Charles W. Sasser

I escorted a reporter for TIME Magazine south to El Camino de Los Muertos (“The Road of The Dead”) that marked the border between Honduras and the communist government of Daniel Ortega’s Nicaragua. Exploded trucks and other battle debris littered a stretch of road where Honduran troops had been killed or wounded in attacks by Nicaragua’s Sandinistas.

American politicians during the Jimmy Carter administration swarmed to Nicaragua like lovesick suitors to woo the dictator. The Carter administration provided Nicaragua millions of dollars in economic assistance to help the communist government succeed.

Liberation Theology was the going philosophy throughout Latin America, spread by nuns, priests, and Jesuits who claimed Jesus advocated the overthrow of the capitalist systems and their replacement by loving communism. The official head of the Human Rights Office in Latin America was an American nun who called herself Sister Mary Hartman.

“You don’t understand the poor,” she chided. “I think the U.S. is evil. I am afraid to go back home very often because I fear an outbreak of fascism in the streets.”

The U.S. Agency for International Development (AID) supported a Jesuit named Peter Marchetti to help the Nicaraguan people. A proponent of Marxism, Marchetti participated in anti-U.S. demonstrations while operating on the American taxpayers’ dime.

Even while Sandinistas were slaughtering campesinos, Democrat Senator Tom Harkin of Iowa and Massachusetts Senator John Kerry proclaimed Danny Boy Ortega to be a “misunderstood democrat” rather than a “Marxist autocrat.”

The Democratic leadership in the U.S. House of Representatives dispatched a “Dear Commandant” letter to Ortega commending his efforts to install “democracy” and pledging House support.

The latest tin-pot dictators are always up for show-and-tell in Hollywood and in the multimillion-dollar mansions of limousine liberals and defenders of the “proletariat.” They threw lush poolside fund raisers for Ortega while back in Nicaragua “the people” were starving their butts off.

American champions of the “proletariat” rushed into Managua wearing compassion and condescension like cheap aftershave or perfume. They even flew in to donate blood for commies injured by anti-communist campesinos fighting back. A Miskito Indian described them: “Sandalistas: They come down in their buses and chant ‘We are Sandinistas too!’ The Sandinistas rouse everybody to ‘Come on, get up, the gringos are here for a little solidarity.’”

Among those who came south to celebrate was then-Mayor of Burlington, Vermont, now Senator Bernie Sanders, an avowed Communist, and a current candidate for the presidency of the U.S. He showed up at an anti-American rally where he lauded Ortega’s mass arrests of critics and the shutting down of opposition media.

“It makes sense to me,” he commented.

Hours after Ronald Reagan won the presidency and supplanted Carter, Carter received that year’s Nobel Peace Prize. Reagan, an ardent anti-communist, was not well received.

Present one night at the Intercontinental Hotel in Managua, a favorite watering hole for leftist American journalists and politicians, were American University Professor William Leogrande, an “expert commentator” for CBN News, and Robert Borosage, president of the Institute for Policy Studies. They explained to Nicaraguan foreign minister Alejandro Bendena how he should play things in order to keep the American media in the communist corner.

All the Sandinistas had to do to survive, they assured him, was to outlast the Reagan administration, the implication being that another Jimmy Carter was bound to come along.

Charles W. Sasser is author of over 60 books, his most recent being Crushing The Collective: The Last Chance To Keep America Free and Self-Governing, which delves deeper into socialism and communism and its encroachment into the United States. Available at bookstores and Amazon.com.