A Call to Conscience: The Anti-Contra War Campaign

Introduction

[ 1 ] Introduction Bill Gandall was eighteen years old when he first set foot on Nicaraguan soil in 1927. He was part of an expeditionary force of three thousand United States Marines sent to put down an anti-U.S. rebellion led by Augusto Sandino. Ordered by his superiors to obtain information about Sandino“byanymeanspossible,”Gandallandhisfellowmarinesroutinelyused torture on local residents to extract the requisite information. “We committed a lot of atrocities, of which I was a part,” reflected Gandall sixty years later. “I was just the same as the rest of them.” Over time, however, he said, “I began to see the fallacy of what I had been involved in. And I slowly began to change, to become a better human being because I was developing a conscience.” Gandall’s conscience led him back to Nicaragua in 1985, at the age of seventysix , to witness firsthand the Sandinista government’s reform program and the ill effects of the U.S.-sponsored Contra War. The leftist Sandinistas had come to power through a popularly supported revolution in July 1979. Soon after, former national guardsmen of the deposed Somoza government formed guerrilla units undertheguidanceofArgentinespecialforces.TheCentralIntelligenceAgency (CIA) began working with these counterrevolutionaries, or “contras,” in early 1981 and assumed full control the following year. Operating out of bases in Honduras, Costa Rica, and within Nicaragua, the contras destroyed economic assets, attacked rural villages, and killed or kidnapped civilians deemed proSandinista . The CIA also undertook military actions on its own, bombing oil [ 2 ] Introduction storage tanks and mining Nicaraguan harbors. Gandall regarded these actions as another egregious U.S. intervention and vowed to do what he could to stop it. For the next five years, he traveled across the U.S., speaking to students, community groups, and the media; joining demonstrations and civil disobedience actions; and raising funds for humanitarian aid, including eleven ambulances sent to the Sandinista government.1 With a patch over one eye and a repertoire of war stories, he was one of the more sought after speakers on the antiwar lecture circuit. His activities elicited a letter from Nicaraguan ambassador Carlos Tünnermann on December 7, 1987: “I believe you are doing such an important job informing people about what really has been going [on] in the armed American interventions and what happens to people of small countries like ours,” wrote Tünnermann. “We commend you for your courage in speaking the truth and sincerely believe that you are serving your country in doing this . . . I wish you much success.”2 Many other U.S. citizens felt the pull of conscience regarding their government ’s proxy war against Nicaragua. In April 1983, Rep. Berkley Bedell (D-IA) remarked during a House debate on U.S. aid to the contras, “If the American people could have talked with the common people of Nicaragua, whose women and children are being indiscriminately kidnapped, tortured and killed by terrorists financed by the American taxpayers, they would rise up in legitimate anger and demand that support for criminal activity be ended.”3 Episcopal Bishop Paul Moore Jr. of New York, after visiting Nicaragua in early 1984, used his Easter sermon to decry U.S. intervention as “illegal, inconsistent, ill-advised, and immoral. . . . We simply cannot go around the world shooting and killing innocent men, women, and children as part of our national policy.”4 Other critics made their views known by offering aid and comfort to “the enemy.” On July 27, 1984, a Norwegian ship docked at the port of Corinto and presented the Sandinista government with a cargo of medicines, school supplies , fertilizer, and rolls of newsprint. On board were four Nobel laureates, Adolfo Pérez Esquivel of Argentina, Betty Williams of Northern Ireland, and George Wald and Linus C. Pauling of the United States. Pauling, awarded the Nobel prize for chemistry in 1954, explained why he had come. “It’s a crime,” he said, “a great mistake and ethically very wrong for our Government to be intervening in Latin America in such a way as to cause suffering to people.”5 Unlike the U.S.-engineered coups in Guatemala (1954) and Chile (1973), the Reagan administration’s attempt to bring down the Sandinista government was not allowed to proceed quietly. A heated debate over U.S. support for the Introduction [ 3 ] Salvadoran government was already underway when the covert war against Nicaragua was revealed in the press in early 1982. According to...