Image: FSLN (Nicaragua) logo – Fair Use

In recent weeks, a motley crew of writers has found common cause in attacking Nicaragua’s Sandinista government: Jaden Hong, a high-school student from Sammamish, Washington, who has never visited the country; Jared O. Bell, a former USAID Foreign Service Officer; Barb Arland-Fye, editor of a Catholic newspaper in Iowa; and Gioconda Belli, a 76-year-old Nicaraguan novelist in self-exile. Writing in outlets ranging from The Teen Magazine to the New York Times, they have produced a string of biased, ill-informed pieces that repeat the same well-worn falsehoods about Nicaragua’s elected government.

Their attacks on Nicaragua’s revolution reflect Washington’s talking points as it pursues its regime-change agenda. Jaden Hong tells “Gen Z” in The Teen Magazine that Nicaragua’s democracy is fading. Jared O. Bell, who lost his USAID job in Managua when Trump shuttered the agency, complains in Peace Voice about the country’s “stolen democracy.” Barb Arland-Fye, in The Catholic Messenger, writes glowingly about a key organizer of the violent coup attempt in Nicaragua in 2018. Novelist Gioconda Belli is given a guest essay in the New York Times to lament her “country’s dictator.”

Belli, born in Nicaragua but living abroad since the 1980s, has been a critic of the Sandinista government since it first regained power through the ballot box in 2007. Her status as a novelist ensures that the NYT, the Guardian, Spain’s El Pais and other mainstream outlets give her space to vent her anger against a revolution which she supported initially but has........

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