The World Stopped Watching

by Peter Raymont, Director
First Run / Icarus Films, Brooklyn, NY, 2003
VHS, 52 mins., col.
Sales, $390; rental, $75
Distributor’s Website: http://www.frif.com.

Reviewed by Michael R. (Mike) Mosher
Saginaw Valley State University, USA

mosher@svsu.edu

As the United States' bloody occupation of Iraq continues, and Americans get little but the embedded press reports that consist of what the U.S. military wishes reported, it is a good time to reflect on media representations of the war two decades ago in Nicaragua. The World Is Watching was Peter Raymont's 1988 documentary of press coverage of Nicaragua during that turmoil. The World Stopped Watching is its sequel and asks where all the global media attention to this small country went. That question is investigated by several seasoned journalists, including Bill Gentile, photographer for Newsweek magazine; Gilles Paquin of La Presse, Montreal; and Ry Ryman, columnist for the Boston Globe who died in 2003 before the film was completed. All covered Nicaragua at time of the Sadinista revolution of 1979 that overthrew dictator Anastasio Somoza, and the ensuing Contra war for the next five years. Thirty to thirty-five thousand Nicaraguans died in this struggle.

In 1990 the Sandinistas lost the election, and there have been three elected governments since them, rolling back many of their gains. One former President, the rotund Arnoldo Aleman, supporter of the former dictator Antonio Somoza (and obliterator of the many murals painted by international volunteers in the Sandinista era) voted himself a salary greater than that of the President of the United States. He was indicted in 2003 for looting $10 million from national treasury. Gentile and Ryman's request for an interview is stopped at the gates of his ranch, but we hear from both Mrs. Aleman and Judge Judith Mendoza, a gun-carrying former Sandinista official who will be hearing Aleman's case.

There is a meeting with the elderly survivor of a Contra massacre whom Gentile photographed immediately afterwards. Other journalists speak, including Edith Caron of the Paris paper Liberation and Carlos Chamorro, Nicaraguan television reporter whose father was a newspaper publisher killed on Somoza's orders. We hear from Alejandro Bendama, former Sandinista foreign affairs secretary, much quoted in the American press during the Contra war, and from the top Sandinista party official, former President Daniel Ortega.

Eleven of ninety-three members of the Assembly are former Contras, including the former commandant "Jimmy Leo" Altimirano. Though his talk of reconciliation seems hollow, it is when we meet former Sandinista revolutionary commanderJulio Ochoa of the Simon Bolivar Brigade that we realize a reconciliation or "convergence" is actually occurring in Nicaragua. Ochoa's neighbors and drinking buddies are former Contras. As these rural countrymen jokingly brandish their guns, there are apparently no hard feelings. One Contra sports a Daniel Ortega t-shirt, perhaps handed out free to him during a Presidential campaign.

The journalists struggle to reconcile the great revolutionary optimism they found in 1979 and the peoples' resolve in the face of U.S.-backed Contra attackers in the early 1980s, with what they find today. Paquin uses Managua's vast garbage dump as a metaphor for the society. Within sight of the National Assembly people barely survive by rummaging for scraps of food or pieces of metal to recycle. Gentile is at odds with today's ethic of jingoistic and feel-good news, for he believes that journalists "have to set the agenda, not pander to the lowest common denominator". Their failure to do so doesn't surprise Daniel Ortega, who comments, "The media are part of the American empire. If they have to choose between justice and empire, they will choose empire."