Nicaragua and the revelations of WikiLeaks

by Jorge Capelán, July 25th 2011

The diplomatic cables of WikiLeaks are not held in high esteem in Nicaragua - and this, not only among the Sandinistas. The reason is simple: they present as facts the assertions of two former ambassadors, Paul Trivelli y Robert Callahan, who have become well known for their blatant stances on the country's internal affairs and their vociferously coarse tone - a reason why people tend to take their words as quaint character traits rather than as sources of classified information about US policy towards Nicaragua.

Both former ambassadors are fanatic right-wingers and disciples of the infamous John Dimitri Negroponte. Callahan is a member of the hard Republican Right, connoisseur of Nicaraguan reality and a former collaborator of the Contras during the war carried out by his government against Nicaragua in the 1980's. Like Callahan, Trivelli also went through the US embassy in Tegucigalpa during that war and shares the same narrow world view.

The rhetoric of Callahan's and Trivelli's reports is indistinguishable from the deliberate propaganda, often violently rude and insulting, used by the main local newspapers La Prensa and El Nuevo Diario - the latter even more so from the moment the Sandinista Front for National Liberation (FSLN) began to look like  the probable winner of the elections of November, 2006.

If the unwary researcher visits the Nicaragua section of the site WL Central, an independent portal that publishes articles on the content of WikiLeaks' cables, he or she will discover the following "revelations":

- That the social programs of the Sandinista government, among them the "Zero Hunger Program" for low income rural families and the "Love Program" for street children, "are dealt with in the midst of budget deficits" under the rationale of "cut the budget and keep it secret".

- That "the leftist party in power Sandinista Front for National Liberation (FSLN), whose revolution ousted in 1979 Anastasio Somoza's dictatorship, promised to establish social justice in Nicaragua, but ended up being a corrupt, authoritarian movement that supressed the opposition and accepted drug trafficking money".

- That "Nicaragua isn't a democracy, since all the State powers are controlled by two persons, namely the President, Daniel Ortega, and his opponent and former president Arnoldo Alemán. Neither of them are serving time because there is no independent justice in the Central American country".

That is exactly what La Prensa and El Nueva Diario repeat every day.

A real fact well known to almost everyone in Nicaragua but ignored by - especially Western - consumers of WikiLeaks' diplomatic cables, is that both newspapers are controlled by members of the aristocratic Chamorro family, which exerts monopolistic control over the country's media: La Prensa (for over 89 years, today run by Jaime Chamorro Cardenal), El Nuevo Diario (for over 30 years ago whose current director is Francisco Chamorro), as well as the magazines Magazine and Confidencial - all of them rabidly anti-Sandinista.

The level of dissociation of those outlets from the reality of the country is such that, if one day "WikiLeaks" (or any of the formats in which it is presented in to the public, such as the web site WL Central) produced a cable that "proved" the kinship ties of president Daniel Ortega with Satan himself, the (mostly Catholic) Nicaraguan public would just frown and remark with a sardonic grin : "Just what you'd expect from those people at La Prensa and El Nuevo Diario!"

There are, broadly speaking, two Nicaraguas: one the observer is able to experience by being in the place and comparing it with the country's situation, say, five, ten or fifteen years beforehand, and a virtual one fed to consumers of global media. Regardless of different ideological, philosophical and political points of view, the real Nicaragua that emerges from direct contact with the country, and that direct reality's virtual counterpart, manufactured by multinational "news" monopolies, are two parallel and radically diverging universes.

In the real Nicaragua, no one of sound mind can fail to acknowledge that the country has changed a lot - to say the least - during the last five years. Irrefutable facts corroborate this development. A traveller who visited the country back in 2005 or 2006 - the last years of the previous neo-liberal administrations - and came back in 2010 or 2011, would notice a series of important changes within the general setting of a poor and agro-exporting country.

- Five or six years ago the traveller would have found children begging at every corner of the major cities, today he or she will find hardly any.

- Back in 2005 or 2006, he or she would find a public transportation system in ruins based on the purchase of scrap buses from countries less poor than Nicaragua, today, in 2011, he or she will notice that those old conveyances, veritable Molotov cocktails on wheels, are being replaced by brand new ones up to today's technological standards.

- Five or six years ago, a trip to the countryside meant a journey along potholed roads, today he or she will discover that the main roads of Nicaragua have been newly paved, and that in many places that before weren't connected to roads, new roads and highways have been built.

