Relay-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site utzoo.UUCP Posting-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site bbncca.ARPA Path: utzoo!lsuc!watmath!clyde!burl!ulysses!bellcore!decvax!genrad!panda!talcott!harvard!bbnccv!bbncca!rrizzo From: rrizzo@bbncca.ARPA (Ron Rizzo) Newsgroups: net.politics Subject: Who is Tomas Borge? Message-ID: <1686@bbncca.ARPA> Date: Tue, 4-Feb-86 19:43:56 EST Article-I.D.: bbncca.1686 Posted: Tue Feb 4 19:43:56 1986 Date-Received: Thu, 6-Feb-86 21:44:03 EST Organization: Bolt, Beranek and Newman, Cambridge, Ma. Lines: 167 SENTINEL OF THE PEOPLE'S HAPPINESS ================================== "Last July 1 a man named Alvaro Jose Baldizon Aviles slipped across the border from Nicaragua into Honduras. He was no ordinary refugee. Baldizon was chief of the special investigations commission of Nicaragua's Ministry of Interior. He worked for Tomas Borge, the interior minister and a powerful figure in the Sandinista government. Baldizon had an eye-popping story to tell of massive human rights abuses by the Sandinistas. In September and October, under the guidance of the U.S. State Department, he told it all over Washington." "Citing specific names, dates, and locations, Baldizon disclosed hundreds of murders of peasants, prisoners, Indians, businessmen, and opponents of the Sandinista regime, all of them carried out by Nicaraguan government soldiers or police. Borge personally ordered some killings and whitewashed others, Baldizon said. In 1981 Borge allegedly standardized the practice of murdering political foes by issuing a secret order allowing `special measures,' the euphemism for assassinations. He institutionalized the deception of foreign visitors, appearing before Christian groups in an office with a crucifix, a statue of Jesus Christ, and a Bible. His real office is adorned with pictures of Marx, Engels, and Lenin, and copies of THE COMMUNIST MANIFESTO and DAS KAPITAL. Moreover, Borge was involved in cocaine trafficking, put former criminals in police jobs, and installed Cuban advisers in operational posts. Baldizon also said the Sandinistas were training Costa Rican guerillas and using mobs of young Sandinistas to break up gatherings of political opponents." from "The Sandinista Lobby" by Fred Barnes, a senior editor, The New Republic, 1/20/86, page 11. The following is a summary by quotation of Stephen Kinzer's "Portrait of Tomas Borge," NYTimes, 9/3/85, p A2. Stephen Kinzer is a leading Latin American reporter, and coauthor with Stephen Schelsinger of BITTER FRUIT (Anchor, 1983), a study of the 1954 CIA-directed coup against the Arbenz government in Guatemala: "Tomas Borge is a man of many public identities. Sometimes he appears in battle fatigues. Other times he is dressed as a policeman. At a recent fire in Managua, he turned up in a fireman's suit, complete with rubber overcoat." "Mr. Borge deports priests whenever he deems it necessary, but his official boigraphy lists the Bible as his favorite book. He says he no longer considers himself a Roman Catholic, but he has accumulated a collection of crucifixes that fills an entire room." "In one of his offices, he proudly displays a moon rock presented to him several years ago by a visiting American astronaut. But he also delights in shocking Western visitors by showing them an album of photographs of himself with `my bad friends.' They are figures of the left ranging from Fidel Castro to Kim Il Sung. Enemies view Mr. Borge as a Leninist ideologue determined to impose totalitarian rule on Nicaragua. But he considers himself to be, in the phrase he has had painted on the front of the Interior Ministry building, `Sentinel of the People's Happiness.'" "Door Is Open To The Poor" Borge has an antibureaucratic streak: every Tuesday he dresses in civilian clothes, and is accessible to ordinary Nicaraguans to hear their private grievances; while Kinzer visited him, Borge listened to a disabled veteran, an impoverished biology student, and a ragtag kids' baseball team, and offered assistance. "Be A Priest, His Mother Said" "But Mr. Borge would be the first to acknowledge that being a revolutionary requires more than that. He has been one since his early youth, rebelling first against his mother, who wanted him to be a priest." [The young Stalin was a Russian Orthodox seminary student.] "`I told her that I would not be blackmailed by her gentleness and naivete, and that I was a Communist,' he recalled in a magazine interview years ago." "Now at the seat of power, Mr. Borge is often viewed as among the hardest-line of the nine Sandinista commanders who run Nicaragua. Some say he and his supporters form a power center that rivals the group around the supposedly more moderate president, Daniel Ortega Saavedra." "As Interior Minister, Mr. Borge's domain is vast, and his power within it is all but absolute. In addition to the police and fire departments, he oversses the prison system, the state security and intelligence apparatus, the press censorship office, the customs service and the nationwide network of Sandinista Defense Committees." [The latter seem to function as residential block spy groups, modeled on similar Chinese and Cuban organizations similarly named.] "A Man Of Contradictions" "He also controls elite combat units believed to number about 5,000 men, and is in charge of formulating government policy for the volatile Atlantic Coast region." [Home of the Moskito Indians.] .... He "....periodically imrpisons political activists in isolated cells." "`He told me,' said Enrique Sotelo Borgen, a conservative member of the National Assembly, `that within half an hour after the first American paratrooper lands in Nicaragua, all the opposition leaders will be rounded up and killed.'" "....After studying guerilla warfare in Cuba [one year at a Cuban military school], he became one of the most senior Sandinista leaders." [He's the only surviving founder of the FSLN.] "He [Borge] was tortured by the National Guard, and guardsmen were apparently responsible for the killing of his wife only weeks before the Sandinista takeover in July 1979." "Film Depicts His Ordeal" Mr. Borge has established a filmmaking unit within the Interior Ministry, and as one of its first tasks, he assigned the unit to film a dramatization of how he was tortured in jail. He shows the film to visitors on request." .... "`Originally, the Sandinista Front had conceived a different kind of revolution,' he said. `In ideal terms, it would be a deeply radical revolution, evem at some point reaching the abolition of private property, a revolution within the classically socialist framework.'" "`But reality taught us that in the special condition of Latin America and Nicaragua, this was not possible.'" "Mr. Borge said that in the coming months Sandinista leaders may decide to take `firmer attitudes' toward their domestic adversaries." "`Without a doubt, U.S. imperialism has decided to destroy us,' he said. `This consolidation of revolutionary forces means if we have to hit even those sectors which partially support the revolution, then they must be hit. We have to consolidate those who are ready to die for Nicaragua and its liberation.'" "Like many Nicaraguans, Mr. Borge is a poet. His most famous work is the Sandinista anthem, which has been set to music and is sung before every Sandinista ceremony. It includes the line `We fight against the Yankee, enemy of humanity.'" So who is Tomas Borge? Felix Dzerzhinsky in Managua? A good progres- sive cop, conscientiously doing his duty? Sentinel of the people's happiness? An enemy of humanity? Who is Tomas Borge? Better well-read than Red, Ron Rizzo