Wright Erratum

I'm largely uninterested in this never-ending Jeremiah Wright controversy, and I'll leave the debunking of his nutty National Press Club rant to others in the blogosphere. But there is one minor point that deserves a correction. According to Wright, his "congregation stood in solidarity with the peasants in El Salvador and Nicaragua, while our government, through Ollie North and the Iran-Contra scandal, was supporting the Contras, who were killing the peasants and the Miskito Indians in those two countries."

I'm not sure I would be trumpeting my "solidarity" with the foul dictatorship of Daniel Ortega, but I suppose that's a matter of taste. It should be noted, though, that it was the Sandinista government that famously massacred truculent Miskito Indians, who then responded by fighting a prolonged guerilla war against the very government supported by liberation theologists like Wright. In 2007, The Independence Institute's Alvaro Vargas Llosa reminded playwright Harold Pinter of "the 1981 massacre of Miskito Indians on Nicaragua's Atlantic coast" after he praised the Sandinista government in his Nobel speech.

Under the guise of a literacy campaign, the Sandinistas, with the help of their Cuban cadres, tried to indoctrinate the Miskitos with Marxist ideology. But the independent-minded Indians refused to accept Sandinista control. Accusing them of supporting opposition groups based in Honduras, Ortega's men killed as many as 50 Miskitos, imprisoned hundreds, and forcibly relocated many more.