Some Americans see Nicaragua drenched in a dangerous sea of red. Others view the country as bathed in a brilliant aureole of white light. Forget gray. Much as in the debate that polarized Americans during the war in Viet Nam, cool heads and dispassionate judgments seldom prevail in a discussion of U.S.-Nicaraguan relations. The Sandinistas are either hard-core Communists with a cruelly totalitarian agenda or committed revolutionaries with a uniquely Latin American vision of the future. The U.S.-backed contras, on the other hand, are either brave freedom fighters or treacherous mercenaries. WARNING: entry into the debate may be hazardous to your reputation.
No one knows that better than Robert Leiken, 47, a Central American analyst at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington. For years he toiled anonymously on the intellectual left, pursuing liberal causes and scholarly studies. While working at a succession of jobs, including posts at some prestigious think tanks in Mexico City and Washington, Leiken produced papers on Soviet strategies in Latin America. His work, however, rarely received much public notice. In early 1984 he edited a collection of essays called Central America: Anatomy of a Conflict, which took the Reagan Administration to task for promoting confrontation rather than negotiation in Central America. It aroused notice among Democratic Congressmen who opposed Reagan's policies, but Leiken's reputation remained limited mainly to the specialized world of Latin American policy.
Then came the deluge. In October 1984 Leiken (rhymes with bacon) published an article in the New Republic titled "Nicaragua's Untold Stories." It was a searing indictment of the Managua regime that accused the Sandinistas of repression, corruption, political manipulation and fealty to Moscow.
The idea that a well-respected liberal analyst would launch such a strong attack on the Sandinistas caused considerable stir in Washington. Leiken's apparent conversion was seen by the entrenched left as a betrayal and by Reaganites as a vindication of their long-held views. Most important, many Democrats who had relied on Leiken's analyses began to reconsider their Sandinista sympathies. Senator Edward Kennedy had the article read into the Congressional Record. Suddenly, Leiken became as controversial as Nicaragua itself.
( Since then, Leiken has assessed the Sandinista issue in other articles, including two pieces in the New York Review of Books. After two trips this year to Nicaragua, the most recent with Democratic Congressman Les Aspin of Wisconsin, he has changed his assessment of the contras. He argues that while the rebels were initially a small mercenary force made up of supporters of ousted Dictator Anastasio Somoza Debayle, they have, as a result of widespread disenchantment with the Sandinistas, grown into a diverse army of 20,000 that is now a popularly based vanguard for a widespread and growing rebellion. Most scholars in the field reject Leiken's assessment, but he argues that popular perception of the contras in both the U.S. and the cities of Nicaragua has not yet registered this change because the rebels have failed to embrace "democratic leadership."