Jonathan Chait's Laughable Attempt to Take Down Bernie Sanders Over Nicaragua
Because vapidity never takes a day off, New York concern troll-at-large Jonathan Chait was at it again on Memorial Day with a piece on why, in a country that has essentially known nothing but perpetual war since World War II, Bernie Sanders’ pro-Sandinista stance in the 1980s is problematic.
Chait has three major qualms with Sanders in this arena based on Sanders’ recent interview with the New York Times, the primary one being that Sanders wasn’t sufficiently mealy-mouthed about the Nicaraguan Civil War and the American government’s attempts to overthrow Nicaragua’s socialist government and replace it with a right-wing militia. Chait writes:
During the 1980s, the Reagan administration was giving military aid to the Contras, a right-wing guerrilla insurgency attacking the Nicaraguan government. Most Democrats opposed aiding the Contras while still deploring the communist Nicaraguan government.
The Times shows that Sanders went well beyond mere opposition to funding the war. He wrote to Sandinista leaders that American news media had not “reflected fairly the goals and accomplishments of your administration.” On a visit to the country, he attended a Sandinista celebration at which the crowd chanted, “Here, there, everywhere, the Yankee will die,” and complained that American reporters ignored “the truth” about Nicaragua’s government, telling a CBS reporter, “You are worms.”
What Chait conspicuously leaves out in his history of the U.S. involvement in Nicaragua—which he frames as an American political issue without directly acknowledging that the Reagan administration committed crimes in giving aid to the Contras—is the long history of American involvement in Central and South America whenever a socialist government would come to power.
As Sanders noted in his interview with the Times last week, the 1980s were a decade removed from the CIA-backed military overthrow of Salvador Allende in Chile, two removed from the CIA-backed military coup in Brazil, and three removed from a CIA-backed military coup in Guatemala. In Nicaragua, the U.S. had backed the Somoza family dictatorships for four decades before the Carter administration changed course as the wheels were actively falling off.