His attitudes toward Cuba are generating Monday’s headlines, but Bernie Sanders’s record on another communist authoritarian state, Nicaragua, might be even more problematic for the 2020 Democratic presidential front-runner.
Where Sanders supported the Castro regime with words, he spent the 1980s providing active logistical and moral support to the Sandinista regime in Nicaragua. Sanders and his supporters present this effort as simply humanitarian in nature — as support to an impoverished nation rising from the ashes of an authoritarian dictatorship.
But that’s not the true story.
Consider what happened in 1986, for example, when Sanders, then the mayor of Burlington, Vermont, orchestrated a 500-ton aid delivery to the Sandinistas and established a sister-town relationship with the Caribbean coastal city of Puerto Cabezas.
It was a notable choice for Sanders’s favor, in that Puerto Cabezas was then a stronghold for the Sandinistas’ war on the native Miskito native peoples living nearby. That Sandinista campaign was a vintage communist authoritarian war for domination of land and eradication of individual freedoms. It was both merciless and deliberate. Defending the regime’s atrocities, one Sandinista officer based in Puerto Cabezas told the New York Times, “They are enemies of the people.”
Words straight from the lips of Lenin, Stalin, and Mao. Words which evidently didn’t concern Sanders. As Philip Wegmann reports, Sanders’s association with this ethnic cleansing is unlikely to go away.
It is worth noting the Nicaraguan counterpoint here. After all, the Reagan administration’s support for the Contras was an equal moral outrage to Sanders’s support for the Sandinistas. The Contras showed a terrible disdain for human rights. But the moral difference, as applied to Sanders, is that the Sandinistas were allies of America’s preeminent Soviet adversary. Moreover, it is Sanders, not Reagan, who is presently running to become president of the United States.
The Democratic front-runner remained an ardent Sandinista supporter throughout the 1980s — even as the regime used a six-year state of emergency to restrict the free press, apply KGB tactics against political prisoners, and dominate civil society under the hammer of its communist rule.
So, why didn’t Sanders alter his attitudes in the face of these injustices?
The only answer is ideology. Sanders has always been a true believer in the global socialist cause. Whether enacted via authoritarianism or democratic means, Sanders hasn’t really seemed to mind. When the gaze of public attention hasn’t shined so tightly on Sanders as it does now, the senator has been happy not simply to defend regimes such as that of Venezuela, but to offer them as examples for America to emulate.
Nor has Sanders shown many qualms about the ideological reeducation required to make young people think that socialism is utopia, even when it brings child starvation to nations blessed with the largest oil reserves on Earth.
Interviewed in July 1986, Sanders explained why educating American children about the Sandinistas’ glory wasn’t enough. They had to know why communist glory is particularly glorious. “When you go into the schools, that is where you start,” he said. “It’s important for young people to understand the history of Nicaragua and what’s going on there. But do you know what is even more important? For them to understand that they’re supposed to understand, that is what is important for them to understand. That is the first thing.”
As Mao Zedong observed, “Our educational policy must enable everyone who receives an education to develop morally, intellectually, and physically, and become a worker with both socialist consciousness and culture.”
