By William Grigsby Vado – Feb 10, 2022
Let us begin with the decision taken by the National Assembly at the request of the Ministry of the Interior to cancel the legal status of a handful of non-governmental organizations which in practice are fronts for European and North American interference in Nicaragua’s internal affairs. I believe that the logic that must be understood in this type of decision is the logic of the defense of the power of the Nicaraguan people, the defense of revolutionary power. In other words, in this logic we must understand that these types of decisions are not capricious, they are not excessive…. They are fair.
The Yankees do not stop working to overthrow the revolution, to overthrow the people of Nicaragua. The Europeans don’t stop working in that direction either; they are the mouse’s tail, and they are the gringos’ bootlickers. So they [agents of the US in Nicaragua] say to Sullivan [US ambassador in Nicaragua], they keep asking him: “What are we going to do now?” We have to be clear: they keep asking him for their tasks; “Yes, sir, what are we going to do now?” So the Yankee aggression against Nicaragua has not rested, I repeat, they do not rest in the logic of aggression.
Neither will we ever rest in defending the revolution.
So in that same logic they created an ideological and organizational apparatus, a powerful one that they have been working on for many years.
It did not start when Daniel assumed the presidency in 2007, no, it began much earlier. They have been creating and financing … garage universities that have no academic quality but are businesses; they serve for money laundering and also to identify and recruit people, which is no novelty in Nicaragua. ….
RELATED CONTENT: It is not Nicaragua That is ‘Isolated’; it’s the US and EU
The main source of recruitment [of US agents] is the universities or centers of higher education [in the US]…. They recruit people who have athletic abilities, who have above-average intelligence and have a rebellious attitude; that’s how they recruit and train them. It is the style of forming the security apparatuses of the United States, which are many. They are not only the FBI and the CIA. And it is not a bunch of disguised people who look for these [future] intelligence assets, to keep the people of the United States under control. And in some cases it is to prepare agents for aggression against other peoples.
So that style is reproduced in Nicaragua and not from recent times but since Somoza’s time. I could mention several well-known personalities, some of them already deceased, who were CIA agents, and who never even revealed their names. And even the CIA had some of its agents here killed because they had decided to leave the agency and join the effort of the people of Nicaragua and that is why they sent people to kill them. I could quickly mention four names of people killed between 1979 and 1981, sent to be killed by the CIA. So let’s not believe that this is a fantastic invention; no, this is reality, pure reality. There was [also] a famous CIA agent who was in the upper echelons of the Sandinista People’s Army and did a lot of damage at the time… and like him, there were many others.
What I want to say is that the CIA does not rest, US imperialism does not rest. That is why the counter intelligence that the Nicaraguan Army and the National Police do to avoid penetration in their ranks, for example, is so important.
The US has helped create this organizational and ideological apparatus in the universities, in centers of higher education with the purpose of recruiting individuals to serve their interests and also their ideological purpose. Remember that the revolutionary struggle is ultimately an ideological struggle because at the same time that we are triumphing in the battle against poverty we must also defeat the idea of imperialism. It always ends up being a cultural battle, an ideological battle … Remember Marxism [which says] that the ideological apparatus is made up of the educational system, the media and the … churches. And now I would add the social networks. These ideological structures have been very much penetrated by the American interests. Who is unaware, for example, that the United States had financed and consolidated the ideological apparatus of the Diocese of Estelí and the Universidad Católica del Trópico Seco (UCATSE) – which just lost its legal status, formerly called Francisco Luis Espinoza School of Agriculture and Livestock. It was donated to the diocese by the revolution; it was personally owned by Bishop Abelardo Mata and he has all the people close to him studying or working there. And later [Mata] used other instruments of the diocese for the formation of youth cadres who in turn reproduced the Yankee discourse [and participated in the 2018 attempted coup].
We should not lose sight of these things, that is, the conspiracy of US imperialism. They have never ceased, they do not cease in the war against Nicaragua. We cannot just be waiting for them to hit us again. And they were again preparing conditions for another coup.
We cannot be naïve about what is going on. A guy who is a lawyer and who was once a Sandinista, took over one of the private universities. And he had started talking to the gringos years ago; he was already working as a petty cashier for them [money laundering]. I had information about that, a student there passed it on to me about three years ago…. Here on the radio two professors came to tell me how that character did it, how he laundered the money, how he traveled to the United States and brought money or hired people to travel disguised as merchants and brought money, and instructions, of course. Then, about 4 or 6 months ago, a colleague passed on more information to us. Imagine, that now this character is crying, and furious [because his university lost its legal status]. The guy is a criminal. I won’t even get started on how they have swindled thousands of young men and women, forcing them to pay thousands of dollars for a degree. The poor kids spend five, ten years to get their degree, swindled. And then they tell them that they have been trained in a certain profession and when they go out to the labor market the poor kids do not know even half of what they need to know for that degree they have supposedly obtained; they were swindled.
Years ago there were 53 universities here in the country. Anybody could go to the National Assembly, before 2007, and say “Here I come – I want you to approve this university.” “How much are you going to give me [would say an Assembly member], OK then.” And suddenly a classroom would appear in a garage of a house with a sign for such and such university … and just as it appeared, it disappeared.
How many youth paid and had their money stolen? But these universities fulfilled three objectives: First – a money-making business, second, money laundering, and third, to work for the strategy of US aggression. I believe that we cannot abstain from this struggle because it is for the defense of revolutionary power, the defense of the people of Nicaragua.
