CIA Influence on the Mass Media: How Disinformation Campaigns Work (Part 3)

The Sandinista National Liberation Front (Spanish: Frente Sandinista de Liberación Nacional, or FSLN) is a socialist political party in Nicaragua. Its members are called Sandinistas in both English and Spanish. The party is named after Augusto César Sandino who led the Nicaraguan resistance against the United States occupation of Nicaragua in the 1930s. The FSLN overthrew Anastasio Somoza Debayle in 1979, ending the Somoza dynasty and established a revolutionary government in its place. Following their seizure of power, the Sandinistas ruled Nicaragua from 1979 to 1990, first as part of a Junta of National Reconstruction. Following the resignation of centrist members from this Junta, the FSLN took exclusive power in March 1981; the Contras formed in 1981 to resist the Sandinista's Junta, but the Contra death squads did not cease even after Sandinistas were legitimately elected in 1984. In 1984, fair and free elections were held, which their main opposition boycotted nevertheless, in which they won the majority of the votes. Those who did oppose the Sandinistas won approximately a third of the seats. The FSLN lost elections in 1990 to Violeta Barrios de Chamorro, after revising the constitution in 1987 and after years of resisting the United States-supported Contras, but retained a minority of seats in the legislature. The FSLN remains one of Nicaragua's two leading parties. The FSLN often polls in opposition to the Constitutional Liberal Party, or PLC. In the 2006 Nicaraguan general election, former President Daniel Ortega was re-elected President of Nicaragua with 38.7% of the vote compared to 29% for his leading rival, bringing in the country's second Sandinista government after 16 years of the opposition winning elections. The Contras is a label given to the various rebel groups opposing Nicaragua's FSLN (Frente Sandinista de Liberación Nacional) Sandinista Junta of National Reconstruction government following the July 1979 overthrow of Anastasio Somoza Debayle. Although the Contra movement included a number of separate groups, with different aims and little ideological unity, the Nicaraguan Democratic Force (FDN) emerged as by far the largest. In 1987, virtually all Contra organizations were united, at least nominally, into the Nicaraguan Resistance. From an early stage, the rebels received both overt and covert financial and military support from the United States government through the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), initially supplemented by the Argentinean government of the time. At other times the US Congress wished to distance itself from the Contras and withdrew all overt support. The term "Contra" comes from the Spanish la contra, short for la contrarrevolucion, in English "the counter-revolution". (Many references use the uncapitalized form, "contra", sometimes italicizing it.) Some rebels disliked being called Contras, feeling that it defined their cause only in negative terms, or implied a desire to restore the old order. Rebel fighters usually referred to themselves as comandos ("commandos"); peasant sympathizers also called the rebels los primos ("the cousins"). From the mid-1980s, as the Reagan administration and the rebels sought to define the movement as the "democratic resistance," members came to think of themselves as la resistencia.