Book Description

The victory of Violeta Chamorro in the Nicaraguan presidential election of 1990 culminated a dramatic struggle waged by the Nicaraguan people against the Sandinistas--and against their apologists in the American media and policy elites. A totalitarian Marxist regime was toppled--by popular vote--in favor of democracy. Such events typically would have been covered in vigorous detail by the American media. But our media greeted Mrs. Chamorro's triumph with a strange silence. Why? A Strange Silence: The Emergence of Democracy in Nicaragua is the first book to explain what made the Chamorro victory possible and why the U.S. media failed to tell the full story behind the Nicaraguan democratic revolution. Stephen Schwartz has challenged his colleagues in the press, the academy, and the intellectual class, marshaling details and analysis that rip away the screen of ideology from Nicaraguan history, politics, and culture. Based on his encounters with the leaders of Nicaragua's struggle for democracy, including the elusive "Comandante Zero" Eden Pastora, Cardinal Miguel Obando y Bravo, and the courageous editor of La Prensa, Pablo Antonio Cuadra, Schwartz weaves a fascinating narrative--provocative, polemical, and passionate--of the Nicaraguan revolution as seen by the Nicaraguans themselves. Schwartz exposes the distortions of perceptions found among American supporters of the Sandinista regime--and why the same media that acclaimed the fall of the Berlin Wall let the stunning Nicaraguan election of 1990 pass in virtual silence. A staff writer for the San Francisco Chronicle, Schwartz has combined his extensive expertise in Hispanic culture and his work as a historian of the cultural andpolitical left to create a unique account of the Nicaraguan and American drama of 1979-1990. This book is an evocative portrait of a time, a country, and a movement--and an eloquent examination of ideological corruption in the intellectual elite.