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By Timothy C. Brown
SPECIAL TO WORLD TRIBUNE.COM
Wednesday, April 20, 2005
Joe Stalin once famously asked: “How many divisions does the Pope have?” His secret police chief, Lavrenty Beria, doubtless agreed. They received their final answer decades later, when the late Pope John Paul II helped defeat their Revolution: “Enough to defeat Communism.”
While serving as Liaison to Nicaragua's Contras at the end of the Contra War, I came to know and admire two of the Cardinals who just elected Pope Benedict XVI, Rodriguez of Honduras and Obando y Bravo of Nicaragua. That Central America's Marxist revolutions all failed — Nicaragua's becoming “the world's shortest” — was largely due to their faithful following the anti-Communist lead of John Paul II. Although he was not elected, Rodriguez has gone on to garner so much respect that he became a papabili, a potential Pope: Obando y Bravo may have fallen as a final casualty of Nicaragua's Contra War when, on his death-bed, John Paul II accepted his resignation as Archbishop of Managua.
Rodriguez and Obando y Bravo have a great deal in common. Both are Salesian priests who studied in El Salvador, strong advocates for Latin America's poor, opposed both radical liberation theory and Communism and were made Cardinal by John Paul II. But there are also important differences.
Rodriguez, an accomplished pianist who speaks eight languages and holds several doctorates, was born in Honduras' capital of Tegucigalpa into the urban upper class. Obando y Bravo is a man of the people, born in a small hill town, La Libertad, across Lake Nicaragua from Managua in “Contra Country.” An upper class “Spaniard” and civilian director of the political arm that pretended to represent the Contra armies, but didn't, once told me that “the most important thing is always to remember is that [Obando y Bravo] he is not one of us. He's an Indian!”
So were the Contra fighters. Despite wartime propaganda demonizing them, they were just poor unlettered “indio” peasants defending their tiny farms from being seized in the name of the Sandinista Marxist revolution that Ronald Reagan also strongly opposed.
But unlike Reagan, his successor George Bush came into office determined to dump the Contras — Jim Baker, Bush's Secretary of State, privately called them “a lose-lose proposition,” — and promptly cut deals with the Soviets, Sandinistas and Congressional Liberals sympathetic to the Sandinistas. But, to keep these deals, the Contras, who had not even been party to them, had to be convinced to lay down their arms and go home. So a scheme was concocted, with Congress the key — cut off their lethal aid (guns and bullets) but give them non-lethal “humanitarian” assistance (no guns, no bullets) administered by AID until they could be safely disarmed, demobilized and then abandoned. Even so, to neutralize in so far as possible the unrelenting hostility to them in pro-Sandinista liberal circles on the Hill and among the PONGOs (politically-motivated non-governmental organizations) that might well have killed the process, it was considered necessary to filter even that through a mind-boggling four layers of auditors from GAO, AID's Inspector General, Price-Waterhouse and, finally, through an extraordinary panel of lay Catholics organized by Cardinal Rodriguez, then a Monsignor, which is how I came to know him.
Thanks to the Contra's willingness to go along with this scheme, even though they understood full well that it was deeply flawed, and despite Congressional liberals and the PONGOs, it succeeded. Rodriguez deserves much of the credit that as a result of their willingness to sacrifice, today Nicaragua is preparing for its fourth consecutive democratic election in which the former Contras will again play a critical role as they did in the first three.
Obando y Bravo deserves even more credit for this. In the 1970s, he mediated between Nicaragua's revolutionaries and the Somoza dictatorship; in the '80s he mediated between the suddenly Marxist Sandinistas and the victims of their new dictatorship; in the '90s his mediation was critical to assuring that Nicaragua's newfound democracy was not strangled in its crib by the Sandinistas. So it should come as no surprise that, while the Sandinistas availed themselves of the Cardinal's help when it suited them, his consistent opposition earned him their undying enmity.
Yet, try as they might, for decades the Sandinistas could not stop him — that is until recently, when he uncharacteristically began to cave in to former Marxist President Daniel Ortega and his cabal because, in a last desperate attempt to subvert the Cardinal, Ortega and his Beria, Tomas Borge, were finally able to concoct a threat to him and the Church that might have forced him to accede to a deal that could have returned Ortega to power in 2006.
To avoid this happening, the Vatican reluctantly relieved Obando y Bravo of his archbishopric, technically by accepting his resignation. The still unbridled lust for power of Marxist oligarchs Ortega and Borge had finally claimed as its victim Nicaragua's favorite proletarian. Peace and democracy will be the worse for his absence, but Stalin and Beria would have been proud.
Timothy C. Brown (tcbrown@hoover.stanford.edu) is a Research Fellow of the Hoover Institution at Stanford University and serves on the Editorial Advisory Board of World Tribune.com.
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