Harvard and Nicaragua

As the Reagan administration carries out a rhetorical, and arguably an actual, war against Nicaragua, an group of Harvard faculty members who have visited the country is publicly challenging the Administration's portrayal of and policies towards the small Central American nation.

Far from being the totalitarian state depicted by State Department spokesmen, these professors and administrators describe Nicaragua as a beleaguered country engaged in a noble experiment but threatened by U.S. backed invaders. Should Nicaragua be forced to fight for its survival, the professors say, it may well become a military state--out of necessity, not out of ideological preference.

These Harvard personnel have visited Central America in the past year as members of a group called the Faculty for Human Rights in El Salvador and Central America. The non-profit, California-based organization consists of faculty members in universities across the country who are concerned with human rights and U.S. policy in the region. Among its directors are Thomas Professor of divinity Harvey G. Cox Jr. and Bliss Professor of Latin American History and Economics John Womack Jr. '59.

"The whole idea is to involve Americans who are of some influence, direct or indirect," says Professor of Law Henry J. Steiner '51, a participant in this June's trip. "The goal is to become more vocal."

The human rights organization has sent four fact-finding trips to Central America in the past two years. The trips include five-day stays in Nicaragua, El Salvador and Honduras and a series of interviews with both pro and anti-government groups.

The visitors, who pay their own way, meet with members of the government, military, civil rights groups, political prisoners and members for the church and the opposition press.

Each trip drafts a report of its findings, which it sends to Congress, national newspapers and academics. The professors involved do no consulting for any government.

Almost all of the Harvard representatives have returned to the University from Central America voicing opposition to the Administration's policy of providing money and training to the "contras," who seek to overthrow the five-year-old Sandinista regime.

"We have no business telling a country how to run itself, what kind of government or economy to have,' says Dr. Barry M. Lester, assistant professor of pediatrics at the Medical School who travelled to Nicaragua on the same trip as Steiner.

Henry Steiner

Steiner, who teaches a course on international human rights, brims with indignation towards U.S. policy in Central America. After visiting the region this June, he describes. Nicaragua as a country "attempting a deep social transformation that could go in a number of directions. One is towards a humane, participatory and inventive society the other towards a one party, tightly controlled state.

"Our military support for the 'contras' is an abomination," Steiner says, adding that "not only does it violate the principles of international law but it is forcing the regime ever more in the direction we accuse it of taking."

Administration critics of the Sandinista regime have long concentrated on its repressive side Hardliners in Washington have pointed to the absence of election and the frequent silencing of dissidents in the press and the church.

While Steiner concedes that the Sandinistas have been oversensitive to domestic criticism he seeks to put it in perspective. He compares the invasion of Nicaragua by 10,000 rebels to an attack on the United States by a million hostile troops. Some suppression of civil liberties is inevitable, he says.

But if the Administration is truly concerned for human rights, Steiner adds, then it is backing the wrong guys. On the June trip, the faculty group amassed information on massacres and torture committed by the "contras" on the civilian population. "No one could ever blame the Sandinistas for some of the things the 'contras' have done," he says.

"However one views the Sandinista record, we are not responsible for it. But we are complicit with what the 'contras' are doing," Steiner adds. "Let's get our human rights priorities straight."

After returning to the States, Steiner wrote to 22 congressmen and leading newspapers about his findings in Nicaragua--over and above the group's letter--and criticized current U.S. policy. Along with the letter he sent a manual that he obtained in Nicaragua. The book let presented in cartoon form instructions on how to destroy farms and burn books, among other acts of sabotage. According to Steiner, sources in Nicaragua said the manual could be traced to the CIA.

Steiner says, he plans no further political activism--but he will raise the issue of U.S. policy in Nicaragua in his class and in the law school human rights program, of which he is an organizer.

Noel McGinn

For Education School Professor Noel F. McGinn, his trip to Nicaragua in August 1983 with the Faculty Committee on Human Rights was not his first. Born in Panama, the 49-year-old McGinn has worked for years on education throughout Latin America. In 1978, on a literacy project for the Agency for International Development, he visited Nicaragua and witnessed the last days of the Somoza regime.

