Pros and Contras

Timothy C. Brown, "The Real Contra War: Highlander Peasant Resistance in Nicaragua" (University of Oklahoma Press, 2001); "When the AK-47s Fall Silent: Revolutionaries, Guerrillas, and the Dangers of Peace" (Hoover Institution Press, 2000).

Timothy C. Brown was the Reagan/Bush liaison with the Contra army, and in the aftermath of this proxy war brought out these two books. The first is an historical reconstruction and analysis of the Contra war in the highlands of northern Niocaragua; the second is composed of interviews with former contras.

In "The Real Contra War" Mr. Brown has done a good job bringing forth the peasant base of the Nicaraguan Contra movement, and comparing it to previous "contra" movements - the Cristeros of Mexico, the Escambritos of Cuba. I would even add my own comparison, the Antonov "green guerrillas" of Tambov, Russia, in 1920-21. Yet these movements did not grow like the Contras, nor last ten years, and the reason is obvious, although discounted in Mr. Brown's book. And that is because the original hypothesis - of being financed and controlled by the CIA and rich exiles - is still valid. Without the Somocista command structure, the money coming in from Miami and Washington, these Segovian highlanders would have been flattened like their historical predecessors and reduced to mere academic footnotes.

In "When the AK's Fall Silent", Timothy Brown lets these former contras speak in their own words. As editor/translator Brown demonstrates the dangers of taking oral history at face value. Brown waxes enthusiastically at the "revelations" of these men concerning Castro's finances in 1950's Mexico, Soviet missiles still secretly in place in Cuba after 1962, abuses by Sandinista cadres who beat peasants and question God, etc. While these citations above sound authentic, I've caught Mr. Brown's witnesses in one inaccuracy after another. To begin, claiming the Farabundo Marti Liberation Front financed the Sandinistas by the millions in the late '70s, when the FMLN was not founded until 1980 as a coalition of several groups. Another witness avers that Celia Sanchez, Fidel Castro's personal secretary, committed suicide in 1972 upon learning details of her brother's death in La Cabana prison in 1959. Celia Sanchez in fact died of cancer in 1980. Another has President Arevalo of Guatemala being overthrown by the CIA in the 1950s, when it was President Arbenz who was so "honored." This same witness also states he spent four months in Cuba in 1960, beginning in April, where he helped his father found the Committees in Defense of the Revolution - which were not established until a speech by Castro decreeing their formation in September, 1960, five months after April.

In this work, Brown clearly if unintentionally demonstrates the dangers of uncorroborated oral testimony. As such this book can be useful as a presentation of how these men think of themselves, or wish others to see them. But their testimonies are so chock full of lapses here and varnishings there that they cannot be accepted as factual reconstructions.