For days, the 2013 mayoral campaign has keyed in on Democrat Bill de Blasio’s 1988 trip to Nicaragua, and his defense of it now.
Seizing on that news, Republican Joe Lhota now says his opponent’s campaign is “directly out of the Marxist playbook. Now we know why.”
That may be pushing the point, but the truth about the Sandinistas — and about what even an idealist fresh out of NYU should have known back then — should give pause to New Yorkers, especially given de Blasio’s disturbing views 25 intervening years.
After initially fleeing (literally) from reporters asking about the trip, he has since doubled down on his defense of it, saying that “United States policies towards Central America in the 1980s were wrong,” and noting that the group he worked with was founded by Jesuits and was helping “needy people in Central America” along with “leaders in the Catholic Church,” much of it “done by nuns.”
Three decades later, de Blasio either hasn’t learned — or won’t admit — the nature of what he was a part of in his youth.
By the 1980s, when 26-year-old de Blasio went to Nicaragua to work alongside the Sandinistas, they were a known quantity. As Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times reporter Shirley Christian wrote in 1985, the regime “intended to establish a Leninist system from the day they marched into Managua. . . Their goal was to assure themselves the means to control nearly every aspect of Nicaraguan life, from beans and rice to religion.”
The “Catholic Church” de Blasio says he worked with? Not quite so simple. The “liberation theology” offshoot’s leaders had in fact been shunned by the regular church. Its leaders were ensconced in the regime-created Popular Church that the cardinal and regular church leaders regarded as a Marxist front group. (De Blasio on Friday said he was “deeply influenced by liberation theology, which I learned a lot about in the years I spent in Central America.”)
At other points, de Blasio stresses that his work was humanitarian and apolitical, delivering medical supplies and clothing to the needy. But he told The Times that he had worked with the Sandinistas to “create a more fair and inclusive world” — a statement that makes it clear that he still accepts the false claims of the Marxist ruling junta.
In fact, the ruling Sandinista National Front was rationing food, spending its money to build up the single largest military force in Central America, and developing a Soviet-style nomenklatura that made itself rich by claiming ownership of every significant and profitable part of the economy, from factories to nightclubs, all taken from their rightful owners.
The regime’s all-pervasive secret police, trained by the East German STASI, were based in a building with the ominous sign: “Sentinel of the People’s Happiness.”
Right around when de Blasio arrived, the regime began the process of crushing dissent, regularly sending organized mobs (called turbas ) to threaten and beat opponents and protestors. The Sandinistas often closed the reform paper La Prensa, which had led the opposition to the long-standing dictator Anastasio Somoza. When it was allowed to publish, they censored its copy.
If de Blasio’s Nicaragua fling were an isolated one, it would be easier to forgive and forget. But as late as 1990, de Blasio took his honeymoon in Fidel Castro’s Cuba (illegally, by travelling there through Canada in defiance of the ban on travel that then existed) — the most repressive Communist regime in our hemisphere, and hardly an example of the “democratic socialism” he once wrote that he believed in.
Even today, after the world has learned the harsh truth about the goals and results of Leninist governments, de Blasio says that he thinks that the Sandinistas “in their own humble way, in this small country” were “trying to figure out what would work better.”
If only Ed Koch was still with us, he might help de Blasio wise up.
In 1989, I traveled with Koch to Nicaragua as part of the New York City Mission to Central America, assembled to try to help bring peace to the then war-torn region. As we stood one night in the midst of a mass rally and heard Daniel Ortega give a rabble-rousing speech while floodlights danced over the thousands trucked in by the regime, Koch turned and said: “This reminds me of nothing more than the Nazis’ famous Nuremberg rally.”
Koch knew from his trip that the Sandinistas were inheritors of the totalitarian mentality, and that the people of Nicaragua despised them.
It’s a lesson de Blasio still hasn’t learned.
Radosh, an Adjunct Fellow at the Hudson Institute and columnist for PJ Media, is a Professor Emeritus of History at CUNY.
