During the last few days of August, however, Somoza’s forces did succeed in quelling the five-day takeover of Matagalpa by students and young working people in that city.

While Somoza’s crack troops were being hemmed in by the high school students of Matagalpa, street fighting was also reported in the cities of Jinotepe, León, Coctal, La Trinidad, Estelí, and Diriamba. Demonstrators were said to have erected barricades in some of these areas, although events apparently had not reached the same scope as in Matagalpa.

On August 28, the Nicaraguan government announced that twelve senior guard officers and seventy-three enlisted men had been arrested and would face court-martial for plotting a coup against Somoza. These were reportedly elements who were furious that Somoza had released all members of the Sandinista National Liberation Front (FSLN) held in Nicaraguan jails. Somoza did this in late August after FSLN guerillas raided the National Palace and took more than sixty legislators and cabinet officials as hostages.

The mass hatred for the Somoza dictatorship was dramatized when thousands of Nicaraguans lined the streets to cheer the FSLN guerrillas as they traveled to the airport with the freed prisoners.  
 
September 14, 1953
The August 15 issue of a leading Negro weekly, the Cleveland Call and Post, concluded an editorial on “The Moral Bankruptcy of South Africa” with the following paragraph:

“Will South Africa be permitted to fester and contaminate the rest of the world as did Hitler? Or, will the United Nations, supported by the great powers, be empowered to end this ‘tragic-comedy’ before it becomes a world drama?”

We’d like to ask the editor who wrote that: Are you serious? Do you really think the main danger of spreading racial discrimination throughout the world, even in places not already diseased, comes from South Africa? Isn’t there a more powerful nation—the most powerful—that has already done more than South Africa in that respect? Wasn’t it the U.S. Army, if you please, that brought Jim Crow to Europe during World War II?

And to which “great powers” in the United Nations would you entrust the ending of this “tragic-comedy” ? Britain, with its brutal, counter-revolutionary policy in Kenya? France, with its vicious and predatory treatment of the natives of Indo-China and Morocco? Or the great “leader” of the United Nations and the “free world” without whose aid neither Britain nor France could continue to fight to the death to exploit all colonial peoples?

The place to look for a solution to the problem of South Africa is not the UN, Mr. Editor. The place to look is to South African labor.  
 
 
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