As the title indicates: this is a partisan book. A marxist who participated in the Sandinista movement until he broke with it in 1975 (four years before the ousting of Somoza) Belli became a committed Catholic two years later. He worked as the editorial page editor of La Prensa soon after the revolution, at a time when that paper, which had been strongly against Somo/.a before the revolution, became increasingly critical of the Sandinistas. He left Nicaragua in 1982 for the U.S.
This book, and the Puebla Institute which Belli has established in the U.S., are, as Belli makes clear, part of a more comprehensive effort not only to interpret the events in Nicaragua for fellow Catholics (and for Protestants, many of whom he sees as equally in need of accurate information) but to question revolutionary “liberation theology” more broadly. The author deplores the almost total subjection of the latter to Marxism, both at the level of theory and at the level of practice. Nicaraguan symbols of this tendency are not only the four priests who occupy high government positions, but a variety of newly established institutes and centers. Belli documents his thesis in detail, with footnoted quotations and the description of specific events. The last part of the book relates what Belli sees as a fundamental, systematic attack by the Sandinistas on the main body of the Catholic Church, i.e., on all those elements (the bishops above all, especially Archbishop Obando) whom Belli classifies as “progressive,” but not “revolutionary.” The Sandinista attacks take the form not only of censorship, spying, disruption of services, the closing of churches, the expulsion of priests, and the restrictions on Catholic education, but assassinations and torture. The failure of the “revolutionary Christians” to take a stand against all this, and their failure to show “Discernment and Solidarity” (the title of Belli’s last chapter) are clearly what anger Belli most.
The evolution of the Nicaraguan revolution—like the Cuban, Chinese, and the Russian before it—is highly controversial. At such short remove from the events (indeed: the events are still occurring), it will be hard to find accounts which, even on the surface, give the appearance of being impartial. Moreover, and however small the country, the variety of events is so great that the number of expert observers on any one of them is very small. For example, one can be knowledgeable about what has happened in the sphere of church-state relations in Nicaragua or on developments in agriculture, but surely not on both. Belli is one of the few persons in this country who are well informed about this topic. But there are others, and the picture they portray is a different one from his.
The issue is not primarily whether the facts cited are incorrect. Some of Belli’s descriptions (such as, for example, that of the interruption of Pope John Paul II’s speech by the crowd hearing him) are indeed much more controversial than he admits. (He terms his description as representing a “consensus,” which it does not). What is at issue is, rather, the overall impression that there has been, and still is, a mass of faithful led by a united episcopate against a small group of left-wing Catholic and Protestant elitists allied to a Marxist clique masterminding a long-thought-out campaign against the church. Archbishop Obando’s highly critical posture is not shared equally by his fellow bishops and especially not by as many priests as Belli asserts. Popular support for the Sandinistas among lay (and clerical) Catholics is assessed by other expert observers to be much broader than portrayed by Belli, and provocative acts have been committed by inflamed spirits on both sides. Thus, while alerting the reader to the possibility of disturbing internal developments in Nicaragua, the book, because of its one-sided hero-versus-villain portrayals, is ultimately of limited use in shedding intellectual light on what is a very complex situation. The book needs to be read with great caution, though it should not be dismissed.
