Still Wrong

I received this message in reply to my comments on Bruce Kauffmann's column in the Oregonian (as seen in yesterday's post):

Mr. Burt - thanks for your note. I was working for CBS News at the time of
the elections. I am well aware of the human rights abuses of the Contras--I
mentioned them in my column. I am well aware of the Reagan and Bush I
administration's support for the contras, and for Chamarro, and we can
presume that the CIA was part of that support. That said, I write with 100
percent certainty that the vast majority of the Nicaraguan people who gave
her a 55 percent plurality in the election did so because they wanted the
Sandinistas out of power and her in power.

You will recall, given your memory of the heady excitement of the
Sandinistas in the post-Somoza years that Chamarro joined the Sandinistas
but later quit when she saw which direction they were taking "the
revolution," subsequently turning her newspaper, La Prensa, into a major
voice of the opposition to the Sandinistas.

I note, finally, that in my column I gave the Sandinistas credit for abiding
by the election results and subsequently running for office in the post-1990
Nicaragua. Indeed, I am hoping the Sunnis in Iraq emulate their actions.
Bruce Kauffmann

My reply:

I am grateful to Bruce Kauffmann for taking the time to reply to a critical letter from a stranger, and for the most part I don't disagree with his comments. I hope I have few illusions about the nature of the Sandinista party and their 1979-1990 rule in Nicaragua. But Mr. Kauffmann did not address one truly vital point: that the first free elections in Nicaragua's history were not held in 1990, but in 1984, and the Sandinistas won that one. The elections were universally affirmed by foreign observers to be free and fair, in spite of the contra terrorists' efforts to prevent them from taking place, and it was a democratically elected government that Ronald Reagan's "freedom fighters" were trying to overthrow.