On Wed, 10 Feb 1999, Louis Proyect wrote: > The simple reality was that the Sandinistas could not find a solution to > Nicaragua's economic problems within Nicaragua itself. Facing a US trade > embargo, it grew to depend heavily on outside assistance. The story of > outside assistance was not one to bolster revolutionary morale. From July > 1979 through December 1987, the nation received almost $6 billion in > credits and outright donations. The US pressured other Western nations to > cut back aid, but Soviet aid increased steadily from 1979 to 1987 until it > amounted to $3.3 billion. Soviet aid was at a high point in 1985 when it > gave Nicaragua $1 billion in assistance, but it dropped by 60% from 1985 to > 1986, and declined further in 1987. Yes, this is absolutely true. Nicaragua's only hope amidst a vicious world-system was to use its limited export earnings for a domestic industrialization drive, a la Hong Kong or South Korea; but of course you can't do this when your biggest market is mining your harbors and blowing up rural hospitals and schools. The Pax Americana's crimes in Central America are mind-boggling: 70,000 murdered by US-trained death squads in El Salvador, hundreds of thousands exterminated in Guatemala with US connivance, the rape of Panama, the strangulation of Nicaragua, the criminal blockade of Cuba, and of course a brutish neoliberalism pretty much everywhere. Compare that record to the EU's nascent reign in Eastern Europe, where the EIB has written off part of their debt and is beginning to finance an economic recovery. Instead of just mourning the past, we should also be fighting like hell for the future: the USA owes Central America war reparations, just like the Axis powers after WW II. Today Pinochet, tomorrow the entire US national security state! -- Dennis