The main thing now with these universities [that have lost their legal status] is that no student will be left in the lurch. They can continue their classes normally; they will receive their degrees. The National Council of Universities (CNU) will be responsible until they are assigned to another university.
The band of outlaws, of the Somocista movement, of the Somocista renovation movement (MRS), came out with a communiqué [against the action of ending the legal status of some universities – see News Briefs]. When have they ever defended the students? What they did [in 2018] was to destroy the UPOLI [a private university that was used and abused during the coup attempt and is one that recently lost its legal status]. Don’t you remember what they did with the UPOLI in the Somocista coup of 2018? They destroyed it! And it was people from inside there; from the Somocismo outlaw gang [MRS]. And they have wanted to go back to the old ways plotting another coup there and also in other places.
This is the big mistake imperialism is making, as well as all its hired assassins here. They think that we are stupid, and we are anything but that. As we were saying the other day – we are peaceful but we are not defenseless. Not only are we not defenseless, we know how to defend ourselves and win.
They believe that we might be careless and, if we are careless, “we’ll hit them again.” That is their logic. They are crazy. Aggression itself is madness. What is the crime of President Daniel Ortega and the people of Nicaragua? What is the crime of the Sandinista Front? To benefit the people of Nicaragua.
Yesterday (Feb. 3), for example, two other convictions were issued [of those recently tried for treason, conspiracy, money laundering, etc.].
Then come imbeciles like Gabriel Boric, who unfortunately was elected president of Chile, talking nonsense. What moral authority has Boric, when he negotiated, negotiated, the betrayal of the popular movement that had put Piñera against the wall. Not only Piñera, but the Chilean political system; and he negotiates the surrender behind the back of this movement, because he thought he might lose? In Chile there are thousands of political prisoners at the moment, whose crime was to walk in the demonstrations, who were not involved in any conspiracy, who did not want to overthrow Piñera, who were not armed, who did not murder people, who did not rape women, who did not destroy state property [as opposed to what the violent opposition did in Nicaragua in 2018]. No. They are in prison for opposing the system.
What are the Argentines going to say to me? They have Milagros Sala in prison for about six years for the crime of organizing and fighting.
What are the Mexicans going to tell me; they have thousands of political prisoners. I was reading about one case – 12 years in prison and he has not been prosecuted. There are people there imprisoned on the basis of torture, demonstrated by different local and international institutions. Yesterday they threw one in jail – a secretary of public security [minister] of a state…
What authority does that little king have [in Spain]? Or [Prime Minister] Pedro Sanchez? What moral authority do they have to talk about prisons, trials and so on? When they have prosecuted singers and composers simply for composing songs against the king.
What are they going to talk to me about? What freedom are they going to talk to me about? Just now they threw a lot of workers in jail for the strike in Andalucía. And didn’t the fighters for the independence of Catalonia spend years in jail? And their only crime was to organize a referendum. That was their crime. They were finally released, but their record wasn’t erased.
What is the United States going to tell me with thousands of political prisoners….
And Julian Assange? What is he? Isn’t he a global political prisoner? He is the political prisoner of the world capitalist system. Why is he in prison? Why is he being held hostage? For the crime of revealing the secrets of imperialism. This is his great crime.
Why did Edward Snowden have to flee to Russia? He was persecuted for revealing the barbarities, the atrocities that imperialism carries out. What moral authority are these people going to have?
What are Salvadorans going to tell me? What is Bukele going to tell me? He has women in jail for having abortions! They have women in jail who had miscarriages.
[From Sin Fronteras, 9 Feb. 2022: There are now protests in four Canadian states with truck drivers blocking the national capital and the Ambassador Bridge, the busiest commercial bridge with the United States. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau sent a tweet in which he affirmed that “Canadians have the right to protest, to disagree with their government and to make their voices heard. We will always protect that right. But let’s be clear: you do not have the right to block our economy, or our democracy, or the daily lives of our fellow citizens. It has to stop.” The paradox is that when between April and July 2018 in Nicaragua, U.S.-funded terrorists ravaged Nicaragua with blockades, assassinations, burnings of public buildings, mass kidnappings, among other criminal rampages, Trudeau did not hesitate to offer his support to the tranqueros (violent road blockers).]
Here it is proven: those being tried are traitors to the homeland. They went to the United States to ask the Yankees to attack Nicaragua; to cut off loans from international financial organizations; to take [Nicaragua] out of CAFTA, to ask for money to carry out a military adventure. That is treason.
This is proven, documented. I ask myself, what would any of these presidents do if the same thing happened to them, what would they do if what happened to us happened to them? What would they do? What would the Spanish king and the slimy Pedro Sanchez do, if the Catalans, for example, went to say to Russia, to ask for help to achieve independence – give us arms, give us money; and Putin gives it to them. What would they do? It’s funny, not to say tragic.
U.S. imperialism must understand once and for all, and so must their hitmen in Europe, their servile governments, their European servants, the Boris Johnson, Pedro Sanchez, and all the rest. They must understand that there is no way they can overthrow us by force, there is no way. And there is no way they will beat us in elections. There is no way. Because the people of Nicaragua continue to rule. And they have enough dignity and conscience to continue voting for the Sandinista Front to defend their revolutionary project. Understand this once and for all.
William Grigsby is a Nicaraguan journalist, analyst and historian.
Featured image: “The CIA does not rest, US imperialism does not rest.”
