De Blasio may have been more involved than most-I really can’t say-but what I can say is that to support the Sandinistas in the 1980s was not in any sense a way to express sympathy with communism. The United States was making allies with right-wing dictators and turning a blind eye to the massacres and assassinations they regularly carried out. Most were relatively unsophisticated about politics, but they were looking for adventure and were uncomfortable with the impression that President Ronald Reagan’s policies were creating around the region. I went to Central America as a journalist in 1988, and the place was crawling with people like young de Blasio. provided overt and covert aid to anti-communist guerrillas and resistance movements in an effort to ‘rollback’ Soviet-backed communist governments in Africa, Asia and Latin America.” It was all based on what became known as the “ Reagan Doctrine,” under which “the U.S.
The Reaganites could not get away with everything they wanted, so they resorted to selling missiles to Iranian terrorists-who were holding Americans hostage at the time-lying about it to Congress, and painting virtually everyone who sought to expose their policies as soft on Communism. Efraín Ríos Montt, was committing genocide against indigenous Indians.
And as Guatemala lobbied Congress to lift restrictions on military aid, the dictator in that country, Gen. They were trying to overthrow the government of Nicaragua with the help of murderous authoritarian dictatorships, such as the one in Argentina. One recalls the bumper-sticker slogan “El Salvador is Spanish for ‘Vietnam.’”Īs part of their campaign to revive the Cold War, Reaganites were aiding a murderous regime in El Salvador propped up by death squads, the victims of which were sometimes nuns and priests and often entire villages. The Reagan administration, after all, appeared to have every intention to involve U.S. de Blasio, who studied Latin American politics at Columbia and was conversational in Spanish, grew to be an admirer of Nicaragua’s ruling Sandinista party” and “thrust himself into one of the most polarizing issues in American politics,” it was hardly unusual for young Americans interested in politics to travel to Central America to see what was going on in the region. The entire story reads as if it were written in a nearly 30-year time warp.
A reporter gets to insinuate that de Blasio was hiding something from someone without even bothering to try to prove it with evidence. Hernández, sought out “hundreds of pages of records” and undertook “more than two dozen interviews,” discovering that “ time as a young activist was more influential in shaping his ideology than previously known.” One is tempted to ask, “Previously known by whom?” But that’s what so wonderful about using the passive voice. Apparently, at the time, the burly, bearded fellow “opposed foreign wars, missile defense systems and apartheid.” The paper’s reporter, Javier C. The folks at The New York Times think it’s front-page news that back in 1988, when he was 26 years old, Democratic mayoral candidate and current New York City Public Advocate Bill de Blasio spent 10 days in Masaya, Nicaragua. Did Bill de Blasio force his friends to say “Neek-a-rog-wha” once upon a time?
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