- Five or six years ago, the traveller couldn't have failed to notice the constant, daily disruptions of basic services such as running water and electricity, today he or she will find that those are much less frequent.

- If the traveller ventured farther into the rural areas, he or she will notice that many communities that before lacked such services today have access to them.

- In places where five or six years ago there were only miserable shacks, the traveller today will notice how, here and there, those shacks are gradually being replaced by newly built, good quality houses.

And so on...

Moreover, all these empirical observations are endorsed by a plethora of international organizations with few suspicions of being under the influence of the Sandinistas, from the UN Food and Agriculture Organization, which has repeatedly praised the efforts of the government to ensure the population's access to food, to the World Health Organization, which has praised the Sandinistas for their health programs, to UNESCO, which validated the Sandinista government's feat of eradicating illiteracy in a few years, to the International Monetary Fund, which year after year subjects the government to exhaustive examinations in order to confirm the proper use of its resources, and also to businesses leaving less stable countries in order to invest in Nicaragua.

One can agree or not with president Daniel Ortega or the Sandinista Front, but one fact of reality is that the country today functions better than it ever did under the previous neo-liberal administrations.

No fairly informed observer of US foreign policy should ignore that it is made up of both a public agenda and a corresponding hidden agenda. This is a feature of the behavior of most countries' governments in today’s world, but it is undeniably a particular trademark of US government behavior with respect to other nations. If that were not the case, the release of the diplomatic cables would not be a matter of such intense interest.

For example, in May 2009, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton made an apparently gratuitous remark  that Iran was building "the biggest embassy in Managua" - while every Nicaraguan (and Clinton herself) knows that the largest embassy here in this country is the embassy of the United States of America, a true high-tech fortress. The infamous Iranian embassy turned out to be a hospital - one that has now been inaugurated.

Hillary Clinton knew this, since no specialized intelligence work was needed to see what was being built with the funding of the Iranian government. This means that the Secretary of State was intentionally smearing Nicaragua in order to construct a negative image of the country and thus to exert pressure on it in the hope that it would fall in with Washington's political objectives. She was, in other words, doing "public diplomacy".

Almost all of the "reports" of Trivelli and Callahan that have been released so far - by the way, most of them marked as Confidential and almost none as Secret - are not aimed at producing intelligence, but to numb that of the US Congress and other influential groups the Department of State needs to manipulate in order to get their support for aggressive measures against a country considered "non-friendly" - to use an educated expression.

The cables contain no proof and are sourced from groups of "Human Rights-wingers" financed by the US government for decades, from conversations with selected spokespersons among the local pro-US government right-wing, and from others with a similar bias. In a nutshell, sheer propaganda.

After all, pure Information-in-itself does not exist. Information only acquires meaning when someone analyzes it from a given position that can be known and evaluated. Furthermore, information can only have meaning if it is related to other known or verifiable information. It is impossible to extract knowledge about the real world just from the assertions of Paul Trivelli and Robert Callahan. Ideally, an understanding of their diplomatic cables would mean coming to the country so as to contrast their reports with other data from the context to which the cables refer.

Processing the WikiLeaks cables is not a neutral activity. It requires taking many decisions, such as the criteria for their organization, determining which cables are relevant and which cables are irrelevant, etcetera. The diplomatic cables that so far have been released on Nicaragua offer a glimpse of the disdainful way in which the embassy treats the local politicians and elites which it uses to advance US government objectives in the country. But the conscious or unconscious guiding principle behind the hierarchization of the released content is filtered through a demonized image of the Sandinistas and their foremost leader. This means that true information, the reality of the really existing country, remains out of focus and distorted.

Presenting information is not a neutral activity either. Deciding who will have access to it and on what conditions, often pre-defines its meaning for the general public. In the case of Nicaragua, the privileged channel for prior access and subsequent mass diffusion of the cables' pre-interpreted and pre-digested content has been the newspaper El País from Spain. El País is owned by the PRISA Group, with strong ties to the anti-Cuban mafia in Miami and all the most reactionary groups of the Latin American right wing. In fact, over the years, El País has consistently supported destabilization campaigns against the ALBA governments of Bolivia, Cuba, Ecuador, Nicaragua and Venezuela.

All those decisions about access to the cables and under what conditions, have to do with knowledge about the world outside the cables themselves. For that reason, it is necessary to have such knowledge of the world outside WikiLeaks or of the people in charge of work relating to the cables.

