Dropping Off the Face of the Earth

Does anyone remember Nicaragua? Where U.S.-backed rebels that former President Reagan likened to our Founding Fathers were fighting Communism? “Our side” won, but the average Nicaraguan is no better off, and U.S. indifference is at least partly to blame.

It’s a sad commentary on the brief attention span of many North Americans that Nicaragua has dropped from the agenda in this country. That is what prompted President Violeta Barrios de Chamorro to come to the United States this week on her first state visit since being elected in early 1990--to remind President Bush and Congress that her country is still desperate for U.S. aid.

But does anyone remember Chamorro? She’s the widow of a martyred newspaper editor whose 1978 assassination set off a popular revolution that overthrew the long Somoza dictatorship. That revolution was, in turn, commandeered by leftist ideologues known as Sandinistas. Reagan, in turn, tried to overthrow them using right-wing rebels known as Contras as his surrogate fighters.

The Contra war was a dirty little episode that ended only after elections were held and Chamorro surprised everyone--probably including herself--by defeating Sandinista President Daniel Ortega.

As far as most North Americans were concerned, that was the end of it. The good guys had won and we could focus our attention on weightier matters in the Persian Gulf and elsewhere. But the real world doesn’t allow for such neat endings.

As Chamorro repeatedly emphasized during her visit, things are still very bad in Nicaragua and will only get worse unless the United States is as generous as it can be. The Bush Administration has requested more than $530 million in foreign aid to Nicaragua, but about $300 million of it is still in the bureaucratic pipeline between Washington and Managua. At the very least, Bush should order that the aid be speeded up.

But even after that tidy bundle gets to Managua, Chamorro’s going to need more help. Because Nicaragua’s economy, weak and underdeveloped to begin with, has to recover not just from 11 years of civil war and a decade of Sandinista mismanagement, but more than 40 years of Somocista corruption before that. And this country has a moral obligation to help, not just because it sponsored the Contra war, but because Washington tolerated the Somozas far longer than it should have.

If talk about moral obligations sounds idealistic in a time of recession and deficits, then ponder a possibility that Chamorro didn’t mention publicly, but which is much on her mind: If things don’t improve measurably in Nicaragua, voters could get angry enough to reelect Ortega, or elect some other Sandinista, as president. Wouldn’t that be an ironic outcome? But in the real-life world of Nicaraguan politics, it’s all too possible.