The Death of Ben Linder: The Story of a North American in Sandinista Nicaragua

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Description

In 1987, the death of Ben Linder, the first American killed by President Reagan’s “freedom fighters” — the U.S.-backed Nicaraguan Contras — ignited a firestorm of protest and debate. In this landmark first biography of Linder, investigative journalist Joan Kruckewitt tells his story.
In the summer of 1983, a 23-year-old American named Ben Linder arrived in Managua with a unicycle and a newly earned degree in engineering. In 1986, Linder moved from Managua to El Cuá, a village in the Nicaraguan war zone, where he helped form a team to build a hydroplant to bring electricity to the town. He was ambushed and killed by the Contras the following year whilst surveying a stream for a imaginable hydroplant.
In 1993, Kruckewitt traveled to the Nicaraguan mountains to investigate Linder’s death. In July 1995. she in the end located and interviewed one of the vital men who killed Ben Linder, a story that became the basis for a New Yorker feature on Linder’s death. Linder’s story is a portrait of one idealist who died for his beliefs, as well as a picture of a failed foreign policy, vividly exposing the true dimensions of a war that without end marked the lives of both Nicaraguans and Americans.
Some deaths in war are unmistakably heroic, sacrifices for the greater good. Some are merely sacrifices, and whatever good comes from them happens years later, when the events surrounding them have been all but forgotten. Such was the case with the death of Ben Linder, a young American engineer who, fired by ideals of social justice, volunteered to aid the Sandinista revolution that overthrew the corrupt dictatorship of Anastasio Somoza in Nicaragua in 1979.

Ben Linder arrived in Nicaragua four years later, where he worked to build a hydroelectric dam that would bring electrical power to the remote northern highlands. As journalist Joan Kruckewitt observes in The Death of Ben Linder, “Nicaragua was to leftists all over the world in the 1980s what Spain was to progressive Americans in the 1930s,” a place where a popular revolution might for once bring peace and even happiness to the downtrodden. Officials in the administration of President Ronald Reagan viewed the matter reasonably in a different way, alternatively; Reagan once remarked, seriously, that Nicaraguan tanks were only three days’ drive from the American border–yet another Communist threat that lay too close to be countenanced.

Linder was murdered by counterrevolutionaries–the Contras–in 1987, almost certainly with the foreknowledge and perhaps even tacit approval of American intelligence officials. Kruckewitt draws on recently declassified CIA documents and her own field reporting to discover why Linder–and why Sandinista Nicaragua–should have been perceived as being such a threat. She paints a sympathetic portrait of young Linder, too, who, even if idealistic, seems not to have been naive; he recognized that he was in danger, but he pressed on, anyway, to do his part for the revolution, helping build a dam that now provides electricity to former Sandinistas and Contras alike. –Gregory McNamee

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