Whoring For The Butcher

This photo, with me on the left, dates from happier times — at least for me.  This shot was taken in 1984 or so when the man in the middle, Father Miguel D'Escoto, was serving as foreign minister for the Nicaraguan Sandinista government (the woman on the right is one of his nieces).  Despite the rhetoric and the intervention of the Reagan administration, the Sandinistas were hardly running some sort of authoritarian dictatorship.  It was a revolutionary regime but there was a vibrant, legal opposition (in spite of its direct links to the armed contras), civil liberties were imperfect but better than most places in Central America, and there was a mixed economy with more than enough room for the private sector.

The cream of the Nicaraguan intelligentsia stood with the Sandinistas and D'Escoto — educated at Columbia — was an erudite and wise voice in the mix.

Unfortunately, he has gone off the deep end in the intervening years and has been one of the very, very few intellectuals who has remained loyal –if not servile– to Sandinista leader and national president, Daniel Ortega.  Far from being a Commie, Ortega has proved to be a puerile PRI-style demagogue. He postures as a revolutionary but governs with the extreme right wing and the ossified Catholic hierarchy while tolerating no opposition or debate in his own sclerotic party.

Ok, so it's one thing to be an aging, pathetic lap dog for a tin-pot demagogue like Ortega. It's quite another to accept the position, as he did today, to become the official UN representative for The Butcher of Tripoli.  That's right, the former Nicaraguan Foreign Minister is now repping in the UN for Muammar Gaddafi.

The Sandinista Revolution was a rather glorious event with a lot in common with the current Arab Spring. The Sandinistas were maybe a couple hundred dedicated revolutionaries who had been fighting the dynastic Somoza regime for more than a decade. But in 1979, thousands of mostly unorganized, really fed-up young people — mostly teenagers– joined the insurrection. Braving tanks and airplanes of the regime, these young men and women gave their lives to push a corrupt U.S.-backed dictatorship from power. The Sandinistas were young and fresh and while mostly socialists of some sort or another, they seemed to have learned many of the hard and bitter lessons derived from the Cuban experience.

I long ago overcame my disappointment and disgust with Ortega who today seems little more than a power-drunk hustler who kisses the ass of Chavez, Ahmadinejad and…. Gaddafi.  I thought I had done the same with D'Escoto.

But I had a pang of nausea this afternoon when I heard of D'Escoto being appointed as Libya's new UN ambassador.

Truth is, I don't give a plugged nickel for him.  Thinking about those hundreds, thousands of Nicaraguan youth, however, who gave their lives to battle Somoza and then the contras only to have their sacrifice defiled by this deluded old man, really makes me sick.