How Washington and soft power NGOs manipulated Nicaragua’s death toll to drive regime change and sanctions
Did
Nicaragua’s Sandinista government really kill 300+ peaceful
protesters? A forensic analysis of the death toll exposes the claim
as a dangerous lie.
by
Max Blumenthal
Part
3 - How anti-Sandinista “human rights” NGOs and Washington cooked
the books
Hendrix
found that the three main self-proclaimed human rights groups in
Nicaragua had removed the contexts of the deaths they recorded in
order to conflate every unnatural death that occurred across the
country between April 19 and June 25 with killings by Nicaraguan
pro-government forces.
He found
that seven categories of deaths were included in the human rights
reports. All categories except for one were totally unrelated to
government violence.
They are
as follows:
Duplicated
names
Deaths
unrelated to protests
People
murdered by the opposition
Opposition
activists, including those involved in the violent tranques
Innocent
bystanders
Names
without significant data to determine the cause of death
Deaths
omitted from each list
According
to Hendrix, reports by CENIDH, CIDH, and ANPDH were padded with the
deaths of “victims of traffic accidents, altercations between
gangs, murders by robbery, those killed by accidental firing of a
firearm and even more absurdly, a suicide.”
CIDH’s
study includes a whopping nine duplicated names, while all three
organizations larded their reports with 97 deaths that were unrelated
to the protests. The causes of 77 deaths recorded in the three
reports remain unknown.
While
the Nicaraguan opposition has howled about genocide-level massacres
of students, Hendrix found in his own research that out of the
approximately 60 deaths among anti-Sandinista elements at the hands
of government-aligned forces, only 16 or 17 were actual students.
Most
shockingly, Hendrix’s forensic research demonstrated that the
opposition killed at least the same number of Sandinista supporters
and police officers as they lost at the hands of the government. This
fact flies directly in the face of the US-centric narrative of a
dictator mowing down peaceful protesters.
It would
be easy for anyone familiar with the situation that unfolded on the
ground over the past three months to see why so many had been killed
on the Sandinista side.
In late
April, Ortega ordered his police forces to stay in their stations as
a condition of the national dialogue he initiated with the
opposition. The order meant that for about 55 days, Sandinista
supporters were left to fend off a national crusade of lethal blood
vengeance. Countless citizens were beaten or faced property
destruction at the hands of the opposition solely because they
belonged to the Sandinista front.
Among
the killings of Sandinistas detailed in Hendrix’s report was a 25
month old baby, the child of Gabriella Maria Aguirre, who died on
June 13 in Masatepe of bronchoaspiration when her ambulance was held
up at an opposition roadblock.
Meanwhile,
in cities like Masaya and Jinotepe, police found themselves under
virtual siege, cut off for weeks from regular food and medical
supplies, and wound up waging a pitched battle with the opposition
militants that had encircled them.
The
deaths of those within opposition ranks who were killed by accident
or as a result of fratricidal violence has also been decontextualized
in these reports, and are therefore unacknowledged by Washington and
international legal bodies. They include Guatemalan journalist
Eduardo Spiegler, who was crushed by a “tree of life” street
decoration toppled by opposition protesters as he was covering their
spree of vandalism.
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