By Kathleen Kern

The United States has invaded Nicaragua — directly or by proxy — about 15 times since 1850. Perhaps no other Central American nation has suffered more from Theodore Roosevelt’s 1904 corollary to the Monroe Doctrine, in which he stated the United States had to act as an “international police power” when Western Hemisphere nations persisted in “chronic wrongdoing.”

Nicaragua’s “chronic wrongdoing” has been its citizens’ insistence that the United States let them rule their own country instead of forcing them to serve as vassals to U.S. interests. The Sandinista government, which claimed this right, fell in 1990 after a protracted war with U.S.-armed paramilitaries who attacked civilian targets such as day-care centers, clinics and schools. Nicaraguans, tired of war and privation, voted for the U.S.-backed candidate, hoping that the Sandinistas leaving office would make their lives easier.

Since the Sandinistas lost power, the United States has supported political parties in Nicaragua that serve the interests of U.S. and multinational corporations. Their governments have acquiesced to demands that they privatize basic services such as water, electricity and phone. The steep increase in the prices of these services has put them out of the reach of most of Nicaragua’s poor, thus causing a precipitous decline in their standard of living.

Nicaraguans slipped back into their “chronic wrongdoing” last month by giving the Sandinista party a decisive victory in municipal elections. In response to the Nicaraguan electorate’s decision to elect people the U.S. government doesn’t like, the State Department sent Dan Fisk, the Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Western Hemisphere Affairs, to berate the right-wing Nicaraguan parties for losing the elections. All that Secretary of State Colin Powell and Fisk had asked in return for U.S. funding was that these parties put their internal squabbles aside and unite to defeat the Sandinistas. They failed to do so, and to show its displeasure, the State Department revoked the visas of the two members of the right-wing “Liberal” party.

On the same trip where he chastised the opposition parties, Fisk met Cardinal Obando y Bravo — a formerly virulent critic of the Sandinistas — and suggested he retire because A) he had participated in a public display of reconciliation with the Sandinistas and B) the Nicaraguan bishops had recently criticized the U.S.-supported government for indifference to people’s needs. The Cardinal reportedly walked out of the meeting, no doubt believing that even a U.S. Deputy Assistant Secretary does not have the right to tell a Cardinal of the Catholic church what to do.
Just once, I’d like my country to support Latin American leaders who win elections because they run on platforms that advocate better lives for the poor majorities in their countries. Failing that, I would like my country to follow a doctrine stipulating that people have a right to elect their own leaders whether the powers in Washington like them or not. I would like my country not to hold the threat of military invasions or economic ruin over smaller countries if they choose to pursue the best interests of their citizens rather than the interests of U.S. and multinational corporations.

In short, I would like my country to reject Roosevelt’s corollary to the Monroe Doctrine in favor of a sentiment that Monroe himself expressed in 1823: that Latin American countries who had declared their independence should not have foreign powers oppressing them or “controlling in any other manner their destiny.”