NICARAGUAFebruary 26, 2020
With help from US media allies, Nicaragua's coup-mongers are aiming for
Western hearts and minds
With its support tanking at home, Nicaragua's opposition is seeking to win
over public opinion in the West. A factually challenged, distortion laden
article in Vox by a familiar anti-Sandinista activist exhibited the
campaign's strategy.
By Nan McCurdy and Nora Mitchell
Having failed to depose Nicaragua's President Daniel Ortega in their coup
attempt in 2018, and having lost most of the support they briefly enjoyed
within Nicaragua itself, opponents of the Sandinista government have changed
their tactics. They've embarked on a long campaign aimed at governments and
public opinion in the United States and in Europe to portray Ortega as a
dictator who is curbing press freedoms and free speech, assaulting human
rights, murdering opponents and maintaining a general environment of threat
and insecurity.
The most recent example of the campaign was an article by Carl David Goette
Luciak and Caroline Houck, Inside the slow culling of Nicaragua's free
press. Houck is or was a writer for Defense One, a news source for the arms
industry. Goette Luciak is a long-time anti-Ortega activist and friend of
US-backed Nicaraguan opposition leaders. He was escorted out of Nicaragua by
police and border officials after claiming to be a journalist and having
written freelance for the Washington Post and the Guardian while never
having the press visa required in Nicaragua (and most other countries,
including of course the US).
Despite recently posing as a journalist, Goette Luciak initially came to
Nicaragua to support anti-canal activists and later formed a close working
relationship with the leaders of the violent opposition that drove the
attempted coup. He can be seen in multiple photos with them and with their
armed lackeys; one of the photos was used for the cover of the book we
contributed to, Nicaragua 2018: Uprising or Coup? The novice reporter, who
never had a byline before the coup began, listed himself as "director of
investigations" for an obscure outlet run by Azucena "Chena" Castillo, an
outspoken member of the Sandinista Renovation Movement (MRS) party who was
directly involved in the regime change attempt.
Goette-Luciak is also captured on video taking photos of an old man being
tortured by the opposition in the documentary March of the Flowers. In this
short video from the June 30th 2018 march, the reporter appears beginning at
13 seconds.
We began to write about Goette-Luciak because he did nothing after
witnessing the torture of the man by violent coup-mongers - his footage of
the shocking incident never appeared anywhere.
When he began his journalist career, writing for the Washington Post and the
Guardian in 2018, Goette-Luciak never once mentioned the opposition violence
he witnessed, the opposition-armed-and-paid thugs he posed for photos with
or the torture he witnessed at the Flowers March. The least he could have
done in the course of his pro-coup coverage was report the opposition's
brutality that unfolded before his eyes.
Factual errors about the coup and misrepresentations of Nicaragua's current
reality
Goette-Luciak and Houck opened their most recent article by hinting at
government limits on the internet, curiously overlook the healthy commercial
internet enterprises that populate Nicaragua as well as the audacious
government programs providing free internet in parks throughout the country
for the population, even in the most isolated parts of the nation.
In the second and twenty-second paragraphs, they claim that government
supporters burned down radio stations, for which there is not a shred of
evidence. In fact, opposition burned down the private pro-Sandinista Tu
Nueva Radio Ya, located in front of the Central American University, one of
the seats, then and now, of the opposition. They actually attempted to burn
it down twice, succeeding the third time with twenty employees who barely
made it out alive. They also burned down Radio Nicaragua and the National
Autonomous University Student Center and Radio Station in Leon killing
Sandinista student, Christian Cardenas.
The authors went on to claim that the government has restricted free press
by blocking newsprint and ink to the newspaper, La Prensa. Few people read
newspapers in Nicaragua and slowly print versions have gone by the wayside.
La Prensa fired two hundred employees in mid-2018.
The Miami Herald is shutting down because it doesn't sell enough papers but
nobody blames the US government. It's a tough market for print newspapers
all over the world.
The right-wing, US-backed media empire driving the regime change narrative
La Prensa is owned by the right-wing Chamorro family, which fiercely opposes
Sandinista rule. Members of this oligarchic dynasty also own Confidencial
and direct the nongovernmental organizations CINCO, Invermedia and La
Fundacion Violeta Barrios, which serve as intermediaries to channel USAID
and National Endowment for Democracy money to other organizations and media.
The Chamorro media empire generates a constant stream of pro-coup propaganda
that helps drive the case for US sanctions and intervention. The Chamorro
family are known historically for having a monopoly on the US-financed
media.
La Prensa owner Jaime Chamorro in his Trump Shirt
La Prensa had long overdue debts with the customs' office (Direcion General
de Aduana, DGA). Rather than pay the debts, the newspaper has accused the
government of blocking their paper and ink supply, and requested help from
the US press.
La Prensa also has a long record of abusing the custom's tax exemptions for
newspaper printing materials by using the supplies for other print
businesses, and also importing luxury cars and even yachts. The exemption
was only for a legitimate work vehicle.
But the onslaught of negative press from the international media prompted
the government to release La Prensa's materials, relieving the paper of its
financial obligation to the customs office.
The international press has been relentless in printing and reprinting
deceptive claims that echo the opposition narrative. The Nicaraguan
population is overall savvy enough to see through the opposition's
propaganda campaign. Claims of repression against La Prensa have failed to
sway the public in large part because it has seen the US use this paper for
over fifty years as its main media vehicle against the population, most
notably during the US-backed Contra war of the 1980's.
La Prensa has received funds from the US government since the 1980s, and
most openly through the National Endowment for Democracy (NED). Confidencial
is funded through the same source.
Of all the US-backed media personalities who participated directly in
Nicaragua's 2018 coup, inciting a campaign of nationwide violence that saw
Sandinistas and unarmed police officers burned and tortured on camera, only
Miguel Mora and Lucia Pineda of 100% Noticias faced prison time.
Miguel Mora was convicted of threatening a young policeman, Gabriel de Jesus
Vado Ruiz, who was kidnapped, tortured, killed and burned at a roadblock
soon after. Mora also threatened a municipal worker, Bismark Martinez, who
was disappeared and found dead a year later after being tortured on camera.
Pineda, for her part, gleefully appeared on camera beside masked bandits who
burned down government buildings in the city of Granada, while the fires
raged behind them.
Lucia Pineda and Miguel Mora met with US Vice President Mike Pence where he
assured them he "would not leave the Nicaraguan people alone."
Under heavy pressure from the US and Organization for American States, and
out of a desire to quell the country's simmering tensions, the Sandinista
government gave amnesty to Mora and Pineda in June 2019.
Knowing what Goette-Luciak did in Nicaragua, for which he was deported on
October 1, 2018 and with numerous articles and photos attesting to his
behavior, it is more than a little surprising that a media outlet like VOX
would publish him.
Nan McCurdy
Nan McCurdy publishes Nica Notes, a regular newsletter on Nicaraguan
political affairs
