How Washington and soft power NGOs manipulated Nicaragua’s death toll to drive regime change and sanctions
Did
Nicaragua’s Sandinista government really kill 300+ peaceful
protesters? A forensic analysis of the death toll exposes the claim
as a dangerous lie.
by
Max Blumenthal
Part
1
A
detailed study of the death toll that has been recorded in Nicaragua
since a violent campaign to remove President Daniel Ortega and his
Sandinista government shows that at least as many Sandinista
supporters were killed as opposition members. The study,
“Monopolizing Death,” demonstrates how partisan local NGOs
conflated all deaths that occurred since April, including accidents
and the murders of Sandinistas, with killings by government forces.
Washington has seized on the bogus death count to drive the case for
sanctions and intensify pressure for regime change.
The
manipulated death toll was the centerpiece of a July 25 harangue by
Republican Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen on the House floor. While
drumming up support for a bipartisan resolution condemning Nicaraguan
President Daniel Ortega for supposedly ordering the massacre of
demonstrators, Ros-Lehtinen declared, “Mr. Speaker, four hundred
and fifty! That is how many Nicaraguans have been killed by the
Ortega regime and its thugs since April of this year.”
The
congresswoman’s portrayal of a dictatorial regime gunning down
peaceful protesters like helpless quails in a canned hunt was
designed to generate pressure for an attack on the Nicaraguan economy
in the form of sanctions packages like the Nica Act. Her narrative
was reinforced by Vice President Mike Pence, who condemned
Nicaragua’s government for “350+ dead at the hands of the
regime,” and by Ken Roth, the long-serving executive director
of Human Rights Watch, who also suggested that Ortega had personally
ordered the killing of “300 demonstrators against his corrupt
and repressive rule.”
Throughout
the past two weeks, I have been in Nicaragua interviewing scores of
victims of the US-backed Nicaraguan opposition. I have met police
officials who saw their colleagues gunned down by well armed elements
while being ordered to stay in their stations, Sandinista union
leaders whose homes were burned down, and average citizens who were
kidnapped at tranque roadblocks and pulled out of their homes to be
beaten and tortured, sometimes with the assent of Catholic priests.
It was clear to me that the Nicaraguan opposition was anything
peaceful in its bid for regime change.
And it
was also clear that many Sandinistas had been killed since the chaos
began in April. The opposition’s victims include Gabriel de Jesus
Vado, a police officer from Jinotepe, who was kidnapped, dragged from
a moving car, and burned alive on video at the tranque in Monimbo
this month, a neighborhood in Masaya that the opposition had
violently occupied for weeks.
But
according to the logic employed by Congress and the White House,
which holds the government responsible for every single death that
occurred between April and June in Nicaragua, the killing of Vado and
as many as twenty other members of Nicaragua’s national police
never took place — nor did the deaths of anyone killed by
opposition paramilitaries. This is what you have to believe if you
blame the Sandinista government for one hundred percent of the
deaths.
The
manipulation of the death toll by Congress and Western soft power
NGOs is exposed in meticulous detail “Monopolizing Death.”
The
author of this forensic study, independent Nicaraguan researcher
Enrique Hendrix, describes his analysis as “evidence of a
campaign that, in the absence of a just cause, uses the death of
every citizen as a motive to manipulate the emotions of the
population in order to counterpose ‘the government’ against ‘the
people.'”
Hendrix
told me that he initiated his study, “Monopolizing Death,” two
weeks after the anti-Sandinista protests began. “All the
opposition media channels started claiming all these deaths were
taking place [at the hands of government forces], and I was having a
lot of uncertainties,” he said. “So I started researching
the lists of the human rights organizations and really trying to
figure out if these death counts consisted only of students, as
opposition media was reporting.”
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