Description of Blood on the Border.
With Blood on the Border: A Memoir of the Contra War, Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz
presents the third volume in her critically-acclaimed memoir. In this long-awaited
book, she vividly recounts on-the-ground memories of the contra war in Nicaragua,
chronicling the US-sponsored terror inflicted on the people of Nicaragua following
their 1979 election of the Socialist Sandinistas that ousted Reagan darling and
vicious dictator Somoza.
The war's opening salvo was the bombing of a Nicaraguan plane in Mexico City
by US-backed contras, the plane Dunbar-Ortiz would have been on were it not
for a delay. This disarming closeness to the fraught history of the US/Nicaraguan
relationship shapes Dunbar-Ortiz's narrative, bringing uncomfortably present
the decade-long dirty war that the Reagan administration pursued in Nicaragua
against civilian and soldier alike.
As with her first two memoirs, in Blood on the Border, Dunbar-Ortiz
seamlessly connects the dots not only between the personal and the political,
but between recent history and our present moment. Unlike the many commentators
who view the September 11, 2001 attacks as the start of the so-called War on
Terror, Dunbar-Ortiz offers firsthand testimony on battles waged much earlier.
While her rich political analysis of this history bears the mark of a trained
historian, she also writes from her perspective as an intrepid activist who
spent months at a time throughout the 1980s in the war-torn country, especially
in the remote Mosquitia region where the indigenous Miskitu people were viciously
assailed and nearly wiped out by CIA-trained contra mercenaries. She makes painfully
clear the connections between what many US Americans only remember vaguely as
the Iran-Contra "affair" and current US aggression in the Americas,
the Middle East, and around the world. Clearly this will be a book valuable
not only for students of Latin American history, but also for anyone who is
interested in better understanding the violent turmoil of our world today.
Table of Contents
Prologue
1 The Road to Nicaragua Runs Through the Black Hills
2 Starting Over and Finding the Sandinista Revolution
3 Desaparecidos
4 A Revolution Is Not a Dinner Party
5 House Arrest
6 Culture Shock
7 Red Christmas
8 A Cruel Spring
9 Getting to Know Rigoberta
10 Drinking for Courage
11 International Law—and International Lawlessness
12 Guide
13 City of Refuge
14 Missionaries and Mercenaries
15 Refugees
16 Quemada
17 The Final Chapter: Rednecks and Indian Country, Again
Epilogue
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Prologue
There is at the head of this great continent a very powerful
country, very rich, very warlike, and capable of anything... the United
States seems destined to plague and torment the continent in the name
of freedom.
—Simón Bolívar (1783–1830)
I helped in the raping of half a dozen Central American republics for the benefit
of Wall Street. The record of racketeering is long. I helped purify Nicaragua
for the international banking house of Brown Brothers in 1909–1912.
—Retired Major General Smedley Butler, United States Marine Corp.
The United States cannot, therefore, fail to view with
deep concern any serious threat to stability and constitutional government
in Nicaragua tending toward anarchy and jeopardizing American interests,
especially if such state of affairs is contributed to or brought about
by outside influence or by any foreign power.
—President Calvin Coolidge, addressing the United States Congress in 1927
Somoza may be a son of a bitch, but he’s our son
of a bitch.
—President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, 1939
I believe one inevitable outcome of a rejection of this
aid would be that it would remove all pressure on the Sandinistas to
change. And if no constraints are put on the Sandinistas, I believe the
brutality and abuse they already aim at their own country and their...
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Advance Praise
"Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz is clearly a memoirist of great skills and even greater heart. She’s a force of nature on the page and off."
—Dave Eggers, author of A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius
“American foreign policy today is being shaped by veterans of the savage
Washington-backed Contra war of the 1980s. In the third volume of her
extraordinary memoir, Dunbar-Ortiz recounts the secret history of that
intervention, as well as her own courageous solidarity with the embattled
Nicaraguan revolution.”
—Mike Davis, author of City of Quartz and Ecology of Fear
“Here is the real life of a brilliant activist, the personal woes and conflicts,
the roles of friendship, character and gender, as well as the big issues and
shining moments; and here is a rousing account of the 1980s, so relevant
and so seldom discussed. Yet the 1980s seem very close these days, as a
right-wing administration once again sponsors torture, war, and other
crimes in the name of freedom—and as Latin America once again is on fire
with liberation movements. Of particular importance is Dunbar-Ortiz’s
exploration of the gray zones between the indigenous Miskitus in Nicaragua
and the Sandinistas. An important book, and a gripping one.”
—Rebecca Solnit, author of Hope in the Dark and Rivers of Shadows
&ld...
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Reviews
Sunday, February 5, 2006
Headfirst into history: Memoirist lived through poverty, feminism, war
Reviewed by Christina Gerhardt, San Francisco Chronicle
To write from some vantage outside history is, in Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz's estimation,
an impossibility. In her new book, Blood on the Border: A Memoir of the
Contra War (South End Press; 304 pages; $18 paperback), the longtime Bay
Area activist explains the tack she's taken in her memoirs:
"Why a memoir? Why do I consider choosing to write an historical memoir
to be important? History. That battle over history. I can no longer bear to
write or to read texts in which the author is ... pretending objectivity. History
is never the 'objective' account found in academic writing." Dunbar-Ortiz's
memoirs, including Blood, are not dry chapters of dusty history books
but vivid first-person accounts of one remarkable woman's journey through American
history.
The first volume of her historical memoirs, Red Dirt: Growing Up Okie
(University of Oklahoma Press; 248 pages; $14.95 paperback) chronicles her life
growing up poor in rural Oklahoma as the daughter of sharecroppers: red because
her mother was part Indian and because her father's father was a Wobbly and
a socialist, and also because red is the color of Oklahoma's soil. Outlaw
Woman: A Memoir of the War Years, 1960–1975 (City ...
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Associated Articles 1
On Columbus Day: Big Lies and U.S. Imperialism
Most people think of the U.S.-sponsored war against the Sandinistas (that came to be called, simply, the "Contra War") as having taken place on the northern border of western Nicaragua and Honduras and on the southern border with Costa Rica. But there was a third front in that war, in the mostly indigenous region of northeastern Nicaragua.
In the same years the Reagan administration began sponsoring counterinsurgency against the Sandinista government in Nicaragua, the United States was busy buttressing the Spanish-speaking military oligarchy in nearby Guatemala against a rebellion by the majority of the population -- the Maya indigenous peoples. The Mayans were slaughtered by the thousands, their fields and homes torched, half the population driven into the Mexican Mayan zone as refugees, and thousands more into internal relocation camps under a military general, Rios-Montt, who was a raving Christian Protestant evangelical.
While the U.S. had helped to suppress the Mayan resistance in Guatemala, the newly created Office of Public Diplomacy...
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Interview
Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz was interviewed by Matthew Rothschild, editor of
The Progressive Magazine on January 30, 2006. To listen to the podcast, click
here.
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