ustxtxb_obs_1985_01_11_50_00003-00000_000.pdf

CONTENTS FEATURES 2 Driving the Car Geoffrey Rips 3 Our War, Their Country Dave Denison 4 Sanctuary Movement Attacked Mike Tolson 6 Terrorism and Motherhood Mary Lenz 7 The U.S. Hand in Nicaraguan Elections Mike Conroy 10 A Conversation with Jefferson Maury Maverick, Jr. 11 South African Opportunism James Ridgeway 13 Enter Lyndon Johnson Anthony Orum DEPARTMENTS 22 Political Intelligence 25 Dialogue Books and the Culture: 26 In the Shadow of the Dictators 27 Poets of Nicaragua 28 Social Cause Calendar Louis Dubose Amy Johnson 30 Afterword: Law School Murders Ruperto Garcia its citizens to prevent hunger, chemical disaster, inequity. It’s as if the leaders of government were more wedded to the idea of inexorable history than was old Karl Marx. It is as if no decisions are being made. But decisions are being made on Wall Street, on the Federal Reserve Board, at Union Carbide decisions that affect huge segments of the economy in this state, in this country, and around the world. Hunger in Ethiopia is an expression of the weather, of the desert, of international markets and marketeers, and possibly of the end of U.S. Food-for-Peace. programs. The indictment of Jack Elder and Stacey Merkt is as much related to the fact that large Valley growers have interests in Salvadoran agriculture as the disaster in Bhopal is related to the fact that desperate Third World economies do not have the leveraging power of the United States populace to force adequate safety measures on multinational firms. The budgetary shortfall now become a legislative fact of life is as much the result of an economy organized as a bulwark against corporate and individual income taxes as of a downturn in oil and gas prices. Other states have done much more with much less \(though the Donald Regan proposals for eliminating federal deductions for state income tax further strengthen the hand of those opposing state income taxes and supporting The time has come to put the isolate flecks together, to witness and adjust before it destroys us. It is time to organize, to take the steering wheel, to drive the car. G. R. Our War, Their Country IF THE United States is to avoid a wider war in Nicaragua there will need to be principled and firm opposition in Congress to President Reagan’s interventionist urges. But political integrity on the question of Nicaragua has been an uncommon commodity in Congress. A particularly sorry example of the wrong stuff emerged from the Congressional Hispanic Caucus in December. Five members of the caucus made a field trip into South. and Central America and on Dec. 8 met with Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega. The next day at a news conference in El Salvador they announced that they were sorely disappointed with Ortega. The leader of the caucus, Representative Bill Richardson, Democrat from New Mexico, said he may now support aid to the contras fighting against the Nicaraguan government. “You could say I have gone from being against aid to the contras to being on the fence about it,” Richardson said. Rep. John J. LaFalce, Democrat from New York, jumped onto the same fence. Congress suspended aid to the contras in October but may be asked to renew it again early this year. An aide to Rep. Richardson told the Observer Dec. 21 that the Congressman is “in a quandary” because of the unsatisfactory meeting in Nicaragua. What set Richardson off, the aide said, was that, while Richardson wanted to discuss press freedom and travel restrictions in Nicaragua, Ortega seemed preoccupied with the threat of a U.S. invasion. Thus, the remarkable conclusion of Representative Richardson: The CIA war against Nicaragua might not be such a bad idea after all. Ponder the arrogance of that for a moment. “You disappoint us, Daniel Ortega,” the Congressman seems to be saying, “therefore we may have to overthrow you.” Even in the event the Congressman is only making the threat for political effect, one can hardly miss the assumption that goes along with his statements: Nicaragua is out of line and subject to penalty when it doesn’t please the United States or a group of Congressional members. Most Democrats seem to share this assumption. In the heat of the excitement over phantom MiGs in Nicaragua on the night Reagan was being re-elected here, even Senator Christopher Dodd warned of U.S. wrath and retribution. Columnist Richard Reeves observed last month: “Even as we celebrate an assertive new Americanism, we can’t seem to comprehend the force of nationalism in smaller places. The most depressing comment I have heard about all this was from an important Washingtonian who met with Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega and came away saying he couldn’t understand why Ortega was so passionately anti-American. Well, the Nicaraguan’s hostility may have something to do with the fact that American troops occupied his country for 22 years, then installed the Somozas as our brutal surrogates for another 45 years.” One wouldn’t think this would need to be explained to “an important Washingtonian,” but it does. As democrats we do have an interest in what goes on in Nicaragua. We are all made nervous by sentences that concede, THE TEXAS C3SERVER 3