It
might seem cavalier for an academically credentialed anthropologist
to assert political influence on the population he is supposed to be
studying; however, Goette-Luciak’s activities fit within a long
tradition.
by
Max Blumenthal
Part
4 - The best ex-Sandinistas the U.S. could buy
Goette-Luciak
appears to have inherited his affinity for the MRS party from his
father, Ilja Luciak, an academic who focused his research on Central
America and served for several years as the chair of political
science at Virginia Tech.
In an
interview with an obscure travel website called the Edge of
Adventure, Goette-Luciak credited his father with inspiring his
interest in Nicaragua. He described him as a “Marxist” who was
inspired by the Sandinista revolution that unfolded during the
1980’s. But according to his academic CV, Luciak’s work on
Nicaragua has been backed by European foundations, the European
Commission, and USAID.
In his
book After the Revolution: Gender and Democracy in Nicaragua, El
Salvador, and Guatemala, Luciak wrote sympathetically about the
female former Sandinistas who helped lead the MRS party’s crusade
against Ortega.
His son,
Goette-Luciak, channeled the purist sensibility of the MRS in his
interview with Edge of Adventure: “As a leftist, I was intrigued
by where the Sandinista revolution — which to me was a very utopian
idealistic revolution and a great example of potential social change
for Latin America — where it had gone awry.”
The MRS
was established to expose and exacerbate the supposed failings of the
Sandinista front. Founded in 1994 by ex-Vice President Sergio Ramirez
and a collection of ex-FSLN militants — most of them from more
affluent, educated backgrounds than common Sandinistas — the
party’s disruptive agenda made it a natural candidate for
assistance from Washington.
In 2006,
the MRS and the U.S. government plotted to prevent Ortega’s
election. A September 6, 2006 U.S. embassy cable — revealingly
entitled, “MRS: We Want To Bring Ortega Down” — laid out some
of those plans. Authored by U.S. Ambassador Paul Trivelli, the cable
described a meeting between the ambassador and Israel Lewites, the
nephew of MRS presidential candidate Herty Lewites, who had just died
from a heart attack.
Trivelli
confirmed direct U.S. government support for the MRS election
campaign, noting that 30 percent of its election observers had been
trained by the International Republican Institute, a U.S.-funded,
Republican Party-run soft-power organization overseen by then-Sen.
John McCain.
“The
MRS intends to have at least two people per voting table […] on
election day, but they need funds to feed and transport the fiscales
and other helpers,” Trivelli stated.
In all,
the U.S. government contributed a whopping $12 million in 2006
towards “election technical assistance, outreach, and observation”
in Nicaragua’s 2006 election. In other words, it spent two dollars
for every Nicaraguan citizen to defeat Ortega.
A
separate leaked diplomatic cable detailed a meeting during that
election campaign between MRS co-founder Dora Maria Tellez and the
ambassador, Trivelli. Foreshadowing the coup that unfolded this year,
Tellez told U.S. embassy officials that “the MRS will warn the
FSLN that if it steals the election, the MRS will ‘take to the
streets,’ opining that this is the ‘only kind of message Ortega
understands.'”
The MRS
ultimately failed to prevent Ortega’s victory and wound up reaching
out to the U.S. again as its domestic support base collapsed. In
2016, the MRS’s Vijil joined a delegation to lobby in Washington
for the Nica Act, a bill proposing crushing sanctions on her country.
On
Capitol Hill, Vigil posed alongside a cast of U.S.-backed activists
and Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, a neoconservative Cuban-American
Republican who was the main author of the sanctions bill.
Two
years later, MRS activists were at the forefront of the coup attempt
that sought Ortega’s removal. Several participants in the protests
this April who later turned against the opposition described
witnessing MRS leaders providing truck loads of supplies for
opposition forces occupying university campuses.
While
the MRS performed its historic role as the knife in the FSLN’s
back, it supplied Western media with a cast of English-speaking
voices demanding regime change in the name of supposedly progressive
values. Its most prominent voice was Gioconda Belli, an affluent
U.S.-based poet and professional former Sandinista, who took to
mainstream U.S. outlets to paint Ortega as a murderous dictator, as
she has done for years. (Belli’s brother, Humberto, is a Catholic
priest affiliated with the far-right Opus Dei cult and a client of
the militantly anti-abortion American tycoon Tom Monaghan).
Then
there was Goette-Luciak, who functioned on the ground as the MRS
party’s publicist in photo-journalistic attire.
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