By Thea Jarvis

(Father Gerry Conroy is part of a three-man team of Glenmary priests involved in promoting justice in Appalachia and the deep south. He left his home in Atlanta recently for a week-long trip to Nicaragua as the southeastern representative of the Conference of Major Superiors of Men Religious.)

In the Nicaraguan border town of Jalapa, a peasant woman rushed up to Father Gerry Conroy and threw her arms around him. Weeping, she recounted her loss of two sons and a daughter to the revolution that toppled the ruling Somoza regime four years ago.

She did not regret her sacrifice, she said, but was distraught because of American opposition to the present Sandinista government.

“You have to tell the American people that since the revolution we are free,” she pleaded.

The woman was one of countless Nicaraguans Father Conroy met during a week-long July stay in that troubled Central American nation. The Glenmary priest was one of 160 Americans from 31 states organized by the Carolina Interfaith Task Force on Central America (CITCA) who went south to investigate the political turmoil in Nicaragua and pray for peace in the region.

In Jalapa, a village close to the Honduran border, the group conducted a prayer vigil that earlier had been threatened due to fighting in the area.

“We went not knowing whether we could do it or not,” Father Conroy admitted, citing a talk by a Nicaraguan military officer warning the Americans that there had been border action two days earlier and if more surfaced the vigil could not be held.

The Honduran border is America’s launch pad for their support – otherwise known as “covert action” – of the rebel “Contras,” former members of the Somozan national guard and others who work toward the overthrow of Sandinista rule. (Another group of “Contras” operate out of Costa Rica and are opposed to the border “Contras.”)

In addition to their prayerful plea for peace, the ecumenical group toured Nicaragua, traveling in a line for Jalapa to Managua, talking to workers, government officials, missionaries and army officers. They wanted answers to questions about popular support for the Sandinistas, human rights violations and economic survival for the poor.

“The government leaders had a sense of honesty and humility that I found just incredible,” Father Conroy said, adding that such openness was “a happy surprise.”

“There was not an issue or area of investigation that we were denied,” he continued. “No door was closed to us.”

The group found the government to be doing “an incredibly good job,” Conroy observed, following the goals of popular liberation promoted by the famed Nicaraguan peasant leader of the thirties, Augusto Sandino. Such goals include agrarian reform, opposition to foreign intervention and, most importantly, the welfare of those who toil in agricultural and industrial production.

Moreover, Father Conroy related, almost all those he spoke to during his trip were supportive of the Sandinista government.

On a bus trip in the mountains, the group’s transport became stuck in a river bed. When a nearby farmworker emerged from the fields to help, Father Conroy asked him, in his fluent Spanish, what he thought of the Sandinistas.

The farmworker, like most of those Conroy interviewed casually, without preliminary introductions, responded with enthusiasm for the government.

In a similar conversation with two coffee pickers, Father Conroy asked about the army presence in the country, which, he claimed, was the “least militarized” of all Central American nations in terms of the visibility of the armed forces.

He had spent eight months traveling through Central American a year and a half ago and had become acutely aware of an expanded military presence in most of the region. It was a presence that was usually accompanied by popular fear and distrust.

The coffee-pickers, however, reflected a widespread national affection for the Sandinista armed forces. “The army is wonderful, they are our friends,” they had told Father Conroy. “These are our people. They are here to defend us.”

Present-day Sandinista rule, in fact, shows no inclination toward the abuses that abound in other Central American revolutionary efforts, Conroy said.

“There are no disappearances, no torture, no systematic elimination of opposition groups,” he said, adding that the government officials themselves admitted some mistakes in dealing with the Miskito Indians involved in border disputes.

“Not a single priest or sister from North America has been killed on Nicaraguan soil since the revolution,” although 22 such priests and sisters have lost their lives in other parts of Central America, said Father Conroy.

“The (Sandinista) revolution is thoroughly rooted in Christianity,” he said. “The people are thoroughly Christian people.”

During the group’s stay in Manague, a prayer service was held in which the Nicaraguans present sang their national anthem and invited their American guests to do the same. Following the singing, the Nicaraguans sent up a traditional cheer, “There is no contradiction between Christianity and the revolution,” attesting to their belief that the current rule is founded on Christian principles.

“Nicaragua is establishing a middle ground between U.S. capitalism and Russian communism,” according to Father Conroy, that is uniquely chosen and suited to their economic, political and religious needs.

They have rejected the laissez-faire capitalist model promoted by Somoza, he said, which put wealth and privilege in the hands of a few and put profits before the welfare of the general population.

It is this fact – that the Sandinistas are “breaking the mold” and that other Central American nations will follow suit – that motivates the United States government in its goal to subvert current Nicaraguan rule, Father Conroy believes.

Because Nicaragua is refusing to follow North American style capitalism, but is instead “developing something that is not capitalism as we know it,” but a form of socialism, American economic interests are at stake, he said. Where before the Somoza rule guaranteed free reign for growth of the American economy in Central America, the Sandinistas are putting national needs first, Father Conroy said.

Nicaraguan socialism, he further claimed, is not Russian dominated, although in the revolution four years ago 12% of the total military and economic support came from the eastern bloc.

“It’s a pittance,” he observed, and certainly “not enough to claim Russian domination or control.”

Yet it is this claim which is promulgated by the American government as its cause for concern in Nicaragua. The United States has repeatedly charged that Nicaragua is exporting its revolution, sending arms and men to nearby El Salvador to maintain the strength of rebel guerrilla forces fighting to overthrow the U.S. supported Salvadoran government.

Although the charges continue to flow, and indeed, are the backbone of expanded U.S. military support for the Contras, such an arms flow to El Salvador has never been substantiated, Father Conroy said.

A $19 million expenditure by the U.S. to investigate such an arms flow – the “covert action” so often referred to in press reports – went directly to supply arms to Contras on the border, he said.

Tomas Borges, the Nicaraguan minister of the interior, in a briefing session with the American interfaith mission to Nicaragua, said that “we must be the best smugglers in history,” since the United States could never offer any substantive proof of such an arms flow from the Sandinistas to El Salvador, Father Conroy said.

“The (Sandinista) government said they support the goals of the Salvadoran revolution, but they say they have never sent arms to El Salvador,” he said.

The bottom line remains the U.S. economic interests,” Conroy continued, “although they say the arms flow is what motivates them. What the current administration is most afraid of is that U.S. economic interests will deteriorate.”

The 160 Americans traveling in Nicaragua came to a “unanimous conclusion” at the end of their visit, calling for an immediate halt to United States support for the Contras fighting the border war against Sandinista rule.

“United States support of this war is an outright immoral act on the part of our government,” concluded Father Conroy, who said it is an intrusion on the national sovereignty of Nicaragua and a distortion of facts to the American people. “It is like England or France funding the Ku Klux Klan.”

Pointing out that the most reliable sources of internal information are the church workers in Nicaragua, Father Conroy noted that out of 87 Catholic missionaries in that country, only two oppose the Sandinista government, he said.

Calling the first line of defense against such an intervention U.S. public opinion, and particularly American church opinion, Father Conroy hopes to communicate the information gathered during the Nicaraguan visit “using every form possible.”

“It is so manifestly clear that the United States is not the defender of freedom and democracy in Nicaragua,” he said sadly. “It is the enemy of freedom in Nicaragua.”