Dora Maria Tellez, formerly active among the Sandinista revolutionaries who opposed the dictatorship of the Somoza regime in Nicaragua in the late 1970s and now a respected historian and author, was scheduled to take up her post as Robert F. Kennedy visiting professor in Latin American Studies at Harvard, no less. And it's not as if Tellez hasn't visited the U.S. many times before receiving this prestigious teaching position.
From the above article: "Professor Andres Perez Baltodano, a Nicaraguan sociologist based in Toronto, said: 'Dora Maria is as much a terrorist as George Washington.' He described the taking of the National Palace as a heroic act which had helped to lead to the overthrow of a dictator."
It's probably futile to point out--to the wingnuts and the brainwashed at least--the fact that the Sandinista revolution was, albeit armed, a popular one which arose from within Nicaragua itself, and eventually culminated in the ascension to power (for a time after Somoza was driven out) of the Sandinistas by democratic means. Or the fact that the violence and bloodshed perpetrated by the Sandinistas in Nicaragua was on nowhere near the scale of the subsequent brutality of the Contras--the "freedom-fighters" who (with a little help from Uncle Ronnie and right-wing disciple Oliver North and others involved in the Iran-Contra affair) were hell-bent on taking back Nicaragua from the Sandinistas once the latter had achieved legitimacy. And on nowhere near the scale of what we've been seeing recently in Iraq--where the Bushies' have, by force from without, installed a feeble parody of democracy.
Perhaps we should give thanks for the denial of Tellez's visa to John Negroponte, who's been resuscitated from his Iran-Contra scandal past by the Bush regime as chief of intelligence dealing with terrorism. Negroponte ought to know a thing or two about terrorism and terrorists--he arranged for Honduras to provide sanctuary for the Contras, who "may well have killed more defenseless civilians in the 1980s than al Qaeda has killed in its decade of terror — albeit one slit throat at a time . . . ," according to Dennis Hans' article "When John Negroponte Was Mullah Omar"at Common Dreams.
