As mayor of Burlington, Vermont, Bernie Sanders once viewed his municipal challenges as comparable to those faced by the Marxist Nicaraguan government, which he took up positively.
In 1989, the future Vermont senator and 2020 Democrat told the Burlington Free Press he lamented the difficulties he faced after overthrowing the city’s Democratic grip on local politics.
“To say (it was) like Ronald Reagan having Jimmy Carter’s Cabinet would be too soft,” said Sanders. “It would be more like having Daniel Ortega having the Contras as his advisers.”
Sanders complained about how the Burlington Board of Aldermen (still under the control of the Democratic Party) would block many of his appointments.
Sanders, elected to the House in 1990 and the Senate in 2006, has long linked himself to far-left figures. He and his wife Jane took their honeymoon to the Soviet Union in 1988.
Ortega, the current president of Nicaragua, holds a contentious place in American history. When Sanders first took office in Burlington, Ortega was leading the Sandinistas in a bloody Marxist revolution against the ruling Nicaraguan regime.
The United States, concerned about the presence of a communist government with ties to the Soviet Union in Central America, began helping supply arms to a right-wing paramilitary force, the Contras.
Both sides were accused of war crimes during the subsequent struggle for power, with reports of the Sandinistas massacring civilians and routinely violating the civil rights of Nicaraguans.
Ortega has since been accused of fixing subsequent elections to maintain his rule over the country. In 2018, massive uprisings against his leadership spread throughout the country for nearly two years. Some international groups say that over 500 people were killed during the period.
Sanders’s relationship with Ortega is well documented. In 1985, Sanders hosted Ortega for a pro-Sandinista rally in Burlington. He would later travel to Nicaragua and praise the new government there.
“After many years of economic and political domination, Nicaragua is determined not to be a banana republic anymore, and it’s free to make its own decisions,” Sanders told a Nicaraguan newspaper in 1985.
The unearthing of Sanders’s 1989 comments is the latest in a series that highlights potential liabilities for him in a general election.
Earlier this month, the Washington Examiner reported on statements Sanders made in 1974 when he compared the presence of 351 Jamaican guest workers in the state to slaves.
In 1972, he offered praise to segregationist George Wallace, although he criticized the southern politician in separate writings. That same year, he told students at a school in Vermont that he didn’t “mind people calling me a communist.”
Throughout his 1981-1989 tenure as the mayor of Burlington, Sanders maintained relationships with various radical left-wing groups and figures.
In both the 1980 and 1984 presidential elections, Sanders bucked the Democratic Party and endorsed Socialist Workers Party candidates Andrew Pulley and Mel Mason. Their platforms included promises to dismantle the entire U.S. military and nationalize most industries.
Sanders would later be investigated by the FBI over his ties to the SWP, although charges were never brought.
Earlier this week, the Washington Post reported that in 1983, Soviet Embassy First Secretary Vadim Kuznetsov congratulated Sanders in a letter for his reelection as mayor of Burlington. Kuznetsov, a leader of the Soviets’ spy outfit, had just attended a conference in Sanders’s city a few days earlier.
