Intractable

Intractable

THE AUGUST ISSUE of The Atlantic carries a discreet paean to Sandinismo--"that most intractable thing, a new kind of faith'--by Conor Cruise O'Brien. O'Brien stops short of embracing the faith himself, but his report on his recent trip to Nicaragua displays what might be called anima naturaliter sandinista.

He fairly gloats that loyalty to the traditional Catholic Church is on the wane, despite the efforts of the Pope and Cardinal Obando y Bravo. Marxism, he says, is now "recessive' within the the Sandinista government, and "the Christian revolutionary element is becoming dominant.' He scoffs at the notion that the regime is a Soviet puppet (or could become one), and he suggests that the harassment of the traditional Church ("unpleasant enough, to be sure,' he concedes) hardly amounts to anything that could be called persecution. What's going on, he says, is that "faith and fatherland' are becoming one--just as in Poland. And the "profound originality of Sandinismo' may make it a model for other countries: "Managua is a potential Geneva for Latin America.' "This is no Gulag state,' he says firmly; it may be a one-party regime--so what else is new?--but its yoke is easy, its burden is light.

A less exquisite hypothesis is that the Communists haven't been able to consolidate total control yet. But the Sandinistas do seem to be obeying the stubborn genetic code, as far as that's feasible in a country that can't easily be sealed off from its neighbors. More than a tenth of the population has fled. La Prensa, the last independently owned newspaper, has been shut down, after years of intense bullying by the state. Bishop Pablo Antonio Vega has been exiled, and another outspoken priest, Monsignor Bismarck Carballo, has been denied re-entry to Nicaragua. A documentary about the Miskito Indians, recently aired on New York's public-TV station, reports that Sandinista forces have destroyed 49 villages, bombing, machine-gunning, hanging, and even burning alive the inhabitants. (A Capuchin missionary, by the way, was shown saying the Indians has never been molested by the Contras.) John Corry, reviewing the program for the New York Times, calls it "a devastating indictment' of the Sandinistas.

On the evidence, the "most intractable thing' still seems to be Communism.

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