La Prensa: Censorship, Followed by Oblivion
"Without a free press, there is no freedom." This motto of La Prensa newspaper has been a powerful force in Nicaragua for 60 years. But it came to an end when President Daniel Ortega shut it down within hours after the U.S. House of Representatives passed a $100 million Contra aid package on June 26, 1986.
Just eight years ago the mysterious assassination of the founder of La Prensa, Pedro Joaquin Chamorro, a powerful and outspoken critic of Anastasio Somoza, inflamed the opposition and sparked the revolution that over-threw the dictator on July 19, 1979.
Recently, Xavier Reyes Alba, associate editor of La Barricada, the official organ of the Sandinista Party said: "La Prensa is an institution that has to exist - it plays a dominant role in the revolution."
Interviewed in Costa Rica, exiled Pedro Joaquin Chamorro, Jr., the son of the founding editor, said: "I finally left Nicaragua in 1984 when it became impossible to please the government censors. I was not printing a newspaper; every issue had big empty spaces where the news should have been. Even public information such as food shortages were censored. People confused La Prensa's existence with 'freedom of the press.’I finally became so ashamed that I left."
Chamorro reminisced, "Once I wrote an article entitled 'We are all Contras.' Contras means 'against,' and the real Contras are the Sandinistas - they are against all freedom of speech, movement, the church, their neighbors, and many more things."
The newspaper struggled on, enduring threats and violence, but had to shut its doors on June 26, 1986.
Textbook Terror
On a recent trip to Nicaragua, a group of Americans were shown text books that are being used in government-run schools.
Ministry of Education officials said, "These are special texts which are more expressive of our realities." I pored over twenty texts, and I found them to be radical and subversive: Math books used AK-47s, grenades, and tanks; spelling books used the words 'Blood', 'yanqui', 'hate', 'kill', and 'strike'. All were printed in East Berlin. The primer textbooks are used to educate Nicaraguan children.
Children educated in this new system have very recently formed gangs and killed four teachers because they hadn't been given good grades. They continue to threaten other teachers and have attacked buses. These events appear to be sanctioned by the new government.
While in Managua, I visited friends who trusted me enough this time to tell me how they felt about the repression by the Sandinistas. They also complained that the country could no longer produce food for its people, but said, "We dare not complain, to anyone, or we could be seriously punished." One relative recounted this incident, "One day I passed a group of slow-moving cars when one of them pulled out after me and machine-gunned my car, barely missing
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