A Call to Conscience: The Anti-Contra War Campaign

6. The Politics of Transnational Solidarity

[ 145 ] CHAPTER 6 The Politics of Transnational Solidarity What progressive activists hailed as “solidarity” with the Nicaraguan people, the Reagan administration and its rightist allies decried as a Sandinista conspiracy. On April 2, 1985, with votes on contra aid coming up in Congress, President Reagan told Washington Post reporters that the reason his Nicaragua policy lacked public support was that “we’ve been subjected, in this country, to a very sophisticated lobbying campaign by a totalitarian government—the Sandinistas.” Three weeks later, he declared in a national radio address, “The Sandinista Communists are lobbying your senators and representatives. Together with the misguided sympathizers in this country, they’ve been running a sophisticated disinformation campaign of lies and distortion.”1 Reagan returned to this theme the following year. On March 11, 1986, he claimed that lack of public support for his Nicaragua policy was due to “a great disinformation network that is at work throughout our country.” As a result, he said, “a great many people are confused.”2 Internal memoranda indicate that President Reagan’s statements reflected a common bureaucratic mindset.3 A memorandum titled “Public Diplomacy and Central America” (May 1, 1983), written by Kate Semarad, an official with the Agency for International Development, warned of a “Soviet-orchestrated effort to influence the United States Congress, the national media, and the general public.” Soviet propaganda agencies, she wrote, were circulating “fabricated allegations of massacres” by U.S. allies in Central America. To counter these [ 146 ] CHAPTER 6 allegations, she advised, “We can and must go over the heads of our Marxist opponents directly to the American people.”4 A fifty-page report from the State Department’s Office of Public Diplomacy for Latin America and the Caribbean (S/LPD), titled “Sandinista Disinformation” (September 1, 1984), identified the ringleader of the “Sandinista disinformation campaign” as Maryknoll Father Miguel d’Escoto, the FSLN government’s minister of foreign affairs. “He spearheaded the organization of a Nicaragua solidarity network in the United States and Europe, even organizing training sessions for activists on how to present the message.” Two other Nicaraguan religious leaders, Gustavo Parajón and Sixto Ulloa, both of the Council of Protestant Churches (CEPAD), were identified as “fervent spokesmen of Sandinista propaganda and hosts to the many tour groups that visit Nicaragua.” The U.S. citizens most likely to succumb to this propaganda were those “who are continually in disagreement with all U.S. foreign policy” and “naive idealists who believe in any movement that calls itself revolutionary.”5 In an effort to find out how deep this “Sandinista propaganda” had reached into the American heartland, S/LPD underwrote a study by the Institute for the Study of the Americas (ISA) in the fall of 1984. ISA interviewed 250 U.S. organizations involved in Latin American issues, including policy-oriented research institutes,universities,interestgroups,humanitarianandhumanrightsorganizations , service organizations, and lobby groups. The ISA report, dated January 1, 1985, concluded that most of these groups maintained a liberal-left orientation: “What appears most unusual about the Latin American affairs area—in comparison to those of, say, Europe or the Soviet Union—is the heavily liberal-radical orientation of the vast majority of the entities which are active in the field. ThisisnotapoliticaljudgmentonthepartoftheISAstaff,butrathertheobvious empirical result of our research. The left of center predominance is so striking . . . that it could hardly be ignored even by the most superficial observers.”6 This objective assessment did not appear to change the thinking of S/LPD director Otto Reich, who continued to maintain that Sandinista propaganda was responsible for the lack of public support for administration policies, not only in the United States but also in Western Europe. In an S/LPD report titled “Public Diplomacy Plan for Europe” (July 29, 1985), Reich wrote, “Because the Sandinista, FMLN, and other communist propaganda supporters work so effectively in Europe, our effort to counter their activities and explain our views will have to be intensive and sustained over a long period of time.”7 Another S/LPD report (December 17, 1985) predicted, “The Sandinistas will probably The Politics of Transnational Solidarity [ 147 ] mount a campaign beginning in early January to persuade Congress to withdraw support from the Nicaraguan armed forces [contras]. The campaign will be run from the grass-roots level and directed at religious groups, the media, and special interest groups.”8 By the time Robert Kagan took charge of S/LPD in April 1986, it...