Why Nicaragua Vanished: A Story of Reporters and Revolutionaries (review)

In this book, Robert Leiken presents a comprehensive study of print and television coverage of politics and society in Nicaragua from Somoza rule in the 1960s through the national elections of February 1990. The book attempts to explain why the public reader and viewer in the United States understood so little about a country in which U.S. administrations, multinational corporations, and private citizens were involved intimately throughout the twentieth century. Instead of making another offering on the once high-pitched political debate over U.S. policy in Central America, Leiken directs his intellectual sword at elite journalists with advanced university degrees and extensive international experience. These privileged individuals, with the advantages of good connections and substantial budgets, appointed themselves the interpreters of events and the investigators of crisis and conflict.

Early on, Leiken quotes Shirley Christian, a reporter for the New York Times in the 1980s and author on the Nicaraguan revolution, on her view that Nicaragua was like a small town where everybody was acquainted or related; but then asserts that the nuances of Nicaraguan culture escaped U.S. correspondents. He attributes the transmission of “stereotypes” northward to the emergence of a dominant liberal culture in journalism after the Vietnam War. Left-leaning correspondents were ideologically opposed to the Somoza dynasty and spellbound by the Sandinista struggle for national liberation. Invoking Samuel Huntington’s theory of modernization, leftist sympathies for mythological nationalist revolutionaries in Latin America led to the underdevelopment of the media as an autonomous institution and had a concomitant negative impact on the availability of accurate information to a modern society. Leiken’s research methods combine a content analysis of major newspapers, magazines, and television news programs with a survey of selected journalists who responded to questions about their intellectual influences; views about the Third World, particularly Vietnam and Central America; and political dispositions when they started covering Nicaragua.

Chastising those foolish enough to believe that the Sandinistas were not committed to the establishment of a communist dictatorship, Leiken casts a wide net at “left-liberal” intellectuals and academics who romanticized guerrilla movements inspired by the Cuban revolution. A polemical tone against the likes of Noam Chomsky and Thomas Walker reverberates throughout the book. Scholarship and commentary with Marxist interpretations of the imperialist and capitalist interests of the United States prevented the recognition of obvious signs of defeat looming on the electoral horizon for the Sandinista government in 1990. Leiken avoids addressing the motivations of U.S. involvement in Central America, the Cold War implications of Sandinista relations with the Soviet Union, and the promotion of revolution in the region; yet he argues that U.S. government agencies, including the Central Intelligence Agency, and the interests of big business had nothing to do with the distorted attitudes and elliptical information emanating from sources in Nicaragua and flowing to the ignorant U.S. consumer.

It should therefore come as no surprise to discover an unfavorable attitude in the reporting on the responses of the Carter and Reagan administrations during the insurrectionary period of the late 1970s and the civil war of the 1980s. A perplexing passage on page 22 scolds journalists for taking issue with the Carter administration’s attempt to mediate a deteriorating political situation in late 1978 by proposing the creation of a provisional government without Sandinista representation. Although he cites interviews with and books by former State Department officials, Leiken offers no insight into the uncertainty of this episode leading to the fall of the autocracy. The reader is left with the facile conclusion that journalists decided on behalf of the U.S. public that the FSLN was “good” for Nicaragua and that the U.S. government was trying to prevent desirable regime change. The significance of Central America in the sad and violent history of the Cold War, however, diminishes the importance of “left-liberal” media, given the still-untold and incomplete stories of the fragmentation of...