Unlearning Dementia : Questions Nicaragua's Opposition Should Answer

By Tortilla con Sal – March 14, 2020

The most fundamental Western false belief, reproduced on a global industrial scale, is that North America and Europe are culturally and morally superior to the rest of the world. Anyone actively defending victims of US and allied aggression, from Palestine and Iran to Cuba and Venezuela, will be familiar with the disturbing symptoms of that superiority complex. Its insane prejudice permeates practically all North American and European information and news media. Its false premises render hopelessly flawed practically any report addressing international affairs emanating from Western governmental, non-governmental and multilateral institutions of all kinds.

Over the last twenty years the progressive decline of North American and European power and influence in the world has accelerated the original false beliefs to unprecedented levels of irrationality. Most recently, the kinds of demented behavior deployed by Western political and economic leaders and their media servants promote:

Endless insistence on absurd presuppositions like “the US and the European Union promote freedom, democracy and human rights” when self-evidently the US and the EU promote their own greed and self-interest;
Hypocritical support for questionable US and European allies – for example nazi sympathizers in Ukraine, mass murdering terrorist proxies in Ivory Coast, Libya, and Syria, or violent right wing gangs in Venezuela, Nicaragua and Bolivia;
Subservient reliance on methodologically flawed reporting by US and EU government and corporate co-opted institutions and NGOs;
Uncritical acceptance of dishonest and inaccurate reports from local partisan pro-Western media outlets;
Systematic distortion or outright omission of news and information sources challenging those false reports.

In Nicaragua’s case, the supporters of those who promoted the failed 2018 coup attempt against Nicaragua’s Sandinista government continue to present violent Nicaraguan opposition actions as ‘peaceful protests’. They attribute practically all the deaths during the 2018 crisis to the police or to Sandinista supporters. While evidence for some of the serious incidents that occurred is confused, opposition activists were very clearly responsible for a great many very serious crimes.

They and their supporters carefully avoid addressing that fact, assisted by the complicity of practically all Western news and information media. Instead, Nicaragua’s opposition and their supporters evade taking responsibility for their atrocities, relying on the now standard demented behavior applied to cover up crimes by Western proxies elsewhere around the world. A brief review of incidents that took place in Nicaragua during April-July 2018, shows indisputable witness testimony confirming that Nicaragua’s opposition committed criminal atrocities. As often as not, this witness testimony is frequently confirmed by self-incriminating videos published by opposition activists themselves on social media.

Opposition supporters never address this reality because they are incapable of engaging rational criticism based on generally accepted rules of evidence. If they accept, as they should, that crimes of murder, kidnapping and torture were indeed committed by opposition activists, then their depiction of the 2018 opposition protests as peaceful falls apart. They have the additional dilemma of looking bad if they fail to condemn the heinous crimes committed by opposition activists. A corollary to that dilemma is that acknowledging those crimes renders untenable the claim that the perpetrators arrested for them were ‘political prisoners’.

Here are ten incidents in which the involvement of Nicaragua’s opposition in violent crimes is practically irrefutable.

The burning of the historic town halls in Masaya and in Granada on May 12 and June 4, of the prosecutor’s office in Masaya on May 28, and of houses of Sandinista officials in Masaya.
The burning down of Nueva Radio Ya with 22 radio workers inside it on May 28 in Managua (condemned by the Committee to Protect Journalists).
The trapping by roadblocks of over 400 large trucks in a 7km stretch of the Pan-American highway south of Diriamba for more than one month from June 5, depriving hundreds of drivers of food and water, making extortion demands and ignoring international demands for their release.
The kidnapping and attempted murder of student leader Leonel Morales, a member of the National Dialogue for the government authorities, by the gangs occupying the UPOLI university in Managua on June 13.
The hijacking of two fuel tankers in Jinotepe on June 19, which were then parked next to the main police station, followed by attempts to set off a massive explosion by firing mortars and lobbing Molotov cocktails at the tankers.
The torture of Sander Bonilla in a Catholic church in León on June 21, in the presence of both a local Catholic priest and a protestant pastor.
The killing of Bismarck Martinez, a Managua municipal worker, kidnapped on his way to visit relatives in Jinotepe on June 29 and brutally tortured and murdered by opposition criminals.
The sniper fire that killed police officers Faber López Vivas and Hilario de Jesús Ortiz Zavala and injured one other officer in Jinotepe on July 8.
The massacre in the small town of Morrito on July 12 in which four police officers and a teacher were killed, and the subsequent kidnapping and abuse of nine police officers.
The torture and murder of unarmed and off-duty police officer Gabriel de Jesús Vado Ruíz on July 14-15 in Masaya, after he was kidnapped at an opposition roadblock.

Many other similarly egregious opposition atrocities and crimes were detailed in the independent report Dismissing the Truth, published in October 2018.

A broader deconstruction of opposition falsehoods and misrepresentations is available in the comprehensive analysis of the Nicaraguan opposition’s failed coup attempt, “Live from Nicaragua: Insurrection or coup?”.

Genuinely independent news and information media or non governmental organizations would address these crimes and acknowledge, firstly, the responsibility of Nicaragua’s opposition for committing them and, secondly, their own complicity in covering them up. But the demented irrationality currently dominating public debate in North America and Europe makes that outcome extremely unlikely.

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