However, anonymity surrounds those doing such work which, one way or another, is also endorsed by the trademark "WikiLeaks", be it when WikiLeaks Cablegate site decides to publish such synopses or when a portal such as WL Central decides to do so. This is misleading and runs contrary to the ideology of openness and transparency professed by WikiLeaks as well as many other related projects sharing its ideas.

Behind such ideologies, it is easy to notice the philosophical-positivist liberal bias of treating information as a fetish, of converting the binary series it is composed of as something in itself endowed with meaning, capable of being "liberated" independently of human systems created by social practices attached to economic and other interests that in the real world construct their meaning.

Information may be stored in hard drives, but it is the human drive of social actors that bestows it with meaning. This is true regardless of more or less speculative discussion on the developments of Artificial Intelligence and its implications for the definition of Humanity.

It is an undeniable fact of reality that the Internet is the creation of a warring imperialistic power - the US government - that needed a communications system capable of resisting a nuclear attack. Other undeniable facts are that still only a tiny minority of the world's population have access to the Internet, that a few, highly monopolistic governments and corporations control its information flows, and that these actors do everything in their power to control those flows and the minds that feed and consume them.

The ideology that freedom of information flows like the waters of an unstoppable river is not neutral. For example, in the case of WL Central, one notices that the site offers "competitions" (with payola included) financed by "donors who wish to remain anonymous", on "investigative journalism" based on the cables. As if the assertion that knowledge is a product of competition and narrow pecuinary interest - rather than resulting from collaboration, critical analysis and ambition to find out what is true - were not a world view, an ideology. Very clearly it is an ideology close to, not to say identical with, the most anti-humanistic and reactionary tendencies and, of course, pertain to the world view of the big monopolies WikiLeaks claims to put into question.

Among the "competitions" announced by WL Central, "financed by a donor who prefers to remain anonymous", is none other than "How can individuals and societies protect themselves against the encroachment and abuse of government power in the modern age?"

It is precisely in this "modern age" that the CEOs of a medium-size multinational corporation, people elected by none beyond a small clique of major stockholders, control economies equivalent to the GDP of several countries. Today, all the realms of life have been privatized and put under the yoke of these corporative psychopaths whose sole objetive is to increase their capital.

More and more aspects of individual and social life are being taken away from people and put under control of multi-national corporate Molochs. Despite that reality, the main question posed by this "donor who wishes to remain anonymous" is one dealing with the "abuse of government power".

People interested in freedom of information and critical comprehension of the world who are unable to see the problems inherent in such ideas should leave their PCs aside for a while and dedicate themselves to other, more productive ways of relating to the world around them.

Much has been written about WikiLeaks as a CIA operation to spread disinformation with the aim of confusing public opinion, above all, those segments of opinion prone to mobilize against the policies of the Western powers and their allies. One of the latest contributions to this debate is the book by Daniel Estulin (Desmontando WikiLeaks, Madrid, 2011, Ediciones del Bronce). It is beyond the scope of this article to judge the information value of WikiLeaks cables in general.

So far, only a tiny fraction of this huge amount of material has been released. In some cases, such as with respect to Cuba, their content has helped to draw a clearer picture of the mechanisms behind US policy towards that country.

But in other cases, they only have served to fuel pseudo-debates. In this sense, it is of the utmost importance to acknowledge the way in which the information contained in the cables has been made available to the world's public, usually by giving privileged access to big media monopolies with enough resources and time to transform, launder and work that information into disinformation.

Beyond that debate, and starting from a known and knowable case (that of Nicaragua), we can see that the picture of Nicaragua conveyed by the diplomatic cables is totally alien to the reality lived, known and interpreted by the vast majority of Nicaraguans from various political and ideological tendencies, as well as by sober foreign observers.

To Nicaraguans, the WikiLeaks cables have so far revealed nothing they have not already been bombarded with, and the ways the information has been presented to them, via outlets such as El País, La Prensa, El Nuevo Diario or WL Central, has not improved one bit their capacity to understand a surrounding world they already know in great detail.

For the general public in the West, the Wikileaks cables on Nicaragua in the form in which they have been made available, have just added one more voice to the strident choir of demonizing views promoted by corporate media. In this case, the aim has been to co-opt the opinion of the many people who advocate a critical and transparent scrutiny of power.