May 2003

Views expressed are those of the authors, not necessarily of the AFSC.

Tax Day Reflections on War and Reparations

Arnie Alpert is New Hampshire Program Coordinator for the American Friends Service Committee. He lives in Canterbury.

April 15, 2003. At the moment the United States launched its attack against Iraq, March 19, I was in Nicaragua, with a group of neighborhood women describing their working conditions in Managua's "free trade zone" clothing factories. Juana said she gets up at 3:30 am, six days a week, in order to cook, iron, wash, and get her kids ready for school in time to get to the foreign-owned blue jeans factory where she works from 7 am to 7 pm. Her typical take-home pay is about $65 a month, of which $25 goes to her sister for childcare.

Budget cut rally and lobbying day, 4/30/03, Boston © Ellen Shub

Sweatshop jobs are one of the legacies of United States intervention in Nicaragua. The Marines landed for the first time in 1894, when they occupied the Atlantic coast town of Bluefields for a month to protect "US interests." They returned in 1896, 1898, 1899, 1907, and 1910. In 1912--five years before the "communist threat" was born in Russia--the Marines landed again, and stayed for twenty-one years. By the time they left, the US-trained National Guard under the leadership of Anastasio Somoza was ready to seize power. Somoza and his sons ran the country for the next 46 years, during which time they and their cronies amassed huge fortunes and those who objected met repression from the National Guard. US support for the Somoza regime is summed up in a statement often attributed to President Franklin D. Roosevelt, who is said to have stated of Somoza senior, "He may be a son of a bitch, but he's our son of a bitch."

Regime change finally came in 1979, when the government of the third Somoza fell to a popular insurrection led by the Sandinista National Liberation Front. The US government responded by organizing former National Guard members into a counter-revolutionary force, known as contras, which waged attacks for the next decade.

Nicaragua responded, in part, by taking the United States to the World Court, a United Nations agency formally known as the International Court of Justice. The Court ruled in 1986 that the United States had violated international law "by training, arming, equipping, financing and supplying the contra forces or otherwise encouraging, supporting and aiding military and paramilitary activities in and against Nicaragua." Specific acts the Court found to be illegal included the mining of Nicaragua's harbors, a trade embargo, attacks on ports, and publication of a training manual instructing the contras in commission of acts that violate humanitarian law, i.e. acts of terrorism. The Court ordered the United States to pay reparations. The United States refused, and maintained its political, military, and economic pressure on Nicaragua, one of the poorest nations in the western hemisphere.

When the Sandinistas lost power to a US-backed candidate in the 1990 election, the contra war ended and US intervention shifted to the economic arena. The Nicaraguan government was forced by US-dominated international lending institutions (the World Bank and International Monetary Fund) to sell off state-owned enterprises, cut spending on education and health care, and create the "free trade zones" so attractive to sweatshop manufacturers like Juana's employers.

The reason I am telling this story now is that I am preparing to complete my tax form, and my mind is filled with the faces of my Nicaraguan friends. I cannot escape the news stories of bombed-out cities in Iraq, where the United States now proposes to reconstruct a country in its own image, probably with the involvement of the IMF and World Bank. Already the Bush Administration has received a special $62 billion appropriation to pay for the cost of war (compared to only $2.5 billion for post-war relief and reconstruction), on top of the $400 billion previously allocated to what is so cleverly called "national defense." With that huge sum of money, which accounts for nearly half of world spending on military forces, the Bush Administration plans to revive production of nuclear weapons, which according to its Nuclear Posture Review, may even be launched against non-nuclear adversaries.

I cannot obey my conscience and turn over another dime to the federal government. Instead, I will devote the amount the IRS says I owe, to reparations--in Nicaragua and Iraq. Half of my withheld taxes will go to a grassroots women's group in the neighborhood where Juana lives, to help with nutrition, education, and economic development projects. The other half will go to a humanitarian organization to rebuild Iraq's water systems.

I have no problem paying my fair share to support our nation's schools, health care system, housing, and environmental protection. But I cannot willingly provide one more cent to a government bent on war, destruction, and nuclear terror.

Previous Article    Next Article