Dear Nica Times:
I read with interest your April 16 online article, “Is Obama a Sandinista? We’ll find out Sunday.” I think the answer to the question you posed was more than answered to the satisfaction of freedomloving peoples everywhere.
That Daniel Ortega paraded around the Summit of the Americas in Trinidad and Tobago portraying himself as a human rights advocate shows what utter contempt he has both for the concept itself and for history.
Consider the following, for example: Under Ortega, 65 Miskito and Sumo indigenous communities were burnt to the ground and 70,000 Miskitos and Sumos -one half the population – were forcibly rounded up into state and external refugee camps, with thousands subject to arbitrary arrest, jailing and torture. Soviet helicopter gunships and Sandinista elite troops attacked indigenous communities whose supposed “crime” was seeking to maintain their traditional ways of life.
The Port of Spain diatribe showed that Danielito can never measure up to the status of his patron, Fidel Castro, being able to muster only a 50 minute diatribe, as compared to the Cuban’s legendary gasbag pyrotechnics that lasted for many hours.
When asked about Ortega’s speech, President Obama deadpanned: “It was 50 minutes long. That’s what I thought.”
While the American leader may not have had all the sordid history at his fingertips, he nevertheless deflated Sr. Ortega using just nine – count ‘em, nine – words.
Martin Edwin Anderson
Churchton, Maryland, USA