After returning from a two-year stint in Mexico in 1981. McGinn discovered that attitudes in the U.S. towards the Sandinistas had changed drastically. Civil war had flared up again in El Salvador, and the U.S. was coming down hard on the Sandinistas for lending support to the Salvadoran rebels.

Two years later, when organizers of the Faculty on Human Rights approached McGinn about a trip to Nicaragua, he jumped at the opportunity.

What he found was a country much changed from the Somoza days. This time, McGinn says, he witnessed wide-spread enthusiasm on the part of the people. "It was clear that the people in the street were supportive," he says. "Now they could get health and educational services. The government was offering political participation and it appeared very democratic."

Like many of his colleagues, McGinn rejects the Administration's explanation of Central American instability. Rather than laying the blame on Cuban and Soviet penetration. McGinn sees the problem as one rooted in centuries of poverty and injustice. Not does he regard the analogy with Cuba as a particularly valid one.

"The difference between Nicaragua and Cuba is that in Nicaragua there are six or so leaders, while Castro did it all on his own," he says. "Nicaragua was a popular uprising with middle-class support. It began with a junta with four priests and a conservative businessman."

But U.S. policies may force Nicaragua along the Cuban route. McGinn says. He agrees with Steiner that armed pressure against the country will militarize the Sandinistas further and push them towards heightened internal controls. "If we attack Nicaragua we will eliminate loyal opposition in the country. The Sandinistas will necessarily centralize and rule out any opposition."

McGinn, who teaches two courses on education at the Ed School and is a fellow at the Harvard Institute of International Development, will host a group of university presidents from four Central American countries who are visiting Harvard this week. The group will speak to a public forum at the Kennedy School on the role of the effects of war on their universities.

Frederick Snyder

Like McGinn, Assistant Dean of the Law School Frederick E. Snyder brought long academic involvement with Latin America to his trip to El Salvador last January. A lecturer on Latin American law, the 40-year-old Snyder teaches a course called "Law, Politics and Revolution in Latin America" and has published articles on the same subject.

Last October he organized the visit of a group of Nicaraguan officials coming to Harvard to study electoral law and political parties, witnessing first-hand the Reagan Administration's hostility to Nicaragua as the State Department delayed the granting of visas to members of the group and pushed back the date of their arrival.

The Faculty on Human Rights wrote to Snyder inviting him to Central America. When he arrived in El Salvador he found the state of human rights deplorable. The bulk of the problem was not, as Washington repeatedly claimed, leftist guerrillas gunning down innocent civilians.

Rather, he says, the culprits were death squads and paramilitary organizations that operated with the tacit, if not overt, support of the U.S. trained army. Salvadoran was a minimum of human rights violations to be expected in a civil war.

"Human rights violations were largely attributable to death squads," says Snyder, echoing the opinion of members of the Salvadoran church and human rights organizations. "These squads operated with the consent and even participation of the military. Their violations far out-weigh the real but minimal number of incidents of civil violence perpetrated by the insurgents."

At the moment, Snyder is waiting to see if Nicaragua will hold national elections in November as scheduled. He hopes to attend as an independent observer along with a group of Boston lawyers.

Barry Lester

Dr. Barry M. Lester, assistant professor of medicine at Harvard Medical school, travelled to Nicaragua and El Salvador in the June group as the token physician at the request of Womack.

Lester, 3" a specialist on the effect of nutrition on childhood development, spent two years in the early "0s working in Guatemala at the Institute of Nutrition for Central America and Panama.

Once in Central America. Lester says, he frequently left the group and showed up unannounced at local health care facilities. In Nicaragua, he observed an impressive commitment to health care on the part of the Sandinistas and tremendous improvement against polio, typhoid and a host of childhood diseases.

"What makes Nicaragua unique in the region is that in there human beings are treated as a valuable resource. The priorities of the Nicaraguan government are related to issues of health and education," says Lester.

This contrasts with El Salvador, Lester says, where all health supplies go to the military, while civilians receive poor care.

He claims that the armed forces automatically divert all foreign donations of medical supplies in professionals suspected of treating or sympathizing with the rebels have been killed.