The facts are clear and unambiguous. The February 1989 declaration of the Central American Presidents (Esquipulas IV) was for the most part a reflection of the triumph of the U.S. government and the media in demolishing the August 1987 accords. Thus the crucial "symmetry" provisions were eliminated so that the U.S. terror states were exempt, and Nicaraguan efforts to restore the international monitoring of Esquipulas II, eliminated under U.S. pressure in the session of January 1988, were once again rejected, allowing the U.S. and its clients full freedom to violate any agreement as they like -- confident, and rightly so, that the press would play along. But despite this capitulation to U.S. power, the agreement

firmly repeated the request contained in Numeral 5 of the Esquipulas II Accord that regional and extra-regional governments, which either openly or secretly supply aid to irregular forces [the contras] or insurrectional movements [indigenous guerrillas] in the area, immediately halt such aid, with the exception of humanitarian aid that contributes to the goals of this document,

Throughout, the media, and the Western intellectual community generally, successfully concealed what was happening before their eyes, operating much in the style of a totalitarian state, though without the excuse of fear. As regularly in the past, the cost is paid in blood and misery by the unimportant people.

The basic principle, rarely violated, is that what conflicts with the requirements of power and privilege does not exist. Therefore it is possible simultaneously to violate and to support the Esquipulas II accords, the March 1988 cease-fire, and "the Central American peace efforts" narrowed to satisfy Washington's demands in February 1989.

The purpose of the government-media campaign to undermine the peace process is not obscure. It was important to ensure that Nicaragua would remain under at least a low level of terrorist attack within and military threat at the borders, so that it could not devote its pitiful resources to the awesome and probably hopeless task of reconstruction from U.S. violence, and so that internal controls would allow U.S. commentators to bemoan the lack of freedom in the country targeted for attack. The same logic lay behind the Pentagon directives to the proxy forces (explicitly authorized by the State Department, and considered reasonable by liberal doves) to attack undefended "soft targets." The reasoning was explained by a contra defector who was so important that he had to be as rigorously avoided by the independent media as the Secretary General of the OAS: Horacio Arce, chief of contra (FDN) intelligence, whose nom de guerre was Mercenario ("mercenary") -- talk about "freedom fighters" and "democrats" is for the educated classes at home. Contras were accorded ample media attention, more than the Nicaraguan government, but Arce received a different treatment.

Arce had a good deal to say when interviewed in Mexico in late 1988 after his defection. In particular, he described his illegal training in an airforce base in the southern United States, identified by name the CIA agents who provided support for the contras under an AID cover in the U.S. Embassy in Tegucigalpa, outlined how the Honduran army provided intelligence and support for contra military activities, and reported the sale of CIA-supplied Soviet-style arms to the FMLN guerrillas in El Salvador (later offered as "proof" of Cuban and Nicaraguan arms shipments). Arce then explained: "We attack a lot of schools, health centers, and those sort of things. We have tried to make it so that the Nicaraguan government cannot provide social services for the peasants, cannot develop its project...that's the idea." Evidently, the careful U.S. training was successful in getting the basic idea across.

It was never seriously in doubt that congressional liberals and media doves would support measures of economic strangulation and low-level terror guided by these principles until Nicaragua would achieve "democracy" -- that is, until political power passed to business and landowning elites linked to the United States, who are "democrats" for this reason alone, no further questions asked.¹⁵ They can also be expected to lend at least tacit support to further Washington efforts to undermine and subvert any government that fails to place the security forces under effective U.S. control or to meet proper standards of subservience to domestic and foreign business interests.

A government turns to clandestine terror and subversion, relatively inefficient modes of coercion, when it is driven underground by its domestic enemy: the population at home. As for the Reaganite propaganda exercises, they achieved the anticipated success among educated elites. It was scarcely possible to imagine any deviation from the basic principles of the Party Line, however absurd they might be: for example, that El Salvador and Guatemala are (perhaps flawed) democracies with elected presidents, while Nicaragua under the Sandinistas is a totalitarian dictatorship that never conducted an election approaching the impressive standards of the U.S. terror states (the 1984 elections did not exist by Washington edict, faithfully honored in respectable sectors). But the propaganda was less effective, it appears, among the general population. There is reason to believe that the substantial improvement in the general cultural and moral levels set in motion in the 1960s continued to expand, setting conditions that any system of concentrated power must meet.

14 For details, see Necessary Illusions, and on the February 1989 agreements, the Managua Jesuit journal Env�o, March 1989 (published at Loyola University, New Orleans).

15 See Necessary Illusions for further details. Needless to say, this prediction in March 1989 proved accurate.