Word: nicaraguan
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...high-ranking Nicaraguan official is scheduled to visit Harvard next month, but the United States government may prevent him from entering the country...
...tried to install an era of democracy. Instead, what we got was another dictatorship. --Jose Cardenal, an anti-Sandinista Nicaraguan...
JOSE CARDENAL IS an intense man with dark brown eyes who seems to have trouble sitting still. Several times during our conversation in a cramped Cambridge motel room, the middle-aged Nicaraguan began to answer a question only to get up, rummage through a briefcase on the nearby bed, pick out a thick file, and sit down again. The files remained unopened on his lap; I sensed that Cardenal was using them as symbolic justification for the points he was trying to make. But even without concrete proof, the Nicaraguan's arguments against the ruling Sandinista junta were often convincing...
Like the overwhelming majority of Nicaraguans, Cardenal took part in the 1979 revolution that ousted long-time dictator Anastasio Somoza and installed the Sandinistas. But Cardenal--a politically middle-of-the-road civil engineer--claims the Sandinistas now in power betrayed the spirit of the revolution. "The Nicaraguan people were united against Somoza," he says, "there was no ideology involved. But in the confusion after the fact, the Marxists took over. They are the ones running things...
Some of the "facts" that Cardenal uses--for example, "90-percent of the Nicaraguan people are against the Sandinistas"--are impossible to verify. Yet he carries a certain authority, a certain legitimacy, simply by virtue of having lived in Nicaragua. It's hard to debate Cardenal when you've never set foot in Central America...