Bernie Sanders in his office at City Hall in Burlington, Vt., in 1985.

Donna Light/Newsday

The long run

Mayor and ‘Foreign Minister’: How Bernie Sanders Brought the Cold War to Burlington

Referendums, rallies, a trip to Nicaragua — all were part of his effort to infuse left-wing activism into local politics.

By Alexander Burns and Sydney Ember
May 17, 2019

BURLINGTON, Vt. — For Daniel Ortega, the president of Nicaragua, the summer of 1985 was to be a moment of extraordinary triumph. In July, on the sixth anniversary of the Sandinista revolution, Mr. Ortega would address a crowd of hundreds of thousands with a message of defiance for his political nemesis, Ronald Reagan, and the Contra militias waging war on him with support from Washington.

Amid the festivities, Mr. Ortega would also meet with the mayor of Burlington, Vt.
Bernie Sanders, then 43, journeyed for 14 hours to reach Nicaragua — switching planes in Boston, Miami and San Salvador — and made a truncated tour of the violence-stricken country before the grand event in Managua.

Aspects of the trip might have unsettled another visitor. A reporter who traveled with Mr. Sanders wrote of strict limits on the taking of photographs. At the anniversary celebration, a wire report described a chant rising up: “Here, there, everywhere, the Yankee will die.”

If Mr. Sanders harbored unease about the Sandinistas, he did not dwell on it.
“After many years of economic and political domination, Nicaragua is determined not to be a banana republic anymore, and it’s free to make its own decisions,” Mr. Sanders declared, according to a Nicaraguan newspaper, El Nuevo Diario, quoting him in Spanish. “Is this a crime?”

Unusual though it was, Mr. Sanders’s trip did not shock his constituents. His Nicaraguan odyssey was part of a yearslong effort to infuse local politics with international issues, and to transform Burlington — a once-sleepy college town on the shores of Lake Champlain — into a haven for left-wing activism in the twilight of the Cold War.

A New York Times review of Mr. Sanders’s mayoral papers — including hundreds of speeches, handwritten notes, letters, political pamphlets and domestic and foreign newspaper clippings from a period spanning nearly a decade — revealed that from his earliest days in office Mr. Sanders aimed to execute his own foreign policy, repudiating Mr. Reagan’s approach of aggressively backing anti-Communist governments and resistance forces, while going further than many Democrats in supporting socialist leaders.

Mr. Sanders’s handwritten notes from his trip to Nicaragua in July 1985.
Credit

Tristan Spinski for The New York Times

Mr. Sanders’s activities during his mayoralty bring into relief the fervently anti-imperialist worldview that continues to guide him. They also underscore his combative ideological persona, which has roiled national Democratic politics as thoroughly as it upended municipal government in Burlington. As mayor, Mr. Sanders denounced decades of American foreign policy that he portrayed as guided by corporate greed, and outlined a vision of international affairs defined by disgust at military spending and sympathy for Marxist-inspired movements in the developing world.
Advertisement

Now, as he competes for the Democratic presidential nomination, Mr. Sanders’s profound skepticism of American power appears to set him apart from other major candidates who have pledged to restore the country’s traditionally assertive global role.

Mr. Sanders’s signature foreign policy issue so far has been his opposition to American support for Saudi Arabia’s brutal war in Yemen, which has inflicted vast civilian suffering, and he has resisted endorsing regime change in Venezuela, where the Trump administration has been pressuring Nicolás Maduro, a leftist dictator, to leave power.

kommonsentsjane