, the US regime change offensive against Nicaragua is planning to impose brute force economic sanctions, likely to result in even deeper rejection by people in Nicaragua of the political opposition’s infinite bad faith.