Opening the Toolbox of US Interventionist Foreign Policy: How the Internal Affairs of Nicaragua has been Undermined their Democracy Tonight’s show critically deconstructs how US government foreign policy along with its strong influences within the UN and with the aid of an uncritical mainstream media has misrepresented the unfolding political realities of Nicaragua leading up to, during and following the failed 2018 US led coup attempt. Our guest John Perry joins Bringing Light Into Darkness to recount this history. John Perry lives and works in Masaya, Nicaragua, where he has been based since 2003.
Since the violent attempt to overthrow the Sandinista government in Nicaragua in 2018, which was especially badly felt in Masaya, he has been working in an informal solidarity network linked to both the UK (the Nicaragua Solidarity Campaign) and the US (the Alliance for Global Justice). This has including lobbying governments, politicians, and agencies such as Amnesty International.
John writes about Nicaragua and also about Honduras, and has been published in The Nation, London Review of Books, Counterpunch, Council on Hemispheric Affairs (COHA), The Grayzone, FAIR, Open Democracy, LA Progressive and elsewhere.
Perry provides an informed overview of US-Nicaraguan history since the 1979 July 19th Sandinista revolutionary victory over the US backed Somoza dictatorship. Our guest describes how the US State Department influences has permeated the internal affairs of Nicaragua and part of US foreign policy has included training thousands of Nicaraguans to return to Nicaragua and foment unrest in hopes of overthrowing the Sandinista government led by Daniel Ortega in the hopes of bringing a government to power that would provide a greater return for US western led investment capital.
Perry provides a blow by blow historical overview of those attempts and the methods used by US foreign policy and the history that preceded it and how it has been misrepresented by mainstream media and enabled by UN mischaracterizations. We begin the show by detailing the experiences of two Cuban double agents who explain how Cubans paid by monies from the US government were misrepresented in US media as ‘dissidents’ instead of as ‘criminals’ engaging in criminal behavior by taking money from a foreign adversarial government to overthrow their own government. Our guest shares the parallel experiences of Nicaragua in great detail to afford our listeners how destabilization of elected government have been executed in Nicaragua.
Please join us tonight for a thought provoking dialogue and historical analysis.
